"The hard part about density, the hard reality of it, is it’s a far riskier kind of building. It’s just riskier to build twenty or two hundred apartment units than it is to build a house. And it takes more players, and it takes a more complex field which is why it’s more expensive.” Underdome Interview
On Power
On Community Advocacy
“I’m a person who has a lot of faith in people. I think people will rise to occasions if given the opportunity and given respect and patience. I’m a Jane Jacobs devotee next to a lot of people, but the problem is the books never address anything large-scale... It’s always about this kind of fine-grained urbanism which is extremely important, and it’s driven the way even developers do business today. If you look at the world of large-scale development across every major city in the world, everyone’s trying to build mixed-use, everyone’s trying to do a lot of the things that Jacobs talked about, just in different scales and in different ways maybe than she intended. But in terms of building large pieces of infrastructure she’s just largely silent on the topic. And the problem is that large infrastructure takes large planning mechanisms. It’s not a grassroots enterprise." Underdome Interview
On Government-Run Projects
“Imagine they said 'America, we have a silver bullet. We are going to rebuild this country.'" Being Dense about Denmark
Levittown, Pennsylvania. source: wikimedia
President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Federal Highway Act of 1964. source: wikimedia
As an advocate for dense urban development, Chakrabarti argues that a strong government is necessary to negotiate the complex relationships necessary to make density work.
Government must take on this responsibility, he argues, because it--and not the free market--was the driving force behind mid-20th Century suburbanization. “We would be wise to remember that the suburbs were a Federal creation – built out of a fear of race, as well as a nuclear arms race. White flight was synthetic, fueled by a set of policies intended to encourage the use of cars and discourage the use of cities." A Country of Cities
In an interview with Underdome researchers, Chakrabarti explains: "There’s an insufficient understanding today about the fact that the government, over the course of the last half century, has created the lifestyle that most Americans live in. It’s set up all the conditions that people now somehow assume are market-based conditions, which they’re not. I think that fundamentally comes down to the Federal Highway Act, the Federal Mortgage Act, and a series of other policies that we saw the government enact in the ‘40s and the ‘50s. In Title I the government was telling the population that for all sorts of reasons – for issues of public health, issues of national security, because of the fear of the Cold War – that as a population we needed to decentralize. And I think if you look at what [Robert] Moses was doing in terms of the creation of parkways where you couldn’t get a city bus through a parkway that was built on Long Island, there’s a clear kind of stratification that was set up that said, “If you were a successful person in America you lived in the suburbs,” which had the desired effect.
"So, to me, when I call for government action to address issues like infrastructure, it’s basically to reverse this trend and also to make people aware of the fact that the way people live is a highly artificial construct. Suburbs are an artificial construct. They didn’t truly exist in any meaningful way before World War II. A lot of things that we just take for granted don’t necessarily need to be the way they are.” Underdome Interview
How much such changes be made?
“Perhaps we might hear our leaders promote time-tested ideas of density and mass transportation, of cities using far less energy per capita. Imagine they instead said 'America, we have a silver bullet. We are going to rebuild this country. We are going to build a new national landscape, and in the process we are going to create jobs, build an innovation economy, rein in health care costs, lower our dependence on foreign oil, and lead the planet to sustainability.“ Being Dense About Denmark
To effect large-scale change, Chakrabarti sketches out a plan called American Smart Infrastructure Act. (ASIA): “We will build and rebuild infrastructure that lowers greenhouse gas emissions and encourages urban density, emphasizing high-speed rail, transmission grids from alternative energy sources, national internet broadband, and critical roadway maintenance. We will de-emphasize all infrastructure that exacerbates emissions, particularly roadway and airport expansion projects. The government will fund approximately $350 billion (about half of TARP) over three years, solving the nation’s mobility needs while lowering automobile use and censuring the energy devoured by McMansions. The Future of Real Estate
