In Defense Of Non-Commercial Culture
Matthew Yglesias suggests that out-group bias against environmentalists explains why libertarians, in contradiction to their own ideology, so often defend sprawl. (Jim Henley, Erik Kain and David Schaengold and others also had interesting reactions to my earlier post.) There’s something to that, though I’d like to add two more factors that may be at work.
The first is relatively benign, namely, availability bias. That sprawl opponents want to restrict development is well-known; less well-known is that existing laws make it impossible to develop anything but sprawl. To save cognitive resources, libertarians rationally overestimate the importance of available information (being anti-sprawl means being anti-development!) at the expense of information that takes time and effort to gather (being anti-sprawl also means being anti-central planning). This doesn’t excuse John Stossel, who presumably had time to research his vindication of sprawl before broadcasting it, but it does explain why others make similar mistakes. Indeed, the availability heuristic explains why both libertarians and their opponents so often assume that the free market causes sprawl.
Even relatively well-informed sprawl defenders are misled by more readily available information. In various comments, for example, some argued that Houston, which famously has no zoning code yet looks just like every other place in America, proves that consumers prefer sprawl. Even without zoning, however, Houston’s land use rules still mandate sprawl. Here, for example, are Houston’s street design ordinances. Among other things, they require that major streets be 100 feet wide and that intersections (which must have a 25 degree turning radius) be spaced 600 feet apart. Imagine yourself strolling down a block three football fields long next to a road packed 100 feet across with moving vehicles. Wouldn’t you rather be safe within your car? I would. Houston, like most other places in America, has driven pedestrians away. The Houston example proves the opposite of what sprawl defenders think. Not only does the government mandate sprawl, but sprawl is legally over-determined. That is, any number of laws, even without the others, suffice to make sprawl the only possible form of development.
Second, libertarians defend sprawl because they have ideological commitments other than to limited government. In sprawling neighborhoods, people only go out in public (and then of course only in their cars) to buy stuff. In traditional neighborhoods, by contrast, people go out to buy stuff, but also to people-watch, gossip, stroll, or maybe all these things at once. Sprawl restricts the range of human activities to the purely commercial. Indeed, the sprawling business and shopping district, with its strip malls, office parks, parking lots and massive road signs, is the very image or “ideal type” of commercial life. Libertarians know that have no problem with meretricious commercialism. They therefore feel compelled to embrace sprawl, which allows nothing else.
Of course, traditional neighborhoods do not actually prohibit commerce. Indeed, the intellectual hero of the New Urbanists, Jane Jacobs, passionately defended commercial values, which she believed flourished most of all in cities. (See her quirky homage to Plato’s Republic, Systems of Survival.) More importantly, just because you oppose sprawl does not mean that you despise people who shop at Walmart, any more than if you oppose rent control you despise people who can’t find housing. The ubiquitous commercialism you see as you drive through America is not in itself deplorable. What’s deplorable is that Americans aren’t free to do anything else.
Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-bending, Celebrating America the Way It’s Supposed To Be — With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac … of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn (Hardcover) By PJ oRourke makes a good point about the first out-bound steps society took away from the city with the introduction of the automobile. He says it was an escape from the pollution, corruption and violence. And the end he concedes that the suburbs are as much of a jail as the cities the people tried to escape, with people commuting to work in essentially giant, powered, cup-holders.
Suburbs, and the curb they put on people watching and the appeal of walking, were first served by trains ironically enough.
yes, the inability to walk in houston was something i noted when i used to visit that city. in fact, in some areas drivers were not expecting pedestrians, so i had to be extra careful….
Just because sprawl is encouraged or even required by ordinances, doesn’t mean that people don’t choose it willingly. It’s possible that zoning regulations and so on actually reflect the popular will. That is, it’s possible that regulations are to some extent the people’s attempt to protect their sprawl.
If sprawl were some way of life imposed from above against people’s preferences, you’d expect to hear a lot of complaining. When suburban families visit places like Old Town Alexandria, you typically hear lots of appreciation and admiration for the beauty, the community, etc., but it’s followed by something like, “but I wouldn’t want to give up being able to park right in front of my house”. Most sprawl-dwellers could live in non-sprawl areas if they wanted to, notwithstanding government sprawl-subsidies. These people just don’t want to leave the sprawl. Most people will gladly sell their birthright for a mess of pottage.
I understand that the phenomenon of suburban sprawl is multifaceted. However, one important component is that people move to where the jobs are.
When American industry boomed post WW II, huge manufacturing installations like auto and steel plants were constructed outside of major cities. The Levittowns of the 50′s naturally followed. Which initiated the sprawl phenomenon.
But here’s the thing. An existing urban architecture is almost perfect for accommodating the transition to a softer, white collar, information based economy. Because the supporting infrastructure is already in place. Office buildings can be constructed up, not out near mass transit stops.
But that development model did not happen. Instead, white collar, corporate “campuses” were developed in the suburbs and exurbs. So that’s where the jobs went, reinforcing isolation and sustaining the sprawl model.
