Traffic congestion, air pollution, social decay, decline of central cities–sprawl has been fingered for a wide array of woes.
But is sprawl the malevolent force many make it out to be or is it merely a scapegoat? While some authorities believe that sprawl is Public Enemy No. 1, others say it is used as a smokescreen, distracting from larger ills.
“There are two things Americans don’t like in their cities–density and sprawl,” observes William Eager, president of TDA Inc., a Seattle-based transportation consulting firm. This, of course, creates a Catch 22 as “density is the inverse of sprawl.”
Eager was one of several experts examining the sprawl dilemma here at last fall’s Urban Land Institute (ULI) conference.
Sprawl has been the country’s dominant form of metropolitan growth for the last 50 years, points out Anthony Downs, an economist and senior fellow at The Brookings Institution in Washington D.C.
Downs, who is numbered among the anti-sprawl faction, spoke out harshly against the trend: “Continuing to rely on it is causing serious negative impacts not only upon the suburbs of our country but upon the entire fabric of American economic, social and political life.”
Sprawl has many characteristics, including low density (usually fewer than 3,000 persons per square mile), a leapfrog pattern of development, reliance on the automobile as the dominant mode of transportation and division of land into zones for different uses.
Yet sprawl’s most dangerous side effects, warns Downs, are the fragmentation of governance and unlimited outward growth.
Fragmentation results in parochial governments trying to seize benefits of growth for themselves and foist off costs onto other communities, a phenonmenon Downs dubs “beggar-thy-neighbor” politics.
Unlimited outward expansion undermines the viability of established communities in central cities and older suburbs, Downs argues. Seeking greener pastures–figuratively and sometimes literally–more affluent businesses and households flee the central city, leaving behind empty buildings that erode the tax base. Providing services to large numbers of very poor households, central city governments then become strapped.
Downs points to Detroit as “being one of the most spectacular examples.”
What to do? Downs advocates an overarching regulatory body to coordinate local land use policies between communities. He also recommends setting a boundary to limit outward expansion. Public infrastructure would be provided within the boundary, while anyone seeking to build outside would have to shoulder costs alone.
Yet many experts vehemently disagreed with an urban line limit as a Band-Aid. Setting such a boundary would grant a monopoly to land players and limit competition, said Claude Gruen, principal economist at Gruen Gruen & Associates, a real estate research and consulting firm in San Francisco.
Communities that have tested this idea have seen housing prices rise and homeownership drop.
Eliminating sprawl would not restore the central city, say the defenders of sprawl. Central cities have become obsolete for many historic uses and can’t recover the competitive advantage they once had in the 19th Century.
Says Gruen: “Cities must specialize in what they can offer now (entertainment, cultural institutions and sports), not what they did before.
“It’s important not to simply accept common mythology that sprawl is horrible,” says Gruen. “Scapegoating sprawl as cause of all the ills . . . merely cripples our effective response to them.”
Bashing sprawl is nothing new, points out Tom Black, resident fellow and economist at ULI, citing a 1956 industry study: “There is little to be said for sprawl. It is socially inconvenient and economically stupid. It is short-sighted and born of ignorance. It promises country living, but destroys the country and hides the costs. It is unfair to both the farmer and the true urbanite. It destroys land and sows innumerable problems for the future.”
Actually, sprawl hasn’t exhausted the nation’s supply of farmland, says William Fischel, economics professor at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H.
If the entire U.S. population were divided into households of four persons and each household given an acre of land to live on, they would only take up 3.5 percent of the country–excluding Alaska.
“Sprawl is not an aggregate land use problem, nor is it an agricultural problem. It is a metropolitan problem,” says Fischel, noting sprawl has both positive and negative aspects.
Many critics claim sprawl creates higher infrastructure costs–for water, sewer and roads–that are spread over the community rather than shouldered by purchasers of the new housing that requires the improvements.
Yet Gruen nixes this notion: “Solid studies show there is no significant relationship in extending our lines and the costs of government.”
“We’re probably mispricing how we pay for our infrastructure,” says Gruen. If costs are priced correctly, sprawl shouldn’t be a drain. If Americans were given the choice between paying higher costs for services or living in compact high density, Gruen wagers that they would opt for higher costs.
Indeed, sprawl has emerged as a clear market preference, agreed James DeFrancia, president of Lowe Enterprises Mid-Atlantic, a large housing developer in Sterling, Va.
“Developers haven’t been rounding up people in the inner cities with shotguns and forcing them to go live in a suburban environment where sprawl is applied,” said DeFrancia. “It’s clearly been the manifestation of public preference and desire.”
And why not? DeFrancia observes: “Sprawl is what you do on Sunday afternoons on the couch. It’s comfortable and it’s got some room.
“Efficiency is when you get the middle seat on USAir with the crying baby next to you.”
Ironically, he says, sprawl was the answer to urban congestion in 1915, done to “loosen out the city.” Yet the pendulum may have moved too far, says DeFrancia.
“There may be an imbalance in the way that we’re addressing urban and suburban development,” he says, but adds that making sprawl the scapegoat is not the answer.
Lashing out at sprawl has become almost as fashionable as lampooning lawyers. Anyone who has sat in bumper-to-bumper rush-hour traffic can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a better way to build.
Yet blaming sprawl for air pollution and traffic congestion is “pure baloney,” says Eager. Population is responsible for high traffic.
“Sprawl is over-rated as a problem,” says Eager. “Getting rid of sprawl will not cure our transportation ills.”
The side effects of transportation–air pollution and traffic congestion–are going to happen without sprawl, and it requires extremely high population density to reap any real benefits from mass transit.
Many authorities see large-lot zoning and not sprawl as the real problem. Although a component of sprawl, Gruen calls large-lot exclusionary zoning “an evil all of its own.” But because so many groups blast sprawl to advance their causes, the detriments of large-lot exclusionary zoning are eclipsed.
Such zoning prevents suburbs from becoming healthy, mixed-use activity centers, says Downs. And they prevent development of affordable housing, in effect turning other areas into ghettos.
Fischel sees the remedy coming not from a higher regulatory agency, as Downs suggests, but from the courts.
He also says developers and land owners should appeal to state legislatures to adopt laws requiring local governments to compensate landowners when any steps are taken to alter the value of land already zoned for low density.
“It would be a discipline,” says Fischel, author of “Regulatory Takings” (Harvard University Press, 1995). “The only thing that makes a local zoning authority pay attention is the possibility that a zoning decision will cost the town money.”
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Next week: Some builders are trying different paths to combat sprawl