Such bold initiatives require an empowered state: "If you look at China, it is extraordinary to think that they pumped $585 billion of stimulus primarily infrastructural project into the economy in almost no time flat. People say, well they’re not a democracy, we’re a democracy. Well, what does democracy get us? It doesn’t get us Central Park anymore. Do you think Central Park would get built today? No, because some assembly members in Far Rockaway needs a piece of Central Park in Far Rockaway. ... We’ve kind of gone loony about this. We can’t seem to efficiently allocate resources. … Between the political left and the political right in the country where they really join forces is this extraordinary questioning of authority. And that’s something that’s fundamentally different about this country. It’s something that’s great about the country but at the same time it impedes us from being able to say, there is an engineering rationale, or an economic rationale, or an architect rationale ... and actually say what’s more important.” The Future of Real Estate
Density in a democracy is still possible, but more complex: “There are plenty of democratic examples where this stuff is getting built in a more rational way. The classic examples of course are in Europe: London, a new train station in Berlin, a high-speed rail system in Spain. Hong Kong is a kind of quasi-democracy, but it has still a very clear the emphasis on infrastructure. I think there is country after country where you can look to precedents and say, 'You can actually build these big things with community input in a democratic process. It’s slower.” Underdome Interview
On Government Regulation
“We have to price carbon. There has to be a much more serious gas tax. There’s no question in my mind. And we have to leverage the money from that gas tax to build the infrastructure we need. Underdome Interview
Chakrabarti rejects claims that there is no political will for an effective carbon tax. Instead, the American system of democratic representation has failed to keep up with population migration, and has thus failed to give voice to pro-density sentiments (see CROSS BORDERS) . "I just don’t buy as an innate argument that we can’t tax negative externalities. I think the population’s more sophisticated than that. I think they understand that, either as corporations or as individuals, if we pollute, then we have to pay the cost to clean up that pollution and prevent that pollution from going into the future. I actually think people get that. I don’t know think it’s a very complicated idea, and it’s part of the cost of doing business. I just think we fundamentally don’t have a political system that knows how to address that.” Underdome Interview
On Territory
On Dense Urban Development
“Imagine a country of cities. No more subsidized highways, no more mortgage deductions, and no more free rides at the gas pump.” A Country of Cities
To Chakrabarti, density is the key to reducing energy consumption: “Statistically the average New Yorker uses a third less energy than the average American without really adopting any green technology, simply by virtue of using mass transit and by living in party wall construction where we heat and cool each others’ apartments. It just makes a massive, massive dent.” Underdome Interview
Dense development is both an economic and ecological necessity, and is key to surviving an economic crisis: “Density means economic diversity. It’s almost always the way. No matter whether you go to poor densities or rich densities, there’s always a tremendous economic diversity there. So if you look at New York City when the recession started, there was a fear that the city was going to lose three hundred thousand jobs, along the lines of what it lost in the late ‘70s. We’ve capped out at a job loss of one hundred and eleven, one hundred and twelve thousand jobs. It’s nowhere near as deep as people thought it was going to be in New York. I think New Yorkers who don’t travel the rest of the country have no idea how desperate a situation it is in the rest of the country. These places are decimated. There’s nothing. So that, to me, is again a byproduct of lifestyle. It’s a byproduct of the lack of density, because there simply isn’t enough diversification in the economy for those places to go anywhere else. ” Underdome Interview
On Extra-National Networks
The Emerging Megaregions source: America 2050
While addressing the popular sentiment necessary to tax carbon in the United States, Chakrabarti argues that political will is masked by a representative system that fails to represent how people live today. "People say, ' [a carbon tax] is politically impossible." Well, why is it politically impossible? Because communities have taxed themselves to create more mass transit. There are clear examples of it. It's happened in different parts of the country. Your populace isn't stupid, so why is it impossible at the federal level?
"It's impossible at the federal level because... seventy percent of the country now lives in regions that cross state borders. Those regions have virtually no political representation at the federal level. Fundamentally at the federal level we don't live in a representative democracy, because we have a huge mass of the country that has fewer than thirty percent of the population in it, that's decanting population at a very rapid rate, yet still has two senators in every state, still has gerrymandered congressional districts.
