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| DC is drastically under-dense |
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08 February 12.
Here is a not-comprehensive list of major cities that are less than about 200 square kilometers in size. These are cities that have a small, defined core. I picked these criteria because I live in DC, which is such a city, and I wanted to compare it to other major cities that have a well-defined core.
There are some oddballs in there: The City of London is tiny, and is currently the financial district, meaning that there really aren't many residences there. I left it in anyway for you to ignore if you wish. I picked these cities because I'm guessing you have some image about all of them. Travel agencies (if any still exist) have posters on the wall for half of them. You probably have a sense of whether a statement like Man, [city], I'd hate to live there. It's such an urban slum rings true for any one of them. Going down the list, I'm guessing that your slummy associations are about the cities below DC in the list (i.e., the less dense ones); your world-class destination cities in the tourist photos are those above DC in the list. In fact, looking more closely at those numbers, notice the relation between between Paris--generally regarded to not be a slum--and DC. Paris's density is over five times that of DC. It's a useful comparison because Paris is of comparable size, has a height limit, and has lots of non-residential park space taken up by affairs of state and tourism. The big difference is that Paris has had an extra few millennia to add residents. No, the places that we associate with blight, like Baltimore and Detroit, are the ones that are less dense. Detroit is twice as large as DC, and so is at the edge of my list of compact central cities. Again, cut it from the list it if you want. I'm not the first to observe that the denser cities are the more interesting and vibrant, by a long shot. Maybe see this article on the joys of congestion, which I found via this article by a New Jersey city planner. More people mean more businesses can prosper, and those quirky local stores that need 1,000 quirky customers to survive are more likely to find them. More density also means more trash and more noise, and if you feel that it is your right to leave your private vehicle on public space on the side of public roads, you're going to have more trouble finding a space. So there are detractors to the idea of growth. This has been true throughout history: for everybody almost everywhere, their neighborhood turns out to be more dense ten years after they moved in, and a lot of people have been unhappy with this throughout the ages. The only people less happy are the ones in areas where people are moving out. I found this blog by a DC no-growth proponent to be a supremely interesting read. The guy is beleaguered: one in ten comments is a concurring complaint about growth, while the other nine out of ten range between shouting him down and just pointing out how quixotic it all is. There's a comment about Paris versus DC submitted a week ago; I am told that it is still awaiting moderation. Maybe the guy is on vacation; maybe the posts we are seeing are the ones that best make the opposition look nasty. He seems to have casually taken a difficult position a while ago, and slowly dug himself in to the point that he can't change course now. So he persists in his arguments: residents within 200 feet of a potential project should effectively have veto power, those outside of that sort of radius should butt out, and every day he has more trouble finding parking. I didn't read all of his entries, but he leans heavily on the solution being to build fewer new buildings and keep those building small, rather than lobbying the city to hire more police, more trash pick-up, and more meter maids with the soon-to-be-expanded tax base. The guy lives in Census tract 44, which I know because I live in the same tract. It has a density around 14,000 people/km2, so it is much closer to the average Parisian square kilometer (but still pretty far short). He lives on a street one block long, meaning that there is little through-traffic and it has a slightly more small-town feel. Also, his house was built maybe fifty to eighty years after mine. Mine was built some time before 1857, and at that time the house was one of two on the block. Some adjacent blocks were entirely vacant. It was technically inside the borders of Washington City, but this was the country. There was a building spurt in the early 1900s that turned this area into row upon row of rowhouses, and that's when this guy's house was built. That is, his house exists thanks to a wave of sudden densification. Historically, DC has been more dense. Here's a quick, selective table of Census data giving the population within DC [These numbers are all cut and pasted from Wikipedia; feel free to chase after the original population counts]:
You can see the growth spurt where the population quintupled over the turn of the other century. The city was at a peak in the 1950s (at 5,000 people/km2), and only stopped shrinking in the last decade, returning to the 620,000 residents listed above. We don't have intra-decade counts, but the city was first at 620k somewhere in the 1930s. Since the boundaries haven't moved in all this time, we can say that the city's current density matches its density somewhere in the mid-1930s. Here is an attractive blog of blight. It consists of before/after photos, showing what a corner looked like back in the early 1900s and what it looks like today. It is striking, but you soon work out the agenda of the photoblog, which is put together by an architect: modern architecture sucks, and we can do much better. Many of the current photos are cropped to show a building taking up the entire photo frame, while the older photos put the building in a sparse context. The broad sense that you get from every pair of photos is that the city was better pre-ruin, in the 1930s. So if the density was the same back in 1935, and we have all these photos of beautiful low-density buildings on sparsely populated streets, where were all the people? Tenements, of course. Unphotogenic tenements. And with those unpleasantly dense parts of town holding so many people in the sort of buildings so lousy that our modern building codes are written to outlaw them, the cheesecake buildings in the attractive photos can stand out on their block. It's not that it'd be fun to be living in the 1930s--it'd be fun to be a rich person living in the 1930s. Of course, DC in the 1930s was expanding, adding 140,000 people from 1940 to 1950, so we need to add another caveat, that it'd be fun to be a rich person living in a snapshot of 1935, in a city that is somehow vibrant yet not growing.
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