Why Sprawl Is a Conservative Issue
Michael Lewyn, John Marshall Law School
Once upon a time, city was not a dirty word in America. Between 1900 and 1950, every American city of any size gained population. But over the past several decades, metropolitan America has been transformed by "suburban sprawl"-the movement of people (especially middle-class families) and jobs from older urban cores to newer, less densely populated, more automobile-dependent communities generally referred to as suburbs. At the end of World War II, roughly 70% of metropolitan Americans lived in central cities. But within four decades, that figure had dropped to less than 40%. Some cities have been devastated by sprawl: For example, St. Louis has lost 60% of its people since 1950, whereas Buffalo and Cleveland have lost more than 45% of their people. The cities that have gained population have done so either by being hubs for immigration from other countries (such as New York and Los Angeles) or by annexing newly developed areas that would be considered suburbs in other cities (such as Indianapolis and Charlotte). As cities have become smaller, they have become poorer. In 1960, central cities contained one third of America's poor people; by 1990, the central city share had climbed to one half, and 31 of America's 37 largest cities had poverty rates above the national average.
In recent years, Vice President Gore and numerous other commentators (especially within the environmental movement) have criticized suburban sprawl. For example, Gore complains that because of sprawl, "resources are siphoned away from older communities to build ever more distant new amenities in new communities." Meanwhile, in newer communities, mandatory auto ownership "means working families must sink thousands of dollars into extra commuting costs, when they may want the choice of devoting those funds to a year of state college." Many such suburbs
have no sidewalks, and no place to walk to, which is bad for public safety as well as for our nation's physical health. It has become impossible in such settings for neighbors to greet one another on the street, or for kids to walk to their own nearby schools. A gallon of gas can be used up just driving to get a gallon of milk. All of these add up to more stress for already overstressed family lives.
In the political arena, the battle over sprawl appears to be turning into a battle between environmentalists and conservatives. Environmentalists focus on the environmental costs of sprawl and endorse more extensive government regulation of land use. Conservatives and libertarians often deny that sprawl is a problem at all and pretend that sprawl merely fulfills consumer desires. For example, Steven Hayward of the Pacific Research Institute writes in National Review (one of the more prestigious conservative magazines), "The threat of sprawl is vastly overblown" and that sprawl opponents believe that "commuting suburbanites are making unenlightened lifestyle choices because they lack the expert supervision that only their betters in government can provide." Similarly, Virginia Postrel, editor of Reason (a conservative magazine with a libertarian bent) asserts, "The anti-sprawl campaign is about telling Americans how they should live and work, about sacrificing individuals' values to the values of their politically powerful betters" (p. 4). The conventional conservative wisdom, as of early 2000, seems to be that
sprawl is merely the result of the free market at work,
therefore conservatives need not oppose sprawl, and
even if sprawl is somehow problematic, it cannot be limited without implementation of the liberal or environmentalist agenda of larger and more intrusive government.
This article rejects all three assumptions. Specifically, I argue that
sprawl is in fact a result of runaway statism rather than the free market;
conservatives should fight sprawl as a threat to conservative values such as limited government, freedom, the work ethic and social stability; and
conservative, free-market solutions can limit if not eliminate sprawl.
Background: How Statism Created Sprawl
As noted above, many conservatives believe that sprawl is merely the free market at work. But in fact, sprawl is as statist as the other government policies that conservatives commonly attack. For example, conservatives often criticize Aid to Families with Dependent Children and similar programs on the ground that by aiding unwed, nonworking mothers, such programs encourage idleness and illegitimacy. In urban policy as in welfare policy, government at all levels has steered private conduct through a complicated mix of rewards and penalties: in the former area, by favoring suburban sprawl at the expense of cities, in the latter area, by favoring illegitimacy and idleness at the expense of marriage.
Government's pro-suburban bias has been especially blatant in three areas: housing policy, transportation policy, and education policy. In addition, government has made suburbia more sprawling and auto-dependent than a free market would dictate.
Housing: Turning America Into Sprawl Land
Federal housing policy has moved middle-class families out of cities both by subsidizing migration to suburbs and by making cities unlivable.
Paying Americans to Move to Suburbs
As early as the 1930s, the federal government was taking its first small steps toward turning our once-great cities into depopulated wastelands. The federal war against urban America began in earnest with the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage insurance program.
Before the New Deal, the home mortgage system was based on down payments as high as 50% and terms as short as 5 years, a system that worked well in good times but led to massive defaults during the Great Depression. To protect homeowners and home sellers, the FHA has insured long-term, low-down payment mortgages against default since 1934.
As a rule, FHA guaranteed home loans only in low-risk areas. FHA guidelines defined low-risk areas as areas that were thinly populated, dominated by newer homes, and had no African American or immigrant enclaves nearby, areas that disproportionately tended to be suburban. For example, one FHA underwriting manual taught that the FHA should concentrate its efforts on newer, lower density areas because "crowded neighborhoods lessen desirability" and that "older properties in a neighborhood have a tendency to accelerate the transition to lower class occupancy." Other government agencies "redlined" cities by issuing maps placing metropolitan neighborhoods in various categories, from "green" (the most desirable) to "red" ("high-risk" neighborhoods where the federal government would not insure mortgages).
FHA policies also favored new construction over renovation of existing homes. FHA loans for repair were smaller than loans for the purchase of new homes, so a family could more easily purchase a new home than modernize an old home. Because the newest suburbs tend to have the newest homes, this criterion also favored suburbs.
As a result of the FHA's biases, the FHA generally insured suburban mortgages while refusing to insure urban mortgages. For example, residents of suburban St. Louis County received five times as much FHA insurance as residents of the city of St. Louis. Thus, a White home buyer who wished to stay in his old neighborhood had to seek conventional mortgages with higher down payments and shorter terms, whereas the same purchaser, by the simple act of buying a new house in the suburbs, could get a cheaper FHA-insured mortgage. In other words, the FHA essentially bribed middle-class homebuyers to move to the suburbs. FHA lending policies were based on a self-fulfilling prophecy: The FHA claimed that it could not insure urban mortgages because cities were doomed and then made sure that this was the case by luring middle-class homeowners away from the cities.
Turning Cities Into Dumping Grounds
While the federal government was bribing middle- class homeowners to leave cities, it was bribing the poor to stay in cities. In 1937, the federal government began to fund local housing authorities to provide housing for the poor. The housing laws provided that any city desiring public housing had to create a municipal housing authority. At that time, cities encompassed rich and poor alike, so that they had a strong incentive to create housing agencies. By contrast, economically homogenous rural areas and suburbs were able to (and did) avoid public housing by refusing to create housing authorities. As a result, public housing became concentrated in cities.
Often, public housing projects are magnets for crime and disorder. For example, Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes contain only one half of 1% of that city's population but account for 11% of the city's murders. Similarly, a 1993 study found that crime in the Los Angeles housing projects was three times greater than crime rates in surrounding high-crime neighborhoods. Because public housing projects are such undesirable neighbors, the concentration of public housing in cities makes city neighborhoods less desirable to anyone who can afford to move. And by declining to place public housing in suburbs, the federal government has given suburbs a huge competitive advantage over cities.
Astoundingly, the federal government encouraged cities to destroy functional neighborhoods to build these dens of crime and vice. The Housing Act of 1949 gave mayors broad powers to condemn huge chunks of land in the name of "urban renewal." And many did exactly that. For example, in Buffalo Mayor Frank Sedita destroyed a stable Italian neighborhood near downtown Buffalo to build the Shoreline housing project, which according to local entrepreneur Mark Goldman, "resembles a trailer park plunked arbitrarily in the heart of the city."
While keeping the poor locked up in cities, the federal government helped lock the poor out of suburbs. In the 1920s, the federal Department of Commerce drafted the State Zoning Enabling Act (SZEA). SZEA, which was quickly enacted by the states, granted municipalities power to regulate the location and use of buildings. Suburbs quickly used their zoning powers to keep out the poor. For example, suburban zoning laws frequently ban apartment construction to keep out "undesirables," or they require minimum lot sizes to keep out less expensive homes. Just as government keeps the poor in cities, it keeps the poor out of suburbs. Either way, cities become the dumping ground for the poor.
Transportation: Putting Suburbs First
Statist transportation policy, like statist housing policy, has consistently favored suburban migration. For most of the 20th century, a major priority of all levels of government was to build roads. By doing so, the government destroyed urban neighborhoods both directly (through physical destruction of cities) and indirectly (by using roads to drain cities of their middle- class tax base).
How Government Put Roads First
Early in the 20th century, state and federal governments began to build new roads. Governments could have levied user fees to reimburse local treasuries for the costs of streets, traffic maintenance, and police services but instead chose to subsidize drivers by relying on general taxation. Thus, the government essentially taxed streetcar users to support drivers. By contrast, streetcar services were typically private and unsubsidized. As a result, aging streetcar equipment and reduced services were accompanied by falling ridership.
In 1921, the federal government began to support highway building, by enacting a Federal Road Act that designated 200,000 miles of road as eligible for federal matching funds and by creating a Bureau of Public Roads to plan an interstate highway system. By that date, government at all levels (federal, state, and local) was pouring $1.4 billion into highways. (By contrast, most transit systems were privately owned, received no government assistance, and paid taxes to support the highway system.)
Because local governments controlled streetcar fares, the transit industry was unable to raise fares to fund improved equipment and service. Meanwhile, government largess to the highways grew. By 1940, government spent $2.7 billion on highways. By contrast, at that time, the total operating costs of all transit systems (except commuter rail) were $661 million, mostly private rather than government spending.
In the postwar years, government intervention on behalf of highways accelerated. In 1950, government put $4.6 billion into highways and virtually nothing into transit. And in 1954, President Eisenhower appointed a committee on highways chaired by Lucius Clay, a member of the General Motors board of directors. Not surprisingly, the committee endorsed a massive highway spending scheme. That scheme was enacted into law as the 1956 Interstate Highway Act. The interstate system was financed by a "trust fund" supported by revenue from federal gasoline taxes. Under the provision of the 1956 Act, these funds were available only for highways: The federal government paid 90% of the cost for the new roads, whereas state and local governments paid only 10%. Eventually, the 1956 Act created a 41,000-mile Interstate Highway System. By contrast, the federal government did not begin to subsidize public transit until 1962, and today, federal road spending exceeds transit spending by a margin of more than 5 to 1.
Henry Ford, one of America's first auto magnates, summed up the relationship between the highway and the city when he stated, "We shall solve the city problem by leaving the city." Government's obsession with road building has created sprawl in two ways: by the physical destruction of city neighborhoods and by making suburban life more convenient.
How Roads Destroyed Cities
During the first decade of Interstate construction, 335,000 homes were razed, and urban highways physically destroyed African American communities in the South Bronx, Nashville, Austin, Los Angeles, Durham, and nearly every other medium-sized or large American city. Even neighborhoods not destroyed by highways have been damaged by them. For example, in the 1950s, the federal government ruined the Treme section of New Orleans, one of the city's oldest African American neighborhoods, to build the I-10 expressway. The community's main street was Claiborne Avenue, which boasted 200 businesses in its heyday and had a 6100-foot-long median. The Louisiana Highway Department built I-10 on that street because it was considered the most direct path from the central business district to eastern New Orleans. With the construction of the interstate, the street's median became a strip of dirt, covered with a concrete roof 100-feet wide and 25-feet overhead. I-10 became a physical barrier that cut the neighborhood in half, and Claiborne Avenue's oak trees were replaced with concrete pillars. Not surprisingly, Treme became a crime-filled slum. Thus, the government had destroyed Treme to provide an escape route to the suburbs.
Indeed, even the threat of a new highway sometimes destroyed urban neighborhoods: Throughout the 1960s, Buffalo planners debated a city highway known as the West Side Arterial, that (if built) would have destroyed much of the Lower West Side of Buffalo. Banks, insurance companies, and government agencies were unwilling to invest in a neighborhood destined for condemnation. For example, when in 1971 the Niagara Frontier Housing Development Corporation applied to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development for a grant to rehabilitate Lower West Side dwellings, its application was denied because according to HUD, "The project is in the probable roadway corridor of the proposed West Side Arterial." Not surprisingly, homeowners took the hint and left the neighborhood. In 1960, a total of 1,900 families attended Immaculate Conception Church in the neighborhood. By 1973, only 500 were left.
How Roads Built Up the Suburbs
Highways enabled people to live farther away from downtown jobs by giving commuters easy access to central business districts from once-distant suburbs. Thus, highways create residential development in suburbs near highway exits. And where highway-driven residential development goes, commercial development inevitably follows, as retail businesses move to a suburb to serve its new residents, and the new residents in turn move their businesses to suburbia to reduce their commutes.
For example, Washington's Capital Beltway, a 66-mile long highway surrounding the city, was designed to allow East Coast motorists to bypass the city. But instead, the Beltway became a magnet for office and retail centers that sprouted near Beltway exits, such as Tyson's Corner, a satellite downtown in Fairfax County, Virginia. And as suburbs grew more populated, they grew more congested, which caused politicians to build even more suburban roads (ostensibly to relieve congestion). A study by the Surface Transportation Policy Project showed that each of the 50 largest metro areas in America added new road capacity in the 1980s and 1990s. For example, the number of roadway miles in the Atlanta, Georgia area have grown by 78% since 1982; yet, Atlanta is sixth in the nation in rush-hour congestion, and the Georgia Department of Transportation plans to spend $11 billion over the next 25 years to build and widen 310 new roads.
Some deny that highways cause sprawl. For example, real estate developer Ronald Utt (2000), in a paper published by the Heritage Foundation, argues that the interstate highways did not cause sprawl because "Suburbanization was well underway in 1960, when the federal interstate highway program had been in existence for just four years." This assertion does not prove that highways are unrelated to sprawl, because even if suburbanization was "well underway by 1960," it would not prove that highways are unrelated to sprawl, because the federal government's pro-highway policies had been in effect long before the interstate highway system was created. Moreover, Utt's assertion is factually incorrect, because American cities' most stunning setbacks occurred after 1960. Of the 17 American cities that had more than 500,000 people in 1950, every single one gained population between 1930 and 1950. By contrast, in the 1950s, 13 of the cities lost population, and 2 lost more than 10% of their population. In the 1960s, 14 lost population, and 5 lost more than 10%. And in the disastrous 1970s, 15 lost population, and 13 lost more than 10%. In other words, the sprawl that went along with the interstate system snowballed as interstates were built during the 1960s and 1970s.
