3 comments about Sprawl Costs: Economic Impacts of Unchecked Development.

1. As a rural resident trying to help my town control predatory developers and manage issues of growth and land use, this book is a potent tool, a fact that is clearly disturbing to some who stand to profit handsomely from sprawl, like the automobile and oil companies, the large-scale construction industries, millionaire developers, automobile manufacturers, and big-box national retailers.
   
   It's interesting that Diane Bast has written a negative review without mentioning, either here or in her Amazon.com profile, that she holds the title of Vice President of Internal Affairs for the benign-sounding (and Richard Mellon Schiafe-funded) "Heartland Institute," whose work she cites here.
   
   She also fails to mention that her husband Joseph L. Bast is also founder, president and CEO of the Institute, whose board of directors includes representatives from General Motors, Exxon-Mobil, and Philip Morris, along with various banks and insurance companies. The Institute has also over the years received substantial funding from the tobacco industry, among other large multinational companies. Of course, none of these board members mention these affiliations on Heartland's flowers-and-little-kids adorned official website, because that would be giving the real purpose of the organization away.
   
   I doubt that such an organization would subsidize any research which would support public transportation or de-emphasize converting far-flung farmland or open space into cookie-cutter subdivisions, so Ms. Bast's citations are unsurprising given her unmentioned affiliation to that organization.
   
   As for Mr. Cox, a quick check of his consultancy website reveals his purpose is to denigrate comprehensive planning efforts (because they supposedly put constraints on private ownership and the so-called "free market") and to promote gasoline-powered transportation over rail, public transportation and other environmentally- friendly alternatives. (In the 1920s and 30s, a consortium of carmakers and tire manufacturers bought up and dismantled existing electric trolley systems in major cities, and Mr. Cox and his colleagues are apparently dedicated to making sure that such systems stay dead.)
   
   In fact, despite Ms. Bast's derision of "politics" as a factor in the costs of sprawl, the Heartland Institute has been more than willing to use politics to its own corporate ends, including coordinating the blast-faxing of legislators to oppose or overturn anti-smoking, pro-environmental and health-care regulatory legislation that could cut into the profits of its benefactor companies. Despite her sprinkling her review with references to the poor and minorities, her organization believes in unfettered corporate power, first and foremost. I believe the reader should take that into account when reading her comments.
   
   The fact remains that sprawl enriches developers, car manufacturers, oil and real estate companies much, much more than individual homeowners, who find that as gas hits $3 - $4 a gallon and above, and their property taxes jump as overburdened small towns try to cope with the sudden need to build new schools and keep formerly little-used town roads in repair, that their "affordable" homes cost them more to own than they imagined -- and that the only part of the supposed wealth they generate is when they sell them, long after the strip-mall, big-box and cookie-cutter developers have pocketed their profits and gone elsewhere.
   
   There is a biological analog to unfettered and out of control growth. It's called "cancer." Cancer eventually kills its host. Sprawl kills community life and saps a region's vitality. This book lays out the evidence in black and white.
   
   For more information on the Heartland Institute, go to www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Heartland_Institute.



2. According to an article by Wendell Cox, senior fellow for The Heartland Institute, this book rehashes the tired claims about suburbanization (pejoratively called "urban sprawl") being unnecessarily costly. In fact, however, Sprawl Costs: Economic Impacts of Unchecked Development (by Robert Burchell, Anthony Downs, Barbara McCann, and Sahan Mukheri) relies on prospective data that is soundly refuted by reality.
   
   The book is an outgrowth of a study led by Burchell, which concluded that more compact (less suburban) development could save $225,000,000,000 in government spending over 25 years. The study made the all-too-common error of concluding that many zeros after a number make it significant. They do not. It will probably take the average reader at least 225,000,000,000 nanoseconds to read this article. $225 billion over 25 years is less than $30 per capita each year. This is a pittance in comparison with overall government expenditures, which have risen more than 100 times that fast over the past 25 years after adjustment for inflation.
   
   Aside from the shock value, the validity of the numbers is questionable. In fact, the suburbs are not more expensive. Joshua Utt and I published research analyzing Bureau of the Census data for more than 700 municipalities concluding that actual (not theoretical) per-capita public expenditures are lowest in the newer suburbs. Even sewer costs were found to be lowest in the newer suburbs. The principal reasons are that politics, congestion, and labor costs drive costs higher in more compact development.
   
   Sprawl Costs' weakest assertion may be that more compact development would reduce the cost of an average new house $16,000, a conjecture that ignores economic reality. To accomplish the more compact development Burchell et al. would prefer requires stringent regulation, such as urban growth boundaries, greenbelts, and other limits on development. Rationing land, like anything else, results in higher prices. Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko, in work published by Harvard University, reported that the principal cause of differences in housing affordability among U.S. metropolitan areas is zoning and land regulation.
   
