Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  THE AVERAGE DISTANCE FROM THE MAIN OFFICE OF A COMPANY IN EDGE CITY TO THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER’S HOME: Eight miles by road.

  HOW TO MAKE A SUBWAY PAY FOR ITSELF FROM THE FAREBOX: Give its riders only three choices: take the train to work; live under Chinese communism; or swim the South China Sea. (Hong Kong has the only subway system in the world that does not require subsidies.)

  HOW MANY SWITCHES IN TRAVEL MODE A COMMUTER WILL PUT UP WITH: Usually no more than one. Typically, zero. In other words, it is conceivable that a commuter will walk partway and take a bus partway, switching travel mode once. It is also possible that a commuter will take a car partway, and then switch to a train, switching mode once. But a car-bus-train two-mode-switch will rarely be utilized. Far more typically, once a person is in his car, you will never get him out of it into a different mode, no matter how bad the traffic is.

  THE PROBABLE MAXIMUM NUMBER OF RIDERS YOU CAN HOPE TO SWITCH OUT OF THEIR CARS AND INTO A COMMUTER RAILROAD, SHOULD YOU BUILD ONE: Twelve percent. In other words, ten million square feet of space may yield forty-eight hundred train trips.

  THE NUMBER OF RIDERS A HEAVY-RAIL SYSTEM NEEDS PER DAY TO BE COST EFFECTIVE: Fifteen thousand.

  HOW BIG AN EDGE CITY WOULD HAVE TO BE TO GENERATE THAT MANY RIDERS: More than thirty million square feet of office space.

  NUMBER OF EDGE CITIES THAT BIG AT THIS WRITING: Zero.

  NUMBER OF RIDERS A LIGHT-RAIL SYSTEM NEEDS PER DAY TO BE COST EFFECTIVE: Seven thousand.

  HOW BIG AN EDGE CITY WOULD HAVE TO BE TO GENERATE THAT MANY RIDERS: Fourteen and a half million square feet of office—more than downtown St. Louis or Cincinnati.

  CERVERO’S LAW OF THE VALUE OF TIME WASTED IN TRAFFIC JAMS: People view the time they waste in a traffic jam as equal, in dollar value, to half of their hourly wage.

  Robert Cervero of Berkeley, author of Suburban Gridlock, came up with the above calculation, which he believes works as follows:

  Suppose somebody makes $10 an hour; $400 a week; $20,000 a year. Cervero thinks that person will pay $5.00 an hour—half of the $10 value of his wage—or $1.25 per quarter hour, to save fifteen minutes of commuting time. Conversely, he or she will eat fifteen minutes of additional commuting time to save $1.25 one way, or $2.50 round trip, or $12.50 a week, or $625 a year.

  That is to say, if she saves $625 a year on her mortgage payments, which is to say she saves more than $6000 on the price of her house, she will be willing to eat a fifteen-minute addition to her commute in exchange.

  Let’s scale that up. A person makes $50,000 a year, or $1000 a week. Which works out to $25 an hour, assuming a forty-hour week. Cervero thinks that person will gladly pay $3.12 cents to save fifteen minutes on his or her commute. Which is $6.25 a day, or $31.25 per week, or $125 a month, or more than $1500 a year.

  According to Cervero’s analysis, it does not matter a whole lot how that money is spent. If you put in a toll road that saves time over surface roads, they will pay the toll. If you find a way to run a train that is actually faster than a stop-and-go commute, they will pay for it. If you run up the real estate prices—this is how it normally works—so that they can live nearer to their work, they will pay it.

  According to his formula, if a person makes $50,000 a year, and is willing to add fifteen minutes to his commute, that should be worth a reduction of about $15,000 in the price of the exact same house closer in. Shortening the commute by a similar amount is probably something for which he will pay $15,000 more.

  If he makes $250,000 per year, or $30.00 per fifteen minutes, a limo and driver at $1.00 per minute saved possibly makes sense. If he makes $2,000,000 per year, or $250 per fifteen minutes, it may seem rational to save time by renting a helicopter and pilot at $8.00 a minute, or $480 an hour, which is about the going rate. It’s worth it to him.

  THE PRIME LOCATION CONSIDERATION WHEN A COMPANY MOVES: The commute of the chief executive officer must always become shorter.

  WHAT A NEW HOUSE MUST SELL FOR IN ORDER FOR A DEVELOPER TO MAKE A PROFIT: The price of the land under it times four. If you build too much house on the land, it will not sell because it will be viewed as too expensive for the neighborhood. If you build too little, it will be viewed as substandard, given the price. Actually, examples exist of houses selling nicely for the price of the land times two. Also, for the price of the land times seven. However, those examples reflect unusual market conditions. The standard calculation, from which all exceptions spring, is the price of the land times four.

