www.csua.org/u/iz5 -> economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/06/urban_sprawl.html
Suburban Cowboys, by Ben Adler, The American Prospect: You know your conservative pet cause has arrived when it gets an event at the Heritage Foundation. Every kooky right-wing crusade, from denying global warming to teaching creationism in public schools, will eventually have its moment in the sun at the conservative think tank. So it is no surprise that the honor was recently granted to a growing group of reactionaries who think that America's sprawling, post-war development pattern is actually a good thing -- and that the nascent anti-sprawl "smart growth" movement needs to be stopped. These pro-sprawl views have begun to find their voice on the op-ed pages and, on May 22nd, with a discussion at Heritage modestly titled "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." The event took its name from the title of a new book by Wendell Cox, a public policy consultant (critics call him a "hired gun for the roadway industry") and visiting fellow at Heritage. Cox was introduced by another Heritage fellow, Ron Utt, who is perhaps best known as the man who led the Reagan administration's privatization efforts. The new right-wing bogeyman that Utt and Cox devote considerable energy to destroying is the smart growth movement. Smart growth advocates seek to present an alternative to the suburban-sprawl model of development. They also suggest that local governments undo restrictions that require separation of residential and commercial property, and requirements that every business be surrounded by a massive parking lot. Simultaneously, they seek to redress the severe imbalance of public funding that currently favors highways over mass transit. The desired result is a walkable, transit-accessible, mixed-use community that is more integrated and has less environmental impact than its suburban counterparts. But commentators like Utt and Cox counter that sprawl enables home-buying by constructing cheap new houses in cornfields, and cuts down on congestion by dispersing traffic into ever-expanding networks of new highways. Of course, there are elements of truth in both propositions, but Utt and Cox never address whether their preferred pattern is environmentally sustainable or culturally desirable. The shallow logic of the pro-sprawl propagandists is apparent in ... that housing prices are lower in Houston and Atlanta than in Washington, DC or Chicago, implying that the greater affordability of the Southern cities can be explained by their sprawling development patterns. This is an interesting inversion of the typical conservative faith in the efficiency of the market. To the extent that there is a premium for living in such locations as DC or Chicago, it's because those locations are scarce. If you have a scarce good, simple economics tells you that you will get a higher price than otherwise might exist." He went on to explain that smart-growth advocates want to level the playing field to ensure that all communities can develop in ways that allow "many more opportunities for people to live in communities that are transit-oriented and pedestrian friendly." Kunstler told the Prospect that Cox is part of "an interesting cohort of observers whose basic argument is that suburbia is OK because people seem to like it." "The interesting thing is that their argument doesn't go beyond that," Kunstler says. "It absolutely fails to take into account whether circumstances will permit us to keep living this way. The fact that people like something doesn't mean it's sustainable." Like many smart-growth advocates, Kunstler argues that the era of cheap oil cannot last forever, and that the environmental impact of paving over ever more land and driving greater distances is devastating. Even if the suburban lifestyle offers a higher quality of life, as Cox maintains, it simply cannot be accommodated indefinitely. Ultimately the pro-sprawl reaction, a sort of Reagonomics of urban planning, betrays many of the peculiar traits of modern conservatism: the impulse to demonize any opposition, no matter how minimal or common-sense, and a proclivity to selectively pull bits of information out of context ... As the Smart Growth Network's Emerine argues, "I think the criticism stems from a real misunderstanding of what advocates of smart growth and better community planning are trying to accomplish. I think the evidence shows that we are really about leveling the playing field for the market and types of development that there is a real market demand for." The question is, why don't pro-sprawl conservatives like Utt and Cox want to allow the free market to work? One part did catch my attention (beyond the confusing parts about free-markets), the part that says that living in DC or Chicago is preferable to living elsewhere, so that's why houses are so much more expensive. Overlooking the condescension in the statements (I can't speak for Houston and Atlanta, or for other people, but I just don't think Chicago or DC are more desirable places to live than where I live), is it demand as claimed? Are housing prices higher because DC, Chicago, and other places because they are such desirable places to live?
another view from Edward Glaeser: Glaeser's recent work on real estate addresses the issues of supply rather than of demand. He is far more interested in the forces shaping land development and residential building in the United States than in the forces shaping buyers' motivations and actions. He views supply as crucial to appreciating what has happened to the US real-estate market over the past 30 years. Between 1980 and 2000, four of the five cities in the US with the fastest-growing housing prices were in Boston's metropolitan area... Glaeser and several colleagues considered two explanations. First, the possibility that builders in the metro area were running out of land and that home prices reflected that scarcity. The second hypothesis was that building permits were scarce, not land. Had the 187 townships in the metro area created a web of regulations that hindered building to such a degree that demand far outstripped supply, driving prices up? Almost as a rule, Glaeser is skeptical of the lack-of-land argument. that 95 percent of the United States remains undeveloped and that if every American were given a house on a quarter acre, so that every family of four had a full acre, that distribution would not use up half the land in Texas. Most of Boston's metro area, he concluded, wasn't particularly dense, and even in places where it was, like the centers of Boston and Cambridge, there was ample opportunity to construct higher buildings with more housing units. So, after sorting through a mountain of data, Glaeser decided that the housing crisis was man-made. The region's zoning regulations -- which were enacted ... in the first half of the 20th century to separate residential land from commercial and industrial land and which generally promoted the orderly growth of suburbs -- had become so various and complex in the second half of the 20th century that they were limiting growth. Land-use rules of the 1920's were meant to assure homeowners that their neighbors wouldn't raise hogs in their backyards, throw up a shack on a sliver of land nearby or build a factory next door, but the zoning rules of the 1970's and 1980's were different in nature and effect. The objections in the article to urban sprawl are "aesthetic, spiritual, and ecological." I don't have much to say about aesthetics and spirituality, though its hard to see why suburban areas can't posses these traits, and I'd rather not have someone else's utopian vision imposed upon me. So I'll take the main objection to be ecological, and that in turn boils down to cars, driving, and carbon if I am reading this right. If so, let's solve the problem in a way that gives people as much choice as we can in how they respond and reorganize in response to the policy change. Part of that can be a cautious reexamination of zoning restrictions and better public transportation systems, but much more than that will be needed and, as has been widely discussed, carbon taxes or cap and trade policies address the...
|
http://csua.com/feed/