This Does Not Compute
There's been a lot of talk in the news lately about Silicon Valley and the housing inequities, growing traffic congestion, and other woes that are undermining the prosperity of the region. Who's to blame for these snakes that are turning up all over the New Capitalist Paradise…is it the poor immigrants brought in to tend the mansions of the cyber-rich? Is it the millionaires who live in them? Is it government? Or is it the American Dream itself?
The root of the trouble is the dispersed-suburb paradigm that has been used as the default mode of community design in Silicon Valley. While suburban land is cheap for developers to buy in its pre-suburban form, it is expensive for both residents to live in and local governments to maintain once it has been converted to pink stucco ghettos.
Suburban development gives homebuyers a very limited choice of housing formats--basically, only those that maximize the amount of land you must buy to obtain living quarters. This is because developers base their profits on buying undervalued (typically agricultural) land, and reselling it at a far higher price. The more of this land that is resold as lawns and driveways rather than as houses, the higher the profit, since lawns and driveways are cheaper to build than even current flimsy housing types. Suburban development is also profitable only if the developer builds the fewest amenities possible given the sales model--this means no parks, in fact no public space except for streets, leading to the need to drive distant places where you can buy entertainment, rather than deriving stimulus from community interactions. Furthermore, the impetus to buy cheap outlying land condemns the eventual residents of those developments to long, time- and money-wasting commutes not only to work but also to shopping, doctors, and other service destinations. Many suburban families feel the need to buy and maintain one car per grownup--a great expense in cash, interest, upkeep, insurance, etc.--and burn large quantities of fuel in pursuit of loaves of bread, movies, socks, or eyeglasses.
Naturally, the current practice of subsidizing developers by giving them roads, waste and water lines, and other infrastructure free of charge leads to much higher government expense than a more concentrated mixed-use form of development (such as "urban villages") would require. Low population densities dispersed far from services mean that more miles of road, pipe, and wire are needed per person than in the concentrated model, as well as more schools, with fewer students in each school. At the same time developers inevitably ask for tax breaks as a reward for the burdens they place on communities, and the Prop. 13 spirit makes it nearly impossible for cities to charge the end users of these services, so the money generally comes from adjacent urban dwellers, who are often poor. (This subsidy of suburbs by the urban poor has been extensively documented in statistical studies over the last twenty years.) Every suburb, however exclusionary, is connected to an urban center by an umbilicus of asphalt and cash.
The oddest thing is that many programmers model their applications after models Christopher Alexander and his team devised for urban development in "A Pattern Language" thirty years ago. Maybe instead of devoting all their talents to online shopping carts, animated calendars, and shoot-'em-up video games, the geniuses of Silicon Valley could donate a year of their time to designing the ultimate "killer app": a city that works for all its residents, young or old, rich or poor, together in peace.
Go to A Word from Eric Miller
