Reflection on Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck

              Suburban Nation is a fantastic book and I am turning into a really big fan of Jeff Speck. IT is incredible to me how the smallest choices made in planning regulations can have such big impacts on the way we live. Speck, Plater-Zyberk, and Duany make excellent points in this book about how to stop suburban sprawl and recreate traditional neighborhoods. They are extremely credible and they put their money where there mouth is, designing many different towns and additions to towns up to 2003, when the book was published.

              Sprawl has caused a lot of problems for our country, significantly damaging our public spaces. Before 1950, new roads increased investment and property values nearby, but since 1950, the opposite occurs. The causes are many, but the biggest culprit seems to be the separation of land uses. Building a place with one area for residences, another for commerce, another for schools, and another for some other use is incredibly inefficient for living. It is, however, very efficient for a lazy designer. The result is all of the traffic taking place on a few collector roads and everyone being stranded without a car.

              One of the biggest obstacles in the way of better urban planning is that almost all planning occurs at the municipal level and therefore cannot take regional, state, or federal concerns into account. A loud group of privileged residents can often block development near them and push it into an area of less powerful people. Luckily for South Florida, we have a regional planning authority, the South Florida Water Management District. We should probably put it to work and give it the power to do more planning in Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade.

              Another major solution that the authors propose is the total overhaul of planning regulations. Regulations should have diagrams and pictures and an overall vision for what cities and neighborhoods should look like, whereas they currently just list pages and pages of rules prohibiting certain things that are perceived (often incorrectly) to be ugly or unsafe. An additional benefit is that this would do “pre-planning,” allowing developers to know exactly what they can build and where they can build it, which would save would-be investors tons of time. This sort of thing is already in place in Providence, Rhode Island and West Palm Beach, Florida.

              I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in public life at all. I feel like it would be incredibly interesting to any American because we are all affected by the suburban style of living, even if we live in urban or rural areas. The writing is great and every chapter has some new, revelatory passage. The authors end with a simple call for more neighborhoods, defined as cohesive, mixed-use, walkable areas, saying:

              No more housing subdivisions!
              No more shopping centers!
              No more office parks!
              No more highways!
              Neighborhoods or nothing!

• Miscellaneous Facts:
• Spending on transit creates twice as many jobs as highway spending.
• Houston provides 30 asphalt parking spaces per resident.
• New “anchor” businesses, like sports stadiums, should be build with parking at least a block away so that other businesses can locate themselves nearby and benefit from the anchor.
• A structured, multi-tier parking lot costs $12,000 per place versus $1,500 in a surface lot.