Sound thinking about “urban sprawl” requires putting development in its proper perspective

Controversy about growth and development has been a staple of politics in fast-growing coastal states such as California and Florida for decades, but now the controversy about sprawl has come to the heartland as well. The concern over suburban sprawl is fueling political sentiment for increased government regulation of land use. The issue might even end up in the middle of the presidential campaign: Vice President Al Gore has jumped on the antisprawl bandwagon.

Sprawl is an issue tailor-made for cliche and hyperbole. Lurid headlines about “the paving of America” and the threat of “vanishing farmland” are common. Behind these alarmist cliches are the very real phenomena of rapidly rising traffic congestion, crowded public schools, and the changing character of our neighborhoods and countryside that results from growth.

Once upon a time in America, if you said, “I live in a growing community,” the statement would be taken as good news. Today it is thought to be bad news. Every new proposed housing development means more cars on our crowded roads and fewer open fields and hillsides to look at.

Sound thinking is needed

Sound thinking about sprawl requires putting development in its proper perspective. All development—including roads, highways, and military bases, as well as urban and suburban housing and commercial buildings— consumes only about 5 percent of the total land area of the continental United States. This is only about half as much as European nations, all of which have thriving agriculture and ample open space. Even the Clinton administration has concluded that “loss of farmland poses no threat to U.S. food and fiber production.”

The rate at which land is being used each year is hard to pinpoint because up-to-date and comprehensive national data are unavailable. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated in the 1980s that since the end of World War II the annual rate of land development has been about 1.3 million acres a year. This sounds huge, but it is only 0.07 percent of the 1.8 billion acres of land in the continental United States. At this rate, it takes nearly 15 years to develop just 1 percent of the nation’s land area.

But cities and towns aren’t defined through aggregate statistics. President Franklin Roosevelt used to put down critics of the long-term effects of the New Deal with the famous quip: “People don’t eat in the long run; they eat every day.” Similarly, nearly every piece of open space that yields to the bulldozer for new development occurs in the line of sight of a populated area where people live now, and the change and disruption it brings locally trumps the fact that the land area in question represents a statistically miniscule portion of the nation.

People in a growing suburb don’t care that 99 percent of Wyoming is going to be open space forever. Similarly, people who are stuck through a second cycle of a traffic light where they used to sail through are not well disposed to hear that growth and low-density development are not the chief cause of their inconvenience.

How fast is the growth?

Of course, the controversy involves more than just the raw amount of land being used. Critics of sprawl think we are developing land at too low a density. They like to cite examples such as the Chicago metropolitan area, whose population grew by just 4 percent between 1970 and '90, while the developed land area grew by 55 percent. In St. Louis the regional population has grown by 17 percent since 1960, but the developed land area has grown by 125 percent.

These statistics are superficial, ignoring the fact that density should fall as household sizes shrink and affluence increases. In fact, density in the central cities has been gradually declining, and the suburbs expanding, for more than a century.

In the nineteenth century, it was not atypical for U.S. cities to have densities of up to 100,000 people per square mile. Urban reformers of the time thought that cities were overcrowded and that dispersing people to the suburbs was an improvement. The technology for lowering the density of crowded cities was, ironically, the same technology that supposedly will raise density today: rail transit.

What is happening is simple to understand: The suburban lifestyle that used to be affordable to only the rich and upper middle class is now within reach of the working class. (The fastest-growing demographic segment of suburban residents is minorities, especially Hispanics.) It is unrealistic to expect that urban densities will remain constant as the middle class grows more numerous and prosperous, or that Chicago’s new suburbs will develop at the same density as the central city itself (12,000 people per square mile).

As more and more people enter the upper middle class, they are demanding larger homes with larger yards in the suburbs. The average new home in the United States is one-third larger than it was 30 years ago and has, for example, large kitchens and living rooms, even as the average household size has shrunk. Sprawl critics deride such houses as “McMansions,” but can we use the law to prohibit their creation? As Gregg Easterbrook, senior editor of the New Republic, bluntly puts it, “Sprawl is caused by affluence and population growth, and which of these, exactly, do we propose to prohibit?”

Moving people

Traffic congestion is probably the greatest flash point in the sprawl controversy. Sprawl critics point to data showing that vehicle miles traveled (VMT) have been increasing about twice as fast as population growth over the last 25 years, and they conclude that this indicates the spatial inefficiency of low-density suburban development.

In fact, federal figures show that the average commuter is traveling no farther to work today than 20 years ago. The increase in VMT owes mostly to the entry of women into the workforce in large numbers, as well as the rising number of minorities entering the middle class and acquiring cars for the first time. Very little is attributed to our spatial pattern or density.

In addition, we have more non—work destinations these days: soccer matches, health clubs, specialty food and retail outlets, and so forth. (These are not the kind of destinations that are practically served by mass transit, which is why “getting people out of their cars” with expensive rail transit projects is not likely to be effective.) In other words, increased driving is a measure of increased affluence.

Another way of looking at this phenomenon is to take up the claim that between 1983 and '87, the number of cars in the United States increased by 20 million while population increased by only 9.2 million. But since no one drives more than one car at a time this must mean that many people who previously did not own cars now do. Unless one adopts the tacit premise that only rich people should own cars, it is hard to see this as a bad thing.

Environmental or social issue

Sprawl is commonly discussed as an environmental issue, though it is probably more accurate to think of it as a social issue. Economist Fred Hirsch predicted 25 years ago that increasingly affluent middle-class Americans would someday turn against growth as the costs of growth— congestion, loss of open space, and the declining quality of public services—came to outweigh the benefits of increased economic activity. How many more high-tech companies and fancy Italian restaurants do we really need in our town, anyway?

Thus sprawl represents a source of change that is seemingly beyond people’s ability to control, and the social anxiety that rapid growth and change brings is enhanced by a second powerful but contradictory social fact: the increasing latitude for choice that people have today. While the main story line of modern life is expanding choice and opportunity, rapid urban growth is seen as narrowing our range of choice and diminishing our control over our own destiny.

In the whole issue’s most acute form, we are less able to choose when and where to drive because of traffic congestion. And when people do not have a sense that they can control events themselves, they earnestly wish that someone else—namely the government—would do it for them.

When all the fancy rhetoric is stripped away, what we really want when we demand that regulation be imposed to control growth is for someone else to be prohibited from building his McMansion. Many “smart growth” schemes to preserve open space by restricting development or compelling higher-density development can be seen as simply a high church version of NIMBY (not in my backyard) sentiment. This is undoubtedly a powerful strain of public opinion, but not the best basis for making policy, since it results in higher housing prices and heavier burdens for the less well off among us. The issue is likely to remain a flash point until the next recession comes along.

Steven Hayward is senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco, and the author of the Index of Leading Environmental Indicators. He can be reached via email at hayward487@aol.com.