The debate over urban sprawl is a healthy sign of
Americans' enduring desire for self-renewal. As such, it is
ultimately a national discussion about how to live "the good life"
in an affluent democracy. At its core, the debate over
"sprawl"--which often masquerades as a dispute over technical
concerns about traffic congestion, mass transit use, population
density, the availability of public works, and so forth--represents
a clash of values and visions over federal and state government
involvement in largely local issues. Even seemingly narrow policy
discussions cannot avoid tacitly endorsing one side or the other in
this controversy.
The
debate promises to get even livelier with the ascension of Maryland
Governor Parris Glendening to the chairmanship of the National
Governors' Association (NGA), which recently released a report on
urban sprawl titled "Growing Pains: Quality of Life in the New
Economy."
Governor Glendening, who has been credited with coining the term
"smart growth," advocates growth control policies that limit
individual and community choices in favor of restrictive government
directives, a fact that promises to provide intense debate on
sprawl issues throughout his term as chairman.
The
nation's governors have been at the forefront of innovative policy
ideas and reforms on such sensitive issues as welfare, education,
crime, and the environment, and it is natural to expect them to
provide equally creative thinking on the issue of urban sprawl. To
do so, however, they will have to overcome the rigid biases of both
the NGA's new chairman and its professional staff that issued the
"Growing Pains" report. The remarkable bias in this report in favor
of restrictive growth control policies is highly inconsistent with
the orientation of a nonpartisan organization that seeks
cooperation rather than confrontation among its members.
The
NGA acknowledges that governors are "choosing from a wealth of
ideas and experiments underway in the United States" to address
sprawl,
yet "Growing Pains" fails to offer fresh thinking or innovative
solutions on this issue. Instead, it relies on many of the familiar
clichés, half truths, misperceptions, and falsehoods
promulgated by the so-called smart growth movement. Though its
criticism of current social and community preferences is muted, the
report nonetheless calls for "developing public consensus for
social and cultural changes"--in other words, for rejecting current
suburban preferences.
Governors and policymakers who seek
critical assessments of the problems facing America's communities
and the best solutions available should note that, as a piece of
policy rhetoric, "Growing Pains" regrettably gives the mistaken
impression that the problems of growth can be addressed adequately
without making hard choices or difficult tradeoffs.
PROBLEMS WITH THE NGA REPORT
Despite "key findings" that "local
governments lack the resources...and the federal government is too
far removed from the diverse needs of regions and states to
effectively influence local growth policies," the recommendations in the
"Growing Pains" report fall short of offering policy guidance that
will effectively address concerns over sprawl. The reason: The
report suffers from five serious flaws.
-
It offers only a superficial analysis of
the varying aspects of the sprawl controversy, and it supports that
analysis with many facts that are incorrect or have been
misinterpreted.
-
It includes facts, case studies, and
anecdotes that are inconsistently sourced or not sourced at all; many of its
key points have been derived from the rhetoric of the smart growth
advocacy groups and are included without question; and little
original research or critical analysis is offered to bolster these
claims.
-
Many of its directives are contradictory.
One section, for example, calls for more emphasis on regional
planning while another suggests greater emphasis on local
"community" planning; and while the report calls for increased
housing choices in one part, elsewhere it condemns large lot
development and clearly implies that this one housing choice should
be constricted.
-
It calls for more "intelligent" and
"coordinated" land use planning, yet it offers no discussion of the
cognitive difficulties facing public-sector attempts at
coordination and resource allocation on the scale it contemplates
for addressing regional or metropolitan land use.
- The sum of its policy prescriptions will
amount to a major increase in government regulation of land use. As
such, "Growing Pains" is all brakes and no motor.
SUPERFICIAL ANALYSIS AND
MISINFORMATION
For
several years, the debate over urban sprawl has been dominated by
half truths, poorly understood facts, and outright falsehoods.
