In this insightful article from this month’s American Enterprise magazine, the author of a book I posted about awhile back offers an essay (adapted from his book, Sprawl), proposing suburban sprawl is a good thing generally, and for those of us who love Sacramento for its charming sprawl around the rivers and through the canyons, a refreshing and validating look at how we choose to live.
Here is an excerpt.
How Sprawl Got a Bad Name
By Robert Bruegmann
There is overwhelming evidence that urban sprawl has been beneficial for many people. Year after year, the vast majority of Americans respond to batteries of polls by saying that they are quite happy with where they live, whether it is a city, suburb, or elsewhere. Most objective indicators about American urban life are positive. We are more affluent than ever; home ownership is up; life spans are up; pollution is down; crime in most cities has declined. Even where sprawl has created negative consequences, it has not precipitated any crisis.
So what explains the power of today's anti-sprawl crusade? How is it possible that a prominent lawyer could open a recent book with the unqualified assertion that "sprawl is America's most lethal disease"? Worse than drug use, crime, unemployment, and poverty? Why has a campaign against sprawl expanded into a major political force across America and much of the economically advanced world?
I would argue that worries about sprawl have become so vivid not because conditions are really as bad as the critics suggest, but precisely because conditions are so good. During boom years, expectations can easily run far ahead of any possibility of fulfilling them. A fast-rising economy often produces a revolution of expectations. I believe these soaring expectations are responsible for many contemporary panics.
Consider, for a moment, the thunderous din of complaints about traffic in Los Angeles. From one perspective, this reaction is bizarre. Even when speeds on the freeway decline to 20 miles per hour, drivers throughout the Los Angeles area move much more quickly than they do by car or public transportation at the center of almost any large, older industrial city in Europe or the U.S. It is clearly not that congestion is objectively worse in Los Angeles; it is that the highway building program of the 1950s and 1960s was so successful in reducing congestion that people became used to being able to drive across the entire metropolitan area at a mile a minute, dramatically expanding their choices in living, working, and recreation in the process. Since then, L.A.'s population has grown dramatically, but road building has slowed because of political pressures. This squeeze produced the inevitable result: more congestion.
Some Los Angeles residents now find themselves even more frustrated about traffic than residents of Paris or New York City. This has little to do with the traffic itself, however, and everything to do with the fact that Parisians and New Yorkers never entertained the possibility that they could drive through the center of the city at 60 miles per hour. The problem in Los Angeles is a deflation of greatly raised expectations.
Today's unprecedented concern about sprawl is similarly an indication of how much expectations have risen among ordinary urban dwellers. Metropolitan changes have become such an issue in Los Angeles and Atlanta not because these are inherently undesirable places to live. Quite the contrary. These places have become so attractive that many new residents have flooded in. This has been beneficial for much of the population. These cities have generated enormous numbers of jobs and vast wealth for a tremendous number of people. Of course, as in all other cities throughout history, there have been problems.
For some of these problems, there are solutions. Others will simply disappear as boom periods fade and citizens adjust their lives to avoid the dislocations and imbalances. For yet other problems there are no real solutions, because they involve a clash in goals and desires among different parts of the populations. In these cases, most people will eventually learn to live with the consequences.
Trying to ameliorate longstanding urban trials is a sensible course of action. What is far less sensible is directing so much critical energy at conditions that don't really qualify as traumatic, or circumstances that can't be changed without causing severe unintended consequences. This is particularly so in the case of urban sprawl--where a clampdown would cause severe losses among the less savvy and well-connected parts of our population.
