How Large Cities Can Grow Denser and Flourish - An Issue Paper

In a recent post at the Manhattan Institute, the topic of how cities can grow denser and flourish was featured in an issue brief.

Overall, relatively dense U.S. cities have followed two distinct paths to growth. One is “grand bargain” planning: municipalities faced with the need for more housing but widespread opposition from neighborhood activists direct new housing (and thus population growth) to a small number of neighborhoods, in and near downtown, that do not have sizable preexisting populations that can object. The areas that can be redeveloped in these neighborhoods may include open parking lots, now-underutilized but once-industrial sites, public property no longer needed for its original purpose or areas cleared of residents under long-ago urban renewal plans.

While pragmatic, “grand bargain” planning to achieve population growth suffers from several flaws. It fosters dependency on the costliest high-rise housing prototypes, requiring that most new units be targeted to high-income households. Most other households compete for the inadequate stock of older units, as well as the relatively few subsidized income-restricted new units that the city manages to construct. Furthermore, grand bargains lead to the similarity of development, as new housing is built at much the same time, for much the same population, in a few locations. Such neighborhoods may adapt poorly to changing populations and lifestyles over time.

An alternative, more difficult path to growth tries to disperse new housing over a broad area of the city. Such “distributed growth” plans cause changes where sizable populations already live, potentially creating controversy over land-use decisions. Some strategies to disperse growth include Seattle’s “urban villages,” still leading to concentrated growth but affecting more parts of the city; Boston’s construction of new housing affordable to middle-income households, without subsidies, near dispersed transit stations; and Minneapolis’s designation of commercial corridors for growth, as well as permitting up to three units on all single-family lots. Dispersed growth is perhaps more easily accomplished through a comprehensive planning process to secure public buy-in, with upgraded transit and attention to the quality of other neighborhood infrastructure and amenities. The rewards for cities that succeed in this endeavor include more gradual and varied neighborhood change, new housing affordable at a wider range of incomes without subsidies, and greater perceived equity in the distribution of the burdens of population growth.