Thus, the conventional wisdom about the causes of and solutions to
sprawl that has emerged is based on stubborn misconceptions and
superficial appreciation of urban phenomena. Regrettably, the
"Growing Pains" report offers little to break the debate out of
this rut. To the contrary, it embraces nearly every misguided tenet
of the conventional wisdom.
While "Growing Pains" eschews the frothier
language that often appears in "smart growth" literature--such as
the "paving of America" or the metaphor of urban sprawl as a
"cancer" on the land --it nonetheless conveys the
impression that urban sprawl is an American crisis. It puts forth a
blizzard of facts, anecdotes, and case studies to support three
broad conclusions, which it calls the "Laws of Growth":
-
NGA Law of
Growth #1: "Population increases are accompanied by much
larger increases in land consumption and somewhat larger increases
in residential dwellings and private vehicles."
-
NGA Law of
Growth #2: "As distance from urban cores increases and
population density decreases, the rate of growth increases for
population, land consumption, residential dwellings, and private
vehicles."
- NGA Law of
Growth #3: "Rapid suburbanization and urban decay are
mirror images of the same phenomenon."
As
descriptions of the phenomenon of suburban growth, the first two
statements are accurate and in fact similar; yet they raise a
fundamental question: What is the scale at which this growth in
population is occurring, both absolutely and relative to other
factors such as total land supply, environmental impacts, and
tradeoffs between different forms of development? The third law, to
the extent that deteriorating conditions in central cities (high
crime rates, poorly performing schools, failing public services,
and so forth) have propelled the middle class to flee to the
suburbs, is an accurate description of trends in the 1960s, 1970s,
and 1980s. But the question remains: To what extent can urban
flight be said to cause urban decline today?
Population
Growth and Suburbanization. "Growing Pains" cites a litany
of alarming statistics about land consumption relative to
population growth. For the nation as a whole, it cites the U.S.
Department of Agriculture's 1997 National Resources Inventory
(NRI), which estimates that the rate of urbanization in the United
States doubled from 1992 to 1997. The fact that the report uses the
NRI as a valid source of these statistics is curious, since the
U.S. Department of Agriculture itself withdrew its NRI report
because of admitted errors that may have led to substantial
miscalculations. The author of "Growing Pains" acknowledges this
withdrawal, but only in a footnote.
More
significant are the report's cited facts about sprawl in specific
cities. For example, it claims that "[b]etween 1970 and 1990, the
population of Chicago increased by 4 percent, but its land area
expanded by 46 percent." For Philadelphia, "the land area increased
by 32 percent from 1970 to 1990, for a population increase of less
than 3 percent, consuming 125,000 acres of open space." However,
sources for these specific statistics are not included. Without
such citation of sources, it is impossible to review the
methodology used to derive the statistics in order to judge their
accuracy.
The
statistics given for Chicago and Philadelphia do not match the U.S.
Census Bureau's statistics for land area and population growth. For
Chicago, the Census Bureau finds that between 1970 and 1990,
"urbanized land area" grew by slightly more than 24 percent (not 46
percent, as "Growing Pains" reports) while population grew by
slightly over 1 percent (not 4 percent, as claimed in the
report).
Moreover, according to the Census Bureau data, Chicago's urbanized
area grew less from 1970 to 1990 than it did from 1950 to 1970
(24.1 percent from 1970 to 1990 compared with 80.4 percent between
1950 and 1970), suggesting that the rapid expansion of land area is
a receding problem.
For
Philadelphia, the Census Bureau statistics are considerably more
dramatic than those reported in "Growing Pains." Between 1970 and
1990, Philadelphia's urbanized area grew 54.8 percent while
population grew by 5 percent, according to the Census Bureau,
compared with the 32 percent and 3 percent, respectively, reported
in "Growing Pains."
Considering changes in population and land
area in percentage terms alone is a misleading and superficial
measure of suburbanization, since percentages always shrink as the
base number against which they are calculated expands. For example,
a 10 percent increase in land area in a city that covers 100 square
miles is an order of magnitude larger than a 10 percent increase in
land area in a city that covers only 10 square miles.
