WASHINGTON, D.C. -- One of the great arguments of the urban sprawl controversy concerns the alleged subsidies that low density suburban growth receives. Suburban growth, it is said, does not pay its way. Maybe not, but this claim brings to mind the old saw about wife-beating: if suburban growth doesn’t pay for itself, when did it stop paying for itself? How did all the suburbs of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s get built if they weren’t paying their way?

One cogent--but unproven--answer is that they never did pay their own way and have always been subsidized through various means. And since we are finally, albeit slowly, cutting back on subsidies to farmers, isn’t it time to cut back on subsidies to suburbs, too? But first we need to get to the bottom of the matter.

A number of the studies which purport to establish that suburban growth doesn’t pay for itself are badly flawed or incomplete. So last year Senator Max Baucus (D-Montana) thought to get the General Accounting Office (GAO), the Congressional auditing and investigating arm, to look into the issue. The anti-sprawl crusaders expected that the GAO would come through with a slam-dunk conclusion that federal policies, especially highway spending and the mortgage interest deduction, have contributed significantly to sprawl.

So it came as a great blow in April when the GAO issued its report whose title conveyed its conclusion: "Community Development: Extent of Federal Influence on ‘Urban Sprawl’ Is Unclear." There just isn’t any compelling or definitive evidence, the GAO concluded, that federal policy has caused sprawl.

Said the GAO: "Despite many studies on the costs and implications of ‘urban sprawl,’ so many factors contribute to it and the relationships among these factors are so complex that researchers have had great difficulty isolating the impact of individual factors. As a result, researchers have generally been unable to assign a cost or level of influence to individual factors, including particular federal programs or policies." There may even be--gasp!--"positive effects" of low density development.

Needless to say, this was the Wrong Answer for the anti-sprawl movement, and the report received little attention. But since the GAO has said it intends to keep looking into the issue and to release follow-up reports, an intensive lobbying effort is under way to get the GAO turned around. The American Planning Association, which has thrown in its lot with the "smart growth" movement (since it will provide more power and career opportunities to planners), has been to see the GAO and twist its arm. So have environmentalists.

There is little prospect that countervailing pressure will be brought to bear on the GAO. The GAO has little to fear from Congressional Republicans, their nominal boss, on this matter, because Congressional Republicans are scared to death of the sprawl issue and would just as soon avoid it altogether. Like any government agency, the GAO bends to political pressure. Watch for a revised conclusion about sprawl subsidies next year. And if the conclusion is different this time, you won’t hear the end of it from the anti-sprawl crowd.

--By Steven Hayward