Salt Lake City's new-urbanism epiphany -- fervently backed by Mayor Ralph Becker and the City Council -- appears to be catching static from an unlikely source.

Transit-oriented development isn't stymied by outdated zoning, unwilling developers or a lack of space. It turns out, banks, wedded to old-fashioned lending standards that stress parking, may pose the biggest blockade by denying financing.

The reason: Lenders operate from a tried-and-true principle that maintains more parking means less risk and a higher return on their investment. But ditching cars is the whole point of urban developers looking to create 24-hour live, work and play environments that hug light-rail hubs. 

Real estate lending standards: A work in progress. Photo: MSN.

That's right, the same sector that got such fantastic returns from the car-dependent suburban fringe isn't sold on the viability of neighborhoods where you can get around without driving. Salt Lake City banks are hardly the exception. Based on informal conversations I've had with people who deal with local lenders and developers, I can tell you that real estate finance in transit-rich New York City is far from enlightened.

If we're ever going to reverse the tide of car-centric development that is gradually suburbanizing New York, we'll need banks to change their assumptions. As Jensen reports, Portland shows that it can be done.

Chris Leinberger discusses strategies to develop walkable urban spaces in the United States. Photo: Mathew Katz

If the American Dream of the Baby Boomers was all about being able to have a car and a house in suburbia, the new American Dream is having the choice between living in drivable suburban places and walkable urban ones.

That's according to Chris Leinberger, a land use strategist at the Brookings Institution, who spoke today at the Walk21 Conference. There's a simple supply-and-demand argument, Leinberger says, for creating more walkable urban space: About the the same number of people want to live in a pedestrian-friendly environment as those who want to live in a drivable suburban one, but the supply of housing in walkable urban areas makes up only 5 to 10 percent of housing nationwide. As millions of New Yorkers know, that leads to exceedingly high prices. 

But that's not always a bad thing. Sarah Gaventa, Director of CABE Space in the U.K., said that her organization managed to prove that walkability adds value to nearby property and attracts investment. CABE developed a scale to rate pedestrian-friendliness called the Pedestrian Environment Rating System (PERS). For every point on the PERS scale, neighborhoods saw a 5.2 percent increase in residential prices and a 4.9 percent increase in retail rent. Attracting more retail and consumers also means more jobs, though there should be incentives to maintain local businesses and affordable housing, Gaventa said. Having proof that making a space more pedestrian friendly will add value to it is a great way to convince those in power that change -- and a more comprehensive strategy -- is needed.

That strategy, Leinberger said, should be the development of more places where residents' everyday needs are within a maximum of 3,000 feet. We've largely run out of room to build more in the busiest urban areas -- it would be difficult for Manhattan to get much denser than it already is -- so the solution to fill that demand for pedestrian-centric space is to transform outlying areas, such as suburbs, into walkable places.

It's not impossible. It's already happened in the D.C. metro area, where 70 percent of walkable areas are outside the city core. D.C. has the greatest amount of walkable urban places per capita in the country, Leinberger said. New York's metropolitan area, with our car-crazy suburbs and exurbs, comes in at tenth. By building up these new walkable places, we could kickstart transformative projects to give a major boost to our recession-weary economy over the next few decades, not to mention re-invigorate our collapsed housing market.

Having more walkable places also makes sense on a personal financial level. According to Leinberger's data, car-friendly suburban households spend anywhere from 25 to 40 percent of their income on transportation, whereas urban households spend only about 9 percent. That extra money can go into paying for housing, or even -- as Leinberger puts it -- that most un-American of things: savings.

Photo: Penn State.

But there's not as much in the way of hard studies of the effects of land use as we might like -- mainly because it's been a non-issue, so far as most of the country is concerned, for much of recent history.

Aiming to address this (and acting under a congressional mandate), the Transportation Research Board recently completed a study that has now resulted in a very large report: "Driving and the Built Environment: The Effects of Compact Development on Motorized Travel, Energy Use, and CO Emissions."

The report is actually five mini-papers, and at nearly 200 pages long it makes for a lot of reading. But the findings reported in the introduction give an idea of what it's all about.

The authors conclude that compact development is likely to reduce VMT: "The effects of compact, mixed-use development on VMT are likely to be enhanced when this strategy is combined with other policy measures that make alternatives to driving relatively more convenient and affordable." No surprises there.