Some
way of putting land area changes in proportion is needed. For
example, the 24.1 percent expansion of Chicago's land area from
1970 to 1990 represents 0.6 percent of the total land area of
Illinois. The comparable figure for Philadelphia is 0.9 percent of
Pennsylvania's land area. The growth in Chicago's land area from
1950 to 1990 (877 square miles, according to the Census Bureau)
represents 1.6 percent of the total land area in Illinois.
Accommodating 40 years of population and economic growth for one of
the largest and most dynamic metropolitan areas in the nation on
1.6 percent of the state's land area seems neither profligate nor a
crisis.
Moreover, while the overall population of
the Chicago area grew by only 1.1 percent from 1970 to 1990, its
suburban population grew by 19.7 percent. It is misleading to
compare the population growth for an entire metro region with the
growth in land area in the suburbs because central city populations
have been shrinking worldwide. Considering such facts makes the
24.1 percent increase in Chicago's land area over this period look
less disproportionate. In fact, the population density of its
suburban areas is higher today than in 1950, according to Census
Bureau figures (2,600 people per square mile in 1950 compared with
2,954 people per square mile in 1990).
Similar trends are occurring throughout
the developed world. Indeed, sprawl is not an American phenomenon.
Between 1970 and 1990, for example,
-
Amsterdam expanded its developed area 12
percent while its population declined 12.4 percent;
-
Copenhagen expanded its developed area
10.3 percent while its population declined 14 percent;
-
Frankfurt expanded its developed area
33.3 percent while its population declined 5.4 percent;
-
Hamburg
expanded its developed area 54.6 percent while its population
declined 7.9 percent;
-
Paris
expanded its developed area 54.3 percent (twice as much as Chicago)
while its population rose only 15.3 percent; and
- Vienna
expanded its developed area 19.2 percent while its population
declined 4.6 percent.
All
of these cities experienced a decline in population density of
between 20 percent and 30 percent, compared with the Chicago area's
decline of 18.5 percent. In other words, European
cities, which the smart growth movement frequently praises for
their public transit capacities and "compact" development patterns,
are sprawling faster than are America's cities.
The
common experience of declining population in both American and
European cities prompts the question of why such trends are
occurring. The first two NGA Laws of Growth imply that the
low-density, decentralized suburban form of development that
characterized the last generation occurred willy-nilly, with little
or no rational relation to the needs of the commercial marketplace
or the demands of consumers and homebuyers. As an example, "Growing
Pains" cites Rochester, New York, where 2 million square feet of
big-box retail stores were built in the suburbs even though there
were 2 million square feet of empty retail space available close to
the urban center. This implies that all retail square feet are
equal in functionality and convenience to consumers, or that the
outcome is something that the public sector is better suited to
decide for retailers and consumers alike.
The
preference for suburban lifestyle and automobility is a function of
widening affluence, the result of the rapid expansion of the upper
middle class over the past 25 years. Transportation analyst Alan
Pisarski concludes that the majority of the increases in automobile
ownership and vehicle miles traveled over the past 20 years
occurred among working women and minorities, and that this has
little to do with the spatial design of American cities and
suburbs.
It is ironic that the smart growth movement deplores an increase in
the democratization of auto ownership and autonomy for two groups
that liberal opinion typically considers victims.
Urban
Flight. The author of "Growing Pains" points out that
central cities must be made more "livable" if they are to become
competitive with their suburbs, and he rightly acknowledges that
without central city revitalization, "Actions that only attempt to
limit suburban growth are not likely to be effective and may have
negative impacts."
Yet
there is a troubling ambiguity in this third so-called Law of
Growth--namely, the implication that suburbanization causes the
deterioration of urban cores. This is not necessarily a
normal occurrence.
First,
there are numerous examples of rapidly suburbanizing metro areas
where the urban core is also thriving (consider Sacramento,
Seattle, San Francisco, Denver, and Houston, among others).