"And so you have this enormous mismatch between how the populace experiences the world versus how its representative democracy works, which is, I think, at the heart of a lot of the frustration with government at both the left and the right, because they're looking out at a set of representatives who don't really understand them anymore. So you've got this crazy stuff like Ben Nelson, Senator from Nebraska, who got all the "corn husker" moves in the heath care bill. I mean, Nebraska has a rapidly decanting population. Whereas you look at the Char-Lanta corridor, the strip between Charlotte and Atlanta, or Dallas and Houston as city pairs. To me it's not just about the Northeast Corridor. The Northeast Corridor, yes, it's the big 800-pound gorilla in the room, but there are other major corridors here. And in some ways the leadership comes from the West. They've got the state bond issue in California for high-speed rail. Seattle and Portland are both much, much more advanced in terms of figuring out how to tax themselves." Underdome Interview
On Expanded Infrastructures
Barack Obama & Joe Biden announce strategic plan for high speed rail. source: wikimedia
Regional high speed rail infrastructures, Chakrabarti argues, are critical to reducing dependency on gas guzzling automotive and airline travel. “You can go from New York to Chicago basically in three hours on [the proposed Chinese high speed passenger trains]... That would, in turn, decimate regional air travel in this country. New York processes a third of the air traffic that goes through the nation. So that means if someone is flying from Albuquerque to Paris on their honeymoon, they're not sitting on a 777 at Kennedy behind a plane going to Philadelphia.” Underdome Interview
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Chakrabarti asserts, fails to adequately promote infrastructures needed to promote viable urban density and in effect promotes more of the status quo: sprawling, car-dependent suburbs. “It is still confounding that the best we can get is $8 billion towards high-speed rail when we need at least $150 billion for all of the major corridors including California, Chicago-St. Paul, Char-Lanta, the Northeast, and yes, Florida. It is confounding when the Vice President states that the $1.25 billion investment in the Tampa-Orlando corridor will generate more than 23,000 jobs over four years, and that by extension one hundred times that investment nationwide might create 2,300,000 jobs. Now that would be stimulus.” Double Down on Density
“At the Federal level, one has to wonder if there is an Asphalt Lobby, because if there is, they must be partying like it’s 2008. The stimulus bill passed earlier in the year feeds rather than fixes our ill-conceived land use patterns, resulting in new “infrastructure” that runs the risk of being little more than a grab bag of roadway construction. The bill’s criteria mandate that projects, in order to qualify for federal funding, must be “shovel ready,” must be compliant with the existing regulatory regime including NEPA, and must be complete in two years after commencement. The much touted $8 billion of stimulus funds for high speed rail is negligible in terms of what is needed. Common estimates for high speed rail in the northeast corridor run $25-$30 billion. This sounds high until one considers that one third of the nation’s air traffic goes through New York, sitting on tarmacs behind turboprops unconscionably flying from Newark to Philadelphia. Nationwide, the needs are probably around $150 billion. This also sounds high, until you consider the checks we write to bail out banks, fund failing auto makers, and care for the human ailments – spanning from asthma to obesity – that result from urban sprawl.” Profile: Vishaan Chakrabarti
On Distributed Development
“You can build all the zero-carbon houses you want, but if everyone has to drive everywhere, I think that just kills the program. That's just people feeling good about themselves, people living in green, 4,000-square-foot, single-family homes.” Underdome Interview
Chakrabarti describes suburbs developments as inherently wasteful because they are dependence on the automobile, and economically vulnerable. McMansion developments, he warns, “could... look like the equivalent of blighted urban neighborhoods that we saw in the ‘70s.” Underdome Interview
“When you're in government, especially municipal government, you understand that it's all about tax base. Everything is about tax base. When a tax base deteriorates, there's just nothing you can do. There's no amount of affordable housing you can build. There's no amount of jobs programs you can enact.