Utt (2000) argues that because some cities in Europe and Japan have also experienced population losses, suburban sprawl is thus a natural result of affluence. But Utt himself admits that sprawl arises from transportation policy, arguing, "In Europe and Japan, as well as in many American cities, comprehensive and heavily subsidized public transit systems helped facilitate the exodus of central-city residents to outlying communities." Utt cannot have it both ways; he cannot intelligently argue that public transit facilitated suburban migration without admitting that highways had the same effect.
Indeed, even lobbies generally regarded as pro-sprawl concede that highways affect the location of development. For example, in 1999, the National Association of Home Builders conducted a survey that purported to show the popularity of suburban living. The survey asked respondents what amenities would encourage them to move to a new area, and their top choice (endorsed by 55% of respondents) was "highway access." If highway access makes a suburb more desirable, obviously building highways in a place makes that place more desirable to commuters and businesses.
Education: Making Cities Less Livable
Most readers of this article probably know someone who lived in a city neighborhood in their twenties but moved to suburbia after marriage or childbirth so that his or her children could avoid urban public schools. School-based flight from cities is especially common among middle-class Whites: In 1990, 17 large cities with majority White populations had school systems in which more than 50% of pupils were Black or Hispanic.
School-based flight has been caused by federal incompetence. For the past 40 years, the federal courts have used a variety of techniques to force racial integration on city schools but made little effort to integrate suburban schools. Because African Americans tend to be poorer than Whites, a racially integrated urban school typically includes children from a city's poorest neighborhoods. As a result, parents who want to send their children to schools dominated by other middle-class children cannot do so without moving to the suburbs or shelling out thousands of dollars for private school tuition.
The federal government's involvement with school integration began with Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which prohibited state-sponsored segregation of public schools. Over the next 14 years, local governments sought to evade Brown by closing public schools, through a variety of more moderate measures. The courts responded in kind by extending Brown. In Green v. County School Board of New Kent County (1968), the Supreme Court rejected a "freedom of choice" plan that permitted each pupil to choose a public school, on the ground that the plan had failed to erase desegregation. In Swann v. Charlotte- Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971), the Court went a step further and allowed lower courts to create integrated city schools through forced busing, racial quotas and a variety of other techniques. Since Swann, federal courts have routinely ordered cities to bus students throughout the city in order to create racial balance in public schools. As a result, middle-class parents fled city schools to avoid the inconveniences of busing and to avoid sending their children to school with children from the cities' poorest, most dangerous neighborhoods.
By the mid-1970s, many big-city school systems had become overwhelmingly African American. Thus, urban school systems could not create integrated schools because very few White students were left in some urban school systems. To solve this problem, some integrationists urged the courts to adopt "metropolitan busing plans" that discourage "White flight" by busing suburban Whites into city schools dominated by African Americans (or vice versa). But in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), the Supreme Court rejected metropolitan busing on the ground that suburbs had never discriminated against African Americans (despite that many of these suburbs had excluded African Americans through zoning designed to keep out poor and working-class people, who tended to be disproportionately African American). Thus, the federal courts presented parents with the following choices: (a) send their children to urban public schools, so that their children would go to school with children from the poorest, most dangerous neighborhoods in the city; (b) stay in cities and spend thousands of dollars on private schools; and (c) move to suburbia and send their children to "good" (i.e., homogenously White, middle- class) schools for free. Not surprisingly, most parents who can afford to move to suburbia prefer the third choice.
The full impact of the government's school policy can be shown by comparing the status quo to a world without government-run schools. If schools were left to the marketplace, popular schools, like popular bookstores and restaurants, would exist wherever parents were willing to pay for them. Presumably, such schools would be concentrated in more affluent areas, but they certainly would not be limited to certain cities or counties within a metropolitan area, any more than popular bookstores or restaurants are limited to suburbia. But by socializing education and requiring children to go to public schools in their own city, government has created a rigid segregation of children by jurisdiction: The richest, Whitest cities and counties have schools for upper middle-class and upper class (usually White) children, the poorest cities and counties have schools for their children, and lower middle- class cities and counties have schools for their children.
It could be argued that middle-class flight from cities is caused by factors unrelated to education, such as transportation policy, housing policy, and crime. But this argument is belied by that middle-class flight from cities has primarily been a family phenomenon. For example, in Washington, D.C., a 1967 court decision sought to integrate city schools by busing African American students into majority White schools and eliminating a "tracking plan" that placed brighter students (who were mostly White) into separate classes. Over the following dozen years, White enrollment in Washington public schools declined by more than 70%, whereas the city's population of single Whites declined by only 6%. Similarly, in Boston, where courts sought to integrate public schools through forced busing, the city's juvenile White population declined by more than 50% in the 1970s, whereas the city's single adult White population decreased by only 3%. In other words, White flight from cities has been led by the people who are the most concerned about schools: families with children. This strongly suggests that schools and sprawl are closely related.
How Big Brother Makes Suburbia Sprawling
In addition to encouraging migration from city to suburb, government has also made cities and suburbs far more sprawling and auto-dependent than the market would dictate. In the absence of government regulation, American suburbs could have looked like Old Town Alexandria near Washington or Shaker Heights near Cleveland: communities that accommodated the automobile without being totally auto-dependent, communities where roads and sidewalks, and pedestrians and drivers, mingled together peaceably. But thanks to stifling government zoning codes, most newer suburbs are totally auto-dependent: Commerce is so far from housing that even if sidewalks exist (as frequently they do not), few people can walk to shops, and densities are so low that public transit is arguably impractical.
The American version of suburbia was created by a few politicians and bureaucrats in our nation's capital. In the early 1920s, the Department of Commerce drafted the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act (SZEA), which was blindly adopted by the states. SZEA set up a general grant of power to cities to allow them to restrict building and lot size, the size of yards and other open spaces, the density of population, and the location and use of structures for trade, residence, and other purposes. The SZEA declared that such legislation would be designed "to prevent the overcrowding of land [and] to avoid undue concentration of population," in other words, to create what is now known as suburban sprawl. Specifically, SZEA defined zones as parcels wherein all lots conform to the same requirements of minimum lot size, yard size, and building distance from streets. By requiring minimum lot and yard sizes for all lots within a given zone, SZEA effectively lowers densities, keeps stores out of residential zones and vice versa, keeps rental properties out of zones reserved for single family homes, and forces all homes in an area to be roughly the same size. The practical consequences of the SZEA and its state and local clones are that absent a zoning variance, walkable traditional neighborhoods are outlawed in most American suburbs, because every activity demands a separate zone of its own; people cannot live within walking distance of shopping, and offices cannot be within walking distance of either.
Governments also create sprawl by forcing businesses, apartment buildings, and developers to provide (usually free) parking. For example, nearly all building codes require developers to provide two off-street parking spaces per house, and most apartment buildings provide at least one parking space per bedroom and sometimes more. Some suburbs are even more restrictive; Schamburg, Illinois, demands that developers provide 1.5 spaces per one bedroom unit, thereby ensuring that apartments have 50% more parking spaces than people. Commercial developers are also required to provide free parking for stores and office buildings. Cities typically calculate the amount of "necessary" free parking based on Institute of Transportation Engineers surveys, which count the number of vehicles parked at the time of peak parking demand in areas with ample free parking and nonexistent public transit, in other words, the maximum imaginable amount of vehicles. Local governments' free-parking mandates create huge costs for developers, costs that are passed on to businesses. In Los Angeles, the average construction cost of a building, excluding the cost of parking, is about $150 per square foot. The installation of four aboveground parking spaces per 1,000 square feet of office space (a fairly typical requirement) costs $40 per square foot. Thus, free parking requirements increase the cost of office space by 27%, and underground parking is even more expensive. Such requirements also increase the cost of housing. For example, a requirement that each apartment include one parking space increases the cost of housing by 12.5%.
Government's parking mandate creates sprawl in a variety of ways. First, when businesses are forced to provide parking, driving becomes cheaper and more convenient, and homeowners have a greater incentive to live in auto-dependent areas. In addition, increases in driving cause the roads to become more congested, thus giving planners an excellent excuse to build and widen roads, which (as explained below) causes sprawl by making it more convenient for motorists to move farther away from cities' older areas. Second, government parking mandates make cities and suburbs less pedestrian friendly and more auto dependent, by forcing consumers to walk through huge parking lots to shop and work and to share this space with speeding vehicles.
Government also makes streets inconvenient for pedestrians through traffic planning. For example, traffic engineers use a standard procedure for grading drivers' experiences at intersections. If drivers wait an average of 5 seconds or less to get through an intersection, they have an "A" level of service (the ideal). If drivers wait 15 to 25 seconds, they have a "C" level of service, and if they have to wait a minute or longer, they have an "F" level of service. By contrast, engineers have no such scheme for grading pedestrian service, and as a result, pedestrians often have to wait 60 seconds or longer to cross. Traffic engineers also make streets unfriendly to pedestrians by making them wider than necessary. For example, much of Main Street in Buffalo, New York, is six lanes wide, a width that discourages pedestrians from walking across the street unless absolutely necessary. By making Main Street too wide to be walkable, government's traffic engineers have also hastened the decay of Main Street by depriving Main Street merchants of walk-in traffic. By contrast, another commercial street three blocks away, Elmwood Avenue, is only four lanes wide and is thriving.
A Counterargument: Blaming the Victims
It has been argued that municipal incompetence rather than suburban sprawl is the cause of cities' problems and that if cities would only provide their citizens with decent services and lower taxes, they would be able to compete with suburbs successfully. This argument has a grain of truth: Middle-class Americans abandon cities not just because of the convenience provided by new and widened highways but also because of crime, high taxes, and bad schools. Nevertheless, cities are not solely, or even primarily, to blame for their own problems.
Confusing Cause and Effect
High taxes, high crime, and poor schools are less a cause of suburban sprawl than a result of suburban sprawl. This is so for a variety of reasons.
First, if a city's middle class migrates en masse to suburbia, its tax base will be smaller, and other things being equal, it will have to raise taxes or reduce services. So other things being equal, migration to suburbia actually causes higher taxes and poor services.
Second, suburban migration itself creates urban governments that drive away middle-class taxpayers. Because of middle-class flight from cities, many cities are dominated by African American and low-income voters, who tend to favor liberal, high-tax, redistributionist policies that drive out the remaining middle-class voters. The classic example of this vicious circle was Washington, D.C., under Marion Barry. The "White flight" of the 1950s and 1960s created an overwhelmingly African American electorate that was responsive to Barry's appeals to racial pride, and the middle-class African American flight of more recent decades created a majority-Black, predominantly lower class and working-class electorate that supported Barry's attempt to inflate the city payroll to create jobs. As a result, Barry was able to emasculate the city's police force, get convicted of using crack cocaine, and nevertheless be reelected as mayor of Washington in 1994. By the mid-1990s, 7.2% of Washington's population was on the city payroll, far more than in any other large American city. Washington's nearest competitor, New York City, clocked in at 5.4%. Not surprisingly, Washington's taxes significantly exceeded those of its suburbs: City residents paid 9.5% of their income in city income taxes, as opposed to 5.75% in nearby Virginia. By contrast, if Washington had not been ravaged by school desegregation, the highway system, and other pro-suburban federal policies, it would have had a more racially diverse, middle-class electorate that would never have tolerated Barry's shenanigans.
Third, the common complaint that "bad schools" drive people out of cities illustrates how federal policies cause "bad" municipal services. As explained above, the courts' failed attempt to desegregate suburban schools has caused urban schools to become dominated by children from poor households. As a general matter, poor children are more difficult to educate, even in integrated schools. For example, P.S. 24, in Riverdale (one of the Bronx's few remaining affluent neighborhoods) has two educational programs: a regular program for relatively gifted students and a "special" program for slower students. The "special" programs are dominated by children who are poor enough to qualify for government free-lunch programs, whereas the regular program is dominated by students from middle-class households. Similarly, in affluent Shaker Heights, Ohio, White students average 1,100 on their SAT, whereas Black students average 800; because many of the latter live in middle-class households, the racial gap would no doubt be even larger if only low-income Black students' test results were considered. Academic studies support the proposition that gaps between students arise out of family background rather than poor schooling. For example, a 1960s survey by sociologist James Coleman showed that everything schools did accounted for only 5% to 35% of the variation in students' academic performances; he concluded, "The inequalities imposed on children by their home neighborhood and peer environment are carried along to become the inequalities with which they confront adult life at the end of school." Similarly, the Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks concluded in his 1972 book, Inequality, that desegregation could close the Black-White academic gap by no more than 10% to 20%. In another study published in 1995, Scott Miller, a scholar now affiliated with the College Board, wrote, "There is little evidence that any existing strategy can close more than a fraction of the overall achievement gap" (as cited in Traub, 2000, p. 52) separating children from high-income and low-income households. In sum, it may be the case that if suburban children and urban children switched schools, school boards, teachers, and administrators, the suburban-urban achievement gap would be as large as it is now.
It logically follows that even if they are relatively well run, schools filled with poverty-stricken children quickly get a reputation as "bad schools," and parents tend to avoid them whenever possible. And because federal desegregation policies (as well as the transportation and housing policies that shifted middle-class families to suburbs) caused urban schools to be dominated by students from low-income households, the alleged "quality gap" between city schools and suburban schools arises partially from federal interference rather than municipal incompetence.
Fourth, cities' high crime rates arise partially from federal policy. As explained above, federal housing policy caused low-income households to be concentrated in cities, while a variety of federal, state, and local policies encouraged middle-class flight to suburbia. As a general rule, people from low-income areas are more likely to commit crimes. Low-income areas in cities are typically more dangerous than high income areas, and low-income suburbs are typically more dangerous than high-income ones. For example, a 1999 analysis in Atlanta magazine divided Atlanta into four quadrants (Northeast, Northwest, Southeast, and Southwest). The poorest quadrant (Southeast) had 56 murders per 100,000 people in 1998, 60% more than the citywide average. Similarly, Atlanta's south-side suburbs (which tended to be poorer and are closer to the city's poorer neighborhoods) had more crime than its affluent northside suburbs. If poor people commit more crimes, and statism packed poor people into cities, it logically follows that statism makes cities more dangerous than suburbs.
