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Vice President Al Gore thinks he's found his Big Issue for the 2000
campaign: suburban sprawl. Sprawl, the Vice President thinks, is a
"threat" to our well being; we have to stop sprawl, he told
the Brookings Institution in September, so that "our kids will
see horses, cows and farms outside books and movies."
Gore is proposing that the Environmental Protection Agency promote
"smart growth" by doling out billions to local communities
that use planning to preserve open space and avoid the evils of
traffic congestion, overcrowded schools, and functional but inelegant
development forms such as strip malls. And the EPA has said it intends
to use its existing authority under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water
Act to strongarm local governments into fighting sprawl. Beyond these
seemingly modest first steps lies a grab bag of visionary planning
ideas that has attracted a diverse coalition of environmentalists,
urban planners, and good government reformers. The four hallmarks of
smart growth are the setting of "urban growth boundaries" to
constrain the amount of land available for development, higher density
residential development, more mass transit (particularly rail
transit), and much more aggressive long range urban planning.
Among the chattering classes it has become axiomatic that future
development should be heavily regulated by enlightened planners. The
usual gaggle of left-wing foundations, including Turner, MacArthur,
Joyce, and Charles Stewart Mott, have formed the Funders Network on
Sprawl, Smart Growth, and Livable Communities, and have already
shoveled millions to smart growth advocacy groups. Beyond the argument
that we have to stop sprawl to preserve farmland and open space lies
the revival of central city urban renewal. People fleeing the city for
the suburbs in search of better schools, lower crime, and quieter
neighborhoods are blamed for sucking the life out of downtowns. Smart
growth advocates say stopping the suburban exodus is key to saving
central cities, which ignores the lessons of busing in the 1970s and
the lessons of big cities recently turning themselves around by
cutting crime and cleaning up.
If sprawl strikes you as the sort of issue that could worry only a fat
and happy land, you're right. Gore is calculating that at a time of
peace and prosperity, spending too much time in traffic is the sort of
thing that still bugs voters. In fact, the politics of sprawl follows
the economic cycle, rising to a crescendo when housing starts reach
their peak late in booms and then disappearing during recessions. The
last big controversy over urban growth started to peak at the end of
the '80s boom, when states like California, Florida, and Washington
adopted growth-control measures. The economy slid into recession
shortly thereafter, and issue largely went away. What's new today is
that the controversy over the proliferation of suburbs has spread
beyond the fast-growing regions of the west and east coasts to the
heartland. Crusades against sprawl are in full swing in St. Louis,
Chicago, Pittsburgh, and other older metropolitan areas that 20 years
ago went begging for growth of any kind. The November '98 election saw
over 200 growth control measures sponsored mostly by environmentalists
and planners on the ballot in 31 states. Voters approved
three-quarters of them.
But the threat of sprawl is vastly overblown. Indeed, there is an
Alice-in-Wonderland quality to the whole campaign-literally. From
chapter seven of Lewis Carroll's book: "The table was a large
one, but the three were all crowded together at one corner of it. 'No
room! No room!' they cried out, when they saw Alice coming. 'There's
plenty of room!' said Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a large
armchair at one end of the table." The anti-sprawl crusaders,
too, are myopically focusing on small corners of the country.
There's plenty of room left. You'd never know it from listening to the
planners, but developed land accounts for less than 5 percent of the
total land area in the continental United States. The amount of land
developed each year, according to U.S. Geological Survey figures, is
0.0006 percent. Since World War II, the amount of land set aside for
wildlife, wilderness conservation, and national parks has grown twice
as fast as urban areas. The amount of land set aside for these
purposes is now three times as large as urbanized areas. And for all
the rhetoric about "vanishing farmland," the amount of
farmland isn't declining in any significant way. The amount of
suburban development and farmland loss (which is driven more by
falling farm commodity prices than development pressures) is actually
lower than it was in the 1960s and 1970s.
Yet these facts have little to do with the politics of the issue. No
one in a fast growing area is likely to be moved by aggregate land use
statistics. If some of that .0006 percent of land development is
taking place in your community, it's a big deal. A Republican trying
to counteract Gore's appeal to the suburbs can't very well stand for
"dumb growth" and unconstrained sprawl. Alas, the favorite
solutions of free market policy wonks, such as peak hour road pricing,
privatization of infrastructure, and zoning that respects property
rights, are also unlikely to appeal to most voters. Between a
candidate appealing to "livability" and your "quality
of life" and a candidate talking about road pricing, who do you
think will win the debate? In this respect Gore's anti-sprawl crusade
can be seen as adapting a kind of conservative nostalgia to advance
liberal ends.
Indeed, a number of Republicans, and even some conservatives, have
embraced much of this agenda. New Jersey governor Christine Todd
Whitman tried to raise gas taxes to purchase open spaces and, when
that failed, successfully sponsored a bond issue for the purpose. Utah
governor Mike Leavitt is a believer in smart growth, and Pennsylvania
governor Tom Ridge two years ago appointed a "21st Century
Environment Commission" that has obsessed about sprawl.
The real problem for conservatives is that, like a medieval heresy,
there is just enough truth in the "smart growth" critique of
contemporary urban life to make a direct attack on the Gore agenda
difficult. Many American cities and suburbs are a mess. This was
foreshadowed in Jane Jacobs's 1961 classic, The Death and Life of
Great American Cities, an attack on the "urban renewal"
being led by the planners of the day. (William F. Buckley, Jr.,
excerpted a chapter from Jacobs' book in the 1970 edition of American
Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century, though Jacobs is not a
conservative.) Urban renewal in those days consisted of bulldozing
entire neighborhoods so that they could be replaced with strictly
separate land uses that were thought to be more "rational."
