When Al Gore was Bill Clinton's vice president, the (non) - issue of urban sprawl could have been described as something of a second tier issue in American life. To be sure, urban sprawl had its usual detractors, but the matter was mostly something of a concern to certain interest groups.
This state of affairs has changed with the election of Barak Obama as President, where the New York Times noted that in February 2009 that the President said
"The days where we’re just building sprawl forever, those days are over,”, urging officials to employ “innovative thinking” when deciding how to spend their transportation money.
Moreover, considering where on the political outlook scales Mr. Obama sits, one can imagine that his administration would look to the Brookings Institution for ideas on many matters, including urbanization.
What a discouragement, therefore, it must be for many in the anti-suburbanization camp to read of a study that was just published by Brookings entitled Job Sprawl Revisited: The Changing Geography of Metropolitan Employment. The Brookings study, which compares the results of a spatial location analysis of private sector jobs across 98 metropolitan areas across the United States, denoting the differences in job locations between the years 1998 and 2006. Notably, private sector job decentralization occurred in 95 of the 98 metropolitan areas studied, and that does not bode well for central cities. Also, in 17 out of the 18 industries studied experienced job decentralization.
The Brookings study asserts a series of ailments that result from job sprawl, including higher water and sewer infrastructure costs, spatial mismatch where employees can have trouble reaching appropriate work, lower pace of innovation, and higher energy consumption.
Noting or complaining about all these issues is nice, but doing so begs one to ask a question that the Brookings study fails to ask, much less answer. If all of these ailments are (or were) occurring during this time frame, then why were private sector employers continuing to move away from central cities anyway?
One aspect of this issue is to look at the types of employment that are locating furthest away from the center. According to the study, it is the retail, construction, and manufacturing type jobs that are the ones that are most prone to moving outwards away from the central business districts (CBD's). The Wizard is willing to bet that these industries are the ones whose land use requirements are the largest. It would behoove them to locate where land is cheapest, which happens to be at the suburban fringe. Not doing so would put them at a competitive disadvantage vis-a-vis with their competitors in the marketplace. As far as retail goes, it also pays to move closer to their customers, and that happens to be in the suburbs.
One issue the Wizard decided to look into was the price of petroleum and of gasoline during this period. This chart shows that during the 1998 - 2006 time frame, the price of a barrel of petroleum rose from a post 1997 Asian economic crisis low of $12 per barrel to a high of $60 per barrel in 2006. The price of a gallon of gas went up from $1 per gallon in 1998 to $3 per gallon by the summer of 2006, yet the trend towards decentralizing of the spatial distribution of jobs continued to occur.
According to the study, Houston is one of the 53 metropolitan areas that is experiencing rapid decentralization of jobs, meaning that job shares were flat or declining in the CBD while growing in the outer rings. The report estimates that there were 1,750,155 jobs within 35 miles of downtown Houston in 1998 and 1,975,566 jobs within 35 miles of downtown Houston 2006. We can set up a table to see how many jobs were located where:
1998: number of jobs: 1,750,155
2006: number of jobs: 1,975,566
1998: percentage located within 3 miles of CBD: 14.2
2006: percentage located within 3 miles of CBD: 11.6
1998: number of jobs within 3 miles of CBD: 248,522
2006: number of jobs within 3 miles of CBD: 229,166
1998: percentage located 3-10 miles from CBD: 36.8
2006: percentage located 3-10 miles from CBD: 32.4
1998: number of jobs 3-10 miles from CBD: 644,057
2006: number of jobs 3-10 miles from CBD: 640,083
1998: percentage located 10-35 miles away from CBD: 49.1
2006: percentage located 10-35 miles away from CBD: 56.0
1998: number of jobs 10-35 miles from CBD: 857,576
2006: number of jobs 10-35 miles from CBD: 1,106,317
Now then, it should be noted that the City of Houston is approximately 640 square miles. A radius of 10 miles encompasses 314 square miles, ergo that is just under 50 percent of Houston's acreage, discounting the fact that there are some areas within this circle that are not under the City of Houston's jurisdiction, such as West University, the Memorial villages, and perhaps Bellaire and Pasedena. It should be noted that the number of jobs within 10 miles of downtown has, for all intensive purposes, stayed stable. Peter Brown told the ITE a while back that Houston was getting only 15 percent of new area population and 23 percent of new area jobs with the rest going outside city limits. If that were so, then that would infer that much of the new private sector employment that Houston is attracting is deciding to locate in the outermost areas of the City itself, with the rest of area job growth occurring outside City limits. Conceivably, the City Council may decide that the only way in which Houston can actually capture some of the tax monies associated with those jobs is to do so the politically unpopular, old fashioned way - via annexation.
This report also casts doubt upon the idea of using light rail as a method of capturing any job growth. Metro started operation of the light rail line in January 2004, a full 2-3 years before the termination of the study period. Yet according to the study, practically all of the job growth in the Houston metropolitan area occurred more than 10 miles away from the CBD.
The current economic downtown that started in late 2007 is not accounted for in this study. Unemployment across the United States has gone up from roughly 4.5% to 8.5%, while it is at roughly 6.5% in Houston. It might be surmised that there may be a gain in density once the economy recovers on the assumption that the cost of transportation fuels will once again go up. But even if there are gains in population density for reasons of continually rising fuel costs, it doesn't necessarily mean that gains in density will occur within the already heavily developed portions of the urbanized area, particularly if job sprawl continues to occur. Motor vehicles could adapt via a change in propulsion, where electricity becomes a preferred form of power. Households could also decide to trade within their indifference curves of their household budgets, giving up larger house sizes for holding on to the mobility offered by the automobile in the event that transportation becomes more expensive.
The Wizard awaits the next Brookings study on this subject. I suspect that the 2010 Census will tell much about these matters.
Wizard
Posted by The Mighty Wizard at April 11, 2009 10:48 PM