Bizarre Coincidences
The claim that bad city government rather than state and federal misconduct drives middle-class families out of cities is logically as well as factually flawed. As noted above, most older American cities gained population in the 1930s and 1940s and have lost population ever since. Thus, to believe that suburban sprawl is the result of municipal incompetence, one would have to believe that dozens of city governments, by an incredibly strange coincidence, became unable to police their streets or improve their schools at exactly the same time, obviously a bizarre proposition.
The "municipal incompetence" theory also fails to explain why, in many slow-growth metropolitan areas, older suburbs closer to the city have begun to lose population. For example, every suburb contiguous to Cleveland and Buffalo has lost population in recent decades-every single one. So to believe that municipal incompetence causes population loss, one would have to believe that all of these suburbs became ungovernable at exactly the same time, obviously a proposition too bizarre to be believable. Indeed, this theory is even more insane than the theory that big cities' incompetence made them ungovernable. It could perhaps be argued that big cities are less governable because of their sheer size (although the growth of cities that have annexed their suburbs proved otherwise), but this argument cannot be made about inner ring suburbs that are just as small as their rivals further away from central cities.
There are exceptions to the rule of urban decay, but the exceptions prove that urban decline is due to sprawl rather than to bad government. Generally, cities that have annexed large expanses of suburban territory, such as Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio, have grown whether they were located in the Frost Belt or the Sun Belt. In his book Cities Without Suburbs, former Albuquerque mayor David Rusk (1995) divides American cities into inelastic cities (that is, those that cannot annex suburban territory) and elastic cities (those that have annexed a great deal of territory). Between 1950 and 1990, the average zero-elasticity city lost 23% of its population, even though these cities' metropolitan areas grew by an average of 30%, whereas the most elastic cities (termed hyper-elastic by Rusk) increased their population by 250%, more than the growth in those cities' suburban populations. If middle-class suburbanites were fleeing big-city governments as such, cities that annexed territory would have continued to shrink, because families would have borne any burden to avoid living within city boundaries. Because this is not the case, suburban migration obviously relates to factors other than municipal incompetence. Of course, it could be argued that the hyper-elastic cities naturally have always had better city governments, but this would require one to believe that nearly every single city government that annexed territory also happened to be incredibly competent, another coincidence too bizarre to pass the straight-face test.
Good Government and Bad Cities
The theory that bad city government causes suburban sprawl rests on the assumption that the most inefficient governments drive out people and businesses while competent city governments do not. Undeniably, high taxes and governmental incompetence are factors that drive out middle-class taxpayers, but far from the only factor. For example, Cleveland imposes lower income taxes than its suburbs and imposes only $593 per capita in taxes, far less than Indianapolis ($688), Seattle ($772), and Denver ($959).Yet, Cleveland has lost nearly half its 1950 population, whereas the other three cities have gained population over time. Why? Perhaps because the other cities have been able to annex some of their suburbs, whereas Cleveland is confined within its 1940s boundaries.
Utt (2000) cites New York, Milwaukee, and Indianapolis as examples of cities that have fought suburban sprawl during the 1990s by the simple expedient of electing mayors who have governed more effectively than their predecessors. But these three examples show the futility of counting on good government to reverse suburban sprawl. Indianapolis continues to grow because decades ago, it merged with a surrounding county and thereby took over a great deal of suburban territory. (Ironically, Utt condemns the metropolitan government that saved Indianapolis from the fate of Cleveland).
In fact, the 1990s have been less kind to Indianapolis than prior decades: The city grew by 4% from 1980 to 1990 but only 1% from 1990 to 1998. Despite its dramatic drop in crime, New York grew more slowly in the 1990s than in "bad old days" of the 1980s: by 3% in the 1980s and by only 1% in the 1990s. And in Milwaukee, the 1990s were a calamity: After losing only 1% of its population in the 1980s, the city lost 6% of its population in the 1990s. It may be that with less charismatic and competent mayors, these cities would have been in much deeper trouble. But nevertheless, these cities' poor performance in the 1990s shows that factors other than the competence of a city's mayor or bureaucracy underlie urban decline. In fact, the cities that have rebounded most impressively in the 1990s have not done a very good job of fighting urban problems like crime. Of the 50 largest American cities, only 4 gained population in the 1990s after losing population in the 1980s: Chicago, Atlanta, Denver, and Kansas City. In 1998, 3 of those 4 "comeback cities" (Chicago, Atlanta, and Kansas City) had higher murder rates than supposedly better governed Milwaukee, and all four had higher murder rates than New York City. Whereas New York's murder rate declined by an amazing two thirds between 1991 and 1998 (from 29 per 100,000 to slightly fewer than 9 per 100,000), Denver's murder rate declined by about 45% (from 18 to 10 per 100,000), Chicago's by about a quarter (from 33 to 25 per 100,000), Atlanta's by about 30% (from 50 to 35 per 100,000), and Kansas City's by a wretched 5% (from 31 to 29). (Nationally, the murder rate declined by about a third, from 9.8 per 100,000 to 6.3 per 100,000.) Yet, all of these cities grew about as fast as New York City in the 1990s.
Another Counterargument, Or, Pent-Up Demand
It could also be argued that even if government has discouraged city living in a variety of ways, the status quo was nevertheless inevitable because Americans naturally desire the bigger houses and bigger lots that they can get from low-density suburban living. This argument requires one to believe that even if cities had crime rates, school systems, tax rates, and government services identical to those of suburbia, they would still be as depopulated as they are now, a proposition that should be self-evidently absurd to everyone who has known anyone who moved to suburbia for the schools.
More important, this argument overlooks a simple fact: Livable city neighborhoods have sky-high property values. Neighborhoods like Buckhead in Atlanta, Cleveland Park in Washington, D.C., and Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia are more expensive than many suburban neighborhoods. For example, in 1998, the average home price in Buckhead was $364,952, more than the average home price in all but one of Greater Atlanta's suburbs. If "good" city neighborhoods are expensive, the demand for such neighborhoods obviously exceeds the supply. In other words, there is a huge pent-up demand for city living that would be satisfied were it not for market failure. The market failure is the shortage of affluent city neighborhoods created by suburban sprawl and the anti-urban government policy that causes sprawl.
Why Sprawl Should Offend Conservatives
Of course, just because sprawl has been engineered by government does not make it a major social crisis. The behavior of Republican congresses and presidents over the past several years suggests that all but the most extreme conservatives have come to terms with a government far bigger than that envisioned by their pre-New Deal forbears. Nevertheless, conservatives should fight suburban sprawl as they have fought other obnoxious bureaucratic innovations, because sprawl offends the values of both economic and cultural conservatives.
Economic Conservatism and Sprawl
Economic conservatives favor more freedom and less government; sprawl, as explained below, means less freedom and more government.
Sprawl Versus Freedom
As a rule, conservatives tend to believe that citizens should have as wide a range of choice as possible, whereas liberals tend to favor top-down government decision making. Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman has argued that the market is superior to government not just because it is more efficient but also because it produces "unanimity without conformity," that is, because millions of consumers can satisfy their diverse needs without imposing their desires on others. Similarly, in a healthy metropolitan area (such as the American cities of the first half of the 20th century, or New York or European cities today), citizens can choose among a wide variety of options: They can live in city or suburb and can live with no cars or plenty. Such diversity, such unanimity without conformity, is what conservatives should support.
But in most of metropolitan America, conformity is the rule in two respects. Sprawl has made auto ownership mandatory in most of America and has made suburban living mandatory in large chunks of America.
Drive or die. In a free society, government should not force a particular mixture of products down consumers' throats: Consumers should be free to spend half their income on mortgage payments and take the bus to work, or live in a rundown trailer park and throw their money at a BMW. But in fact, government-induced buying has forced nearly all Americans older than age 16 to spend thousands of dollars on one product: a functional automobile.
In a few cities, such as New York and Washington, D.C., one person can comfortably survive without a car. But in most cities and suburbs, government policies have made auto ownership virtually mandatory. As explained above, government used the highway system, the education system, and the FHA to lure middle-class people and their jobs to the suburbs and then used zoning to make those suburbs as auto-oriented as possible. Government has further rigged suburban life in favor of the auto by building roads for drivers but providing inadequate public transportation to non-drivers. Thus, suburbanites often need a car even if they live in regions with relatively well-developed transit systems, and in most smaller and Sun Belt cities, even city residents can barely function without them.
For example, the Boston region has a central city with a well-developed transit system and a commuter train system that serves many of its suburbs. But even in Greater Boston, just 32% of entry-level employers are within 1/4 mile of transit, 43% are within 1/2 mile, and58%are within 1mile. Just14%of entry-level jobs can be reached by transit within an hour from Boston's poorer neighborhoods.
The situation is even worse in Sun Belt cities. For example, Atlanta's second largest suburban county (Gwinnett County, which had 522,000 people in 1998) had no public transportation whatsoever, and even some neighborhoods within the city limits are transit free. My parents live within the city of Atlanta about 10 miles from city hall, but (except for a "maid bus" that comes to downtown once a day and from downtown once a day), the nearest bus stop is about a mile away, and the absence of sidewalks (or even lawns that one can walk on) prevents anyone from walking safely to the bus stop.
And in smaller cities, a non-driver's life is more desperate still. For example, in Macon, Georgia, buses only operate until 6:45 p.m. in the evening on weekdays, Saturday service is limited, and there is no service on Sundays or holidays. Because many entry-level employers require their newest employees to work evening and weekend shifts, this system essentially shuts most of Macon's poor, car-less residents out of the job market.
Many employers are not transit-accessible at all. Macon's largest employers are located in the area's periphery far from any bus line: Brown &Williamson (cigarettes), Riverwood (paper mill), Cagle's (chicken processing), Cigna (insurance data processing). Hotel operators and fast food establishments are located among major streets. As a result, Macon's employers of unskilled labor often ask employees whether they have a car, and if the answer is no, they will not hire you.
Macon's transportation system limits a wide variety of other activities as well. The largest supermarket chain in the area, Kroger, is not efficiently served by the buses. Although two of the system's routes pass Kroger stores, the routes do not swing down access roads and into the store parking lots to permit less agile riders (such as children and senior citizens) to reach the stores. The two largest Kroger stores in the area are not on bus lines nor is a large discount supermarket, FoodMax, or a new Publix supermarket. Conversely, a largely abandoned shopping center where anchor tenant K-Mart closed in 1991 is served by the system, but the new K-Mart is not. Churches are not served by the system at all, because churches tend to be most active on Sundays and weekday evenings, when the bus system is shut down. Even on the bus system's limited routes, the frequency of service is so minimal as to discourage use. For example, students who use public transit to attend Macon College must devote the entire day to the ordeal. After rising before 6 a.m. to catch the first bus from their homes to the downtown transfer station, students must catch a morning bus from downtown to the college at 7:30 a.m. Later in the day, they have only one opportunity to return home. Needless to say, drivers suffer from none of these limitations: Government has built a toll-free, 24-hour system to serve them, and by building highways farther and farther away from downtown Macon, it has encouraged employers to relocate to areas not served by bus routes.
In sum, in most of America (especially in suburbs and small cities), government has rigged transportation systems to make driving a necessity for anything resembling a normal life. Government builds roads that shift economic development to suburbs but mysteriously lacks the money to run bus routes to those suburbs (excepting the occasional expensive light rail system that serves a few blocks of suburbia well). Conservatives would certainly oppose a law ordering consumers to spend thousands of dollars a year on television sets, housing, or ice cream. It logically follows that they should oppose policies that have the effect, however inadvertent, of forcing consumers to spend thousand of dollars on automobiles.
Suburbia or else. Just as government policies have forced Americans to buy more cars than they might otherwise buy, government policies have forced Americans out of cities and into suburbs. The tyranny of the automobile arises in part from a second tyranny: the tyranny of suburbia. In many cities (especially older industrial cities in the Northeast and the Midwest), urban decay has advanced so far that cities are essentially not an option for any consumers but the most adventurous, and the shift of jobs to suburbia has made cities impractical even for many adventurous consumers.
This is reflected in the mainstream media: All too often, suburban is used as a synonym for White and urban for African American. In the most degraded cities, like Detroit and Newark, urban decomposition is so advanced that even single people are unwilling to live in the city. For example, an elite prep school in Connecticut, Choate Rosemary Hall (CRH), has dozens of alumni in New Jersey suburbs and hundreds in New York City but not one who lives in Newark. And in southeastern Michigan, CRH has about 20 alumni in Detroit's suburbs but not one who lives in the city of Detroit. By contrast, healthier big cities are jam packed with CRH alumni, especially younger alumni. For example, about 1,000 CRH alumni live in Manhattan, and 180 more live in New York City's other boroughs.
And when I moved to St. Louis in 1990, I asked a friend of a friend what neighborhoods I should look at. I thought he would recommend one or two chic city neighborhoods and one or two close-in suburbs. Instead, he virtually chanted at me, "I do not recommend the city," and understandably so. Among St. Louis area households earning more than $100,000, only 6% live in the city of St. Louis (which has lost more than 60% of its 1950 population).
Even where single people can live in the city, families often cannot. For example, in Cleveland, even the most open-minded Clevelanders were unwilling to stay in the city after marriage, both because of the condition of the city's public school system (which was unusually disreputable even by the low standards of urban public school systems) and because in Cleveland, unlike in other areas, nearly all of the area's private schools are located in the suburbs (except for a few Catholic and Lutheran schools). As a result, in Cleveland, only 4% of households earning more than $100,000 live in the city. Even people and institutions that would be urban in other communities are suburban in Cleveland. For example, the city's major bohemian- oriented shopping street, Coventry Road, is in the suburb of Cleveland Heights, as is the area's major alternative weekly (the Free Times).
In many metropolitan areas, suburban life is not an option but a virtual necessity, because of the absence of decent city neighborhoods or reputable city schools. So by fighting sprawl and preserving cities, conservatives will actually be expanding, rather than limiting, consumer choice.
Sprawl Means Higher Taxes
Over the past two decades, taxes have become a defining issue in American politics, like Vietnam in 1960s or the role of government in the 1930s. Conservatives and Republicans have generally opposed higher taxes; liberals and Democrats have not. As explained below, sprawl is more likely to raise local taxes than to lower them.
