Forcing urban sprawl

There are two big planning developments that will happen throughout this year which will inevitably reignite the “sprawl versus intensification” debate that has been going on in Auckland for many decades.  The two big planning issues are the development of the Auckland Spatial Plan and the ‘urban’ changes being proposed to the Resource Management Act. I wrote my Masters thesis on the 1999 Auckland Regional Growth Strategy, so I have a reasonable amount of background knowledge when it comes to analysing the question of “how could/should Auckland grow?”

I have looked at both these issues previously on this blog. Most particularly, a couple of months back I wrote a lengthy post outlining my thoughts on the proposed changes to the RMA – and my concerns that they involved effectively a central government ‘takeover’ of planning in Auckland particularly, with the specific aim (it would seem) of banishing the metropolitan urban limits and encouraging urban sprawl. My concerns were deepened when reading Steven Joyce’s opinion piece in the Sunday Star Times a couple of months ago – where he talked about planning in Auckland. In particular, his following statements got a few of my alarm bells ringing:

Some people believe the way our cities have grown is wrong. They think the quarter acre section is a fool’s paradise. People should live more in apartment buildings and less with a backyard, or heaven forbid, in a small town outside of the city.

It’s a philosophy that argues that urban planners should have much more say about how we live our lives; and it’s an agenda that the old ARC had in Auckland for a long time: have a cast-iron metropolitan urban limit, force up the price of sections, increase the density of our suburbs, have people live in high-rise apartments, don’t let people get off the highway at Puhoi. And so on. If you follow that logic too far, the Auckland Harbour Bridge would never have been built, and the North Shore would still be a couple of seaside villages.

The truth is more prosaic. Yep, we should allow the city to increase in density (watch councillors run a mile when it comes time for the district plan changes), and we should support cost-effective transport options that support that. But we also have to understand that people like to live where they want to live, and provide cost-effective transport options (roads even!) for those people too. Amusingly, Auckland has increased in density in recent times. But largely not where the central planners said it would, (along the transport corridors) and instead in the beach-side suburbs. Fancy that.

And that will be the challenge for Auckland’s spatial planners. Not to impose their ideal Auckland on us, but allow for an Auckland that reflects the varied ways in which the people of our biggest city already choose to live.

It seems fairly clear which side of the “sprawl versus intensification” debate Steven Joyce sits on. And it’s a worrying side in terms of the effect urban sprawl has on the environment and on economic efficiency (it’s a lot more expensive to build new schools, roads etc. than to use existing ones more efficiently).The ARC’s recent study into modelling the outcomes of different urban development options clearly showed the negative effects of an “urban expansion” model.

However, perhaps what’s more interesting about Steven Joyce’s opinions on urban growth is the reasoning behind it. Basically, he’s arguing that people naturally prefer lower density ‘quarter acre sections’, and planners should stop telling those people how to live their lives. In particular, Joyce is arguing that sprawl is the ‘natural’ outcome – based on personal preference and market forces – and that planners should stop meddling with this so much.

This is a fairly common argument among opponents to intensification, smart growth, New Urbanism or whatever you want to call it. Planning efforts to increase densities, to contain sprawl, to direct where development is focused are denounced as something akin to ‘social engineering’. At a more academic level, the burden of proof to show that it’s worth ‘interfering in the market’ to promote development patterns other than sprawl seems to clearly sit with those promoting intensification, smart growth and so forth. It is assumed – actually by both sides of the sprawl vs intensification debate – that, if left to its own devices, the market will naturally produce urban sprawl. After all, when asked, most people say they’d like a standalone house on a big piece of land, rather than a small apartment.

Now here’s where things get interesting, and where a very interesting book – Zoned Out: regulation, markets and choices in transportation and metropolitan land-use by Jonathan Levine – that I bought myself recently, provides an interesting twist on the assumption that I’ve outlined above. The book questions the assumption that urban sprawl is a natural, market-led, urban outcome:

There is an internal inconsistency with that account of US metropolitan development, however. It supposed that planning interventions tend to counter any sprawling tendencies of the land-development market. Yet empirical social science research into the impact of land-use regulation on metropolitan development patterns suggests that zoning and other municipal interventions actually do the opposite: they lead both to development that is lower in density and to communities that are more exclusive than would arise in the absence of such regulation. This should hardly be surprising; zoning ordinances typically limit building heights and lot coverage and set minimum parking space requirements for a development, and engineering standards determine roadway-width minima. Empirical research suggests that rather than mitigating the market’s sprawling tendencies, the ubiquitous interventions of municipal land-use regulation actually exacerbate them.

