If the population of north Texas continues to grow, where we will house all the new people? There are only two options: either greater density or more sprawl. Lately, Jim Schutze has been writing on Facebook against so-called "gentle densification" efforts in Dallas. His arguments seem, to me, to lack logical rigor. It's not that he's not smart. He is. It might just be the nature of social media. Anyway, let's examine one of his responses to my own comment in which I suggested that sprawl is worse than density from a cost viewpoint. I said, "Sprawl creates the need for additional future maintenance. Density uses existing infrastructure."
In case you aren't familiar with Jim Schutze, he's a former Dallas journalist (Dallas Times Herald, Dallas Observer, D Magazine for a while) with a reputation for being cantankerous, but smart. He's a pitbull at guarding his old East Dallas neighborhood and he pretty much views any change as a threat. He used a photo of himself pointing a long gun to go with the title of his "Get Off My Lawn!" column for the Dallas Observer. He's retired now, but that hasn't kept him from writing. He uses a Substack ("Shoots") to discuss school reform efforts in Houston, where he's a supporter of state-appointed superintendent Mike Miles's New Education System (NES). He uses Facebook for things Dallas related.
Jim Schutze replied to my comment about density vs sprawl:
This idea of so-called "gentle densification" is really sprawl-made-worse, more people sprinkled out across what are basically mid-century garden suburb neighborhoods, whether they are within the city limits or not. Doubling up occupancy on those lots just requires the municipality to pipe more water and sewer back and forth, manage more traffic, pay for more street repair.
The thing that's missing, left out, is the public cost, the maintenance, the tax bill for all that. It's left out, ignored, not accounted, because if you put it on the books, if you started collecting it and escrowing it, all of a sudden all those far-flung new houses would be totally unaffordable because of the taxes.
The way to cut that bill down, to reduce those costs, is to gather people in tighter around a less sprawling more efficient infrastructure system.
The problem is that people don't want to live that way -- most people. For most people, the American dream is still the mini-castle with its own mini-forest and mini-moat.
Developers just want to build stuff and sell it. It's their business. They want to build what people want to buy.
But in order to keep selling that deal, we have to lie to ourselves about the cost. So far, the piper ain't quite here yet. But those potholes are his footprints.
Not to mention turning the planet into a ball of fire.
Source: Jim Schutze, Facebook.
There's really too much packed into that paragraph to adequately respond to, but let's try to unpack it anyway.
Housing more people in "mid-century garden suburb neighborhoods" is not "sprawl-made-worse." It's ameliorating a decades-old urban design mistake. It's providing new sources of revenue to help pay for the maintenance that's been neglected for decades. In that sense, it's sprawl-made-better.
Sure, increasing occupancy in a neighborhood will require piping more water and sewage back and forth, but it doesn't require more pipes. Most of our neighborhoods have excess capacity. Densification means using that capacity instead of laying new pipes in new subdivisions. I live in Richardson. Through conservation efforts, the city uses less water today than it did in 2001, despite adding tens of thousands of new residents. There's a similar story about streets. The city has added 23 miles of bike lanes on existing streets, and we still have more car lanes than we need. Densification is cheaper than building more sprawl.
Supporters of densification are not "leaving out" the public cost. That's the crux of their argument. I agree with Schutze when he says, "if you started collecting [taxes for future maintenance] and escrowing it, all of a sudden all those far-flung new houses would be totally unaffordable because of the taxes." That's an argument against sprawl, not against densification, even though both densification and sprawl need taxes to pay for maintenance. The point is that densification needs less tax money to pay for new infrastructure.
Schutze argues that for many people, "the American dream is still the mini-castle with its own mini-forest and mini-moat." I concede that many people want that, but that's a different argument than whether such sprawl is indefinitely scalable or sustainable. It isn't.
Schutze says "developers just want to build stuff and sell it. It's their business." Developers are agnostic. They'll build either sprawl or dense, as long as it "pencils out" for them. Let's steer them to build in ways that are scalable and sustainable. That's more density, not more sprawl. Society needs to make informed decisions about fulfilling its wants. We have to always remind ourselves of the old maxims. "Pay me now or pay me later." "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." "Your eyes are bigger than your stomach."
In another Facebook post, Schutze asks, "Is density just more tax base, a revenue machine cranking more money into the same undisciplined, unfocused, opaquely accounted dollar gobbler we've got already?" If government insatiable greed is a problem, governments will choose sprawl over densification. There's simply more public money to be spread around building whole new subdivisions on open land than in allowing people to build, say, granny flats in their unused back yards. So one way to combat the growth of municipal government is to combat the growth in the number of miles of streets and water and sewer pipes. Densification is a good tool for that. Sprawl is not.
Schutze adds a postscript: "Not to mention turning the planet into a ball of fire." If you've read this far, you'd know I would argue that densification has less impact on global warming than sprawl does. But I'm not sure Schutze was serious. He seems just a small step away from explaining to me, "Get Off My Lawn!"
All of this is pertinent not just to Dallas, but to Richardson, too, which is in the process of updating its own Comprehensive Plan. If that process is being guided by thinking anywhere close to what Schutze expresses here, Richardson is in big trouble.
"Cities expand wide,
With sprawling streets and pipelines.
Densify for thrift."
—h/t ChatGPT
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