Taxes in the cities. Although suburban sprawl is not generally thought of as a tax issue, sprawl in fact means higher taxes and bigger government in city and suburb alike. The reason is that as cities lose middle- class residents and retain the poor, they become poorer. In the metro areas encompassing the 23 American cities that David Rusk (1995) designates as "zero elasticity" cities (that is, cities that have been unable to annex their suburbs and thus lost population), city per capita income is only 66% of suburban per capita income. And in many of these cities, the city-suburb income gap has widened over time. For example, in Buffalo city, income declined from 77% of suburban income in 1979 to 69% in 1989. Some other cities experiencing similar declines include Flint, Michigan (from 84% to 69%), Birmingham, Alabama (from 79% to 69%), St. Louis (from 71% to 67%), Chicago (from 69% to 66%), Saginaw, Michigan (from 81% to 66%), Baltimore (from 68% to 64%), New Haven (from 70% to 62%), Philadelphia (from 72% to 64%), Cleveland (from 63% to 54%), Hartford (from 62% to 53%), Detroit (from 67% to 53%), Trenton (from 65% to 50%), and Newark (from 48% to a stunning 42%).
Common sense dictates that as a city becomes poorer, its tax base will decline, and tax hikes will become more tempting. For example, between 1972 and 1987, Cuyahoga County (Cleveland and its older suburbs) lost $4 billion worth of payroll, whereas Cleveland's newer outer suburbs gained $1.5 billion. And as poverty and deteriorating services drive middle-class people away from cities, property values decline, which diminishes the tax base still further and creates an additional turn in the vicious circle of urban decay. And as a city (and more recently, its inner suburbs) becomes more dominated by poorer voters, its electorate will be more likely to be dominated by liberals and Democrats who will prefer higher taxes to reductions in the size of government. For example, between 1976 and 1996,
In the city of Buffalo, the Republican percentage of the two party presidential vote nosedived from 37% to 17%, a 20 percentage point drop that dwarfed the national 4 point drop in the Republican vote (from 49% to 45%).
In Buffalo's population-losing inner ring suburbs, Republicans suffered comparable drops. For example, the Republican nominee lost 14 points in Lackawanna (from 35% to 21%), Cheektowaga (from 45% to 31%), and West Seneca (50% to 36%), as well as 19 in Tonawanda (from 56% to 37%). By contrast, in Clarence, a still-growing outer suburb, the Republican nominee lost only 8 points (from 64% to 56%).
In the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., the Republicans suffered an 11 point drop (48% to 37%) in the mature suburb of Montgomery County, and only a 4 point drop (50% to 46%) in booming Howard County.
In Philadelphia, the Republicans lost 15 points (from 32% to 17%). The Republicans lost 12 points in Delaware County, a stagnant inner suburb (from 56% to 44%) but only 5 points in booming Chester County (61% to 55%).
In sum, suburban sprawl means that cities and older suburbs will become poorer, which means they have a smaller tax base, which means that (a) their politicians will be more tempted to raise taxes, and (b) their voters will be poorer, more politically liberal, and thus less fiscally conservative.
Taxes in the suburbs. It could be argued that even if city residents face higher taxes from the redistribution of people and jobs caused by sprawl, suburbanites do not. After all, suburbanites live in growing areas with few poor people to make demands on government or elect pro-spending politicians. But even in suburbia, sprawl's impact on the public fisc is as best ambiguous. A fast-growing suburb benefits from a larger residential and commercial tax base but suffers when its new residents demand additional schools and roads to serve them. For example, in rapidly growing Loudoun County near Washington, D.C., the annual tax rate increased by 11% from 1997 to 1998 to pay for new services. Likewise, Prince William County, another high-growth Washington suburb, has the highest real estate tax rate of any county in Virginia. Such tax increases arise from the infrastructure expenses caused by population growth. In Prince William County, for example, schools are so overcrowded with new residents' children that students are crammed into more than 100 classroom trailers. Some suburbs also try to temporarily limit or avoid tax increases by taking on huge debt loads. In Loudoun County, debt payments rose from 3.3% of the county budget in 1990 to more than 10% in 1999. In rapidly expanding Howard County, between Baltimore and Washington, debt nearly tripled from $130 billion to $384 billion from 1987 and 1997. In Montgomery County, Maryland, some areas are fast growing whereas others are shrinking. So to accommodate these population shifts, the county built 70 new schools during the 1980s, while closing 68. Thus, Montgomery County had the worst of both worlds: The money it spent building the now-closed schools was unmasked as a waste, yet the county also had to throw money at new schools.
Some suburban cities and counties try to finance the costs of increased residential development by encouraging increased commercial development. For example, Howard County's planning goals state that commercial development should account for 25% of the county's tax base because those developments provide revenue without adding students to the school system. This strategy, although helpful if it works, is quite risky: Because many commuters wish to live close to work, any increase in commercial development many create a demand for nearby residential development, which in turn, increases the costs of government services. And if a suburb tries to solve this problem by limiting such residential development, workers will have to commute from other suburbs, which in turn, means more traffic congestion, which creates political pressure for more roads, and which means higher spending and higher taxes.
The car tax. In 1995, the average American household spent $5,666 on car-related expenditures: $2,639 on new and used vehicle purchases, $1,006 on gasoline, $261 on finance charges, $653 on maintenance and repair, $713 on car insurance, and $390 on leasing costs, rental costs, and license fees. Households with teenage children must spend even more, because they "need" cars not just for both parents but for every child older than age 16. As explained above, Americans live in areas where autos are a daily necessity not because of free choices made in a free market but because of government policies that have made daily life without a car impossible for many drivers. It logically follows that American auto dependency is an unfunded mandate analogous to the thousands of pages of federal regulations contained in the federal register and that most auto-related spending is a form of indirect taxation just as much as if government enacted a law requiring consumers to spend $5,666 per household on automobiles (a sum equaling two thirds of the mean federal income tax payment). And if auto-related spending is a tax paid by consumers, it further follows that any efforts to reduce auto dependency reduce the burden of government on the American people. Or to put the matter another way, if the average American could avoid having to own a car, he or she would get the equivalent of a 65% income tax cut to save, invest, or spend on other consumer goods.
In sum, sprawl means higher taxes for city and suburbanite alike, plus a continuation of the car tax that squeezes so many American households.
Sprawl and Cultural Conservatism
Suburban sprawl also impairs two values commonly associated with cultural conservatism: social stability and the work ethic.
Sprawl Versus Stability
As Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation has pointed out,
Community is of significant value to most cultural conservatives, for very good reason. Without it, there are few mechanisms to uphold morals and maintain standards of behavior. Traditionally, when most people were part of a community, they behaved for fear of community sanctions. But where there is no community, community sanctions cannot exist.
And for community to exist, there must be stability: Today's stable, safe neighborhoods must be tomorrow's stable, safe neighborhoods, so their residents and their children and grandchildren can build a community rather than being driven out by the next wave of urban decay.
But sprawl creates constant instability: Today's suburbs can quickly become tomorrow's slums. Some of today's poor city neighborhoods were once rich, outlying areas comparable to today's suburbs. For example, in Cleveland, Euclid Avenue was once a street filled with the mansions of industrial-era millionaires (including John D. Rockerfeller's first "trophy house") and is now, in the words of author James Howard Kunstler (1993), a "weed-filled wasteland." (In fact, when I visit in Cleveland I go out of my way to take the Euclid Avenue bus so I can see the ruins of Euclid Avenue.) And in Detroit, 19th-century tycoons built mansions on Woodward Avenue, a street that is now, in Kunstler's words, "something worse than a slum" where the remaining "hopelessly damaged mansions stand in these blocks like inscrutable megaliths in a wilderness of rubble" (p. 190).
In turn, the decline of the oldest, closest-in city neighborhoods has set in motion a chain of events that endangers newer city neighborhoods and even suburbs. As the oldest neighborhoods decay, they become occupied by the poor, and nearby middle-class neighborhoods become uncomfortably close to city slums, which in turn, causes them to become less appealing and eventually decay, which in turn, starts the cycle in another nearby neighborhood. And by using its powers to drain cities of middle-class taxpayers, government has accelerated this cycle.
So in recent decades, urban decay has spread out beyond the central city line. The poorest suburban municipalities near cities as varied as Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, and Miami have murder rates far higher than those of the big cities themselves. For example, in 1998, Highland Park, Michigan, had 91 murders per 100,000 people (more than twice as many as nearby Detroit) and 1,117 robberies per 100,000 people (more than 30% more than Detroit). Similarly, Compton, California, had 51 murders per 100,000 people, more than four times as many as nearby Los Angeles. Although these municipalities are extreme cases, city crime has frequently spread to other inner ring suburbs. In 1991, for instance, nine of Chicago's suburbs had higher crime rates than the city of Chicago.
And even where suburbs are not quite as dangerous as nearby cities, they are often in decline. For example, most of Cleveland's inner ring suburbs have experienced dramatic declines in household income relative to other suburbs. In Cleveland's poorest inner ring suburb, East Cleveland, household income declined from 77% of the metro area mean in 1970 to 57% in 1990. Other suburbs experiencing similar declines include Bedford (101% to 87%), Bedford Heights (106% to 84%), Brooklyn (109% to 81%), Brook Park (127% to 101%), Euclid (101% to 82%), Fairview Park (136% to 113%), Garfield Heights (100% to 82%), Lakewood (99% to 93%), Maple Heights (103% to 85%), Mayfield Heights (103% to 85%), Middleburg Heights (138% to 114%), North Olmsted (124% to 115%), Parma (111% to 96%), Parma Heights (114% to 89%), Seven Hills (148% to 121%), South Euclid (117% to 106%), and Warrensville Heights (104% to 84%). All but two of these suburbs lost population during the 1990s, as did all of Cuyahoga County (which includes 77 square miles within the city of Cleveland and 381 square miles of suburbia), not because metro Cleveland as a whole lost population but because "outer counties" such as Geauga, Lake, and Medina Counties sucked away middle-class Clevelanders. In fact, Cleveland's decay is not limited to the inner ring of suburbs (that is, those suburbs that are contiguous to the city). Of the declining suburbs listed above, several (Bedford, Bedford Heights, Parma Heights, Middleburg Heights, Seven Hills, South Euclid, and North Olmsted) are second ring suburbs: They border inner ring suburbs but not Cleveland itself. Mayfield Heights is a third ring suburb: It does not border either Cleveland, nor does it border any of the inner ring suburbs.
Cleveland is not alone; suburbs in other metro areas, especially slow-growth areas in the Midwest and Northeast, are experiencing similar problems. The major inner ring suburbs of Rust Belt cities such as Buffalo, St. Louis, and Chicago lost population during the 1990s. The Jewish community may present a classic example of how suburban sprawl destroys traditional values.
The Jewish community has traditionally been even more footloose than other ethnic groups, moving up and out every generation. For example, in Buffalo, most of the Jewish community originally lived in the East Side of the city, near downtown, and near the East Side's African American population. Almost a dozen synagogues stood in the area by 1920 (about as many as can now be found in the entire Buffalo metropolitan area), and even now, one can occasionally see barely legible Jewish names on storefronts that are now boarded up or owned by African Americans. Over the next few decades, the Jewish community abandoned the East Side for North Buffalo, a city neighborhood several miles north of downtown. And in the past few decades, most Buffalo-area Jews have moved to Amherst, a northern suburb. In the 1950s, virtually the entire Jewish community of Cleveland moved to the inner ring suburbs of Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights; in the 1980s and 1990s, Jews have begun to abandon these racially integrated suburbs for relatively lily-white outer suburbs such as Beachwood and Solon. Similarly, in my parents' lifetime, the center of the Jewish community has moved from now-depopulated areas near downtown Atlanta to the Morningside neighborhood northeast of downtown to the city's northern suburbs, where a child has to be driven just to meet his or her neighbors.
As Jews have moved every generation, the once-tight bonds of Jewish community have frayed. In greater numbers every generation, Jews marry non-Jews and abandon their faith. As late as 1968, Albert Vorspan, director of the Commission on Social Action of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (an association of Reform Jewish synagogues) wrote, "Many more Jews are marrying out of the faith than anybody had realized" because about 20% of all marriages involving Jews were mixed marriages. By contrast, today, among the generation of Jews who mostly grew up in suburbia, as many as half of Jews marry non-Jews, most offspring of mixed marriages are non-Jewish, and the future of American Judaism is thus in doubt. It cannot be proven that suburban life causes intermarriage, but common sense dictates that if children grow up in areas (even disproportionately Jewish areas) that require them to be driven almost everywhere, they will have weaker ties with their Jewish neighbors than if they grew up in a traditional urban neighborhood, especially if that suburb is likely to be deserted by the time they grow up. It further follows that those Jewish neighbors will therefore be less likely to grow up to be Jewish wives and husbands, and their ties to a geographically defined community will vanish. In such a situation, it is certainly possible for a single person to go out of his or her way to associate with Jews and to become part of the Jewish community, but it will take the kind of effort that will deter all but the most motivated, and as with the Jews, so with every other type of community.
In sum, suburban sprawl, like the French Revolution, devours its own children. Sprawl creates inner ring suburbs, only to destroy them a few decades later by creating outer suburbs to skim off their elites. So as long as sprawl is the status quo, no community is truly safe from the ravages of neighborhood decay, and no stable community can long endure.
Sprawl Versus Work
Conservatives tend to believe that people should be independent and work for a living rather than relying on government for handouts. For example, it took a Republican Congress to enact the welfare reform bill that limited the amount of time anyone can spend on welfare.
But sprawl punishes work and rewards welfare dependency: Thanks to suburban sprawl, most low-skill jobs are located in areas that are inaccessible by public transportation or nearly so. For example, in small cities such as Macon, many jobs are inaccessible without a car either because the public transportation system does not reach major employers or because the buses stop running early in the evening. And even in the relatively transit-friendly Boston metropolitan area, just 32% of entry-level employers are within 1/4 mile of transit, 43% are within 1/2 mile, and 58% are within 1 mile. Just 14% of entry-level jobs can be reached by transit within an hour from Boston's poorer neighborhoods. So to get off welfare and get a job, a welfare recipient often needs a car that she probably cannot afford (otherwise she would not be on welfare in the first place). The recipient may be stuck in a vicious cycle: She needs the car to get a job, but she cannot get a job unless she has a car first. Thus, the dispersion of employment opportunities caused by sprawl frustrates welfare reform and encourages welfare dependency.