Second,
where the phenomenon of suburban growth and urban deterioration has
occurred, it is not a chicken-and-egg dilemma that allows the
observer to discern causation. It is manifestly the case that bad
government in the urban core accelerated the exodus of the rising
urban middle class.
"Growing Pains" contains no acknowledgment
of the legacy of poor government policies that plagued major
American cities in the postwar decades. There has been a hopeful
turnaround in the quality of urban government over the past decade,
visible most dramatically in falling crime rates, but even
this improvement says more about public policy and urban decline
than population growth or suburbanization.
FAULTY PRESCRIPTIONS
Disputes over the facts of urban phenomena
and how they should be understood will go on for a long time to
come.
Yet, the most significant defect of "Growing Pains" lies not in its
purported facts or their interpretation, but in its general
prescription for more intensive planning.
"Growing Pains" calls for "more
intelligently and sensitively coordinating, steering, and shaping
growth to better serve immediate and longer-term needs of
states."
Aside from recommending "channeling more growth into areas already
developed, principally urban centers and older suburbs"--in other
words, achieving growth chiefly through infill--it fails to explain
how "more intelligent" and "coordinated" planning should work in
practice.
Yet
the report provides scant evidence that population growth and
consumer demands can be accommodated through infill. As James
Frank, professor of urban and regional planning at Florida State
University, notes:
In
most cities, not much surplus capacity is lying idle, so the
duration of the payoff from infill development may be quite short.
It would be desirable to have some sense of how much available
unused capacity actually exists in typical communities....
[An] area of desirable research should be
aimed at the quantitative measurement of the amount of available
capacity that exists in typical communities to evaluate the
magnitude of opportunities for infill.
"Growing Pains" offers only one statistic:
"One hundred eighteen cities said they could add more than 5.8
million people without adding appreciably to their existing
infrastructure." But no source is given for
this figure, so it is impossible to know whether the population
densities assumed for this projection are realistic or whether
"infrastructure" in this case comprises land area and roads. The
population of the United States is growing by 2.5 million people a
year; thus, these 118 cities could accommodate less than three
years of growth. Infill does not appear to be a serious long-term
policy solution for accommodating population growth.
The
few case studies of rapidly growing cities are not encouraging.
There is some information available for Phoenix, Arizona, generated
by its Infill Housing Program in 1997. This program offers a
sliding scale of fiscal incentives for developers to build within a
162-square-mile zone inside the city limits. The program has
identified 1,365 parcels of vacant land larger than 0.7 acre within
this zone, which sounds like a substantial supply of land; but if
it were all built out at the higher range of residential densities,
it would accommodate only about one year's growth in the city's
population.
A
similar estimate exists for Albuquerque, New Mexico. The
Albuquerque Transportation Evaluation Study identified 34,000 acres
of empty land in the city limits but failed to look at how this
land was classified or how much of it had existing infrastructure.
A more precise picture is offered by the Albuquerque Geographic
Information System (AGIS). The most recent AGIS map identifies
20,624 acres of open land within Albuquerque's urban service area
that is zoned for single-family housing and 2,609 acres of land
zoned for multifamily housing. However, the map designates 11,822
acres of vacant land zoned for single-family housing within the
existing water service area and only 1,576 acres of land zoned for
multifamily housing in this area. Though this amount of land sounds
substantial, if built out at the higher range of residential
densities, it would accommodate less than 10 years' growth in the
city's population. Infill is not an adequate long-term growth
management policy; it promises more than it can deliver.
The
plethora of adjectives in the third Law of Growth, such as more
"intelligently and sensitively coordinating, steering, and shaping
growth," slides over a more significant difficulty than just the
limitations of infill. The intensive regional land use planning
called for in the report sets out some large objectives that are
highly detailed in their outcome, including jobs-housing balance,
higher density residential development, more mass transit usage,
and more open space preservation. This kind of intensive land use
planning represents a quantum jump from traditional zoning. As
such, it represents a major increase in public-sector resource
allocation, chiefly in the amount of land and strict regulation of
its uses.
