Several times each year for the past 23 years, I’ve driven from Chicago to Appleton, Wisconsin, and back again. I’ve seen the fields and woodlands along Highways 94 and 41 gradually replaced by office parks, shopping malls, and residential developments. Over the years, the change has been dramatic.
“Urban sprawl” worries some people. They say it will lead to a shortage of agricultural land, deplete the planet’s limited supplies of fossil fuels, and load the air we breathe with hazardous pollutants. Others worry that sprawl reinforces social inequalities by separating jobs from workers and encouraging race- and income-based isolation. Still others think “sprawl” is compromising our quality of life by taking away the intimacy, social connectivity, and sense of social identity that come from living in compact neighborhoods.
Sprawl and the Environment
I have a difficult time taking seriously any of the concerns raised by the growth control crowd. What triggered my skepticism were the claims of environmental damage that so often accompany calls for growth management.
Urban expansion is, in fact, responsible for surprisingly little conversion of either forest or croplands into roads, houses, and parking lots. In 1945, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, urban land uses accounted for just 1 percent of the area of the U.S. By 1992, that figure had risen to 3 percent. Forests covered 32 percent of the U.S. in 1945 and a not-much-smaller 30 percent in 1992. Cropland stayed unchanged at 24 percent.
Urban sprawl is not correlated with a decline in air quality. Air quality in nearly all major American cities has dramatically improved during the past twenty years, even as suburban “sprawl” boomed. Concentrations of all six of the air pollutants tracked by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) fell dramatically between 1975 and 1991: Dust and airborne ash fell by 24 percent; sulfur dioxide, by 50 percent; carbon monoxide, by 53 percent; ozone, by 25 percent; nitrogen dioxide, by 24 percent; and lead, by 94 percent.
Will the long commutes caused by sprawl lead to depletion of the world’s petroleum supplies? Not in our lifetimes, and almost certainly not in our children’s. During the past twenty years, estimates of oil reserves have increased nearly every year due to new discoveries and technological advances, even as we consume more gasoline with each passing year.
Economic Development
Those who blame suburbs for luring industry and jobs away from cities, leaving behind many skilled but unemployed workers, have confused cause with effect. As cities grow, property values in their central business districts rise, prompting businesses that require large amounts of space–typically manufacturers–to leave, and companies requiring less space–typically service providers–to enter. The new companies are less likely to impose nuisances on their neighbors–noise, odors, and smoke–than the companies they replace.
While the migration of manufacturers and other space-intensive employers from center city locations is inevitable, the net loss of jobs by cities is not. New employers will take the place of businesses that leave, provided adequate crime protection, quality schools, reliable transportation, and other basic requirements of urban living are met.
When suburban expansion harms low-income families, it is usually due to government policies that inflate the cost of housing in suburban areas, making it more difficult for low- and moderate-income families to relocate closer to the new suburban job markets. Many suburbs require large lot sizes, restrict the number of new developments, and in other ways act to prevent the construction of affordable and multiple-family homes. Rather than complain that the poor cannot travel to suburban jobs, advocates of growth management ought to campaign for repeal of policies that unnecessarily restrict the supply and increase the price of housing.
Are Suburbs Inefficient?
It is a myth that the cost of providing infrastructure and services is significantly higher for low-density suburban development than for high-density urban locations. Randal O’Toole says empirical investigations consistently find that lower operating costs in the suburbs more than offset the higher initial capital costs of installing new infrastructure. One study of public service costs per housing unit in 247 counties found that “above 250 people per square mile [about one house for every eight acres] costs increase with higher densities.”
Some say automobile owners don’t pay enough in taxes and other fees to cover the full cost they impose on society, and that ending that subsidy would slow urban expansion. But a careful study of taxes paid by road users in 1992 found total revenues of $114 billion, while spending on roads that year (including law enforcement and administration) was just $76 billion. The difference, some $38 billion, was used to finance other social services and infrastructure needs.
Quality of Life
I lived in a small town for my first 18 years, then in Chicago for 16 years, and in a rather distant suburb of Chicago for the past six years. Reflecting on the benefits and disadvantages of all three locations, I find it impossible to say one is better than the other. Each, in fact, is best at delivering the quality of life most desired by those who choose it.
My life growing up in a small town could have come straight from a Norman Rockwell painting. In the mornings as I walked to school, I passed a steady stream of men carrying lunch buckets heading for a paper mill whose front gate was just two blocks from my home. Doors went unlocked and kids roamed the neighborhood almost unsupervised. During summer evenings we would play kick-the-can in the street under the branches of majestic elm trees while our parents sat on the front porch and talked with the neighbors.
At the age of 18 I decided work in a paper mill wasn’t for me, so I headed for the Big City to attend college, get my first real jobs, and start a career in the think tank business. It may “take a village to raise a child,” but it requires a city to give birth to a school such as The University of Chicago and an organization such as The Heartland Institute.
By the age of 34, I had grown to dislike the noise, crime, and grit of city living. Diane and I left the city to those young enough or old enough to sleep through the nighttime police sirens, car alarms, and mysterious loud noises (gun shots? cars backfiring? fireworks?). In suburbia we found peace, quiet, and access to amenities, such as tennis courts and walking paths, that we now value more than good restaurants and night clubs.
I am struck by how my lifestyle choices have determined the places I’ve lived, and how those places, in turn, have served the peculiar needs of each lifestyle. Why, I wonder, would anyone want to deny people the same choices I was able to make?
Destroying Freedom
The growth management debate may sound arcane or of little interest to most people, but in fact it touches on an enormous range of public policies affecting virtually every aspect of our lives. Growth management policies aim to influence where we live and work, how we travel from place to place, whether elected officials or unelected bureaucrats will decide important planning issues, and the character of our local communities.
At the heart of the debate over growth management is not whether growth should be managed, but how it is managed and by whom. In most parts of the country, the path and nature of growth were traditionally left to the private sector. Individual home buyers, developers, and business executives drove most decisions about where new neighborhoods would be born and where a business would be located. Elected local officials participated in the process by using zoning powers, their control over public infrastructure, and their power of eminent domain.
We should not assume that giving government more authority or resources is the solution to whatever problems are produced by urban growth and expansion. Indeed, the problems often attributed to unplanned growth are more often the result of prevailing government policies that interfere with and distort market processes that would otherwise lead to win-win solutions.