Even if one assumes that the welfare recipient could somehow obtain a car, the costs of auto ownership encourage welfare dependency or even crime at the margins. For example, suppose that welfare recipient A can earn $700 a month on welfare (by engaging in some illicit activity, or through a combination of the two) and $900 after taxes at work but would have to spend $250 a month on a car if she gets a job. On balance, A would be better off on welfare because the cost of a car reduces her overall pay to $650 ($900 in wages minus $250 in auto expenses). Thus, the auto dependency caused by sprawl discourages work and has helped to turn the uneducated but law-abiding and hard-working working class of the 1940s to the uneducated, lawless underclass of the past few decades.
What Conservatives Can Do About Sprawl
Conservative hostility to anti-sprawl measures exists for a good reason: When environmentalists propose to fight sprawl, their remedies often involve a bigger, more intrusive government. For example, in his first major "anti-sprawl" speech, Vice President Gore endorsed $700 million in newtax credits to entice state and local governments to issue bonds to "build more livable communities," $6.1 billion in public transit spending, $1.6 billion for "state and local efforts to reduce air pollution and ease traffic congestion," and a $50 million "Regional Connections initiative." At the state level, environmentalists have often endorsed regulating land use and development more intensely, rather than trusting the market. Conservatives should learn, however, that even if they must agree to disagree with environmentalists on some fiscal and regulatory issues, they can still fight sprawl in other ways consistent with conservative values.
For example, conservatives can focus on (a) eliminating highway spending that encourages sprawl, (b) breaking the link between residence and schooling, so that families can live in cities without being trapped in crumbling urban schools, and (c) limiting sprawl by reducing rather than increasing government regulation of land use and property rights.
No New Roads
If state and federal policy caused our urban crisis, the logical solution is to stop the policies that led to the crisis. Because highway spending has been a major cause of suburban sprawl, we can take a significant bite out of both sprawl and big government by eliminating sprawl-generating highway spending.
Specifically, the state and federal governments should prohibit the use of their funds to build or widen roads in or near suburban areas. Because highway spending totaled $77 billion in 1995, such a "paving moratorium" would give taxpayers a significant break (including, ironically, drivers, whose fuel taxes pay for more than half of government highway spending). A paving moratorium would not prevent settlement in existing suburbs but would prevent government from creating new suburbs by building more highways and thus would prevent government from turning today's suburbs into deserted slums.
Government justifies new and widened roads on the ground that more roads, not fewer, are needed to deal with traffic congestion. But the claim that new roads eliminate congestion is at best speculative and at worst laughable. I concede for the sake of argument that if new and widened roads did not affect development patterns, a new or widened road might reduce traffic congestion. But in reality, highway building affects where people live and work. If government builds highway X to suburb Y, homeowners and businesses will soon move to subdivisions near X's interchanges, thereby increasing traffic along the interchanges. Thus, new suburban highways typically fill up with cars almost from the moment the ribbon is cut. Even people and groups generally identified as pro-sprawl admit as much. As Joel Garreau (1991) of the Washington Post has written, "The more capacity you add, the more likely you are to make the place more popular . . . creating more traffic" (p. 128). Garreau is hardly an anti-sprawl activist; for example, he has described the status quo as the "manifest pattern of millions of individual American desires over seventy-five years." Similarly, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) conducted a survey that reveals that highway access would influence 55% of respondents to move to a new community, more than any other community. By suggesting that highways encourage movement to areas with highway access, the NAHB has effectively conceded that highways shift development to suburbs (thus making those suburbs more rather than less congested). Similarly, Alan Sipress (1999) of the Washington Post apparently defends sprawl-induced traffic, claiming that unspecified "researchers agreed that building roads can still be crucial for fostering economic development, even if the potential for easing congestion is limited" (p. B1), in otherwords, that road building is good because it promotes sprawl (a.k.a. "economic development") even if it does not stop congestion.
Numerous studies have documented that "induced traffic" eliminates some or all of the reduction of congestion caused by new roads and road widenings. For example, Mark Hansen, a professor of transportation engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, used statewide California statistics in concluding that new road capacity is almost entirely offset by induced traffic within five years. He found that a 10% increase in capacity leads to a 9% increase in miles driven. A study conducted by Robert B. Noland, a former transportation analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency, similarly found that a 10% expansion in roads produced a 2.8% rise in travel more than 2 to 4 years. In fact, studies such as Hansen's dramatically overestimate the benefits of new roads by failing to account for the long-run changes in development plans caused by new and widened roads.
For example, in 1991 Montgomery County, Maryland (a suburb of Washington) widened Interstate 270 to as many as 12 lanes to reduce traffic congestion. According to Sidney Kramer, Montgomery County executive from 1986 to 1990, "You saw a tide of development go forward because of that improvement." One of the high-growth suburbs created by the I-270 widening, Germantown, Maryland, grew from just more than 41,000 people in 1980 to 70,000 people in 1998. In turn, the growth of Germantown and nearby suburbs caused traffic to increase. In fact, traffic along I-270 has surpassed the levels state highway planners forecast for 2010 in their 1984 study of the proposed widening. The Maryland highway department reported that the 1997 volume at Route 28 in Rockville was 193,000 vehicles per day-2,000 more than the 2010 projection. According to David Palank, an area real estate broker, "With all the lanes that are there, it just doesn't seem to be moving that quickly. . . . I haven't found any relief at any time. It seems like it was congested and continues to be congested."
If I-270 were an aberration, areas that increased road space would have experienced a reduction in congestion during the 1990s, or at least less congestion than areas that did less road building. But recent studies show otherwise. The Hartford, Connecticut, and Providence, Rhode Island, areas experienced similar population growth (13% and 9%, respectively) over the past two decades. But Hartford actually reduced its road capacity, whereas Providence increased its road mileage by 59%. If road-building reduced congestion, Providence would have far less congestion than Hartford. But a study by the Texas Transportation Institute revealed that the two areas had similar levels of traffic growth and traffic congestion. In 1997, the cost of congestion per eligible driver was $390 in Hartford and $360 in Providence (Numbers 49 and 50 of 68 areas surveyed). Rush-hour congestion increased by 200% in Hartford and 225% in Providence between 1982 and 1997. Annual delay per driver increased by 283% in Hartford and 320% in Providence between 1982 and 1997. In other words, Providence built far more roads, yet congestion increased by slightly more in Providence.
The correlation between free-flowing traffic and free-spending road builders is equally weak in fast-growing metro areas. For example, Charlotte and Fresno had comparable population growth rates (64% and 57%). But Charlotte increased its highway mileage by 113%, whereas Fresno's road-building lagged behind its population growth (with only a 27% increase). Charlotte's congestion cost $680 per driver, whereas Fresno's cost only $315. Annual delay per driver increased by 356% in Charlotte and only 171% in Fresno, whereas peak hour congestion increased by 229% in Charlotte and 225% in Fresno.
In sum, both common sense and actual experience lead to the experience that suburban road building creates sprawl without mitigating congestion. Thus, continued road widening and road building is nothing more than a boondoggle.
Ending the School Crisis
In recent decades, middle-class families have fled cities to avoid public school systems full of low-achieving students from low-income families. As explained above, a "bad" school (one with a low reputation) is typically bad not because of its teachers, its school board, or its principal but because of its disadvantaged student body. It logically follows that even if government can improve poverty-packed urban schools slightly by spending more, raising expectations, or other reforms, it probably can never make such schools as attractive to middle-class families as suburban schools filled with middle-class children. It logically follows that if government wishes to stop driving middle-class families out of cities, it must stop forcing parents to choose between middle-class schools and city living. The most market-oriented remedy for the urban education crisis (other than the complete abolition of government-funded education in city and suburb alike) is the policy commonly known as the voucher system.
Vouchers
The obvious remedy for government's anti-urban education policy is a voucher system. Under a voucher system, children can obtain free, or partially free, education in private or suburban schools regardless of their mailing address. Under a voucher system, the government provides parents with a voucher or chit (analogous to food stamps) to pay for the child's education at the school of their choice. The parents then give the voucher to the school officials when the child is enrolled. The school then returns the voucher to the government, which in turn, sends the school a predetermined amount of publicly raised tax dollars. The purest form of voucher system would require the government to pay for a student's education in any public or private school that accepts the student. Less radical voucher plans might require the government to pay only part of a student's private school tuition, just as college students obtain tuition assistance through government- backed loans and grants.
Any form of voucher program (other than one limited to the poor) would discourage middle-class flight by ensuring that parents could live in the city and send their children to private or suburban schools. Such a plan would also encourage residential desegregation because some parents unwilling to send their children to poverty-stricken city schools might be willing to live in diverse neighborhoods or at least live in the same jurisdiction as diverse neighborhoods.
Some criticize the voucher system as a repudiation of the American ideal of the "common school" where children of different backgrounds cross paths and learn about one another. In pre-suburban America, this argument might have had some relevance to reality. But in major metropolitan areas, the common school concept has been assassinated by sprawl: Middle-class families live in middle-class suburbs with homogeneously middle-class schools, whereas poor families live in cities or poor suburbs with homogeneously poor schools. By contrast, a voucher system will increase children's exposure to diversity by enabling parents to live in or near diverse neighborhoods without sending their children to widely feared urban schools. For example, suppose Mr. and Mrs. X are willing to expose their children to city life but fear city schools. Under today's educational system, when the X children reach school age, they would reluctantly leave the city to avoid city schools. Under the voucher system, Mr. and Mrs. X would be able to live in a diverse city neighborhood and send their children to the same schools that their children would attend if they lived in suburbia.
A related argument is that competition between city schools and private schools would be "unfair," because private schools could exclude the least desirable students, such as disabled students and those from low-income households. This argument is beside the point, because suburban schools can also exclude some of the least desirable students by using zoning and the resulting high property values to exclude low-income households whose children are more likely to be slow learners. Whether upper middle-class children go to exclusive urban schools or exclusive suburban schools, those schools will be segregated by class and/or ability: But under the status quo, this segregation creates the additional evil of urban decay. In other words, the status quo equals segregation plus sprawl, but vouchers would at worst create segregation minus sprawl. Because two social evils are worse than one, the voucher system is obviously preferable to the status quo.
Voucher critics predict that an increased demand for private schools might cause private schools to raise tuition and make vouchers so fiscally impractical as to make private schools financially unaffordable and that vouchers will naturally lead to government over-regulation of private schools. These arguments overlook the fact that the United States already has a modified voucher system at the college and university level: the intricate web of grants and loans that help Americans attend college. If vouchers reduced access to college or made colleges worse, America's college and university system would be smaller to and inferior to that of other countries. In fact, Americans attend college in greater numbers than citizens of other affluent countries, and our university system, far from being burdened by government regulation, is so superior that in 1995, 23,276 foreign students came to American universities to learn. Thus, vouchers have worked well at the university level and accordingly should be provided for younger students.
Another common anti-voucher argument is that vouchers violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment by subsidizing church-run schools. As long as vouchers subsidize both religious and secular private schools, this argument borders on the frivolous, because under the First Amendment, government need only treat religion and irreligion equally rather than favoring the latter. A modified version of this "church/state" argument (recently endorsed by a federal judge in Cleveland in the case of Simmons-Harris v. Zelman [1999]) is that in areas in which most private schools are religious, a voucher system would favor religious schools so heavily as to effectively favor religion over irreligion. This argument rests on the assumption that vouchers will not change the size of the private school market: an assumption that may make sense when (as in the Cleveland program) vouchers aid only a small number of students but not when vouchers would affect every student in a city. If, thanks to government aid, millions of consumers entered the market for private schools, new secular private schools would probably spring up to meet this demand, just as developers built homes to satisfy the demand for suburbia created by government-funded highways.
To give governments a chance to evaluate the validity of opponents' concerns, any voucher plan that includes private schools should be limited to the group that needs vouchers most, residents of cities where the school system drives out the middle class. Thus, a state or federal voucher plan might give vouchers only to residents of cities above a certain size that had lost population in recent decades. If the voucher system worked as intended, governments could follow up by expanding vouchers to all children.
Vouchers Lite
A less radical plan would be a "public schools only" voucher plan. Under such as system, the federal or state government could radically expand consumer choice by enacting the following statute: "No publicly funded elementary or secondary school receiving state [or federal, depending on who enacted the statute] shall discriminate in its admissions on the basis of residence." Under a "public schools only" voucher plan, parents would be free to send their children to suburban or urban schools, no matter where they lived. This plan would increase individual freedom without creating the practical, constitutional, and fiscal difficulties of a voucher system that included private schools. However, a "public schools only" voucher plan would do less to combat sprawl than a pure voucher plan, because parents with children in suburban schools might be tempted to move to suburbs to reduce their commutes to suburban schools.
No More Coercive Zoning
As explained above, traditional, walkable neighborhoods have been outlawed in most of suburban America, thanks to dictatorial zoning laws. Under zoning laws, a command-and-control bureaucracy, aided and abetted by suburbanites who wish to use government to limit their neighbors' property rights, dictates that almost nothing may be within walking distance of anything else, that commercial streets must be built for the happiness of cars rather than people, and that densities must be lower than a free market could tolerate.
One remedy to this policy might be the complete abolition of zoning laws (excepting perhaps restrictions on pollution-spewing industrial sites). The abolition of zoning would maximize individual freedom and reduce housing costs by allowing developers and homeowners to build as they please, without any interference from government. On the other hand, the abolition of zoning would eliminate sprawl-limiting ordinances (such as those limiting development in newer suburbs) as well as sprawl-creating ordinances.
A narrower (and thus more politically feasible) remedy to zoning-generated sprawl would be a developer's bill of rights, which would target zoning laws that most directly encouraged sprawl. Such a statute would limit localities' zoning powers by eliminating many of the most onerous sprawl-creating zoning restrictions.
First, states should outlaw government-imposed minimum lot sizes, yard sizes, house sizes, or setbacks (that is, the distance between a house and the street). Where lots, yards, and setbacks are humongous, houses are so far from each other that their occupants cannot walk from one house to shopping or even other houses. If people want to live in such an environment, they have a right to, but there is no reason why government should force them to by ordering developers to create unwalkable subdivisions.
Second, states should outlaw municipal restrictions on residential development in commercial zones and allow some retail development in apartment buildings and other residential areas. Under the status quo of single use zoning, suburbanites who would like to walk to work or to shopping often cannot do so, because the dead hand of government prohibits would-be landlords from building or renting apartments in commercial zones. By contrast, if shop owners or office park developers were consistently allowed to rent surplus space to residential tenants, more Americans would be able to walk to work, shopping, and other opportunities. Similarly, states could allow some commerce in residential areas while preserving their residential nature by allowing retail development in residential zones up to a certain percentage of a subdivision's or apartment building's square footage (up to, say, 10%) so that homeowners could walk to some amenities without having their neighborhoods completely transformed.