The problem that you have in exurban locations is that the tax base is incredibly homogenous. If you look at exurban Phoenix or exurban Las Vegas, what was the economy? The economy was the development. People are moving there, so you had home builders. And people moved in, so you needed a Home Depot because people were going do their own DIY projects. And then you need a Chili’s next to the Home Depot, and someone has to hire a waitress and a bus boy. That is the economy. And so when the real estate market collapsed in those places, it took the entire economy with it. Which is why you got a foreclosure rate in exurban Phoenix or exurban Las Vegas that's way beyond the foreclosure rate of most of the country. …
I think New Yorkers who don't travel the rest of the country have no idea how desperate a situation it is in the rest of the country. These places are decimated. There's nothing. So that, to me, is again a byproduct of lifestyle. It's a byproduct of the lack of density.” Underdome Interview
On Lifestyle
On Tenancy
When asked how can renting be encouraged as an economically viable model Chakrabarti remarked, “You could either make rent tax deductible, instead of trying to strip away the mortgage deduction, just try to put them on an even playing field, which would worsen our deficit, or you can basically strip away the mortgage deduction to level the playing field.” Underdome Interview Chakrabarti suggests “dismantling the false promise of the “ownership society” by putting renters, who are primarily city dwellers, on equal footing and on the forefront of a more agile, mobile labor force. Being Dense About Denmark
“You know it’s interesting because landlords and real estate developers, the more old-school real estate developers, hate condos. They don’t want to develop condos. They like the steady income that comes from a rental property. It’s when you have a frothy market that you get a condo market. What happens is land owners start to think, 'Oh, I can make a quick buck by selling.' You get a lot of amateurs who enter the real estate market and say, “I can sell condos like in New York for two thousand or twenty-five hundred dollars a square foot.” So you get a lot of new entrants into the market who drive up land prices because again the old-school developers don’t sit there and say, “I’m going to buy land based on the idea that I’m going to sell condos for some extraordinary amount of money.”
And if you look right now you’ll see that in a city like New York, the old-school developers, because they’ve got their rent rules and because they didn’t go out and buy land for ridiculous prices (they stopped buying land a couple years ago), are in much better shape than the new entrants to the market who are purely condo developers, who are largely speculators, who came in and bought land for extraordinarily high prices, and now can’t sell the condos that they either started to build or have built.” Underdome Interview
On Green Consumerism
To Chakrabarti, green consumer behavior isn't enough: “I feel that the market has already responded to sustainability: hybrid vehicles, fluorescent light bulbs, and all these things that Americans feel that if they adopt as individuals – that if they recycle – that if they do all of these things on an individual basis, that they're going to affect the problem. And I think, by and large, it’s duping people. That's not because I'm against all of those sustainable technologies, but if you look at the numbers, it just simply doesn't seem to make much of a dent. It doesn't seem very scalable....
"I was talking to Nancy Levinson, … and she was saying that they’ve got research at ASU that's starting to show that you can put solar arrays on every house in Phoenix, and it just doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because the land form of Phoenix so completely devours energy that those individual efforts on the part of well-meaning people are really meaningless. ” Underdome Interview
“We are being told, in the end, that sprawl is just fine, that if we just weatherize our McMansions, drive hybrid Yukons, and change to fluorescent light bulbs, our gluttonous use of land is legitimate. It is from Silicon Valley, where sprawl is high art, that progressives fuel the mentality that technology will save us from ourselves. (As an aside, one only need to look at the viral spread of this approach to the physical landscape of the Indian IT sector, where smart minds, office parks, and malls prevail.)” A Country of Cities
On Owner-Occupation
Chakrabarti blames the myth of the ownership society for rampant suburbanization. “In terms of the Federal Mortgage Act---I'm a real estate professional, so people go crazy when I say this, but---where is it written that people get the right to deduct their mortgage interest from their houses? Yeah sure, people do that with condos in cities too, but if you look at the numbers it disproportionately impacts suburban dwelling versus urban dwelling, because the vast majority of people who live in cities are renters.
"Richard Florida has a lot of writing about why renting is better in the kind of economy that we live in: renters are more mobile and if their jobs change…That this thing, this Bush ownership-society thing is a complete fallacy in so many ways, and you can see it now where people are tied down to homes that are underwater financially.
"Basically in this whole drive toward home ownership, and again I think just like suburbs themselves, there’s a societal moral overlay that's put on this. It is, “If you're a successful person in America you own a house in the suburbs. You don't rent an apartment in the city, especially if you have a family.” I mean if you have a family, the notion that you rent is somehow considered really substandard: it’s something poor people do.” Underdome Interview
On Self-Determination
“I think you could create a popular sentiment that says 'How long does it take to get your kid to little league?' (Underdome Interview)
"How do you hit people at their most fundamental day-to-day issues, as opposed to having everything be at the ethereal level of policy? People are sick of the traffic. They're sick of that particular lifestyle." (Underdome Interview)
While suburbia might seem to be a place for privacy and individual freedom, Chakrabarti points to the loss of free time created by congested highways and overdependence on the car.