Finding No. 2 is: "The literature suggests that doubling residential density across a metropolitan area might lower household VMT by about 5 to 12 percent, and perhaps by as much as 25 percent, if coupled with higher employment concentrations, significant public transit improvements, mixed uses, and other supportive demand management measures."

They note that were you to move the residents of Atlanta to an area built like Boston, you'd lower the Atlantans' VMT per household by perhaps 25 percent.

Better land use results in reductions in energy use and carbon emissions, the authors report, from both direct and indirect causes. (Direct causes would be a reduction in VMT; indirect include things like longer vehicle lifetimes from reduced use and the greater efficiency of smaller or multi-family housing units.)

But one of the crucial pieces of data included in the report is this:

As many as 57 million new housing units are projected to accommodate population growth and replacement housing needs by 2030, growing to between 62 and 105 million units by 2050 - a substantial net addition to the housing stock of 105.2 million in 2000.

Critics of smart growth efforts or rail and transit investments often wave off the potential gains from building differently by noting that so much of the current housing stock is of the sprawling, single-family home, auto-oriented sort. Convincing the people who currently live in such places to give that up for something different, they say, is sure to be an extremely difficult sell.

But that's not the issue. No one is suggesting we rip down all of suburbia. Rather we, or at least I, am pointing out that between now and mid-century, the country will very nearly have to build itself all over again to accommodate population growth. In addition to the 100 million homes now in America, somewhere between 62 and 105 million more will be built.

The critical question is what the balance of that new construction will look like. The TRB report suggests that if 75 percent of this new construction is of a more compact variety, that emissions could be reduced 10 percent or more from the baseline scenario (and that is not taking into consideration the deployment of cleaner electricity generation and other potential sources of savings).

Ed Glaeser argued -- and this is kind of hard to believe -- that land use shifts from building high-speed rail between Dallas and Houston would not provide much in the way of benefits, since, he guessed, only 100,000 or so people in each city would move from the suburbs to the central city. But this entirely misses the point.

Houston and Dallas may each double their current housing stock between now and 2050. Where are those homes going to go, with what climate impacts? That's the critical question.

Demographic shifts and changes in energy prices are sure to encourage some households that are currently living at low densities to move to more compact developments, and that's a good thing. But that's not the main reason to begin focusing on the significant available savings from smarter land use decisions.

The main reason is the growth that America will continue to face. It's difficult to imagine that the nation can double its housing stock while building in a sprawling fashion without facing major environmental costs and economic difficulties. Land use patterns will need to change. And as this report documents, there will be considerable advantages to facilitating that change.

Ballston Metro station, Arlington Co. Photo: Point Images/Flickr

The future looked as though it belonged to Fairfax County, and Arlington's decision to target development around its new Metro stations seemed quixotic and anachronistic.

But now, with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight, Arlington seems to have been extraordinarily foresighted in its decision to grow around Metro. From 2000 to 2008, Arlington's population grew by 10 percent -- all of it infill development, and a remarkable achievement for an inner suburb.

Even more remarkably, this growth has led to a negligible impact on local traffic. Daniel Malouff, author of the BeyondDC blog, reported this week on a meeting with Arlington's Department of Transportation, at which officials recounted some numbers that had emerged from research on the effects of county development choices.

Among the remarkable statistics:

1. Auto traffic counts in the Pentagon City area are level today compared with counts from 1975. Despite all the development that has occurred there in that time frame, including construction of one of the region’s largest and busiest shopping malls, there has been no measurable increase in traffic congestion.

2. [One thousand] units of urban-format TOD housing generates fewer auto trips per day than a single suburban-format McDonalds or 7-11. You can build 1,000,000 square feet of residential TOD and generate less congestion than 2,000 square feet of auto-oriented retail.

Arlington has very nearly maximized the development potential of available land around Metro stations, but it's looking to create new transit access for its communities by building a streetcar line along one of the county's busier thoroughfares (and running along its busiest bus routes). Already, denser, walkable, and mixed-used developments are replacing older strip malls on the planned line.

And of course, Fairfax County has been busily working to reverse its approach to transit and development, its streets and highways having bogged down under the weight of constant congestion.

Back when Metro was originally built, Fairfax did not attempt to lobby for routing through population centers, opting instead for a cheaper alignment along the median of I-66 (for the Orange Line), and along existing rail right of way (for the Blue Line). Stations were almost exclusively surrounding by parking; riders would nearly all arrive by car.