Third, duplex homes and apartments should be permitted by law in all residential construction. If a homeowner wants to rent out his basement, he should be allowed to do so. Restrictions on rental use of homeowners' property are far more intrusive than similar restrictions on commercial use and increase auto dependency by artificially reducing population density.
Fourth, municipalities should be required to permit home offices and telecommuting not involving show windows or exterior display advertising. Just as Americans should be allowed to walk to work, they should be allowed to work at home.
Fifth, states should preclude municipalities from discriminating among permitted structures (such as apartments and homes) on the basis of the number of housing units contained therein or on the basis of form of ownership (e.g., homes vs. condominiums vs. rentals). In other words, if developer A wants to build an apartment building on its own property in suburb X, it should not be prevented from doing so merely because a vocal minority (or even a vocal majority) of X's residents do not like apartment buildings. Such a statute will not preclude the market from making such distinctions; there will always be significant separation of income classes that depending on consumers' choices, may be related to population density. However, the market should be allowed to make less land-consuming forms of development available.
Sixth, municipalities should not be allowed to require more free parking than the market would dictate. If a business believes it will benefit by encouraging customers to park for free rather than parking on the street, it will build free parking without government encouragement. This rule prevents government from subsidizing drivers by artificially increasing the supply of free parking and makes streets more pedestrian- accessible by encouraging on-street parking (which buffers pedestrians from traffic).
As a rule, metro areas with few zoning restrictions have cheaper housing. For example, Houston has no zoning at all and is far more affordable than other cities of comparable size. It logically follows that in addition to making American cities and suburbs more walkable and increasing property owners' freedom, zoning deregulation would have one other beneficial side effect: increasing the supply of low-rent, affordable housing, and thereby limiting the demand for public housing (which as explained above, has turned cities into dumping grounds for the poor).
Conclusion
Suburban sprawl is not an invention of environmental extremists but a serious problem that conservatives can and should solve. Sprawl exists in large part because of government policies favoring suburbia and forcing auto dependence and can be at least partially remedied by policies that make government smaller and less intrusive. More important, sprawl offends values that conservatives should care about, such as consumer choice, because when an American family moves to a suburb because they feel that they have to do so to educate their children decently or buys an extra car because they think they cannot live without one, we are all a little less free.
References
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
Garreau, J. (1991). Edge city: Life on the new frontier. Washington Post, p. 128 Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, 391 U.S. 430 (1968).
Jencks, C. (1972). Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America. New York: Basic Books.
Kunstler, J. H. (1993). The geography of nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape. New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster.
Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974). Hayward, S. (1999, March 22). Suburban legends. National Review, pp. 35-38.
Postrel,V. (1999, March). The Pleasantville solution. Reason, p. 4. Rusk, D. (1995). Cities without suburbs. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press.
Sipress, A. (1999, January 4). Widen the roads, the drivers will come. Washington Post, p. B1. Simmons-Harris v. Zelman, 54 F. Supp. 2d 725 (N.D. Ohio 1999). Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 (1971).
Traub, J. (2000, June 16). What no school can do. The New York Times, p. 52.
Utt, R. D. (2000, January 20). Cities and suburbs [Online]. Available: http://www.heritage.org/issues/chap13.html
Michael Lewyn is an associate professor at John Marshall Law School, Atlanta, GA.
Back to the Walkable Streets home page.
Michael Lewyn, John Marshall Law School
Once upon a time, city was not a dirty word in America. Between 1900 and 1950, every American city of any size gained population. But over the past several decades, metropolitan America has been transformed by "suburban sprawl"-the movement of people (especially middle-class families) and jobs from older urban cores to newer, less densely populated, more automobile-dependent communities generally referred to as suburbs. At the end of World War II, roughly 70% of metropolitan Americans lived in central cities. But within four decades, that figure had dropped to less than 40%. Some cities have been devastated by sprawl: For example, St. Louis has lost 60% of its people since 1950, whereas Buffalo and Cleveland have lost more than 45% of their people. The cities that have gained population have done so either by being hubs for immigration from other countries (such as New York and Los Angeles) or by annexing newly developed areas that would be considered suburbs in other cities (such as Indianapolis and Charlotte). As cities have become smaller, they have become poorer. In 1960, central cities contained one third of America's poor people; by 1990, the central city share had climbed to one half, and 31 of America's 37 largest cities had poverty rates above the national average.
In recent years, Vice President Gore and numerous other commentators (especially within the environmental movement) have criticized suburban sprawl. For example, Gore complains that because of sprawl, "resources are siphoned away from older communities to build ever more distant new amenities in new communities." Meanwhile, in newer communities, mandatory auto ownership "means working families must sink thousands of dollars into extra commuting costs, when they may want the choice of devoting those funds to a year of state college." Many such suburbs
have no sidewalks, and no place to walk to, which is bad for public safety as well as for our nation's physical health. It has become impossible in such settings for neighbors to greet one another on the street, or for kids to walk to their own nearby schools. A gallon of gas can be used up just driving to get a gallon of milk. All of these add up to more stress for already overstressed family lives.
In the political arena, the battle over sprawl appears to be turning into a battle between environmentalists and conservatives. Environmentalists focus on the environmental costs of sprawl and endorse more extensive government regulation of land use. Conservatives and libertarians often deny that sprawl is a problem at all and pretend that sprawl merely fulfills consumer desires. For example, Steven Hayward of the Pacific Research Institute writes in National Review (one of the more prestigious conservative magazines), "The threat of sprawl is vastly overblown" and that sprawl opponents believe that "commuting suburbanites are making unenlightened lifestyle choices because they lack the expert supervision that only their betters in government can provide." Similarly, Virginia Postrel, editor of Reason (a conservative magazine with a libertarian bent) asserts, "The anti-sprawl campaign is about telling Americans how they should live and work, about sacrificing individuals' values to the values of their politically powerful betters" (p. 4). The conventional conservative wisdom, as of early 2000, seems to be that
sprawl is merely the result of the free market at work,
therefore conservatives need not oppose sprawl, and
even if sprawl is somehow problematic, it cannot be limited without implementation of the liberal or environmentalist agenda of larger and more intrusive government.
This article rejects all three assumptions. Specifically, I argue that
sprawl is in fact a result of runaway statism rather than the free market;
conservatives should fight sprawl as a threat to conservative values such as limited government, freedom, the work ethic and social stability; and
conservative, free-market solutions can limit if not eliminate sprawl.
Background: How Statism Created Sprawl
As noted above, many conservatives believe that sprawl is merely the free market at work. But in fact, sprawl is as statist as the other government policies that conservatives commonly attack. For example, conservatives often criticize Aid to Families with Dependent Children and similar programs on the ground that by aiding unwed, nonworking mothers, such programs encourage idleness and illegitimacy. In urban policy as in welfare policy, government at all levels has steered private conduct through a complicated mix of rewards and penalties: in the former area, by favoring suburban sprawl at the expense of cities, in the latter area, by favoring illegitimacy and idleness at the expense of marriage.
Government's pro-suburban bias has been especially blatant in three areas: housing policy, transportation policy, and education policy. In addition, government has made suburbia more sprawling and auto-dependent than a free market would dictate.
Housing: Turning America Into Sprawl Land
Federal housing policy has moved middle-class families out of cities both by subsidizing migration to suburbs and by making cities unlivable.
Paying Americans to Move to Suburbs
As early as the 1930s, the federal government was taking its first small steps toward turning our once-great cities into depopulated wastelands. The federal war against urban America began in earnest with the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage insurance program.
Before the New Deal, the home mortgage system was based on down payments as high as 50% and terms as short as 5 years, a system that worked well in good times but led to massive defaults during the Great Depression. To protect homeowners and home sellers, the FHA has insured long-term, low-down payment mortgages against default since 1934.
As a rule, FHA guaranteed home loans only in low-risk areas. FHA guidelines defined low-risk areas as areas that were thinly populated, dominated by newer homes, and had no African American or immigrant enclaves nearby, areas that disproportionately tended to be suburban. For example, one FHA underwriting manual taught that the FHA should concentrate its efforts on newer, lower density areas because "crowded neighborhoods lessen desirability" and that "older properties in a neighborhood have a tendency to accelerate the transition to lower class occupancy." Other government agencies "redlined" cities by issuing maps placing metropolitan neighborhoods in various categories, from "green" (the most desirable) to "red" ("high-risk" neighborhoods where the federal government would not insure mortgages).
FHA policies also favored new construction over renovation of existing homes. FHA loans for repair were smaller than loans for the purchase of new homes, so a family could more easily purchase a new home than modernize an old home. Because the newest suburbs tend to have the newest homes, this criterion also favored suburbs.
As a result of the FHA's biases, the FHA generally insured suburban mortgages while refusing to insure urban mortgages. For example, residents of suburban St. Louis County received five times as much FHA insurance as residents of the city of St. Louis. Thus, a White home buyer who wished to stay in his old neighborhood had to seek conventional mortgages with higher down payments and shorter terms, whereas the same purchaser, by the simple act of buying a new house in the suburbs, could get a cheaper FHA-insured mortgage. In other words, the FHA essentially bribed middle-class homebuyers to move to the suburbs. FHA lending policies were based on a self-fulfilling prophecy: The FHA claimed that it could not insure urban mortgages because cities were doomed and then made sure that this was the case by luring middle-class homeowners away from the cities.
Turning Cities Into Dumping Grounds
While the federal government was bribing middle- class homeowners to leave cities, it was bribing the poor to stay in cities. In 1937, the federal government began to fund local housing authorities to provide housing for the poor. The housing laws provided that any city desiring public housing had to create a municipal housing authority. At that time, cities encompassed rich and poor alike, so that they had a strong incentive to create housing agencies. By contrast, economically homogenous rural areas and suburbs were able to (and did) avoid public housing by refusing to create housing authorities. As a result, public housing became concentrated in cities.
Often, public housing projects are magnets for crime and disorder. For example, Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes contain only one half of 1% of that city's population but account for 11% of the city's murders. Similarly, a 1993 study found that crime in the Los Angeles housing projects was three times greater than crime rates in surrounding high-crime neighborhoods. Because public housing projects are such undesirable neighbors, the concentration of public housing in cities makes city neighborhoods less desirable to anyone who can afford to move. And by declining to place public housing in suburbs, the federal government has given suburbs a huge competitive advantage over cities.
Astoundingly, the federal government encouraged cities to destroy functional neighborhoods to build these dens of crime and vice. The Housing Act of 1949 gave mayors broad powers to condemn huge chunks of land in the name of "urban renewal." And many did exactly that. For example, in Buffalo Mayor Frank Sedita destroyed a stable Italian neighborhood near downtown Buffalo to build the Shoreline housing project, which according to local entrepreneur Mark Goldman, "resembles a trailer park plunked arbitrarily in the heart of the city."
While keeping the poor locked up in cities, the federal government helped lock the poor out of suburbs. In the 1920s, the federal Department of Commerce drafted the State Zoning Enabling Act (SZEA). SZEA, which was quickly enacted by the states, granted municipalities power to regulate the location and use of buildings. Suburbs quickly used their zoning powers to keep out the poor. For example, suburban zoning laws frequently ban apartment construction to keep out "undesirables," or they require minimum lot sizes to keep out less expensive homes. Just as government keeps the poor in cities, it keeps the poor out of suburbs. Either way, cities become the dumping ground for the poor.
Transportation: Putting Suburbs First
Statist transportation policy, like statist housing policy, has consistently favored suburban migration. For most of the 20th century, a major priority of all levels of government was to build roads. By doing so, the government destroyed urban neighborhoods both directly (through physical destruction of cities) and indirectly (by using roads to drain cities of their middle- class tax base).
How Government Put Roads First
Early in the 20th century, state and federal governments began to build new roads. Governments could have levied user fees to reimburse local treasuries for the costs of streets, traffic maintenance, and police services but instead chose to subsidize drivers by relying on general taxation. Thus, the government essentially taxed streetcar users to support drivers. By contrast, streetcar services were typically private and unsubsidized. As a result, aging streetcar equipment and reduced services were accompanied by falling ridership.
In 1921, the federal government began to support highway building, by enacting a Federal Road Act that designated 200,000 miles of road as eligible for federal matching funds and by creating a Bureau of Public Roads to plan an interstate highway system. By that date, government at all levels (federal, state, and local) was pouring $1.4 billion into highways. (By contrast, most transit systems were privately owned, received no government assistance, and paid taxes to support the highway system.)
Because local governments controlled streetcar fares, the transit industry was unable to raise fares to fund improved equipment and service. Meanwhile, government largess to the highways grew. By 1940, government spent $2.7 billion on highways. By contrast, at that time, the total operating costs of all transit systems (except commuter rail) were $661 million, mostly private rather than government spending.
In the postwar years, government intervention on behalf of highways accelerated. In 1950, government put $4.6 billion into highways and virtually nothing into transit. And in 1954, President Eisenhower appointed a committee on highways chaired by Lucius Clay, a member of the General Motors board of directors. Not surprisingly, the committee endorsed a massive highway spending scheme. That scheme was enacted into law as the 1956 Interstate Highway Act. The interstate system was financed by a "trust fund" supported by revenue from federal gasoline taxes. Under the provision of the 1956 Act, these funds were available only for highways: The federal government paid 90% of the cost for the new roads, whereas state and local governments paid only 10%. Eventually, the 1956 Act created a 41,000-mile Interstate Highway System. By contrast, the federal government did not begin to subsidize public transit until 1962, and today, federal road spending exceeds transit spending by a margin of more than 5 to 1.
Henry Ford, one of America's first auto magnates, summed up the relationship between the highway and the city when he stated, "We shall solve the city problem by leaving the city." Government's obsession with road building has created sprawl in two ways: by the physical destruction of city neighborhoods and by making suburban life more convenient.
