This article was listed as one of forty Blogs about Living in the “Burbs” by the site changeofaddress.org
Like all major urban centers in the United States, Philadelphia is surrounded by expanding concentric circles of suburbs.
I have a vague idea of what life in suburbia is like, I lived in Bucks County, the northern 
suburbs of Philadelphia for almost 20 years.
At the time it made sense to move: I was working in Princeton NJ, I had two young children and had no intention to pay tens of thousands of dollars every year to a private school. After all, I did all my schooling in European public schools and there was no way that my sons would go to a private school, etc…. Back when we arrived in Philadelphia, we were living in the Art Museum area, I did not like being woken up by the sound of gun shots in the middle of the night. So questioning the move to the suburbs did not cross my mind for one second.
Although my suburban house was across the street from my kids elementary school, it became very clear, very quickly that there was no getting anywhere without car. Mom’s role in suburbia is to taxi the kids from sport activity to friend’s house to birthday parties, all … by car, not by moppet as in the picture, a station-wagon preferably. Well, you already probably know the drill.
Life in the suburbs is mostly about “stuff” and logistics.
I have been wondering: Can Suburbs survive high energy costs…??
Let’s see…. according to the Energy Information Administration Short Term Energy Forecast, the cost of gasoline may increase in 2011 to a national average $3 /gallon.
The Huffington Post quotes Gasoline expert Fred Rozell who predicts that 15 states – including Alaska, Hawaii, Connecticut and Rhode Island – will see gasoline prices top $4 a gallon by Memorial Day. “A dollar more per gallon isn’t that much – probably about $750 more per year for each motorist”.
Do you have $750 to donate to your favorite oil company?
It does not take a PhD in Economics to figure out that the cost of Energy and in particular the cost of fuel will keep on increasing.
The obvious question is: Is the suburban lifestyle sustainable??
Let’s consider some Evidence:
1. Here is a slide that summarizes research done by the Jonathan Rose Companies.
The Jonathan Rose Companies is a green real estate development company based in
New York City whose mission is to repair the fabric of communities by helping metropolitan
regions to become more resilient, competitive and equitable.
The slide compares Energy usage between Suburban and Urban Single Family Households.
Please note that the slide I present here is a simpler version of the original that you can find here. The slide above shows the impact of:
- Residential development patterns,
- Sustainable building practices
- Higher efficiency automobiles on household transportation
- Home energy usage.
On this chart, categories that are noted as “Green” account for additional energy usage reductions achieved by:
- homes that are built to meet the Energy Star criteria and
- households that drive hybrid automobiles.
General Findings:
- Energy usage decreases per household as housing density increases and development patterns become more urban.
- Significant reductions in transportation energy usage occur as development patterns move from suburban to urban because of the increased availability of comprehensive transit networks.
Highlights:
Moving from auto-dependent suburban single family homes into transit connected urban green single family homes can reduce household energy consumption by 64%.
Moving from auto-dependent suburban single family homes into transit connected urban green multifamily homes can reduce household energy consumption by 75%.
2. One of the feature articles in the the Sunday Dec 19th edition of the New York Times Magazine presented the work of of Physicist Geoffrey West who decided in 2002 to study cities using the tools and methods of Physics .
Here is a link to the article: “A Physicist turns the City into an Equation“
This is a lengthy article from which I extracted a few salient passages. BTW, I strongly recommend you read the full article.
Here is what Mr. West and his colleague Mr. Bettencourt found out:
- Based on the equations that West and Bettencourt uncovered from their extensive data analysis, if you know the population of a metropolitan are in a given country, you can estimate its average income and dimensions of its sewer system, with about 85% accuracy.
- Whenever a city doubles in size, every measure of economic activity, from construction spending to the amount of bank deposits, increases by about 15 percent per capita.
- After a city doubles in size, it also experiences a 15 percent per capita increase in violent crimes, traffic and AIDS cases.
- The problem is that as we increase our energy efficiency by living in cities, our appetite for “stuff” increases as well. Mr. West translated computed how much watts it takes to support human life.
- A human being at rest runs on 90 watts.
- A hunter-gatherer living in the Amazon rain forest will need about 250 watts to survive.
- Mr. West asks the question of how much energy our lifestyle in America requires?
- When you add up all the calories, then add-up the energy needed to run the computers, the air conditioner and the clothe dryer, it takes around 11,000 watts per person!!! I presume this is 11 kilowatt/h.