It
is an unremarked irony of the smart growth movement that at a time
when virtually the entire world is deregulating markets for
fundamental goods, such as the telecommunications, transportation,
banking, and energy production and distribution sectors, America
should be considering stringent new government regulations on the
market for the basic commodity of land. Moreover, there is no
serious consideration given in "Growing Pains" or elsewhere to how
planners can overcome the chronic failings of other kinds of
public-sector resource control and allocation--failings rooted in
the inability of planning processes to assimilate sufficient
information in order to make correct local decisions.
This
problem is compounded as the time horizon lengthens, which is why
long-term "comprehensive planning"--as called for by the smart
growth movement--is inherently destined to produce perverse
results. (Consider, for example, the failure of repeated attempts
to regulate cable television; the number of factors involved in
long-term comprehensive land use regulation dwarfs those of cable
TV.)
It
is doubtful, to say the least, that the public sector can produce
more efficient (however defined) land use without introducing a
host of unwanted side effects (chiefly higher housing prices) and
unintended consequences (chiefly worse traffic congestion). Nobel
laureate Friedrich Hayek wrote in 1960 that
We
must not overlook the fact that the market has, on the whole,
guided the evolution of cities more successfully, though
imperfectly, than is commonly realized and that most proposals to
improve upon this, not by making it work better, but by
superimposing a system of central direction, show little awareness
of what such a system would have to accomplish, even to equal the
market in effectiveness.
Professors Harry Richardson and Peter
Gordon of the University of Southern California's School of Urban
and Regional Planning have commented: "Any claims for the cost of
market failure [in land use] have to be balanced by an assessment
of the costs of government failure.... [I]mperfect markets work
better than imperfect government."
When
this problem is seriously considered, it becomes evident that the
principle underlying the third Law of Growth ("more intelligently
and sensitively coordinating, steering, and shaping growth")
conceals deep confusion. Like much of the smart growth literature,
the report states that the object of policy change is to provide
more choices for people. But it downplays the implication that
aggressive planning will deliberately constrict choice. For
example, "Growing Pains" says that one object of smart growth is to
"[c]reate a range of housing opportunities and choices." Yet
another section of the report strongly criticizes the trend of
larger houses on larger lots because such development uses too much
land,
implying that smart growth policies would make this choice
available to fewer people. (The report, for example, praises a
minimum housing density requirement in Maryland, which clearly rules out the
choice of large lot development.)
In
the end, "Growing Pains" does not offer policy guidance
commensurate with its estimation of the dimensions of the problem
of sprawl. The report singles out numerous state and local
initiatives to address particular aspects of the problem (such as
neighborhood revitalization programs, open space preservation
ordinances, and regional planning initiatives ), yet the examples seem
both small next to the seriousness of the problem described in the
report and incommensurate with its clarion call for "articulating a
statewide vision" for growth.
CONCLUSION
When
the word "vision" appears in contemporary discourse, it is usually
either a sign that difficult tradeoffs are being avoided or a sign
of belief that changes can be made without making hard choices. The
difficulty in discussing urban growth is that different people and
different communities have different "visions" for their future. It
is not possible for governors to "articulate a statewide vision"
that can harmonize all the knowledge, values, preferences, and
passions these different people and different communities have for
their own future.
In
practice, therefore, having a statewide vision for growth will mean
having to impose one vision over competing visions. Between the
unacknowledged tradeoffs, conflicting goals, and uncertainties of
the smart growth vision, governors may wish to think twice before
embracing the perspective offered in the NGA's "Growing Pains"
report.
Steven Hayward is a
former Senior Fellow at the Pacific Research Institute for Public
Policy in San Francisco. In 1997 and 1998, he was a Bradley Fellow
at The Heritage Foundation, where he studied urban issues.