How Roads Destroyed Cities
During the first decade of Interstate construction, 335,000 homes were razed, and urban highways physically destroyed African American communities in the South Bronx, Nashville, Austin, Los Angeles, Durham, and nearly every other medium-sized or large American city. Even neighborhoods not destroyed by highways have been damaged by them. For example, in the 1950s, the federal government ruined the Treme section of New Orleans, one of the city's oldest African American neighborhoods, to build the I-10 expressway. The community's main street was Claiborne Avenue, which boasted 200 businesses in its heyday and had a 6100-foot-long median. The Louisiana Highway Department built I-10 on that street because it was considered the most direct path from the central business district to eastern New Orleans. With the construction of the interstate, the street's median became a strip of dirt, covered with a concrete roof 100-feet wide and 25-feet overhead. I-10 became a physical barrier that cut the neighborhood in half, and Claiborne Avenue's oak trees were replaced with concrete pillars. Not surprisingly, Treme became a crime-filled slum. Thus, the government had destroyed Treme to provide an escape route to the suburbs.
Indeed, even the threat of a new highway sometimes destroyed urban neighborhoods: Throughout the 1960s, Buffalo planners debated a city highway known as the West Side Arterial, that (if built) would have destroyed much of the Lower West Side of Buffalo. Banks, insurance companies, and government agencies were unwilling to invest in a neighborhood destined for condemnation. For example, when in 1971 the Niagara Frontier Housing Development Corporation applied to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development for a grant to rehabilitate Lower West Side dwellings, its application was denied because according to HUD, "The project is in the probable roadway corridor of the proposed West Side Arterial." Not surprisingly, homeowners took the hint and left the neighborhood. In 1960, a total of 1,900 families attended Immaculate Conception Church in the neighborhood. By 1973, only 500 were left.
How Roads Built Up the Suburbs
Highways enabled people to live farther away from downtown jobs by giving commuters easy access to central business districts from once-distant suburbs. Thus, highways create residential development in suburbs near highway exits. And where highway-driven residential development goes, commercial development inevitably follows, as retail businesses move to a suburb to serve its new residents, and the new residents in turn move their businesses to suburbia to reduce their commutes.
For example, Washington's Capital Beltway, a 66-mile long highway surrounding the city, was designed to allow East Coast motorists to bypass the city. But instead, the Beltway became a magnet for office and retail centers that sprouted near Beltway exits, such as Tyson's Corner, a satellite downtown in Fairfax County, Virginia. And as suburbs grew more populated, they grew more congested, which caused politicians to build even more suburban roads (ostensibly to relieve congestion). A study by the Surface Transportation Policy Project showed that each of the 50 largest metro areas in America added new road capacity in the 1980s and 1990s. For example, the number of roadway miles in the Atlanta, Georgia area have grown by 78% since 1982; yet, Atlanta is sixth in the nation in rush-hour congestion, and the Georgia Department of Transportation plans to spend $11 billion over the next 25 years to build and widen 310 new roads.
Some deny that highways cause sprawl. For example, real estate developer Ronald Utt (2000), in a paper published by the Heritage Foundation, argues that the interstate highways did not cause sprawl because "Suburbanization was well underway in 1960, when the federal interstate highway program had been in existence for just four years." This assertion does not prove that highways are unrelated to sprawl, because even if suburbanization was "well underway by 1960," it would not prove that highways are unrelated to sprawl, because the federal government's pro-highway policies had been in effect long before the interstate highway system was created. Moreover, Utt's assertion is factually incorrect, because American cities' most stunning setbacks occurred after 1960. Of the 17 American cities that had more than 500,000 people in 1950, every single one gained population between 1930 and 1950. By contrast, in the 1950s, 13 of the cities lost population, and 2 lost more than 10% of their population. In the 1960s, 14 lost population, and 5 lost more than 10%. And in the disastrous 1970s, 15 lost population, and 13 lost more than 10%. In other words, the sprawl that went along with the interstate system snowballed as interstates were built during the 1960s and 1970s.
Utt (2000) argues that because some cities in Europe and Japan have also experienced population losses, suburban sprawl is thus a natural result of affluence. But Utt himself admits that sprawl arises from transportation policy, arguing, "In Europe and Japan, as well as in many American cities, comprehensive and heavily subsidized public transit systems helped facilitate the exodus of central-city residents to outlying communities." Utt cannot have it both ways; he cannot intelligently argue that public transit facilitated suburban migration without admitting that highways had the same effect.
Indeed, even lobbies generally regarded as pro-sprawl concede that highways affect the location of development. For example, in 1999, the National Association of Home Builders conducted a survey that purported to show the popularity of suburban living. The survey asked respondents what amenities would encourage them to move to a new area, and their top choice (endorsed by 55% of respondents) was "highway access." If highway access makes a suburb more desirable, obviously building highways in a place makes that place more desirable to commuters and businesses.
Education: Making Cities Less Livable
Most readers of this article probably know someone who lived in a city neighborhood in their twenties but moved to suburbia after marriage or childbirth so that his or her children could avoid urban public schools. School-based flight from cities is especially common among middle-class Whites: In 1990, 17 large cities with majority White populations had school systems in which more than 50% of pupils were Black or Hispanic.
School-based flight has been caused by federal incompetence. For the past 40 years, the federal courts have used a variety of techniques to force racial integration on city schools but made little effort to integrate suburban schools. Because African Americans tend to be poorer than Whites, a racially integrated urban school typically includes children from a city's poorest neighborhoods. As a result, parents who want to send their children to schools dominated by other middle-class children cannot do so without moving to the suburbs or shelling out thousands of dollars for private school tuition.
The federal government's involvement with school integration began with Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which prohibited state-sponsored segregation of public schools. Over the next 14 years, local governments sought to evade Brown by closing public schools, through a variety of more moderate measures. The courts responded in kind by extending Brown. In Green v. County School Board of New Kent County (1968), the Supreme Court rejected a "freedom of choice" plan that permitted each pupil to choose a public school, on the ground that the plan had failed to erase desegregation. In Swann v. Charlotte- Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971), the Court went a step further and allowed lower courts to create integrated city schools through forced busing, racial quotas and a variety of other techniques. Since Swann, federal courts have routinely ordered cities to bus students throughout the city in order to create racial balance in public schools. As a result, middle-class parents fled city schools to avoid the inconveniences of busing and to avoid sending their children to school with children from the cities' poorest, most dangerous neighborhoods.
By the mid-1970s, many big-city school systems had become overwhelmingly African American. Thus, urban school systems could not create integrated schools because very few White students were left in some urban school systems. To solve this problem, some integrationists urged the courts to adopt "metropolitan busing plans" that discourage "White flight" by busing suburban Whites into city schools dominated by African Americans (or vice versa). But in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), the Supreme Court rejected metropolitan busing on the ground that suburbs had never discriminated against African Americans (despite that many of these suburbs had excluded African Americans through zoning designed to keep out poor and working-class people, who tended to be disproportionately African American). Thus, the federal courts presented parents with the following choices: (a) send their children to urban public schools, so that their children would go to school with children from the poorest, most dangerous neighborhoods in the city; (b) stay in cities and spend thousands of dollars on private schools; and (c) move to suburbia and send their children to "good" (i.e., homogenously White, middle- class) schools for free. Not surprisingly, most parents who can afford to move to suburbia prefer the third choice.
The full impact of the government's school policy can be shown by comparing the status quo to a world without government-run schools. If schools were left to the marketplace, popular schools, like popular bookstores and restaurants, would exist wherever parents were willing to pay for them. Presumably, such schools would be concentrated in more affluent areas, but they certainly would not be limited to certain cities or counties within a metropolitan area, any more than popular bookstores or restaurants are limited to suburbia. But by socializing education and requiring children to go to public schools in their own city, government has created a rigid segregation of children by jurisdiction: The richest, Whitest cities and counties have schools for upper middle-class and upper class (usually White) children, the poorest cities and counties have schools for their children, and lower middle- class cities and counties have schools for their children.
It could be argued that middle-class flight from cities is caused by factors unrelated to education, such as transportation policy, housing policy, and crime. But this argument is belied by that middle-class flight from cities has primarily been a family phenomenon. For example, in Washington, D.C., a 1967 court decision sought to integrate city schools by busing African American students into majority White schools and eliminating a "tracking plan" that placed brighter students (who were mostly White) into separate classes. Over the following dozen years, White enrollment in Washington public schools declined by more than 70%, whereas the city's population of single Whites declined by only 6%. Similarly, in Boston, where courts sought to integrate public schools through forced busing, the city's juvenile White population declined by more than 50% in the 1970s, whereas the city's single adult White population decreased by only 3%. In other words, White flight from cities has been led by the people who are the most concerned about schools: families with children. This strongly suggests that schools and sprawl are closely related.
How Big Brother Makes Suburbia Sprawling
In addition to encouraging migration from city to suburb, government has also made cities and suburbs far more sprawling and auto-dependent than the market would dictate. In the absence of government regulation, American suburbs could have looked like Old Town Alexandria near Washington or Shaker Heights near Cleveland: communities that accommodated the automobile without being totally auto-dependent, communities where roads and sidewalks, and pedestrians and drivers, mingled together peaceably. But thanks to stifling government zoning codes, most newer suburbs are totally auto-dependent: Commerce is so far from housing that even if sidewalks exist (as frequently they do not), few people can walk to shops, and densities are so low that public transit is arguably impractical.
The American version of suburbia was created by a few politicians and bureaucrats in our nation's capital. In the early 1920s, the Department of Commerce drafted the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act (SZEA), which was blindly adopted by the states. SZEA set up a general grant of power to cities to allow them to restrict building and lot size, the size of yards and other open spaces, the density of population, and the location and use of structures for trade, residence, and other purposes. The SZEA declared that such legislation would be designed "to prevent the overcrowding of land [and] to avoid undue concentration of population," in other words, to create what is now known as suburban sprawl. Specifically, SZEA defined zones as parcels wherein all lots conform to the same requirements of minimum lot size, yard size, and building distance from streets. By requiring minimum lot and yard sizes for all lots within a given zone, SZEA effectively lowers densities, keeps stores out of residential zones and vice versa, keeps rental properties out of zones reserved for single family homes, and forces all homes in an area to be roughly the same size. The practical consequences of the SZEA and its state and local clones are that absent a zoning variance, walkable traditional neighborhoods are outlawed in most American suburbs, because every activity demands a separate zone of its own; people cannot live within walking distance of shopping, and offices cannot be within walking distance of either.
Governments also create sprawl by forcing businesses, apartment buildings, and developers to provide (usually free) parking. For example, nearly all building codes require developers to provide two off-street parking spaces per house, and most apartment buildings provide at least one parking space per bedroom and sometimes more. Some suburbs are even more restrictive; Schamburg, Illinois, demands that developers provide 1.5 spaces per one bedroom unit, thereby ensuring that apartments have 50% more parking spaces than people. Commercial developers are also required to provide free parking for stores and office buildings. Cities typically calculate the amount of "necessary" free parking based on Institute of Transportation Engineers surveys, which count the number of vehicles parked at the time of peak parking demand in areas with ample free parking and nonexistent public transit, in other words, the maximum imaginable amount of vehicles. Local governments' free-parking mandates create huge costs for developers, costs that are passed on to businesses. In Los Angeles, the average construction cost of a building, excluding the cost of parking, is about $150 per square foot. The installation of four aboveground parking spaces per 1,000 square feet of office space (a fairly typical requirement) costs $40 per square foot. Thus, free parking requirements increase the cost of office space by 27%, and underground parking is even more expensive. Such requirements also increase the cost of housing. For example, a requirement that each apartment include one parking space increases the cost of housing by 12.5%.
Government's parking mandate creates sprawl in a variety of ways. First, when businesses are forced to provide parking, driving becomes cheaper and more convenient, and homeowners have a greater incentive to live in auto-dependent areas. In addition, increases in driving cause the roads to become more congested, thus giving planners an excellent excuse to build and widen roads, which (as explained below) causes sprawl by making it more convenient for motorists to move farther away from cities' older areas. Second, government parking mandates make cities and suburbs less pedestrian friendly and more auto dependent, by forcing consumers to walk through huge parking lots to shop and work and to share this space with speeding vehicles.
Government also makes streets inconvenient for pedestrians through traffic planning. For example, traffic engineers use a standard procedure for grading drivers' experiences at intersections. If drivers wait an average of 5 seconds or less to get through an intersection, they have an "A" level of service (the ideal). If drivers wait 15 to 25 seconds, they have a "C" level of service, and if they have to wait a minute or longer, they have an "F" level of service. By contrast, engineers have no such scheme for grading pedestrian service, and as a result, pedestrians often have to wait 60 seconds or longer to cross. Traffic engineers also make streets unfriendly to pedestrians by making them wider than necessary. For example, much of Main Street in Buffalo, New York, is six lanes wide, a width that discourages pedestrians from walking across the street unless absolutely necessary. By making Main Street too wide to be walkable, government's traffic engineers have also hastened the decay of Main Street by depriving Main Street merchants of walk-in traffic. By contrast, another commercial street three blocks away, Elmwood Avenue, is only four lanes wide and is thriving.
A Counterargument: Blaming the Victims
It has been argued that municipal incompetence rather than suburban sprawl is the cause of cities' problems and that if cities would only provide their citizens with decent services and lower taxes, they would be able to compete with suburbs successfully. This argument has a grain of truth: Middle-class Americans abandon cities not just because of the convenience provided by new and widened highways but also because of crime, high taxes, and bad schools. Nevertheless, cities are not solely, or even primarily, to blame for their own problems.
Confusing Cause and Effect
High taxes, high crime, and poor schools are less a cause of suburban sprawl than a result of suburban sprawl. This is so for a variety of reasons.
First, if a city's middle class migrates en masse to suburbia, its tax base will be smaller, and other things being equal, it will have to raise taxes or reduce services. So other things being equal, migration to suburbia actually causes higher taxes and poor services.
Second, suburban migration itself creates urban governments that drive away middle-class taxpayers. Because of middle-class flight from cities, many cities are dominated by African American and low-income voters, who tend to favor liberal, high-tax, redistributionist policies that drive out the remaining middle-class voters. The classic example of this vicious circle was Washington, D.C., under Marion Barry. The "White flight" of the 1950s and 1960s created an overwhelmingly African American electorate that was responsive to Barry's appeals to racial pride, and the middle-class African American flight of more recent decades created a majority-Black, predominantly lower class and working-class electorate that supported Barry's attempt to inflate the city payroll to create jobs. As a result, Barry was able to emasculate the city's police force, get convicted of using crack cocaine, and nevertheless be reelected as mayor of Washington in 1994. By the mid-1990s, 7.2% of Washington's population was on the city payroll, far more than in any other large American city. Washington's nearest competitor, New York City, clocked in at 5.4%. Not surprisingly, Washington's taxes significantly exceeded those of its suburbs: City residents paid 9.5% of their income in city income taxes, as opposed to 5.75% in nearby Virginia. By contrast, if Washington had not been ravaged by school desegregation, the highway system, and other pro-suburban federal policies, it would have had a more racially diverse, middle-class electorate that would never have tolerated Barry's shenanigans.