  WHAT AN OWNER WHO HOLDS HIS MORTGAGE TO TERM WILL ULTIMATELY PAY FOR HIS HOUSE: The original sales price times three. Two out of every three dollars will go for interest, not lumber and land.

  THE PLATONIC IDEAL OF THE SIZE OF AN OFFICE BUILDING’S FLOOR-PLATE: Twenty thousand square feet. (“We decided the way the Law happened was, in 1978, there were six brokers drinking in Clyde’s, all from Coldwell Banker,” reported Jim Todd, a developer who is active in the Urban Land Institute. “And they all decided that from that point on, twenty thousand square feet would be the size of the office floor and it’s always been. And when those six guys get together and change it, it’ll change, but in the meantime it’s the Law.”)

  Actually twenty thousand square feet—about half a football field—is the golden mean because an Edge City building is usually a hundred feet wide in order to yield the maximum number of windows and, hence, offices with windows that command high rent, at the lowest total building cost per square foot. The building tends to be two hundred feet long because a hundred feet in any direction is thought to be the maximum distance that can be served by one costly “core.” A core is that vertical tunnel in the middle of the building containing all elevator shafts, bathrooms, air conditioning, utility connections, and the like.

  Actually, the typical floorplate range is from eighteen thousand to twenty-five thousand square feet. Smaller floorplates carve up better for multitenant use, notes David Shulman of Salomon Brothers. But the largest practical floorplate is thought to be thirty thousand square feet, because that holds the maximum number of employees a manager can effectively walk around and deal with personally in one day.

  Although it does increase building costs, it is frequently thought valuable to integrate as many twists and turns and sharp angles as possible into the edge of a floorplate. If the number of corners is increased, the number of corner offices is maximized far beyond the traditional four per floor.

  See also Floorplate in Chapter 12, “The Words.”

  THE FUNCTION OF GLASS ELEVATORS: To make women feel safe. Not to offer a view out. Rapes rarely occur in glass elevators.

  THE POINT OF CRITICAL MASS OF EDGE CITY: Five million square feet of leasable office space.

  THE LEVEL OF DENSITY AT WHICH AUTOMOBILE CONGESTION STARTS BECOMING NOTICEABLE IN EDGE CITY: When you get as much as twenty-five square feet of office space built on each hundred square feet of land. In developer’s parlance, this is a floor-to-area ratio (FAR) of .25. See also FAR in Chapter 12, “The Words.”

  THE LEVEL OF DENSITY AT WHICH IT IS NECESSARY TO CONSTRUCT PARKING GARAGES INSTEAD OF PARKING LOTS BECAUSE YOU HAVE RUN OUT OF LAND: 0.4 FAR.

  THE LEVEL OF DENSITY AT WHICH TRAFFIC JAMS BECOME A MAJOR POLITICAL ISSUE IN EDGE CITY: 1.0 FAR.

  THE LEVEL OF DENSITY BEYOND WHICH FEW EDGE CITIES EVER GET: 1.5 FAR.

  THE LEVEL OF DENSITY AT WHICH LIGHT-RAIL TRANSIT STARTS MAKING ECONOMIC SENSE: 2.0 FAR.

  THE LEVEL OF DENSITY OF A TYPICAL OLD DOWNTOWN: 5.O FAR and up.

  THE DENSITY-GAP COROLLARY TO THE LAWS OF DENSITY: Edge Cities always develop to the point where they become dense enough to make people crazy with the traffic, but rarely, if ever, do they get dense enough to support the rail alternative to automobile traffic.

  THE MAXIMUM DESIRABLE COMMUTE, THROUGHOUT HUMAN HISTORY, REGARDLESS OF TRANSPORTATION TECHNOLOGY: Forty-five minutes.

  THE MAXIMUM DESIRABLE DISTANCE A BACKSHOP LOCATION CAN BE FROM A CORPORATE HEADQUARTERS: One and a half hours
by car, or three hours, nonstop, by plane.

  THE MOST RATIONAL EXPLANATION OF WHY THE FIRST THING A DEVELOPER USUALLY DOES IS BULLDOZE EVERYTHING FLAT: A parking surface may not undulate more than 6 percent, by law. If a car is parked sideways on a grade steeper than that, its door will be very difficult to open on the uphill side, or close on the downhill side. Also, the surface will offer unacceptable liabilities when covered with ice.

  THE MOST PROBABLE EXPLANATION OF WHY THE FIRST THING A DEVELOPER USUALLY DOES IS BULLDOZE EVERYTHING FLAT: Because architects use T-squares. Therefore, when designing a building, the first thing an architect usually draws is a horizontal base line, which in turn gets incorporated into the final building by the work of a bulldozer.

