Sprawl

Your regional planning agency is probably set up to favor the suburbs.

The mortgage interest deduction costs the federal government more than all rental subsidies combined. All that money promotes sprawl by encouraging people to buy more house, while transferring wealth to the upper tiers of the income ladder.

Like many Sun Belt cities, Memphis owes its population growth over the last several decades to outward expansion. Since 1998 alone, the city has overseen 15 annexations, occupying a larger footprint than Chicago. But now the city believes that some of its farthest flung territory is more liability than asset.

Sprawl isn't just a problem in car-centric America. Even cities with the world's best transit systems are surrounded by suburbs with poor transit access, according to a new report by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. As billions of people migrate from rural to metropolitan areas in the next few decades, these growth patterns threaten to maroon people without good access to employment while overwhelming the climate with increased greenhouse gas emissions.

Just a few months ago we were being told—erroneously, in our view–that the McMansion was making a big comeback. Then, last week, there were a wave of stories lamenting the declining value of McMansions. Bloomberg published: “McMansions define ugly in a new way: They’re a bad investment –Shoddy construction, ostentatious design—and low resale values.”  The Chicago Tribune chimed in “The McMansion’s day has come and gone.” Whither are these monster homes headed?

Cross-posted from City Observatory. 

The Illiana Tollway, a proposed highway boondoggle that would run through land south of the Chicago metro area, is the project that just won't die. The tollway would be a joint project of the Illinois and Indiana transportation departments and cost Illinois taxpayers a minimum of $500 million. That's $500 million that might otherwise be spent on necessary and financially viable projects like rebuilding the North Red Line, constructing the Ashland bus rapid transit route, and building Pace's transitways.

What tenants want in an office building is changing, and the old model of the isolated suburban office park is going the way of the fax machine. That's according to a new report from Newmark, Grubb, Knight and Frank [PDF], one of the largest commercial real estate firms in the world.

One of the big downsides to sprawl is the public cost of maintaining infrastructure that is extended over wide areas. A new study of New Jersey by Smart Growth America [PDF] attempts to quantify this relationship by looking at the amount of space devoted to roads in communities of varying densities.