Addressing the Irrational Fear of Density

Jim Bacon of the Bacon's Rebellion blog (there is also a companion website) has a nice piece on revitalizing inner ring suburbs, but it's about revitalization generally, really. The thing is that with deconcentration and sprawl, market power at the city and neighborhood level has been atomized. To provide amenities you need a basic level of population that most places don't have. The solution is adding population (with a decent disposable income). From the entry:

The biggest obstacle to the re-development of decaying "inner suburbs" built in the 1950s, '60s and and '70s is the irrational fear of density. Any developer asking to re-zone land at greater density will run into a buzz saw of neighborhood opposition. The inevitable complaint: Density = congestion. ...

According to the conventional thinking, that density should have translated into more congestion. But it hasn't. The key, as I explain in this week's column, "Vanquishing the Density Demon," is the three-fold set of policies that Arlington has pursued consistently over more than three decades: (1) Invest in mass transit, both rail and buses, (2) encourage walkable, high-density, mixed-use projects around transportation nodes, and (3) market the "one-car lifestyle" to residents. ...

Density is not the problem. Poor planning is the problem. Re-developing decaying neighborhoods at higher density, with detailed attention to limiting transportation demand, is part of the solution.
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In DC, despite the fact that the city was "built" during a time when greater density was typical and proximate to transit, many of today's residents have a profoundly suburban understanding about planning, and they fight appropriate changes, further contributing to the problems that they believe they are solving.