  THE COST OF BEING CANADIAN: U.S. plus 25 percent. A Swiss economist, attempting to calculate what Canada’s kinder, gentler form of urbanity costs the average Canadian, by factoring in differences in currency value, differences in cost of living, differences in wage levels, differences in taxation, differences in levels of government service provided, and myriad other such factors, came up with that fudge factor.

  THE GENDER THOUGHT DESTINED TO SELL COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE, BY THOSE WHO SELL COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE: Men.

  THE GENDER THOUGHT DESTINED TO SELL RESIDENTIAL REAL ESTATE, BY THOSE WHO SELL COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE: Women.

  WHAT PEOPLE WHO HIRE COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE SALESMEN LOOK FOR IN A RÉSUMÉ: Background as a jet-fighter pilot. It is an article of faith that the best commercial salesmen are former sky jockeys, although it is the sheerest speculation exactly why that correlation may exist.

  JAKE PAGE’S LAW OF SEVERED CONTINUITY: “You name a place for what is no longer there as a result of your actions. So one has Foxcrest Farms, for example, where no fox will ever again hunt and no plow ever make a furrow worth the name.”

  THE KEITH SEVERIN COROLLARY: All subdivisions are named after whatever species are first driven out by the construction. E.g., Quail Trail Estates.

  THE THREE LAWS OF BUILDING: (1) Build. (2) Build at the lowest possible cost. (3) If rule number one and rule number two come into conflict, rule number one takes precedence.

  Acknowledgments

  ANY LARGE-SCALE LOOK at America ends up involving a legion of co-conspirators, I’ve discovered. Hundreds of people all over the country contributed interviews, information, candid advice, incisive readings, and lasting companionship to this effort. It quite simply could not have been done without them. I regret that I cannot either thank each of them here or cite them all adequately in the text. Any errors of fact, emphasis, or interpretation in this volume are entirely my own.

  However:

  Milton Coleman, the assistant managing editor for the metropolitan report of the Washington Post, actually sought the opportunity to ship me out on long patrol. When I returned with tales of “emerging cities,” “shadow governments,” and “Cluster 31,” he did not flinch, much. My line editor, Douglas B. Feaver, voluptuously fulfilled his promise to kick my butt to new heights. Deborah Heard, my number three boss, held my hand.

  Benjamin C. Bradlee, the executive editor of the Washington Post, Leonard Downie, Jr., its managing editor, and Richard Harwood, former deputy managing editor, gave me the job from which this book sprang, and then the leave of absence to write it. Few were more supportive of my efforts than Don Graham, the Post’s publisher.

  My wife, Adrienne, was my most trusted editor. She adjusted fairly gracefully to my materializing in her workday. (Although unsolicited analysis of the dialogue in another person’s favorite lunchtime soap opera turns out to be more of a threat to a marriage than I would have guessed.) Toward the end she even volunteered that when I was on the road, she found my perpetual presence missed.

  Henry Allen—America’s foremost practitioner of that oxymoron, a journalism of ideas—was my moderately patient tutor, asking questions to which I did not have answers, and reading books I did not know existed. He also claims he had a 1960s New York crash pad on the wall of which he painted “Welcome to Edge City.” Osmotically, I must have gotten even my title from him.

  Barbara Blechman Sherbill, my indefatigable researcher, was a bountiful source of wit, cheer, files, books, babies, and bagels. My mother, Gloria Garreau, of Pawtucket and Little Compton, Rhode Island, continued to be exceedingly generous with her time and resources. Rafe Sagalyn, my agent, who never got over selling a book about places like Tysons Corner, was always calm, reassuring, thoughtful, effective, and right. Michael Barone, Jerry Knight, Joel Kotkin, and Barry and Sandy Lopez were sources of expertise and kindred souls. John Loberg’s abiding interest in the woods, its critters, and horticulture kept me grounded. Olwen Price transcribed hundreds of tapes, sitting under her headphones making wry Welsh anarchist asides. Dave Cook, cartographic wizard, created the maps. Dennis (Gomer) Pyles kept running a commentary and, more important, my computer. Ken Garrett made my author photo. It only seemed right: for the National Geographic he spends half his time in exotic terrain.

  In the topsy-turvy world of New York publishing in the late twentieth century, quite a few editors got a chance to improve my manuscript as they passed through Doubleday. Nancy Evans and Nan Talese helped jump-start this project. Patrick Filley was strikingly imaginative in shaping it and getting it off the ground. Steve Wasser man provided critical midcourse corrections. Ann Godoff flitted in solely, it seems, to provide a crucial in-flight refueling, wrestling a key check out of the bureaucracy. David Gernert brought the project in for a landing in style. The legendary copy editor Frances Apt swept up the debris.