   The current "housing bubble" is most pronounced where there is strong land rationing-places like California, Portland, and the Northeast, from Boston to Washington's Virginia and Maryland suburbs. In the past five years actual house prices in those areas have risen $200,000 more than the average in Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Houston, growth dynamos where there is little land rationing. In just five years, the conjectural $16,000 savings over 25 years have been consumed 12 times over by the actual excess price increases in areas that have implemented the very strategies required to compel the compact development advocated by Burchell et al.
   
   Moreover, with minority home ownership in the U.S. a full third below the Non-Hispanic White homeownership rate, the cost-increasing effects of land rationing are today denying opportunity and blocking the ladder to the economic mainstream. Of course, the higher prices will also drive other millions out of the homeownership market.
   
   All of this shifts wealth from young to old and poorer to richer in a perverse trickle-up economy. The American Dream is under threat. A nation of renters will be less affluent.
   
   None of this is to suggest that suburbanization should be the favored form of urban development. Instead, people should be allowed to live and work where and how they like. Anti-suburban interests have yet to find a compelling reason why this should not be so.
   
   Sprawl Costs misses the economic opportunities and wealth that have been created by broad home ownership, made possible by building new houses on inexpensive land in the suburbs. It is not surprising that virtually all urban growth in the United States, Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand has been suburban for decades. Consumers know better. What Burchell et al. perceive as costs are really benefits.
   
   Wendell Cox (cox@heartland.org) is a senior fellow at The Heartland Institute and a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.



3. I just heard one of the authors on talk radio out here and must say that I was blown away by the amount of money sprawl costs every year. Just making a list of the items that tap into our tax dollars is staggering: schools, highways, sewers, electricity, water. And if you watch a new housing development going into the desert, this fact is so obvious---much of the bill must be paid by all the rest of us, how else could they afford all those big costs. So I know the argument for sprawl is that if we didn't have it, housing prices would go through the roof. But one sensible point this author made is that with a very limited change in the way we live, would result in a massive savings to our government spending. So I hope people will listen to this message cause it seems to make sense to me. Looking forward to reading the book, and I hope government officials will as well.

1 comments about Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production.

1. This insightful book provided me with a fundamental understanding of not only the history of architectural representation, but also scientific, psychological, philosophical and metaphysical backgrounds of the architectural expressions of epochs throughout the Western culture. What is especially interesting to me is how the idea of 'architecture as language' especially in relation to Bauhaus and modernism is investigated. Since the manifestation of fragments of contemporary cities continuously surfaces in our environments to be comprehended or to take in charge, the text seems to be very relevant to our present time, perhaps even more so in developing countries. One passage reads: "... (I)n amnesic aphasia, the discontinuity between the possible and actual reality of words, between their concrete and abstract meanings, destroys the physiognomic qualities of experience, perception, and language. The loss of physiognomic qualities is directly related to the loss of categorial background, affecting language and perception... This shows just how critical is the communication between articulated, conceptual experience and its background; even more important, it shows that the background is common to our experience as a whole, including our language."

1 comments about The Architecture of McKim, Mead & White in Photographs, Plans and Elevations (Dover Books on Architecture).

1. Man-o-man, I used to love looking at old buildings and would be in awe of the amount of work that went into them. All of the art work, craftsmanship, and downright labor. Well, this book really brings to the forefront through numerous period photos and floor plans. The book actually contains very little wording, but then the photos and floor plans are enough to tell you many things about the structures. Most of the buildings are in New York City and I recently had the opportunity to visit. As I walked along the many streets, I came across buildings that had been built by the architects and it was just awesome to look, of course, only from the outside at the wonderful structure and compare it to the photos and floor plans that are now etched in my mind. I look at the book and discover new things about the works of art that I hadn't known before. Sorry if it sounds a little romantic but when I pass one of the new office buildings or structures, well, I'm just not moved by them. Dave Sanchez

4 comments about The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance.

1. I would have little to say other than that this work is probably the most readable that i have seen and is quite useful. Color pictures and better quality photography-rendition would have been ideal, but the date of original authorship makes this unlikely, unless the work is to be revised.



2. For the layperson who is interested in the evolution of renaissance architecture, this is the book I would recommend. It is easy to read without swamping the reader with architectual jargon, while remaining informative. The abundance of illustrations and structural diagrams further help the understanding of how these buildings are important historically, as well as pointing out the artistic merits of them. Highly recommended, particularly for those visting Italy - it will clarify and deepen your understanding of renaissance structures.