The bigger the area "renewed," the bigger the disaster, the
apotheosis being Brazilia in South America, which sprang full-blown
from the mid of the best planners of the day, and which resulted in
perhaps the most ugly and dysfunctional city in the world.
Jacobs' point was that truly livable cities evolve spontaneously, and
that prescriptive planning stifles this process and upsets the urban
order. She was especially critical of the proscriptions against
mixed-use and high-density development that formed part of the
conventional wisdom among planners at the time. Today's smart growth
advocates hold Jacobs up as their guru because of her praise of
density and mixed-use development, but totally miss her main point
about the limitations of planning and the spontaneous nature of city
life. Here we have the beginnings of a possibly effective
counterattack on "smart growth": Why should we let the
government and the planners that failed so badly at urban renewal try
their hand at suburban renewal?
The Quest for the Holy Rail
And the new plans work just as poorly as the old. People keep failing
to fit the planners' mold. Light rail, which together with high
density development is supposed to reduce congestion, has been a flop.
In his Brookings speech in September, Gore incredibly claimed that the
light rail system in Portland, Oregon (the Potemkin Village of the
smart growth movement) was attracting 40 percent of daily commuters.
The actual number is less than 4 percent on a good day; that Gore was
completely credulous about this fantastic figure, and that no one
caught this blooper, is telling. There is no rational reason why we
should be looking to a 19th century technology for 21st century
mobility needs. Future historians may well write off this mania as
"the quest for the holy rail."
Nor does high-density development reduce congestion. The superficially
appealing idea is that if we all live closer to where we work and
shop, shorter car trips and mass transit will replace all those long
car rides. But the real world doesn't work that way. Try this thought
experiment. What happens at a cocktail party when a new wave of people
shows up and the population density of the living room doubles? It is
harder or easier to get to the bar and the cheese tray? Is it easier
or harder to carry on conversation and move around the room? As urban
population density rises, auto traffic congestion gets worse, not
better, and commute times get longer, not shorter.
If density and proximity to transit cured congestion, then walkable,
transit-rich New York City would have the best mobility and least
congestion of any American city. In fact, while the average
home-to-work commute in American cities is about 22 minutes, the
average home-to-work commute for New Yorkers is 36 minutes, according
to U.S. Census data, one-third longer than the average. No other city,
not even Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, or Philadelphia, comes close.
"Sprawling" low density cities like Phoenix and Albuquerque,
meanwhile, have commute times below the national average. So why would
anyone want to embrace a "solution" that will make the
problem of congestion worse?
The answer is simple: To get us out of our cars. It is no exaggeration
to say that for most smart growth advocates, the car is a rolling
cigarette, General Motors is the moral equivalent of Philip Morris,
and American Graffiti is a pornographic movie. In Earth in the
Balance, Gore wrote that the internal combustion engine "is
posing a mortal threat to the security of every nation that is more
deadly than that of any military enemy we are ever likely to confront
again." It is this animus toward the car that explains why the
smart growth crowd is fixated with high density development. The
planners want to increase congestion deliberately, to force us out of
our cars and onto light rail. National Public Radio gave up the game
when it noted in a report that "Portland's planners are embracing
congestion; they want to create more of it." Portland's 40-year
plan restricts road-building and envisions congestion tripling. The
smart-growth coalition in Utah has produced a 25-year plan that
predicts a 10 percent increase in congestion over what would otherwise
be expected.
Here is where the planners' elitism and condescension is revealed. For
behind their contempt for the car is contempt for the communities and
ways of life it enables. Elite contempt for suburban life is an old
liberal theme. Herbert Gans wrote his famous book The Levittowners 30
years ago to defend suburbanites from the charge that they were
"an uneducated, gullible, petty 'mass' which rejects the culture
that would make it fully human, the 'good government' that would
create the better community, and the proper planning that would do
away with the landscape-despoiling little 'boxes' in which they
live."
Those attitudes persist to this day. They are present in a recent
report of the Pennsylvania commission appointed by Gov. Ridge.
Identifying urban sprawl as the single most important environmental
problem for the Keystone state, the report declared, "We must
find ways to prompt individual Pennsylvanians to explore their
personal lifestyle choices-where they choose to live and work, how and
how much they travel each day, how much energy they consume or save,
and consider changes in those patterns that will not only improve the
long-term quality of their lives but also contribute to a better
quality of life for all citizens of the Commonwealth."
There you have it: commuting suburbanites are unreflective sheep,
making unenlightened lifestyle choices because they lack the expert
supervision that only their betters in government can provide. Gans
couldn't have characterized the full repulsiveness of the elite
condescension to the suburbs any better. And this gem came from a
Republican administration.
Gore can be expected to be a lot more careful with his rhetoric about
suburban life, and his remedies will be described in the most benign
way. He knows that a direct attack on cars won't work, and that the
imposition of urban growth boundaries and massive new government
planning power can only proceed by stealth. (Watch for the new land
conservation program to establish de facto urban growth boundaries by
targeting key parcels of land on the urban periphery, and for the EPA
to start looking over the shoulder of your local zoning board.) That's
why smoking him out will require equal skill and finesse. But the
openings are clearly there. Conservatives need to revive the populist
language about centralized government and liberal elitism that worked
well in the past. The same government that brought you urban renewal,
conservatives should say, is likely to make an even worse mess of
suburban renewal.
Steven Hayward is senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute
in San Francisco.
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