  In the middle of all this, God bless him, there was Paul Golob. There is nothing like having your manuscript come under the pencil of a bright twenty-six-year-old who has spent his entire life in Manhattan, except for four years at Harvard, to remind you just how many extraordinary ways there are of looking at this country.

  Many colleagues at the Washington Post contributed to this work, including, alphabetically, David S. Broder, Ron Browne, Victoria Churchville, Al Crenshaw, the late Herb Denton, Kirstin Downey, Lynda Edwards, Noel Epstein, Patrice Gaines-Carter, Cynthia Gorney, John Harris, Alison Howard, Rob Howe, Gwen Ifill, Robert G. Kaiser, John Lancaster, Jay Mathews, Eric Charles May, Caroline Mayer, Peter Lester Milius, Courtland Milloy, Dan Morgan, William Raspberry, T. R. Reid, Paul Richard, Lynda Richardson, Phyllis Richman, Wendy Ross, Bob Thompson, James M. Thresher, Mary Lou Tousignant, Bob Webb, Linda Wheeler, and Juan Williams.

  Christopher B. Leinberger, of Santa Fe, pioneered in the popular press the concept of Edge Cities—which he called “urban villages”—in his October 1986 article in The Atlantic with Charles Lockwood called “How Business Is Reshaping America.” Ever since he has offered great quotes, good cheer, and sartorial inspiration.

  Ciaritas, L.P., one of America’s premiere marketing demographic outfits, burned mainframe computer time lavishly, helping me around statistical time lags caused by so much of Edge City rising after the 1980 U.S. Census, but before the 1990 results dribbled out. I am especially indebted to Mark Capaldini, Robin E. Rice, and Doug Anderson.

  As this work progressed, market analyst Pamela Manfre and urban designer Patricia L. Faux became my esteemed cohorts, dedicated to the idea that it is possible to make Edge Cities come out right. Cory Amron is the guardian of the trade and service marks. The manuscript was lawyered by Kathy Trager.

  Among those who offered crucial insights into this new world were Boyd Van Ness and his troops at Coldwell Banker Commercial, E. Wayne Angle of Homart Development Company, Wilbur Zelinsky and Peirce Lewis of Penn State, Leo Marx of MIT, Robert Fishman of Rutgers at Camden, E. M. Risse of Synergy Planning, Katherine Gehbauer of The Office Network, Peter O. Muller of the University of Miami, James Rouse of the Enterprise Foundation, Tom Baerwald of the National Science Foundation, Ron Abler of the Association of American Geographers, Tony Downs of the Brookings Institution, Tom Black of the Urban Land Institute, James Todd, president of the Hazel-Peterson Companies, Josef W. Konvitz
of Michigan State, Charles Fenyvesi, author of When the World Was Whole, James Burke, author of Connections, Larry Harrison, author of Underdevelopment Is a State of Mind, Nick Lemann of The Atlantic, and Jean Gottmann, author of the book that is godfather to us all, Megalopolis.

  I shall never forget the eight-lane drift across Georgia Route 41 demanded by Peirce Lewis so that he could pounce on an unsuspecting artifact of the culturally significant landscape.

  Others not already mentioned here or in the text who served as compasses, orienting me in my travels, included:

  In the New Jersey—New York—Connecticut area, George Sternlieb of Rutgers, William H. Why te, author of The Organization Man and City, Scott Toombs of Princeton Forrestal Village, Roger Garreau of A T & T and Lorrie Garreau, Sally Lane of the Trentonian, and Richard K. Rein, editor of one of the first newspapers specifically targeting an Edge City. That paper is called, appropriately enough, U.S. 1. Most especially, David G. Shulman of Salomon Brothers and his globe-girdling band of young analysts, who produce, in the far-too-modest guise of real estate reports, some of the most insightful cross-cultural examinations of cities, both old and Edge, I know.

  In the Philadelphia area, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, authors of Learning from Las Vegas; James Timberlake and Steve Kieran of Kieran, Timberlake & Harris; and Don Cook, my clip service and sounding board.

  In the Boston area, Ralph and Barbara Whitehead of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Gene Mallove of MIT, David Birch of Cognetics, Tom Grape of Spalding & Slye, Glenn Miller of Bridgewater State, and the incomparable Sheila Murphy of Mount Holyoke.

  In the Detroit area, Chris Cook of the Detroit Free Press and Kathy Sue Horn, Peter Gavrilovich of the Free Press, David Cole and David Lewis of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, John L. Wright of the Henry Ford Museum, and Leo Tosto of Trerice Tosto, commercial real estate. In addition, on the subject of how the automobile shaped Edge City, I am indebted to Rob ert Cervero and William Garrison of the University of California at Berkeley.