3. This well-illustrated, tightly-crafted paperback is a pleasure to read. By well-illustrated I don't mean fancy. You won't find big color photographs, but you will see what the author is talking about. Murray is not only an expert on the subject; he's a good writer, and I know of no other book that so effortlessly leads the reader through the story of how the wonderful Renaissance architecture of Venice, Rome, and particularly Florence came to be. If you want to know WHY those churches and palaces look that way, and why it matters, this is your book. I especially recommend it to Florence-bound travelers.



4. I am not an academic, so I cannot judge the accuracy or importance of this book from a historical perspective. I bought this book to help prepare for a trip to Tuscany and Umbria, and was pleasantly suprised to find it very readable and even difficult to put down. I am now more excited than ever to visit not only the famous sites such as the Duomo and Palazzi in Florence, but also lesser known sites such as Lucca's Palazzo dello Signoria and its Piazza and fountain, by the Mannerist Amanetti. I wish I had this book before my visit to St. Peter's in Rome, because the knowledge of the succession of architects and their circumstances would have made my visit even more rewarding, if that could be possible.

No comments about The Black & Decker Complete Guide to Gazebos & Arbors: Ideas, Techniques and Complete Plans for 15 Great Landscape Projects (Black & Decker Complete Guide).

No comments about Stair Design.

2 comments about The Queen Anne House: America's Victorian Vernacular.

1. Generally, books of this type fall into two categories - either they are dense textbook-like examinations of a particular style of architecture that lack visual appeal, or they are beautifully illustrated with minimal text that amounts to fluff. This book is a triumph in that it combines the best of both. It is at once visually appealing and informative. Both the professional and the layperson will find it useful and enjoyable. What an exciting concept!



2. Really a well done book on one of the great American house styles. The text is highly informative and the images are crisp and well executed. Overall, I was pleased with the houses chosen, some are quite reserved and some are massive and grand. I do wish the author had chosen one of the great Galveston Queen Anne style mansions, instead of the simple quant home chosen to represent Galveston, the city has some spectacular mansions in this style. Though having said that i still highly recommend this wonderful book, if you have a love for Queen Anne, you will not be disappointed, unless you happen to be a Galvestonian.

3 comments about Buildings of Earth and Straw: Structural Design for Rammed Earth and Straw-Bale Architecture.

1. Learn how to build with earth, and straw. The one thing I didn't like about the book is that there are no photo's of finished projects.



2. This book educates the lay builder of "earth and straw" about the technical side of the mentioned building methods. This technical lingo is explained clearly for the person's understanding. This book bridges the gap between building inspetors and the "alternative" builder by increasing the technical knowledge of basic building structures and forces.



3. This book is definitely the funniest structural engineering book I have ever read. It is also useful for the professional, intelligible to the general reader, and attractively illustrated. King includes California's straw bale code, a comprehensive wish list for further testing, and a useful list of references for both stabilized earth and straw bale. Included are equations for the engineer who is ready to start designing right now, and a glossary for the lay reader who isn't quite sure of some of the terms. A valuable book which is also enjoyable to read. This is not always true of engineering texts!

No comments about Ortho's All About Roofing & Siding Basics (Ortho's All about) (Ortho's All about).

1 comments about Architecture: Choice or Fate: Travel Size Series.

1. Leon Krier is one the two or three greatest architects and urbanists of our time. In this book, he outlines a profound and at the same time sensible approach to the built environment. Krier is the winner of the Richard Driehaus Prize for Classical and Traditional Architecture (the equivalent prize to the Pritzker, but meant for buildings fit for human beings and human sensibilities). I doubt that anyone -- from layperson, to beginning architecture student, to practicing architect hardened by years of practice -- will not be moved by its message, and will not immediately react by a sudden comprehension of what architecture and urbanism are really about.
   
   After reading this book, any architect can begin to move towards creating a humane built environment. Krier gives the essentials that everyone can develop further. Once his philosophy (and it is a philosophy of universal respect for human sensibilities) is understood, then its application is straightforward. The only problem is the numerous obstacles that have been put into place by the architectural establishment.
   
   At the same time, Krier's message is bound to bring an almost violent reaction at the massive brainwashing that society has been subjected to in order to promote a small group of anti-architects. How could we have ignored methods of building structures that make our lives more pleasant and more human, in order to support arrogant and unworkable dreams? Furthermore, in something very much akin to a Ponzi pyramid scheme, unworkable buildings have been propped up by increasingly convoluted pseudo-philosophical jargon (not to mention prestigious prizes). Krier cuts through all of that nonsense like VIM cuts through kitchen grease.
   
   There are some indications that we are due for a massive, revolutionary change in architectural paradigm. Like octogenarian dictators due to meet their well-deserved date with the afterworld, the architecture of bizzarre images is overdue for a collapse. Leon Krier's book is one of the pillars of the new architecture that will replace the old and worn-out deceptions.