Steven Hayward, Senior Fellow, Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy

I am Steven Hayward, senior fellow with the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco, and until a few weeks ago a visiting fellow in urban issues at the Heritage Foundation. The Pacific Research Institute studies a wide range of issues in political economy, and favors policies that employ market remedies and individual incentives. I have been conducting research and writing about growth management and environmental issues for more than ten years.

The best way to begin putting the current debate on urban sprawl into some context is to make recourse to that proverbial barometer of public sentiment, the taxi driver. Not long ago I was in a taxi on route from Lindbergh Field in St. Louis to an appointment in St. Charles County, which is where the suburban sprawl of the greater St. Louis area is taking place. Looking for some local insight, I asked the driver what he thought about what was going on there. "Man," he told me, "they’re building so fast out here there isn’t going to be any land left." I asked where he lived. "I live in the City of St. Louis," he told me; but he quickly added without any prompt from me: "But I’m going to move out here. The quality of life is so much better; you get much more value for your housing dollar."

This is what social psychologists have long termed "cognitive dissonance"—the ability to keep two contradictory thoughts in mind and be relatively untroubled by it. As Jim Johnson, recently retired as chairman of Fannie Mae, neatly summarizes it: The American people are against two things—they’re against sprawl, and they’re against density. What I want to suggest is that there is a lot of cognitive dissonance, misperception, and lack of proportion in the current discourse about sprawl, open space and agricultural land preservation, and urban form.

One should begin with a quick reference to aggregate land use statistics. The total amount of urbanized or built-up land is less than 5 percent of the total land area in the continental U.S., and the rate of land being developed, based on U.S. Geological Survey estimates, is about seven one-hundredths of one percent (0.07%). Some evidence suggests that the rate of "sprawl" is actually lower today than it was in the 1950s and 1960s. The "sprawl index," a simple comparison of population growth and the rate of urbanization, has actually declined since 1980. Moreover, since the end of World War II, the amount of land set aside for parks, wilderness, and wildlife has grown twice as fast as urban areas. In 1969, there were 2.6 acres of conservation land for every acre or urbanized land; today there are about 4 acres of conservation land for every acre of urbanized land. (These figures exclude national parks and agricultural conservation land programs.) And private land conservation efforts are booming.

These kind of aggregate national statistics are almost irrelevant to the politics of the issue. I am reminded of President Roosevelt’s famous quip to critics of the long-run effects of the New Deal: "People don’t eat in the long run; they eat every day." Similarly, nearly every piece of open space that yields to the bulldozer 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 whole.

The aversion to rapid change is the dominant social fact behind the controversy over sprawl, and it is enhanced by a second powerful social fact: the increasing latitude for choice that people have today. Thirty years ago, for example, our phones were the property of the monopoly phone company; today we choose our long distance provider. 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 its 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—the government—would.

Most of the ideas that make up the conventional wisdom on the subject at the moment, such as urban growth boundaries and, to a lesser extent, the bundle of ideas that go under the banner of "smart growth," are misguided, because they misperceive much of what is happening in urban areas (especially the increase in traffic congestion), and as remedies they would be ineffective in solving the main problems associated with growth.

Explaining why this is so would take a lot longer than five minutes, so let me mention the single most important reason for being cautious about embracing ambitious land-use regulation schemes or other measures that will distort the land market. A century of experience with regulation of various kinds has taught us that regulation typically favors the affluent and the organized over the less affluent and less organized. There are few groups less organized or represented than the people who would benefit from the houses and jobs that do not yet exist. Many of the advocates of "smart growth" will tell you that this is not a debate about growth per se, but is a debate about the form growth should take. While I take them at their word at this, I think we are being na•ve if we fail to recognize that growth management schemes can easily become the machinery of negation by existing residents. To pick a nearby example, the angry voters attending Fairfax County Commission meetings are not arguing over the form of development: they simply want less of it because, as several told the Washington Post a few months ago, our housing values are stagnant because the county is allowing too many homes to be built.

Everyone’s favorite model for enlightened growth management these days—Portland, Oregon—is starting to show the same kind of exclusionary effects that have long been observable in the boutique regions of Boulder, Colorado, and Santa Barbara and Marin Counties in California: disproportionately rising housing prices (see table below), and signs that in-migration is being deterred, which is no doubt what many Oregonians had in mind all along. The Wall Street Journal recently carried a short news item regarding the rising number of people moving out of Oregon—the only western state where this can be observed. (See attached clip.)

Federal policy, whether funding for open space purchases, or infrastructure policy such as ISTEA, should guard against the potential for exclusionary effects. This is very difficult to do. A more effective alternative to land use regulation would be variable rate road pricing, which would not only affect individual incentives for the time of day and amount of driving people do, but would also become a factor in site-selection decisions for business location. Both would help encourage more compact and efficient use of land and roads.

* 1996 HCI, U.S Census Bureau (median income related to median housing prices; US average = 100)

Note the contrast with the "sprawling" cities of Phoenix and Las Vegas.