The DC region is currently constructing a multi-billion dollar extension of the Metro in Northern Virginia. It’s bound to be boon doggle because the existing development patterns of spread out campuses and sprawled neighborhoods means that people will still have to get into their cars or take a bus to get to a Metro stop. And then take another shuttle bus to get to a campus job half a mile away. Once a suburbanite gets in his car, you are not going to get him out. Sprawl – mass transit models are doomed to fail.
Those same billions could have been spent on enticing commercial development in cities like Baltimore and Philadelphia because the mass transit systems are already in place. Commercial development would have catalyzed sprawl free residential (re)development closer in.
But the sprawl model is now part of the middle class American psyche. Unfortunately, the horse has left the barn and there appears to be no way to get him back.
Here is Dallas in 1951:
http://forum.dallasmetropolis.com/showpost.php?p=286371&postcount=52
The problem with suburbs, we have plenty in the Dallas area, is that they become that which they try not to be…Dallas. Your inner ring suburbs, such as Farmers Branch and Irving, are starting to see the same problems that face Dallas. Plano, which was Dallas’ premier suburb, is now seeing those same problems as well. Now so-called great places to live are Frisco and McKinney, but then they too will share that fate of the suburbs before them.
But the suburbs themselves are not the problem. Many of these places were small towns connected to Dallas by an interurban electric railway. They had genuine town centers, not these faux-town centers which are nothing more than outdoor malls.
I don’t like “big government” but I do not see how driving a car sets me free. I don’t have to pay to walk. To drive, I need to be licensed, I need a car on which I pay taxes and pay annual registration and inspection fees, I pay for gas that is taxed, I occasionally have to pay a toll to drive on a road, I have to pay for state-mandate insurance, I allow the state to use eminent domain to build these roads, and now we are on the hook assisting American carmakers.
I know I sort of contradict myself regarding suburbs not being the problem, but also being the problem.
What I meant is that suburbs, which were actually small farm towns, had centers of commerce that had less sprawl than they do today. Anyone can talk a walk around historical McKinney and Plano to see that. But unfortunately most of today’s commerce in suburbs takes places in campuses surrounded by a sea of concrete
I think that in most major cities, an increasing population is what most encourages sprawl. I live in Phoenix, and people have been moving here in droves for the last couple decades. I find it interesting that the some on the left’s support for more immigration is counter-productive to their opposition to sprawl. If you import massive of amounts of impoverished job seeking people into your city, regardless of their origins, that city will have to expand…. with more walmarts, cheap condo developments, ghetto apartment buildings etc. which will always lead to a demand for more suburban areas as people seek out places with less people.
Also, one of the reasons that city development is not encouraged is because urban land is so much more expensive…not because of the laws but because of it’s scarcity. Developers are shrewd businessmen, and they want buy where it’s cheap, build using cheap materials, and sell high.
I personally am against most forms of sprawl, and would like to see less of it…and less people. However, I don’t think either is likely to happen. Our democratic society does not really reward candidates who make painful choices and take unpopular stands which demand sacrifice. People like happy talk, and transnational businesses and politicians love sprawl. The euphemism they use for it is “pro-growth.”
Paul Mulshine, a columnist for the Star Ledger in NJ, has been writing for years about sprawl in the sprawlingest state in the country. Whatever has been the bottom up demand, the top down pressure from the NJ Courts (fair housing) and the State bureaucracy (affordable housing) guarantees that sprawl, if you ain’t got now, is coming your way sooner or later. As for choice: if you prefer high density living, Newark, Camden, Patterson, Trenton, Atlantic City, Asbury Park (oceanfront living), apartments are available in all of these cities. Some commercial activities, mainly drugs, but superb people watching opportunities..
I don’t know that “community” would still happen – there are a lot of cross currents – simply forcing the current suburbanites together won’t create a community, no more than the racial experiments in integration created true integration.
Yes, sprawl is artificial and effectively subsidized (as are roads and cars over trains), but government has to act collectively and often can only pick one winner.
If it was or is going to happen you would see it in the gentrification of the cities near or in downtown. But the artists and others don’t seem to want to be a “community”.
You had communities (and still do) when you have a group of people who have to band together. Back before I was born, it was the “Polish” neighborhood, complete with Church and its school, the Czechs over a few blocks, Mexicans and Chinese and Japanese elsewhere, but in their enclaves. Because they had something in common like language or religion and were melting into the pot. But you wanted a lawyer who could speak and understand your native language if not english. Same with a doctor.
And please don’t forget “Busing to Desegregate schools”. White flight. Where do you go where the black robed micromanagers can’t get to you? Suburbs or Exburbs. I think the integration would have occurred naturally over years. The burbs might be isolating, but being forced to participate in a sociological experiment against your will is worse.
If you wish to recreate community today, you will have to find something which a community can form around where locality is important. When the boomers get older and driving becomes an effort?
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