- To get another perspective, Wikipedia list the average annual electrical energy consumption of a household in the United States is about 8,900 kilowatt-hours vs. the average annual electrical consumption of UK household’s approx 4,700 kilowatt-hours. Note that Wikipedia is only considering electrical wattage consumption. Mr. West’s estimate an overall 11 kilowatt total energy consumption per capita per hour.
So what makes cities so much more efficient??
Simple: “When people come together, they become much more productive.”
>> My conclusion for now:
I can increase my productivity and my “fun factor” while saving quite a bit of money and significantly cut my energy usage by living in town and getting rid of my car.
This is exactly what I did. And I suggest you consider doing the same for yourself.
blue ladan
January 5, 2011
Sure. And the next crucial step is to build new development to be pedestrian, cyclist, and transit rider friendly otherwise space in cities and towns will become overly expensive for most people.
jayma19
January 5, 2011
Yes, totally. Living in town, whether it is a large or smaller city needs to be “convivial”, practical, easy, healthy and cheap.
Ian
January 6, 2011
Cool stuff, thanks. I thought that your bit about the cost of private schools was interesting, especially in light of the “charter explosion” seen in Philadelphia. Why is it that it’s so expensive to live in the city is my question… Whether it be school, insurance, food, etc., it seems to me that the reason for the rush hour always going toward the city in the morning and away from it in the afternoon, is because one can often make more money in the city, but save more by living outside of it… Moreover, a big reason that urban schools suffer is because they are dealing with a more impoverished population to begin with… So, if there is a greater concentration of poor people living in the city, again, why does it feel so expensive for a non-poor person such as myself to live there?
jayma19
January 7, 2011
Excellent point Ian.
The economic ideal seems to be: to work in the city were the high paying jobs are concentrated and sleep/live in the burbs were the better public schools, my own “green space” and the lower crime rate are. That has been the general operating paradigm in the United States.
For one thing, that reasoning does not take the stress of the Commute into account. That itself is a cost and a price.
And the logic that supports Commuting will last until it the energy cost of living in suburbia becomes VERY obvious. The impact of the energy cost of suburban life may not hit hard yet and I wager that as the data in the post “Death of Suburbia” shows, it is there and will become more and more obvious as time goes by.
Your question is: “why does it feel so expensive for a non-poor person such as myself to live there” (i.e: in the city).
Well, I think in your comment you pointed out to what part of living “in the city” is expensive:
- Owning a car (gas, insurance, parking). Think of it, cities concentrate considerable amounts of humans in small spaces with more chances of accidents. Now you want to own your own private mode of transportation? That will be expensive. Try owning a car in New York City or London, let alone Philadelphia.
- Food:
Prepared food bought or served, in the city or outside of the city is, will be, should be expensive. And prepared food will be more expensive in the city. Why? Because as Mr. West pointed out, people who live in cities are paid more. Hence the prepared food they produce will be more expensive than the same prepared food bought outside the city.
Food components: I think if you dig a little you will find places to buy your vegies, meat, fruits etc… cheaper. The issue with the cost of raw Food Components is the distribution cost. Right now, the economy is organized to transport mundane vegetables or incredible stuff such as fresh exotic fruits or just fresh tomatoes in the middle of the winter over VERY long distances. That has a cost and it is rising.
- School: well, yes Cities in the US (and elsewhere) have large impoverished populations. Historically in the 1940s and 1950s, cities concentrated large numbers of industrial jobs. That is the reason why lots of poor people moved to the northern cities and it is still the reason why poor people all over the world move to cities.
Well, now in the US, the industrial jobs are gone.
Result is the poor people kids go to public schools and the richer parents of the other kids put their kids in private schools. For me, the emergence of Charter Schools is cheap and interesting experiment on how to offer a variety of learning environments. Whether this experiment works or not is the question.
IMO, the creation of the suburbs has been a way to side step addressing the underlying issues that came about with the creation of large cities.
It is much easier to put people in jail than to build an economy that create jobs and a descent living for everyone with or without University degrees.
The hard job is to make city living affordable, pleasant, safe, healthy for a large number of people and doing that by getting the city inhabitants involved in that change process. Making cities resilient to the extreme climate events means making cities more like a series of interconnected villages.
My prediction is that in 20 years or less, cities like Philadelphia will be producing much more of their own food supply.
My prediction is that in the coming 20 years, cities that succeed in re-building strong social fabrics in their neighborhoods will be very desirable.
Cities that fail to take that turn will be more like living hell holes.