I'm almost alarmed at the tone that's developing in these discussions, which seems to be heading towards pining for the good ol' days with cheap land as the solution for affordability and buying into a low-rise version of the "vertical cities joined by super highways" snake-oil that Le Corbusier and GM sold to America back in the "First Machine Age". Those days are gone, the experiment is over, and the results aren't nearly as good as we'd hoped.
In many parts of the western world, particularly Australia and America, we've spent too long living in a fool's paradise where we could assume that everything would be cheap forever. Land is cheap! Petrol is cheap! Electricity is cheap! Water is cheap! Food is cheap! In many ways, I see the increase in the price of land as part of a correction to that pattern that is a long time overdue; petrol prices have risen due to the price of oil, but in terms of the impact that petroleum has on our trade-deficits, I think that it's likely still undervalued; electricity prices better reflect now that it costs a heck-of-a-lot to generate and supply the stuff; water is probably better controlled through use restrictions than price, but if we're going to insist on building de-sal plants, you'd better see the price rise to reflect the trouble that we have to go to; food prices have increased, but not nearly as much as the cost of production - the burden there falling mainly on the producers who have seen their operating margins slashed.
And agriculture and "sprawl" have another important meeting point. Back in days of yore, people had a couple of important considerations for locating their city: it needed transport to other cities, generally a port or a river, later a railway, and then a highway; it needed a supply of fresh water; and it needed to be able to produce its own food, because there was no decent way to transport food from other areas, with the exception of grains and salted meats. The most successful cities were the ones that could best satisfy these conditions; the lack of any of them would mean the city would wither and die (with some notable exceptions like Machu Picchu). Adelaide was able to survive its first hundred years because the area provided these fundamentals.
Then transportation advances changed the playing field - now people and food could travel longer distances quickly, and the need to have agriculture in the area seemed to go away. So the local farmlands were turned into housing - it's always surprising to see photos of the Marion area from the 50s/60s and see how much of it was market-gardens. With the margins for farming now so poor, many landowners on the fringes are seeing residential development as kind of retirement option; unable to save from their income, they can sell the farm for housing to pay for their retirement.
But it turns out that not all land is created equal, especially in Australia whose soil is so old that much of it is under-supplied with nutrients. In a Pareto-principle-on-steriods statistic, Jared Diamond gives the figure of 80% of Australia's agricultural profits being generated by
two per-cent of the farming area (it's in
Collapse, sorry, haven't a better source for you). And where is that area? Primarily in WA's Great Southwestern grain regions, and around Adelaide. The rest of Australia's agriculture produces food, but at a much greater cost: due to the lack of nutrient in the soil, they have to use much higher quantities of fertilizer; that's much of the reason for Chinese produce being cheap in Australia, they simply have better soils.
Gawler is known for having some of the richest farmland in the state, and what are we doing? We're putting houses on top of it. Once we build on this stuff, it's gone forever. There is no way,
no way, to ever reclaim that land; mortar and concrete introduce too much alkalinity into the soil. As expensive as land may seem to be, I think that it's still undervalued. If we only understood better just what are the implications of sticking houses down everywhere, I think we'd be much less cavalier about it.
And on the subject of greenbelts and satellite towns, we've seen those developments over here and they're not pretty. Unable to sustain themselves, they depend on the presence of the "mothership" and become little more than "bedroom communities", emptying out by day as people make the trip to their work in the larger centres. They require high-speed transport as their lifeblood, and ultimately the transport comes to dominate the town. Either the freeway cuts through the town (and you can imagine how attractive that is), or the freeway is over to one side and the area around the off/on-ramp quietly takes over as the new centre of town (that's where all the new development like motels or restaurants will go).
An example of the freeway-changes-town-centre effect that I will never forget is
Limon, Colorado. It's a modest sized country town that is at the intersection of Interstate-70, US highways 24, 40, and 287, and State Roads 71 and 86. That sounds like it should have made for a healthy town. But take a virtual drive down
Main Street and see all the closed businesses, the lack of anything that looks like prospects for that area. All the new businesses appeared along the
Interstate ramps.
And all this open space that supposedly adds so much public amenity? They are phantasms - under-used, desolate wastelands. Even in Adelaide, look at the parklands; isn't that the complaint that we keep hearing about them on this site? There are many more people crowding down Rundle Mall or into the Markets, or (God help us!) Marion than are in the parklands. One of the things that we were struck by over here was how many people were in the parks on almost every day of the year. This summer, we'll have to post some pictures of what a sunny day means to Green Lake Park or Discovery Park; literally thousands of people crowd into them. And the density here isn't that much higher than Adelaide, only twice as great, but people don't have as substantial a yard, and people just seem to value their open spaces far more than we do.
Affordability is an issue, but this perpetual spreading ourselves thinner, ever thinner, is not a solution. Ultimately, that's just going to impoverish the future, who are the ones that will actually face problems that we can just ponder - peak-oil, climate change, feeding a growing population, drought.