These decisions have proven difficult to reverse engineer, but Fairfax County has been trying. Along the I-66 corridor, the county is encouraging such transit-oriented development as can be accommodated. In Springfield (on the Blue Line), a large, walkable redevelopment plan has been slowly making its way forward despite the difficult economic situation.

But the biggest shift is occuring elsewhere. Fairfax County and the state of Virginia recently won federal funding for a new extension of the Metrorail system, to be run through the densest portion of the county at Tysons Corner.

The Silver Line will be used as a framework around which to completely remake Tysons into a dense, walkable downtown. The area may ultimately be home to over 100,000 people, and an employment center to rival downtown Washington.

The rest of the country will be watching. Tysons represents one of the most ambitious attempts to reengineer a suburban employment and retail center into a pedestrian friendly mini-city, fit for residents as well as workers.

Of course, the opportunities to make these kinds of changes are extremely limited. Very few heavy rail systems have been built in the past half century. Commuter rail and light rail systems are increasingly common in growing cities, but federal funding has simply not been made available for new lines on the necessary scale, and the federal government has not made transit-oriented development a priority in choosing where and how to allocate transportation dollars.

This is an inexcusable missed opportunity given transit-oriented development's record of accommodating population growth without contributing to new congestion. Hopefully it is one Congress will address when it gets around to crafting a new transportation bill.

House Energy & Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), his climate legislation co-author. Photo: Washington Independent

In a report released Friday, the Center for Clean Air Policy (CCAP) quantifies the benefits of setting tangible goals for reducing the carbon footprint of transportation, which currently accounts for about one-third of total U.S. emissions.

Using smart growth policies to reduce per-capita VMT by 10 percent below 2005 levels would achieve emissions reductions equivalent to taking 35 large coal plants off-line or taking 30 million cars off the road by 2030, according to the CCAP analysis.

The report, viewable in full here, offers some interesting examples of how smart-growth proposals can pay environmental dividends. For example, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the International Energy Agency -- hardly known as bastions of the environmental movement -- have found that emissions reductions of up to 14.5 percent can be achieved at a cost of less than $3 per ton of CO2 simply by encouraging carpooling, telecommuting and eco-driving.

Perhaps the most politically relevant conclusion in the CCAP report, however, deals with a topic very much on the minds of Congress these days: how to push regionally favored industries, from Rep. Collin Peterson's (D-MN) agriculture producers to Rep. Gene Green's (D-TX) oil refiners, to accept their share of the emissions-reduction burden.

After noting that better fuel economy means a 15 percent rise in per-capita VMT over the next two decades would achieve a 14 percent decrease in CO2 (relative to 2005 levels), the CCAP notes that the target needs to be more than double that 14 percent. From the report (emphasis ours):

If we fail to pursue cost-effective GHG reductions from the transportation sector, other sectors of the economy will need to implement more expensive solutions, ultimately costing the public more money. There is compelling evidence that we can achieve significant, and inexpensive, transportation GHG reductions.

(h/t Kaid Benfield at NRDC)

A section of Tysons Corner slated for infill development. Image: Fairfax County/PB PlaceMaking [PDF]

Four of the line's stations are planned for Tysons Corner, a collection of malls and offices so unwalkable that traffic clogs streets when employees break for lunch. Only 17,000 people live there, but it provides 167,000 parking spaces for the hordes of commuters and shoppers who drive in on a daily basis. In this excellent NPR segment (listening to the audio is well worth the time), Robert Siegel looks at how Fairfax County officials are attempting to transform Tysons Corner into a more urban setting:

...a central part of the plan is to build residential housing, and plan for 100,000 people. But that means more than build apartment houses -- Tysons is also utterly inhospitable to pedestrians.

Clark Tyler, who chairs the Tysons Corner Land Use Task Force, says there are nine lanes of traffic near Tysons Corner Center, but the street lights give pedestrians only 40 seconds to cross them. Sidewalks mysteriously end.

So, what will the new Tysons be like? 

"Hopefully it will have sidewalks that aren't hyphenated," Tyler says. "It will have a grid of streets, shorter blocks, it will have a circulation system, so the other thing that would be radical is what they call LEED certified -- or green buildings that are energy efficient -- and all the rest because that's what we've recommended."

