Living on Fumes

The report, "Measuring Sprawl and its Impact," was released from Smart Growth America last month.  In case you missed it, this was the report that named Atlanta the most sprawling large metropolitan area.  Right after that report came out, I had a trip for work.  I was sitting next to the window and it was a clear day.  This was not long after take off but I'm not sure how long; even if it's some distance from Atlanta, it illustrates the point -- housing in places where you have to have a car to get around.  There just is no other way.

As more of the people who could afford to live this way decide they don't want to do it, there's increasing demand for housing in real places, in actual neighborhoods, in places where there is somewhere to go and something to do and where you don't have to drive everywhere.  I am fortunate enough to live in one of those places.  But there's no more space, inside the perimeter, than there was when it was built, so the only way to add more housing is to fill in the empty spaces (there are some) or knock down something that was already there and build something new.  That happens, in my part of town, with houses and with commercial developments.  Of course all of the new construction is much more expensive than what it replaced, so there are fewer and fewer places for lower income people to live.  This means that our neighborhoods are less diverse and less interesting, because there are fewer and fewer places (for example) for the young people who make neighborhoods interesting and fun, and the people who can't afford to live here any more get pushed out to areas where housing costs less.

Where are those areas in the metropolitan Atlanta area?  There are still more affordable areas intown than my neighborhood, of course, and if you can't afford Morningside or Virginia Highland, there are other neighborhoods to go.  But at the bottom of the income scale, increasingly, those places are in the suburbs, those places where transit doesn't go, where you have to have a car.  What happens to the poor and the almost-poor and the one-broken-down-car-away-from-homelessness poor?  Rebecca Burns wrote about it today in Politico, in a piece entitled "Sprawled out in Atlanta," with the subheading, "What happens when poverty spreads to a place that wasn't built for poor people?"  (Not to pick on Cobb County, the subject of Rebecca Burns' piece, in particular -- the New York Times had the very same article today, but set in Moreno Valley, California, east of Los Angeles).  Both articles make clear how sprawl keeps people poor, with requirements for long commutes and the resulting high costs of commuting in both time and money to low-paying jobs.

It all circles back to the need for more compact development and density and the importance of transit.  Which brings me back to accessory dwelling units.  I know I just wrote about this, but in case you missed it, Virginia Highland just had an opportunity to support the development of accessory dwelling units (garage apartments and so forth) in their new neighborhood Master Plan but decided against it.  In Portland, Oregon, the city now allows accessory dwelling units, and there adding an accessory dwelling unit increases the value of the property, provides rental income for the property owner, and contribute to sustainable communities through dramatic decreases in construction waste.  According to the New York Times article, "additional living spaces are springing up everywhere, providing affordable housing without changing the feeling or texture of established neighborhoods the way high-rise developments can."

In our neighborhoods, we value property owners' rights so highly that they can build any kind of house that meets zoning requirements whether or not it fits in at all into the neighborhood, but not enough to let the property owner build a garage apartment that might be invisible from the street.