This makes an enormous amount of sense. I have read through a lot of District Plans – the document prepared by councils to guide land development – and I would hazard a guess that at least 90% of the rules in each and every District Plan I’ve ever come across seek to limit the density of development. Even in Auckland’s CBD there are building height limits, maximum floor area ratios – although thankfully not minimum parking requirements. While the overarching planning strategies may seek to encourage urban intensification, mixed-use developments and so forth, when it comes down to the nitty gritty of District Plans, they generally seek to achieve the opposite. The easiest thing to get resource consent for is, inevitably, a single house in the middle of a giant section with tonnes of parking spaces: pure urban sprawl.

Zoned Out argues that recognising that sprawl isn’t a ‘natural outcome’ of personal preference and the market, but rather a highly planned outcome that results from highly detailed government regulation, creates an entirely different paradigm for us to examine the relationship of urban sprawl and the free market.

In this alternative story, although the private market may well have sprawling tendencies of its own, it is capable of producing alternatives but is impeded by municipal regulations that lower development densities, separate land uses, specify wide roadways, and mandate large parking areas. Under these circumstances, an easing of some governmental institutions is a prerequisite – a necessary though perhaps not sufficient condition – to the flourishing of alternative development forms. The thrust of policy reform on behalf of compact development would not be market forcing but market enabling; it would seek to overcome regulatory impediments to compact, mixed-use development so that these neighbourhood forms can be provided where they are economically feasible.

Neither the book Zoned Out nor I are making the argument that we shouldn’t have planning rules. There are good reasons for many of the planning rules that we have, although many others are relics of early 20th century problems that no longer exist in cities like Auckland (such as the risk of smokestack industries locating in residential neighbourhoods). The important point is that the argument between sprawl and intensification isn’t an argument about the market versus regulation; it’s about one type of regulation against another. In fact, in Auckland it’s about a somewhat ugly mix of regulations that have both cut off sprawl and inhibited urban intensification. It is little wonder the result has been that housing has become increasingly unaffordable.

Another argument that Steven Joyce made in his opinion piece is that people naturally prefer low density suburbia, a big section and a standalone house. That may well be true (although I think it’s a gross over-simplification), but that doesn’t meant it’s necessarily what would be provided for the majority of people under a ‘regulation free’ scenario. Urban sprawl is actually really expensive to provide, with large houses using up lots of land and requiring lots of infrastructure investment (roads, pipes, schools etc.). Regulating in favour of such a land development outcome – and then subsidising the infrastructure to support it out of general rates and taxation (the amount of money the Ministry of Education is spending on new schools in Flat Bush is eye-popping) – is hardly a ‘natural’ outcome. It’s almost like saying that people prefer Ferraris to Hondas, and as a result banning Hondas, subsidising the cost of Ferraris then claiming that the market naturally favours Ferraris!

So throughout all the inevitable debates we will have this year, in formulating the Auckland Spatial Plan and in reworking the urban provisions of the RMA, it is important to remember that there really are no ‘natural urban outcomes’ for us to use as a basis to compare regulatory interventions against. An expansion based low density urban form is just as much, if not more, the result of a myriad of planning rules, as an urban form based around intensification and consolidation.

In fact, looking back to the past, when there was far less planning regulation, we actually ended up with fairly high-density mixed-use urban forms (Auckland’s 19th and early 20th century suburbs). Often, smart growth and New Urbanist advocates most want to re-create this type of urban environment. Perhaps fewer planning rules would actually be more likely to result in such outcomes, rather than more rules. Perhaps a market-based urban outcome would actually be sustainable, higher-density, mixed-use, transit-oriented and so forth. We don’t really know, but one look at our urban history and another look at the sprawl enforcing planning rules that permeate District Plans, tends to indicate that’s a hell of a lot more likely than a low-density sprawl outcome.

If Steven Joyce is so worried about planners telling people how to live, he should be extremely worried about all the planning regulations forcing lower density. They’re a heck of a lot more common and pervasive than regulations forcing the higher density intensification that he’s so worried about.