SPRAWL & AUTOMOBILES:“1000 Friends of Automobility” needed

120 years ago, most urban Americans were jammed into high-density city centers. Only the wealthiest could afford a horse, so transportation was mostly on foot. Even the cost of streetcars, introduced in the 1890s, was too great for most workers to afford. This meant that people had to live close to where they worked and shopped. Intellectual and social leaders considered the high-density tenements of that time to be unsanitary and unsafe.

The major goal of early planners was to find ways to relieve cities of their crowding. As planning historian Peter Hall says in his book, ‘Cities of Tomorrow’: “Twentieth-century city planning, as an intellectual and professional movement, essentially represents a reaction to the evils of the nineteenth-century city” (p7).

Hall shows that planners came up with all sorts of utopian solutions for helping the downtrodden masses. But, he says, the “central irony” turned out to be that “even as the first tentative experiments were made in creating a new planned social order, so the market began to dissolve the worst evils of the slum city through the process of mass suburbanization” (p7-8).

To say that “the market” solved the problems of urban slums, while true enough, is an oversimplification. It is just as accurate to credit Henry Ford, whom FORTUNE magazine recently named the “businessman of the century,” with the solution. Ford, of course, developed the Model T Ford and sold it at a price low enough that average working people could afford to buy it and thus liberate themselves from the crowded city. More important, Ford implemented the mass production system. As this system spread from industry to industry, it made it possible to pay workers enough that they could afford to buy not only cars but their own homes.

“The suburban car and automobile have rendered confinement within the city unnecessary for large numbers of people,” noted Ford himself in 1922. “And one of the most hopeful facts is that, whereas only the well-to-do once found it possible to get away from the city, now the workingman finds it not only possible but advantageous to live in the country.”

Today, as everyone knows, the automobile has led to urban sprawl. And the solution to sprawl is to pack everyone back into high-density housing in the cities and make them get around on foot and streetcars, instead of automobiles. And the people who came up with this solution are the same sorts of people—planners, architects, urban leaders—who were so desperate to get people out of the tenements a century ago.

The most recent argument in the sprawl-warrior’s rhetoric is that sprawl causes poverty. An entire conference on this subject is to be held in Las Cruces, New Mexico, on March 18, sponsored by 1000 Friends of New Mexico. According to Ned Farquhar, the director of 1000 Friends of NM, “lower-income people would have more opportunity to find rewarding work and build lifetime equity if we didn’t let sprawling growth undermine our economic performance.”

To justify this claim, Farquhar trots out several familiar and sometimes conflicting arguments:

* Sprawl imposes higher transportation costs on poor people because they must travel further to work. (In fact, most people live within twenty-five minutes of their work.)

* Sprawl reduces the wealth of poor people. (Their wealth is lower but not because of sprawl.)

* Sprawl imposes high costs on people of color, who are disproportionately concentrated in the cities. (But they too are rapidly moving to the suburbs.)

* Sprawl makes housing less affordable because the least expensive housing is in the suburbs where residents have to own autos. (Low-density suburbs provide choices of housing that would not exist if everyone were crammed into high-density cities.)

* Sprawl increases the costs of urban services and thus increases taxes. (Suburbanization reduces, not increases, urban service costs.)

* Sprawl undermines local economies because companies won’t “expand or locate in our increasingly stagnant economy.” (Businesses aren’t investing in San Jose, Seattle, Phoenix, & other “sprawling” cities?)

* Sprawl reduces school investment in low-income neighborhoods. (In fact, New Mexico and many other states have school equalization policies insuring that all school districts, rich or poor, get equal funding per student.)

* Sprawl makes it harder to provide public transit which poor people need.

These claims are flat out wrong. Autos and low-density suburbanization have helped tens of millions of Americans escape poverty and improve their lives. While some people remain poor, and some of these have been “left behind” as other people moved to the suburbs, it doesn’t make sense to punish everyone else by forcing them to live in costly, congested cities.

In fact, studies show the best way to help people out of poverty is to help them obtain automobiles. Katherine O’Regan, an economist at Yale, and John Quigley, an economist at UC Berkeley, say that poor people who own cars are more likely to find better-paying jobs than ones who do not. Ironically, until recently welfare policies prevented poor people from owning cars, lest they lose their welfare benefits. To reduce poverty, they conclude, we should “promote the mass transit system that works so well for the nonpoor – the private auto” (“Cars for the Poor,” ACCESS, Spring, 1998, p20-24).

The truth and falsehood of Farquhar’s arguments are less important than the significance of Farquhar’s tactic: The anti-sprawl movement is trying to add another ally to its crusade. The movement already includes environmentalists, historic preservationists, downtown business interests, some developers and builders, and many others. In contrast, they can accurately say that pro-mobility forces consist mainly of the highway lobby, suburban developers and realtors, and libertarian thinktanks.

Spending time refuting Farquhar’s claims is far less important than building new alliances in favor of mobility and freedom of choice. We need to convince groups representing poor people and minorities that mobility is their hope, not their enemy. We need to convince major retailers that smart growth is an enemy worth fighting. Other potential allies include emergency service providers, trucking companies and labor unions, suburban elected officials, and suburban neighborhood associations and leaders.

If we don’t build these alliances, we are likely to win the battle of words and lose the war for mobility and freedom of choice. (Contact Randal O’Toole, The Thoreau Institute Oregon rot@ti.org http://www.ti.org)