Some Thoughts About Density

by Sandy Ikeda
Wed, 9 Jan 2008 at 3:49 PM

Send

RSS

One of my favorite sources of urban information is Demographia, run by Wendell Cox. There you can find a lot of good urban stuff including data on (domestic and international) urban and state demographics and housing affordability, as well as studies on such things as the consequences of the so-called "smart growth" approach to urban planning. The Web site's motto is "Demographia is 'pro-choice' with respect to urban development. People should have the freedom to live and work where and how they like," to give you an idea of its ideological bent.

To pick just one interesting finding, the population density of Los Angeles in 2000 (6,720 persons per square mile) is actually higher than that of New York City (5,309 per square mile). You can find those data here. This has been adjusted for urbanized-area definitional changes that were made after 1990 to make 2000 census data compatible with it; otherwise the raw population per square mile in NYC does exceed that of LA by a considerable amount. (Unfortunately until I've found Cox's specific method of adjustment, I'll have to take this with a grain of salt.)

Anyway, density is one of those concepts that get misinterpreted in two ways.

First, advocates of smart growth (and its architectural sibling, "new urbanism"), who try to combat what has been derisively called "sprawl," use it to justify imposing greenbelts and severe building restrictions, forcing people onto less and less space, thereby driving up real-estate prices. What they forget is that for genuine economic development to take place, density needs to occur in a context of economic freedom in conjunction with a genuine diversity of uses. The latter is not really the same thing as the now-fashionable idea of "mixed uses" — a topic I'll blog about in the near future. The mistake is trying intentionally to construct density and diversity on a neighborhood- or district-scale (see my previous post on Hudson Yards on New York's far West Side), although it might work at smaller scales.

Second, free-market critics of such policies typically deny the importance of density at all by pointing out, for example, that economically challenged Calcutta is at least five times denser than New York, thereby conflating density, i.e., persons per (adjusted or unadjusted) square mile, with "overcrowding," i.e., too many persons per room. They also argue that individual choice of cars over mass transport trumps the traditional downtown ethos for living close to a bunch of strangers so that spreading populations out is actually a good thing. However, Cox's NYC vs. LA density data seem to contradict that notion (with a pinch of salt).

An example that addresses both kinds of mistakes appeared last fall in the New York Times in an article, "Reborn in the U.S.A.," about the resurgence of the designer-jeans industry in Los Angeles. Contra smart growth/new urbanism, this industry was not the brainchild of some urban planner, but arose spontaneously from old industrial laundromats, the remnants of the 1980s jeans industry, and local designers working in cheap space. Thus the designer-jeans industry was itself undesigned. Contra the anti-density wing of free-market urbanism, it was not only the genuine diversity of uses that got this industry off the ground but also, crucially, their proximity to one another in an urban matrix, enabling cheap, usually informal and tacit, information flows via casual face-to-face contact and networking to take place. It's easier to do business, at all levels, when you can have personal contact at critical moments in the production process. Of course, this does pre-suppose an environment of economic freedom.

Culture of Congestion Homepage