Those
who advocate so-called smart-growth planning
claim their policies will improve the livability of
America’s urban areas. But in fact they will
merely improve the livability for a tiny elite,
while they reduce livability for everyone else.
Low-income people and minorities will be hardest
hit, a fact that has prompted some to dub the war on
sprawl “the new segregation.”
At
heart, the war on sprawl is a war on homeownership
and automobility. Autos, we are told, are dangerous,
polluting devices and we would be better off
walking, cycling, or riding transit. The
single-family home with a large yard is a waste of
space, they say, and we would be better off living
in apartments.
Yet
homeownership and automobility are important sources
of wealth. Autos help make us wealthy by giving us
access to better jobs and lower-cost consumer goods,
not to mention recreation and distant friends and
relations.
Eighty-three
years ago, the United States had the world’s most
extensive network of intercity passenger trains and
urban streetcars. Yet automobiles allow the average
American today to travel fourteen times as much as
Americans did in 1920, and that mobility has made us
rich.
Homeownership
does more than provide us shelter. It also allows us
to build our wealth by borrowing funds against the
equity in our homes and investing those funds in new
businesses. Most start-up businesses and many
college educations in America are partly financed by
second mortgages on the business owners’ or
parents’ homes.
Unfortunately,
the benefits of automobility and homeownership are
not equally shared among all Americans. In
particular, 95 percent of white families own or
lease an automobile, but less than 75 percent of
African-American families do. More than two out of
three white families own their own homes, but only
45 percent of African-American families do. Policies
that help these families buy cars and homes will
help them build wealth and get out of poverty.
Smart
growth calls for increased urban densities through
urban-growth boundaries and minimum-density zoning
and for construction of expensive rail-transit lines
instead of increased road capacity. These policies
will make it harder for poor families to get out of
poverty.
Urban-growth
boundaries and land-use regulation have driven
housing prices up almost everywhere they have been
used. In Columbia, S.C., which has had
little land-use regulation, an African-American
family can buy a nice, four-bedroom, two-bath home
for $143,000. That same home costs twice that much
in Portland, Ore, where planners drew an
urban-growth boundary in 1979, and more than four
times as much in San Jose, which drew its
urban-growth boundary in 1974.
Researchers
at the University of California have found that
giving someone a cheap, serviceable car will do far
more to help them get out of poverty than giving
them a free transit pass. But once they have a car,
will they be able to get to where they want to go?
Not if smart-growth advocates have their way.
Anti-automobile
policies promoted by various smart-growth groups aim
to discourage driving by increasing traffic
congestion. Portland, San Diego, the Twin Cities,
and other urban areas that have adopted smart-growth
policies have some of the fastest rising congestion
in America. Portland planners gleefully predict
that, because of their policies, the amount of time
Portlanders waste in traffic will quadruple between
1997 and 2020.
The
impacts of such congestion fall hardest on women,
who tend to use cars for errands more than men, and
low-income people, who tend to live in the most
congested neighborhoods. Expensive and little-used
rail transit systems will hardly make up for the
increased congestion.
Planners
in Cincinnati who wanted to build an expensive
light-rail system estimated job accessibility before
and after the rail lines were built. They found that
accessibility for white, middle-class commuters
remained virtually unchanged, but accessibility for
low-income people and minorities would decline by 20
to 35 percent. Fortunately, voters rejected funding
for the rail line.
People
who want to live in high-density city centers and
who are willing to pay the cost should be more than
welcome to do so. Yet most families tend to prefer
living in low-density suburbs and enjoying the
liberating benefits of automobility.
So-called
smart-growth policies that attempt to restrict those
benefits harm everyone. But they especially harm
low-income families who have few alternatives.
Environmental justice demands that we allow these
families to enjoy the same benefits of large
backyard, low-density suburbs, and auto-liberation
that most Americans take for granted.
--
July 14, 2003
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