WHY SPRAWL IS GOOD
by Peter Gordon and Harry W. Richardson
Carping at Los Angeles has long been a national pastime. In his recent two-part series, "Becoming Los Angeles" (New York Times, December 29-30, 1996 and cited in The Oregonian, 1-4-97), Timothy Egan combines this with praise for Portland, in making the case for interventionist urban planning to slow down urban growth and change the prevalent patterns of urban settlement. The case is built on several misconceptions.
1) He forgets that the virtue of markets is that they give people what they want. No developer gets rich by building housing and projects that people dislike. No city strengthens its tax base by promoting developments (e.g. most downtown projects) that are unpopular, unprofitable and badly located.
2) Los Angeles is not the sprawl capital of the world. On the contrary, its urbanized area has the highest population density in the U.S (according to the U.S. Census), higher than New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, and double that of Phoenix. The reasons include small lot sizes , a sizeable stock of apartments and high dwelling densities among the large immigrant population.
3) Most people throughout the country are choosing to live away from commercial areas, enjoying the private spaces afforded by single-family homes set back from streets and the mobility and accessiblity offered by the private automobile. This lifestyle is not imposed by malignant U.S. policies, for suburbanization trends are global: in Canada without mortgage interest tax deductions, in Europe with high gasoline taxes, in Seoul with plentiful public transit, and in Mexico City with its huge subway subsidies.
4) Compact development is not a cure for traffic congestion. In the absence of a major shift to transit (highly improbable, given that transit use declined in every "new rail" city in the 1980s), higher densities mean more congestion not less. Los Angeles' commuting speeds compare favorably with Portland's (31.7 mph vs. 26.7 mph in the central city, and 33.6 mph vs. 35.0 mph in the suburbs). Commuting everywhere is increasingly suburb-to-suburb. This means a relatively speedy trip for most commuters; only 10 percent travel more than 44 minutes one way.
5) Rail transit has an impossible fit to modern cities. U.S. rail transit investments have been costly failures that have paradoxically resulted in less transit use as bus funds were cannibalized for rail. Los Angeles, as a typical example, has lost more than a fifth of its transit riders since it started spending billions of dollars on rail. As for the much touted Portland light rail (MAX), every Portland freeway carries four to five times more riders per day, only 0.8 percent of the regional jobs created between 1990 and 1994 were downtown (and MAX is a downtown-oriented system), the cost per one-way trip (including capital costs) is about $20, and transit ridership has not increased because of the substitution of Federally-substituted rail for bus routes. In the new Mecca of urban planning, transit accounts for only 2.8 percent of trips, with a mere 0.3 percent using MAX, and only about one percent of the Tri-Met's service area population is within walking distance of MAX stations.
Anticipating all of this, one of us forecast MAX 1990 ridership (19,700 boardings per day) quite accurately back in 1983. That forecast actually predicted 19,730 MAX boardings per day; Metro's estimate was for 42,500 boardings per day.
6) Improving air quality has been a major rationale for growth management and other anti-sprawl measures, often by quoting Los Angeles. But air quality in Los Angeles has been improving dramatically year by year, even during its rapid growth phase of the 1980s. There were only seven smog alerts in the 1996 smog season compared with 121 in 1977.
Furthermore, more compact development has a minimal impact on air quality because it is likely to result in more frequent but shorter automobile trips (almost two-thirds of automobile pollution is associated with starting and stopping, the cold start and the hot soak problems).
7) Markets continue to do a good job of allocating resources, including farmland. U.S. cropland use peaked in 1930. We continue to feed millions more on less land because of improved farming methods. The demand for agricultural land would fall even further if the 105th Congress continues the good work begun in the 104th in cutting farm subsidies.
8) The telecommunications revolution is allowing jobs to move to where people want to live, unlike in the past when people followed the jobs. An increasing proportion of mobile households choose to live in high amenity-low density settings. Most job growth is now in rural areas. There is little evidence that people prefer to live in more compact environments, such as downtowns, the communities of the New Urbanism, or within fixed urban growth boundaries (where prices are higher). A golden rule for urban planners is: don't play at being King Canute.
Growth gets a bad rap, both when it happens and when it stops. In either case, intelligent discussions must take place if sound policy choices are to be made. Getting the facts right is a good beginning. So much of the so-called New Urbanism and the compact city movement rests on wishful thinking and the arrogance of social engineers who override individual preferences.
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Is urban sprawl an American problem? - By Witold Rybczynski - Slate Magazine
Urban Sprawl
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