"There was a period in the ‘60s going through the ‘80s when people treasured their time in their car. It was the pre-Starbucks “Third Place” where you weren't at home and you weren't at work, and you actually had this time to yourself. And I think people for a while really treasured that, until it just got out of control and started impacting people's quality of life. ... If you watch Mad Men, it always amazes me when they're in their cars. They're always free flowing. There's this freedom to the way they drive. Don Draper has his elbow on the window, and he's driving like this, and there's never traffic, and they’re just moving along. It's just fundamentally different than the experience of driving in America in 2010, where you almost don't get to experience that anywhere except for maybe in the open roads of the West....
"There is a tremendous sense of this in the American psyche that's very strong and can't and shouldn't be undone. And it has to do with a belief in this kind of freedom where you can get in a car and go anywhere. And that no train line, no set of airports, no anything is dictating your final destination. And I actually think there's a real power to that, and that's important for people to understand as they start talking about this. I think if there isn't enough sympathy and sensitivity to it... Because it's part of what makes the country amazing. If you drive in the western part of the country especially, there's no other way to do that. You can't walk it, you can't sail it, you can't train it. There are certain things about that I think are valuable and go to the core of who we are as Americans.
"The problem is that you can't possibly equate that experience to commuting in downtown Atlanta. Those two experiences are radically different, and they need to be disassociated from each other. The notion of that ability to get in your car and go somewhere is just so different than what most Americans do or ever get to do. I mean, how many people who own minivans and live in the suburbs ever drive cross-country? I mean, people don't do that. So I think it's important to create these distinctions. When I talk about this, I'm not trying to strip away Americans’ ability to be free in their own country. To me, this is more free because it means that if you own a car you’re actually going to be on a clearer road and actually able to get where you’re going in a different way....
"We also live incredibly stressful lives in America. We have a higher proportion of two-income families. We have kids who are wildly overscheduled. You have this situation where you've got families with enormous amounts of their lives are spent in traffic. When you have that situation, what are both the quantitative and qualitative losses that occur from that situation? There's a quantitative loss in terms of workers who could be at work, children who could be at school, people doing more productive things than sitting in a car. There's a qualitative loss in terms of just quality of life. It's that much more time you get to spend with your child or your spouse. It's that much more time that you get to do something other than being in your car." Underdome Interview
"My litmus test [for density] is 'Do people have to get in their car to get a quart of milk?" Underdome Interview
On Risk
On Mutual Benefit
For Chakrabarti, Density is a matter of environmental and human health: “There are all [of the] secondary and tertiary issues that come around [density]. We just had this huge health care debate in this country, and yet very few people it seems to me study the relationship between public health and density. You look at the statistics, and I think there is a 2003 study in my blog somewhere where it clearly shows that Americans who live in less dense environments are more obese. And that just leads to the cascade of health care problems that we've got, that are particular to this country, in terms of heart disease and diabetes. So it just seems to me that there are layers and layers to this problem that don't go away simply by virtue of people dreaming up how to make the American lifestyle carbon neutral.” Underdome Interview
While Chakrabarti asserts that energy and health (as well as our dependence on foreign oil) are linked, he criticizes the Obama Administration's health care plan and its failure to pass “the sniff test of cost control.” December 2009, and argues that health concerns can be better addressed by structural changes to land use and density patterns.
“You know what's fun about this topic and what's scary about the topic is that it's kind of about everything. So when you look to the metrics, obviously there are emissions metrics and things like that. But the less obvious ones like health, like productivity, like foreign oil dependence that then triggers our need to spend untold amounts of money and blood on foreign wars and oil rich lands." Underdome Interview
Background
Vishaan Chakrabarti is Marc Holliday Professor of Real Estate and the Director of the Real Estate Development program in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. He is also the founding principal of Vishaan Chakrabarti Design Collaborative (VCDC, llc), an urban design, planning, and strategic advisory firm based in Manhattan, and formerly Executive Vice President of Related Companies, Director of the Manhattan Office for the New York Department of City Planning, and Associate Partner for the New York Office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP.
Comment (1)
Really.
hebyintinny wrote 2 years 19 weeks agoAdd A Comment