Oh, no. Just when urban-affairs writers thought the public was starting to take an interest in one of our issues, urban sprawl, Vice President Al Gore has started talking about it.
Couldn’t the Tennessee room-emptier stick to his usual topics–access to the Internet, global warming and which telephone to use when raising political money? Isn’t urban sprawl, which envelops our lives so totally as to go largely unnoticed, hard enough to make interesting?
But there was the Veep, delivering a major public policy address recently at the prestigious Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. They know and care about urban sprawl at Brookings so the audience, no doubt, was attentive. The national press corps, on the other hand, isn’t all that interested, so there was precious little coverage of Gore’s speech.
That’s probably for the best. My copy of his address reads like vintage (yawn) Gore. It begins with obtuse references to Thoreau, Twain and Lakota storytellers and ends with the familiar Woody Guthrie refrain of “this land was made for you and me.”
In between is some better stuff. But before I get to that, here’s what others have been saying lately about you-know-what.
Openlands Project, a highly regarded environmental group hereabouts, issued a report two weeks ago that concluded the Chicago region is expanding, in a physical sense, at a much faster rate than its population justifies. Between 1950 and 1995, when the region’s population grew by 48 percent, the amount of land gobbled up, by everything from strip malls to office parks, increased by 165 percent.
“Uncoordinated development,” said Openlands, “has created a regional footprint that now spans three states” (a 13-county arc from Kenosha to Laporte, Ind.) and has replaced “once distinct communities with placeless sprawl.”
And despite all the lip service paid to good planning and “smart” growth, Openlands found that our region’s per capita consumption of land “is increasing at faster and faster rates.” There are many reasons for this, according to the study, but the three main ones are the favorable short-term economics of developing along the urban fringe (as opposed to redeveloping the older core,) the low cost of driving and government’s obliging habit of financing evermore superhighways and other sprawl-inducing public works.
Then last week, the national Sierra Club issued a report that placed the Chicago region among the 10 U.S. metropolitan areas with the fastest-paced sprawl. Atlanta was first, followed by St. Louis, Washington, Cincinnati and Kansas City. The Chicago area, where land coverage is now growing at four times the rate of population growth, ranked 10th among U.S. metros of more than 1 million people.
What has urban planners here worried is that the worst is yet to come. The Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission predicts the region’s population will grow by 25 percent over the next two decades, considerably faster than the 1970 to 1990 period. If our buildings-to-bodies ratio holds up, or keeps increasing, we’ll soon have mall-to-mall development from Schaumburg to Rockford, Naperville to DeKalb, Joliet to Kankakee.
Then again, a lot of people–including a lot of smart, well-read people–greet this news with a big, fat “So what?”
This is another problem (besides sprawl’s ubiquitous invisibility) with trying to sound an alarm over urban sprawl. Convinced of the infallibility of free markets, many folks view the spread of suburbia as the inevitable expression of millions of individual choices. People want bigger homes for themselves and bigger backyards for their kids. Companies want campuslike settings and fewer “urban” hassles. Stores and restaurants simply follow their outward-bound customers. Where’s the harm?
This is where Al Gore’s speech pertains, because the vice president tries (Oh, how he tries) to move beyond the usual, debatable reasons for opposing sprawl. Those reasons include longer commuting times and the negative impact on older communities. But Americans are willing to drive longer to get the house they’ve always wanted . . . and they don’t much care if their leaving causes problems where they left. A third argument, that sprawl destroys good farmland, also fails to resonate. Not when farmers are going out of business because oversupply has depressed the value of what they grow.
Gore does make those familiar arguments, but he also said this:
“This kind of uncoordinated growth means more than a long drive to work. It means a half hour to buy a loaf of bread . . . It means mothers isolated with small children far from playmates and old people stuck in their homes alone. Air and water quality go down; taxes go up; there are no sidewalks, and even if there were, there is nowhere to walk to.”
He was talking, I think, about physical and social isolation. It’s something worth thinking about.
Gore knows better, in an era of deregulation, to call for new federal or state laws against sprawl. He did say Washington should stop making the situation worse by locating government buildings along the suburban fringe, or by grandly subsidizing new superhighways while starving mass transit.
It’s a tough issue, urban sprawl. And I’m not sure Gore’s attentions will make it any more approachable to the untold millions who endure its consequences.
At least he tried. You now may return to sex in high places and other, more interesting, issues.
