Sprawl happens with or without infrastructure. I-933 will make it easier, so make sure you own the most upstream property.

Nice to see the NIMBY's and anti-urbanists are jumping all over each other to come up with ever more Orwellian language.

If you encourage a bunch of upscale new construction that displaces affordable housing now occupied by people who work in the City to the suburbs - ta da - you've just exacerbated sprawl.

That's not so hard to understand now, is it?

Conversely - if you build a bunch of new commercial skyscrapers in the city, and only 25% of the people recruited from throughout or outside of the region to be employed in them live in the city - you also exacerbate sprawl (unless they all live on mass transit lines, which, with current ST planning, they won't for at least the next 20+ years).

Inversely, if you pack a bunch of new development into what are now fairly quiet in-city neighborhoods, many of the people who live there now for the quality of life they offer may well move further afield to find that same quality of life (or they'll move after the City piles another $400+ onto their existing $4000+ property tax bill, which rises as their assessment does, but also when their income doesn't).

The problem with New Urbanism is that it doesn't deal with the complexity of existing areas, or account for the fact that not everyone wants to (or can afford to) live the way "smart growth" types think they should.

Welcome to the real world, armchair urban planners.

The issue is this. Ensuring lively neighborhoods depends on a lot of things. Density of infrastructure, availability of ground-floor retail and restaurants, property prices, the availability of housing options, proximity to transportation. We argued that the construction of 250-300 apartment towers in a eighborhod that is primarily three and four storey rowhouses from the 1850s through 1890, constituted vertical sprawl. Sprawl because the developer was not going to be required to include necessary infrastructure (increased public transportation and parking, increased consumption of city services for his buildings, etc.) and would bring at absolute most 5% more density to the neighborhood. Moreover the prices of the new housing would push established families further from the center of Baltimore. So. Sprawl. Caused. By. Tall. Buildings. Vertical Sprawl.

This may not make sense, so let me try to explain. See, all that upscale housing causes the upscale people to breed more than they otherwise would have. If we can limit the supply of upscale housing, we can control upscale population.

Y'know, as Orwellian as phrases like "vertical sprawl" are, what really gets Orwellian is when these people actually try to explain themselves.

Well, you must be proud of yourself. Have you ever considered getting a job with the Bush adminstration? They could always use folks to come up with phrases like "Clear Skies Initiative."

Anyway, I think I see your logic, Jonathan. A logical person might pose the question, "What happens to all those people who would move into those tall buildings if the buildings weren't actually built? Where will they live instead?" Well, believe it or not, they would not actually exist if not those tall building don't get built. Those people are not actually real, living human beings but rather Matrix-like figments of our imaginations.

Were you even here when a series of conscious decisions were made to turn over our working waterfront to cruise ships, to replace low-income SRO hotels with highrise office buildings, or to put light rail down the middle of MLK Way - among the many other policy choices that are pushing working class people out of the City?

Do you have any historical context at all?

Along these lines I believe I have a new slogan for the NIMBY's: "Density is sprawl." Feel free to run with it, folks.

Anyway, I was trying to come up with an analogy for this bizarre logic that promoting density produces sprawl. And I think I finally found it: supply-side economics with the principle, "The more government cuts taxes, the more revenue government brings in." Of course, that thinking was always more of a slogan than an actual economic principle, and in that sense it proved quite effective.

Actually, I was making an attempt at a strange thing called logic.

I think the reason the NIMBY's and sprawl supporters use this kind of tortured logic that says "density causes sprawl" is that they're ultimately motivated by selfishness and greed. But they can't use selfishness and greed as an argument, so they have to invent something.

It's a bit like supply-side economics actually. The figures who first espoused it didn't actually believe it themselves, but it served their purpose quite well.

You can't win an election in King County, let alone statewide, without suburban Democrats (of course, the Stranger illustrated the perils of a Capitol Hill-centric worldview when they called West Seattle - which is in the Seattle city limits - the suburbs, but that's another story...)

Your argument apparently seems to be that if you just increase density rents will go down. However, if you have to tear down all of the older lowrise apartments that now rent for well under $800/month and replace them with apartments that rent for $1200/mo and up or with $225,000 condos - that whole portion of the market that serves poor and working class folks in this City disappears.

This is what is happening in the real world - and it is neither "selfish" nor "greedy" to point it out.

A similar line of argument seems to be behind GW BUSH's argument for not enacting pollution standards which will control green house gas emissions. That line is "pollution is a fact of life everywhere, has been, and will be" then he goes on to say how most controls against pollution would not work, would invite "justifiable" defiance (due to *sniff* economic hardship) of any regulations, would end in failure, and are only seriously talked about by naive fools (at best) anyways. So shut up already.

I offer no way to rectify the situation, or a deeper explanation; it just seems to me that there is a curious similarity in the conclusions that everything is just fine and dandy with America and as Americans we should “preserve” and keep intact the car culture and industrial culture as it stands today for future generations of Americans.

What follows from much of the arguments here is that these exurb sprawl places will be filled with you and people like you (or -- lucky for you Gentry -- those you manage) in the next ten to twenty years. And sprawlsville is hicksville, no? Through being cool already...Tudwell? I doubt 'forced exurbanization' happens without a fight for urban verticality.