The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Bob Lanning
The City of Tucson Mayor and Council just adopted the “Community Corridors Tool” last week (March 18) and this is a great thing. This “tool” will allow for the creation of more significant projects along Tucson’s arterial and collector streets.
Urban Planning 101 would suggest that larger projects are most appropriately located along these arterial and collector streets. I believe the City of Tucson needs more significant projects, and a lot of them. We need more housing of all kinds: single-family homes, duplexes and tri-plexes, tiny homes, apartments, townhomes, and affordable housing. We have a housing crisis, which is common knowledge at this point. We need large numbers of housing starts, not just one here and one there. A piecemeal approach will not even come close to solving our problems. We also need more innovative types of projects, we need live-work projects, and we need mixed-use projects.
Tucson also needs more urban density, in order to become a greener or more sustainable city. How are urban density and the relative green-ness of cities related? A variety of metrics have been used to determine how green cities are in the United States. One of the most important standards for green-ness is total gasoline (and diesel) use within a community per capita. How much driving do the inhabitants in a city do over the course of a year? The lower the fuel energy use per capita, the smaller the carbon footprint, and the greener the city.
The densest cities in the United States use less energy per capita, and therefore most studies suggest that they are among the “greenest.” As a city becomes denser, use of private automobiles drops as they become less convenient and less necessary. People then move toward walking, bicycling, and utilizing mass transit to get around, all resulting in less energy use per capita. One study that I found suggested that Manhattan is the greenest city (borough actually) in the US, and it is also the densest, which is not a coincidence. Tucson is the forty-sixth densest city in the United States (out of the 53 largest cities), which is terrible from a green or sustainable perspective.
Zoning regulations are the largest impediment to the creation of more housing. There just simply are not enough vacant parcels in this city that are zoned for higher densities. In addition to the CCT that just passed, we need other zoning changes. Other cities are already looking at zoning solutions to housing and other issues. The cities of Minneapolis, Charlotte, Arlington, and Gainesville have completely eliminated single-family zoning, and the City of Tucson should do the same. We can support reductions in parking space requirements in the city, because the more parking spaces that are required for projects directly lead to lower urban density. Hartford, Buffalo, San Francisco, and Minneapolis have all eliminated parking requirements altogether. And we can support urban infill projects because they will create higher urban densities.
One comment that I hear often is “I support more urban density, but it ought to be downtown where it is appropriate.” Simple mathematics makes this statement unrealistic. The Tucson metropolitan area is 353 square miles (and growing). Downtown is, what, maybe four square miles? If an increase in our urban density is limited to downtown, it will be statistically insignificant. We need more urban density across our entire metropolitan area if we want real progress.
There are numerous rather dense project proposals that are currently receiving mixed comments right here in Tucson. Some people vocalize that they feel uncomfortable with the “scale” or the “height” of these proposals. However, a forward-thinking response to these project proposals would be “This is good, it’s dense!”, and “When can you start?”
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