Buses to get you from the rail stations to these stores -- right now, that sounds like science fiction. It also sounds like a city.

Siegel's guide, Chris Leinberger of the Brookings Institution, sees Tysons Corner as a watershed of sorts, a model that other sprawling edge cities might follow. As the story makes clear, however, there are still plenty of misconceptions to dispel about density and smart growth:

Mayor Jane Seemans of the neighboring town of Vienna has some concerns about the Tysons plan. Will it increase her town's traffic, which is already congested? Will Vienna's schools and parks become overcrowded? "It's the impact that it will have on our quality of life in Vienna... We just want to make sure that we have a voice in the continuing development."

Policies in favor of dense development shouldn't be viewed on a left-right spectrum and certainly needn't be filtered through culture-war rhetoric, the panelists said. In fact, one doesn't have to be concerned about climate change at all in order to support such policies; values of fiscal conservatism and localism, both key to Republican ideology, can be better realized through population-dense development than through sprawl.

Tom Darden, a developer of urban and close-in suburban properties, said Wednesday, "I'm a Republican and have been my whole life. I consider myself a very conservative person. But it never made sense to me why we would tax ordinary people in order to subsidize this form of development, sprawl." Darden told the story of a road-paving project approved by North Carolina when he served on the state's transportation board. A dirt road that handled just five trips per day was paved at taxpayer expense, with money that could have gone toward mass transit benefiting millions of people.

"Those were driveways, in my view, not roads," Darden said.

Now that U.S. taxpayers will probably have to bail out the Highway Trust Fund to the tune of $8 billion, how much longer can the free-spending road-building industry masquerade as an enabler of personal freedom?

Personal sidenote: Stories like this remind me of my high school calculus teacher, Mr. Hall, who was conservative through and through, and didn't shy away from sharing his views in class. When he was a kid, his family's farm ceased to be viable when it got split down the middle to make way for I-91. Much of his distaste for government seemed to spring from this fact. Not that eminent domain doesn't have its uses, but here was a guy whose conservatism was rooted in opposition to highway building.

They warn that if sprawling development continues to fuel growth in driving, the projected 59 percent increase in the total miles driven between 2005 and 2030 will overwhelm expected gains from vehicle efficiency and low-carbon fuels. Even with projected efficiency improvements, vehicle emissions of carbon dioxide would be 41 percent above today's levels, rather than well below 1990 levels as required for climate stabilization by 2050, according to Growing Cooler....

The report cites real estate projections showing that two-thirds of development expected to be on the ground in 2050 is not yet built, meaning that the potential for change is profound. The authors calculate that shifting 60 percent of new growth to compact patterns would save 85 million metric tons of CO2 annually by 2030. The savings over that period equate to a 28 percent increase in federal vehicle efficiency standards by 2020 (to 32 mpg), comparable to proposals now being debated in Congress....

The findings show that people who move into compact, "green neighborhoods" are making as big a contribution to fighting global warming as those who buy the most efficient hybrid vehicles, but remain in car-dependent areas.

While demand for such smart-growth development is growing, government regulations, government spending, and transportation policies still favor sprawling, automobile-dependent development. The book recommends changes in all three areas to make green neighborhoods more available and more affordable.

The problem is that the global population base has increased so radically that even seemingly modest birthrates can have momentous consequences. Joel Cohen (head of the Laboratory of Populations at the Rockefeller University and Columbia University) calculates that if we do add 2.5 billion people by 2050, and virtually all the increase, as expected, goes into poor countries' cities, then the world will have to build one city of one million people every week for the next 43 years. "Is this," he asks, "feasible -- physically, environmentally, financially, socially?"

One sort of shudders at the answer. But there is a first step: get a handle on growth of the world's cities. Without that, how can city leaders estimate the peripheral areas they'll have to urbanize, or, alternatively how much they'll have to "infill" their current territory with higher density development?

The bottom line is clear: the developing world's cities -- and the developed world's cities still expanding significantly -- must plan early, much more carefully, or expect to be overwhelmed by a virtual growth tsunami.

Good planning, for example, can recycle underused urban land, or schedule better use of expansion areas, to achieve much greater people-carrying capacity. Good planning can avoid some of the worst modern traffic jams, put public transit first, make walking and biking convenient, and preserve pockets of "green" critical to humans' physical and emotional health.