WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Once upon a time, presidential campaigns were run on Big Issues like who could better
safeguard the nation’s security in the Cold War, or who could best revive a stagnant economy. Vice President Al
Gore is now field-testing his presidential campaign for the year 2000 and has the luxury of selecting any
number of major issues. He has come up with--drum roll please--suburban sprawl.

Suburban sprawl? As a presidential issue? It is doubtless true that at a time of full employment and robust economic growth, politicians need to chase after what bugs people most, and in prosperous times what
really galls people on a day-to-day basis is traffic congestion, crowded public schools, and the disorienting change that comes when rapid metropolitan growth transforms open fields and hillsides into new clusters of houses and business sites. But is this a national crisis, requiring federal action? Gore’s proposal is to dole out federal money for localities to buy up open land and "save" it from development. The catch is that, for you to get the money, the Environmental Protection Agency would have to approve your local land-use plan.

As we have mentioned before in this space, the hysteria about sprawl is disproportionate to the facts. We are
not paving the nation. In fact, the amount of land used for all urban and suburban purposes is less than 5
percent of the total land area in the continental United States. And according to figures from the U.S.
Geological Survey, the amount of land in the continental U.S. developed each year is only .0006 percent -- six ten thousandths of one percent. If some of this .0006 percent is happening in your community it may be a big deal, but it is not a national crisis. Moreover, it should be pointed out that since World War II the amount of land set aside for wildlife, wilderness conservation, and national parks has grown twice as fast as urban areas. The amount of land set aside for these purposes is now three times as large as urbanized areas.

But a more interesting aspect of this issue is that the main remedy proposed--higher density cities--will make
the problems associated with growth worse. Try this thought experiment: What happens at a cocktail party
when a new wave of people shows up and the population density of the living room doubles? Is it harder or
easier to get to access the bar and cheese tray? Is it easier or harder to carry on a conversation and move
around the room? Turns out that real-world data show that as urban population density rises, auto traffic
congestion gets worse, not better, and commute times get longer, not shorter. So why do we want to embrace
a "solution" that will make the problems worse?

There is of course one group that profits from supposedly smart growth schemes: government planners
and social engineers who don’t like the way we live and lust after the power to reorder our social
arrangements. Call it "suburban renewal," and like urban renewal in the 1960s and 1970s, it would be just
as big a disaster.

--By Steven Hayward