SPRAWL STUDIES:Smart Growth Rhetoric Challenged

One can agree with some of the esthetic problems raised by what is called “sprawl” (new development is usually stark until trees grow) while being appalled by the contempt such terminology expresses for local and individual decisions that produce it. The sprawl-busters are also quite dogmatic and reckless in their claims for what planning restrictions can achieve, asserting that great economic savings can be achieved, traffic problems reduced, and environmental impacts alleviated. These new communities will be ‘livable’ and ‘sustainable’ they say, as if the tens of millions of people who have been buying suburban housing are some sub-species of mental retards who bought ‘unlivable’ and ‘unsustainable’ property.

Our interest in this issue is that everywhere it is being used as a rationale for blocking new highways and squandering $$s on supposed alternatives to cars.

Samuel R Staley’s report for the Reason Public Policy Inst is a quiet, dispassionate examination of the “sprawl” issue. It looks at the evidence and the data in respect of land use, farmland losses, costs of compact versus lower density, central city vs fringe, emissions implications, municipal services costs, and implications for quality of life and living standards. Staley finds sprawl definitions elusive, the benefits of denser development overstated, and the costs overlooked. He is sharpest on the sprawl-busters claims that current development is “haphazard”, “random” and “uncoordinated.”

In fact real estate markets are quite orderly, coordinating the wishes of existing property owners (farmers and other owners of large tracts of land) with the preferences of tens of thousands of people who want housing, offices, shopping places and the like. Intermediary developers only thrive to the extent that they can anticipate the wishes of prospective urban building users and add value to land previously in less intense use. Developers who fail to find the best use for the land soon fail financially.

Writes Staley: “Markets create order out of seemingly random decisions every day by matching consumer preferences with products and services supplied by entrepreneurs and producers... Markets transform land from one use to another using the price system to guide buyers and sellers.”

He provides examples of how the real estate market corrects developers where they misjudge consumer preferences and willingness to pay, and notes that the process is just as rational for real estate as for other products such as food or furniture.

Staley is all in favor of developments paying full cost of services so long as those services are available to be bought from competitive utility suppliers. He suggests roads should be provided by investors or neighborhood associations, not from centrally collected taxes. (Contact Reason Public Policy Inst 310 391 2245 www.reason.org)

Higher density will generally worsen congestion and pollution, Staley finds, because it will force more trips to be made and more produced within a given area.

There has also been good coverage of the issue in REASON magazine, hitting off with the Thoreau Institute and Portland OR researcher Randal O’Toole in the Jan 99 issue.

O’Toole was way ahead of everyone on this issue and his 1996 “The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths: a Critique of the New Urbanism & Portland’s Metro 2040 Plan” is one of the classics – well worth revisiting (www.ti.org).

For example he writes: “There is nothing wrong with developers building pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods – on their own without subsidies or prescriptive zoning. Such neighborhoods are attractive to many people, though not necessarily to everyone. But to build a regional plan around the claim that high-density, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods will reduce congestion, when in fact they will do no such thing, makes no sense at all.”

Another excellent recent survey of the issue comes from Frank Moretti “Smart Growth: a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing” at The Road Information Program (TRIP) (202 466 6706 www.tripnet.org). He’s an assiduous researcher who pulls together the results of a decade or more of studies of these issues, and presents the results in a very fair fashion. It’s an elaboration of a paper he gave at TRB.

Wendell Cox in “The President’s New Sprawl Initiative: a Program in Search of a Problem” from the Heritage Foundation (www.heritage.org/library/backgrounder/bg1263.html) systematically examines the sprawlbusters arguments. He looks at the relationship of density and congestion (the enviros agenda would worsen congestion), air pollution (again they talk through their hats) agricultural land (there’s so much going a lot is reverting to forest) and, most original, he looks at what has actually happened in European cities where they have actually had in force most of the growth-boundary, densepack, and anti-car/anti-road policies of the Gore so-called ‘smart growth’ for at least half a century. Cox is a demon nerd with bar charts, graphs and tables. He must have mastered the esoterica of Lotus 1-2-3 or somesuch spreadsheet program at age 1, 2 or 3.

NATIONAL REVIEW the conservative fortnightly is showing an interest in such issues, possibly for the first time in its history. It has run a bunch of good articles (by Steven Hayward and others) under the cover story title “Suburban Legends” (3/22/99). Liked this line from Hayward: “Beneath the contempt for the car is contempt for the communities and the ways of life it makes possible.” NR also had an “Apocalypse Gore: the Dark Vision of the VP” (3/8/99) as another cover story (www.nationalreview.com).

Liberal Gores Gore

And on the liberal side NEW REPUBLIC presented Greg Easterbrook “The Case for Sprawl” (www.newrepublic.com 3/15/99) He sees the anti-sprawl campaign as fundamentally elitist, selfish and inequitable: “Of course, everybody wishes there were fewer cars on the road, fewer strip malls, and less demand for living space or commercial square footage. But how do you discourage such things without denying a place at the table to those who have not yet been seated—especially in a country whose population is growing? As an issue sprawl can also sound awfully similar to exclusionary zoning and other pull-up-the-ladder ideas that comfortable communities have used in the past to keep out unwanted arrivistes—often minorities and immigrants. One person’s greenspace preservation is another’s denied housing permit.”

On cars and roads Easterbrook has this: “Consider the assumption that road construction is odious. Roads are not only much cheaper to build than mass transit systems; they are also more flexible. The excellent subway system in Washington DC, which I ride to work, is fixed in its downtown-outward configuration: tens of billions of dollars would be required to rebuild the system to reflect the between-burb commuting that has been the main urban transportation trend of the past 20 years. Roads, on the other hand, can reflect changes in commuter patterns instantly—people just point their cars at different destinations.

“Cars, in turn, are consumers of money and fossil fuel, and we belittle ourselves when we regard them as status symbols. But automobiles also promote economic efficiency and personal freedom; there are good reasons why even anti-sprawlers want to own one. As new cars approach negligible levels of pollution emissions, environmental objections to them decline.

“And an annoying little secret of suburban life is that, even with traffic congestion, it’s almost always faster to get somewhere in a car than by riding public transit. Cars are ubiquitous partly because people make rational time-money tradeoffs regarding their use, and those sorts of judgments, though sometimes wrong on the micro scale, are usually logical on the macro scale.”