Third, the common complaint that "bad schools" drive people out of cities illustrates how federal policies cause "bad" municipal services. As explained above, the courts' failed attempt to desegregate suburban schools has caused urban schools to become dominated by children from poor households. As a general matter, poor children are more difficult to educate, even in integrated schools. For example, P.S. 24, in Riverdale (one of the Bronx's few remaining affluent neighborhoods) has two educational programs: a regular program for relatively gifted students and a "special" program for slower students. The "special" programs are dominated by children who are poor enough to qualify for government free-lunch programs, whereas the regular program is dominated by students from middle-class households. Similarly, in affluent Shaker Heights, Ohio, White students average 1,100 on their SAT, whereas Black students average 800; because many of the latter live in middle-class households, the racial gap would no doubt be even larger if only low-income Black students' test results were considered. Academic studies support the proposition that gaps between students arise out of family background rather than poor schooling. For example, a 1960s survey by sociologist James Coleman showed that everything schools did accounted for only 5% to 35% of the variation in students' academic performances; he concluded, "The inequalities imposed on children by their home neighborhood and peer environment are carried along to become the inequalities with which they confront adult life at the end of school." Similarly, the Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks concluded in his 1972 book, Inequality, that desegregation could close the Black-White academic gap by no more than 10% to 20%. In another study published in 1995, Scott Miller, a scholar now affiliated with the College Board, wrote, "There is little evidence that any existing strategy can close more than a fraction of the overall achievement gap" (as cited in Traub, 2000, p. 52) separating children from high-income and low-income households. In sum, it may be the case that if suburban children and urban children switched schools, school boards, teachers, and administrators, the suburban-urban achievement gap would be as large as it is now.
It logically follows that even if they are relatively well run, schools filled with poverty-stricken children quickly get a reputation as "bad schools," and parents tend to avoid them whenever possible. And because federal desegregation policies (as well as the transportation and housing policies that shifted middle-class families to suburbs) caused urban schools to be dominated by students from low-income households, the alleged "quality gap" between city schools and suburban schools arises partially from federal interference rather than municipal incompetence.
Fourth, cities' high crime rates arise partially from federal policy. As explained above, federal housing policy caused low-income households to be concentrated in cities, while a variety of federal, state, and local policies encouraged middle-class flight to suburbia. As a general rule, people from low-income areas are more likely to commit crimes. Low-income areas in cities are typically more dangerous than high income areas, and low-income suburbs are typically more dangerous than high-income ones. For example, a 1999 analysis in Atlanta magazine divided Atlanta into four quadrants (Northeast, Northwest, Southeast, and Southwest). The poorest quadrant (Southeast) had 56 murders per 100,000 people in 1998, 60% more than the citywide average. Similarly, Atlanta's south-side suburbs (which tended to be poorer and are closer to the city's poorer neighborhoods) had more crime than its affluent northside suburbs. If poor people commit more crimes, and statism packed poor people into cities, it logically follows that statism makes cities more dangerous than suburbs.
Bizarre Coincidences
The claim that bad city government rather than state and federal misconduct drives middle-class families out of cities is logically as well as factually flawed. As noted above, most older American cities gained population in the 1930s and 1940s and have lost population ever since. Thus, to believe that suburban sprawl is the result of municipal incompetence, one would have to believe that dozens of city governments, by an incredibly strange coincidence, became unable to police their streets or improve their schools at exactly the same time, obviously a bizarre proposition.
The "municipal incompetence" theory also fails to explain why, in many slow-growth metropolitan areas, older suburbs closer to the city have begun to lose population. For example, every suburb contiguous to Cleveland and Buffalo has lost population in recent decades-every single one. So to believe that municipal incompetence causes population loss, one would have to believe that all of these suburbs became ungovernable at exactly the same time, obviously a proposition too bizarre to be believable. Indeed, this theory is even more insane than the theory that big cities' incompetence made them ungovernable. It could perhaps be argued that big cities are less governable because of their sheer size (although the growth of cities that have annexed their suburbs proved otherwise), but this argument cannot be made about inner ring suburbs that are just as small as their rivals further away from central cities.
There are exceptions to the rule of urban decay, but the exceptions prove that urban decline is due to sprawl rather than to bad government. Generally, cities that have annexed large expanses of suburban territory, such as Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio, have grown whether they were located in the Frost Belt or the Sun Belt. In his book Cities Without Suburbs, former Albuquerque mayor David Rusk (1995) divides American cities into inelastic cities (that is, those that cannot annex suburban territory) and elastic cities (those that have annexed a great deal of territory). Between 1950 and 1990, the average zero-elasticity city lost 23% of its population, even though these cities' metropolitan areas grew by an average of 30%, whereas the most elastic cities (termed hyper-elastic by Rusk) increased their population by 250%, more than the growth in those cities' suburban populations. If middle-class suburbanites were fleeing big-city governments as such, cities that annexed territory would have continued to shrink, because families would have borne any burden to avoid living within city boundaries. Because this is not the case, suburban migration obviously relates to factors other than municipal incompetence. Of course, it could be argued that the hyper-elastic cities naturally have always had better city governments, but this would require one to believe that nearly every single city government that annexed territory also happened to be incredibly competent, another coincidence too bizarre to pass the straight-face test.
Good Government and Bad Cities
The theory that bad city government causes suburban sprawl rests on the assumption that the most inefficient governments drive out people and businesses while competent city governments do not. Undeniably, high taxes and governmental incompetence are factors that drive out middle-class taxpayers, but far from the only factor. For example, Cleveland imposes lower income taxes than its suburbs and imposes only $593 per capita in taxes, far less than Indianapolis ($688), Seattle ($772), and Denver ($959).Yet, Cleveland has lost nearly half its 1950 population, whereas the other three cities have gained population over time. Why? Perhaps because the other cities have been able to annex some of their suburbs, whereas Cleveland is confined within its 1940s boundaries.
Utt (2000) cites New York, Milwaukee, and Indianapolis as examples of cities that have fought suburban sprawl during the 1990s by the simple expedient of electing mayors who have governed more effectively than their predecessors. But these three examples show the futility of counting on good government to reverse suburban sprawl. Indianapolis continues to grow because decades ago, it merged with a surrounding county and thereby took over a great deal of suburban territory. (Ironically, Utt condemns the metropolitan government that saved Indianapolis from the fate of Cleveland).
In fact, the 1990s have been less kind to Indianapolis than prior decades: The city grew by 4% from 1980 to 1990 but only 1% from 1990 to 1998. Despite its dramatic drop in crime, New York grew more slowly in the 1990s than in "bad old days" of the 1980s: by 3% in the 1980s and by only 1% in the 1990s. And in Milwaukee, the 1990s were a calamity: After losing only 1% of its population in the 1980s, the city lost 6% of its population in the 1990s. It may be that with less charismatic and competent mayors, these cities would have been in much deeper trouble. But nevertheless, these cities' poor performance in the 1990s shows that factors other than the competence of a city's mayor or bureaucracy underlie urban decline. In fact, the cities that have rebounded most impressively in the 1990s have not done a very good job of fighting urban problems like crime. Of the 50 largest American cities, only 4 gained population in the 1990s after losing population in the 1980s: Chicago, Atlanta, Denver, and Kansas City. In 1998, 3 of those 4 "comeback cities" (Chicago, Atlanta, and Kansas City) had higher murder rates than supposedly better governed Milwaukee, and all four had higher murder rates than New York City. Whereas New York's murder rate declined by an amazing two thirds between 1991 and 1998 (from 29 per 100,000 to slightly fewer than 9 per 100,000), Denver's murder rate declined by about 45% (from 18 to 10 per 100,000), Chicago's by about a quarter (from 33 to 25 per 100,000), Atlanta's by about 30% (from 50 to 35 per 100,000), and Kansas City's by a wretched 5% (from 31 to 29). (Nationally, the murder rate declined by about a third, from 9.8 per 100,000 to 6.3 per 100,000.) Yet, all of these cities grew about as fast as New York City in the 1990s.
Another Counterargument, Or, Pent-Up Demand
It could also be argued that even if government has discouraged city living in a variety of ways, the status quo was nevertheless inevitable because Americans naturally desire the bigger houses and bigger lots that they can get from low-density suburban living. This argument requires one to believe that even if cities had crime rates, school systems, tax rates, and government services identical to those of suburbia, they would still be as depopulated as they are now, a proposition that should be self-evidently absurd to everyone who has known anyone who moved to suburbia for the schools.
More important, this argument overlooks a simple fact: Livable city neighborhoods have sky-high property values. Neighborhoods like Buckhead in Atlanta, Cleveland Park in Washington, D.C., and Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia are more expensive than many suburban neighborhoods. For example, in 1998, the average home price in Buckhead was $364,952, more than the average home price in all but one of Greater Atlanta's suburbs. If "good" city neighborhoods are expensive, the demand for such neighborhoods obviously exceeds the supply. In other words, there is a huge pent-up demand for city living that would be satisfied were it not for market failure. The market failure is the shortage of affluent city neighborhoods created by suburban sprawl and the anti-urban government policy that causes sprawl.
Why Sprawl Should Offend Conservatives
Of course, just because sprawl has been engineered by government does not make it a major social crisis. The behavior of Republican congresses and presidents over the past several years suggests that all but the most extreme conservatives have come to terms with a government far bigger than that envisioned by their pre-New Deal forbears. Nevertheless, conservatives should fight suburban sprawl as they have fought other obnoxious bureaucratic innovations, because sprawl offends the values of both economic and cultural conservatives.
Economic Conservatism and Sprawl
Economic conservatives favor more freedom and less government; sprawl, as explained below, means less freedom and more government.
Sprawl Versus Freedom
As a rule, conservatives tend to believe that citizens should have as wide a range of choice as possible, whereas liberals tend to favor top-down government decision making. Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman has argued that the market is superior to government not just because it is more efficient but also because it produces "unanimity without conformity," that is, because millions of consumers can satisfy their diverse needs without imposing their desires on others. Similarly, in a healthy metropolitan area (such as the American cities of the first half of the 20th century, or New York or European cities today), citizens can choose among a wide variety of options: They can live in city or suburb and can live with no cars or plenty. Such diversity, such unanimity without conformity, is what conservatives should support.
But in most of metropolitan America, conformity is the rule in two respects. Sprawl has made auto ownership mandatory in most of America and has made suburban living mandatory in large chunks of America.
Drive or die. In a free society, government should not force a particular mixture of products down consumers' throats: Consumers should be free to spend half their income on mortgage payments and take the bus to work, or live in a rundown trailer park and throw their money at a BMW. But in fact, government-induced buying has forced nearly all Americans older than age 16 to spend thousands of dollars on one product: a functional automobile.
In a few cities, such as New York and Washington, D.C., one person can comfortably survive without a car. But in most cities and suburbs, government policies have made auto ownership virtually mandatory. As explained above, government used the highway system, the education system, and the FHA to lure middle-class people and their jobs to the suburbs and then used zoning to make those suburbs as auto-oriented as possible. Government has further rigged suburban life in favor of the auto by building roads for drivers but providing inadequate public transportation to non-drivers. Thus, suburbanites often need a car even if they live in regions with relatively well-developed transit systems, and in most smaller and Sun Belt cities, even city residents can barely function without them.
For example, the Boston region has a central city with a well-developed transit system and a commuter train system that serves many of its suburbs. But even in Greater Boston, just 32% of entry-level employers are within 1/4 mile of transit, 43% are within 1/2 mile, and58%are within 1mile. Just14%of entry-level jobs can be reached by transit within an hour from Boston's poorer neighborhoods.
The situation is even worse in Sun Belt cities. For example, Atlanta's second largest suburban county (Gwinnett County, which had 522,000 people in 1998) had no public transportation whatsoever, and even some neighborhoods within the city limits are transit free. My parents live within the city of Atlanta about 10 miles from city hall, but (except for a "maid bus" that comes to downtown once a day and from downtown once a day), the nearest bus stop is about a mile away, and the absence of sidewalks (or even lawns that one can walk on) prevents anyone from walking safely to the bus stop.
And in smaller cities, a non-driver's life is more desperate still. For example, in Macon, Georgia, buses only operate until 6:45 p.m. in the evening on weekdays, Saturday service is limited, and there is no service on Sundays or holidays. Because many entry-level employers require their newest employees to work evening and weekend shifts, this system essentially shuts most of Macon's poor, car-less residents out of the job market.
Many employers are not transit-accessible at all. Macon's largest employers are located in the area's periphery far from any bus line: Brown &Williamson (cigarettes), Riverwood (paper mill), Cagle's (chicken processing), Cigna (insurance data processing). Hotel operators and fast food establishments are located among major streets. As a result, Macon's employers of unskilled labor often ask employees whether they have a car, and if the answer is no, they will not hire you.
Macon's transportation system limits a wide variety of other activities as well. The largest supermarket chain in the area, Kroger, is not efficiently served by the buses. Although two of the system's routes pass Kroger stores, the routes do not swing down access roads and into the store parking lots to permit less agile riders (such as children and senior citizens) to reach the stores. The two largest Kroger stores in the area are not on bus lines nor is a large discount supermarket, FoodMax, or a new Publix supermarket. Conversely, a largely abandoned shopping center where anchor tenant K-Mart closed in 1991 is served by the system, but the new K-Mart is not. Churches are not served by the system at all, because churches tend to be most active on Sundays and weekday evenings, when the bus system is shut down. Even on the bus system's limited routes, the frequency of service is so minimal as to discourage use. For example, students who use public transit to attend Macon College must devote the entire day to the ordeal. After rising before 6 a.m. to catch the first bus from their homes to the downtown transfer station, students must catch a morning bus from downtown to the college at 7:30 a.m. Later in the day, they have only one opportunity to return home. Needless to say, drivers suffer from none of these limitations: Government has built a toll-free, 24-hour system to serve them, and by building highways farther and farther away from downtown Macon, it has encouraged employers to relocate to areas not served by bus routes.
In sum, in most of America (especially in suburbs and small cities), government has rigged transportation systems to make driving a necessity for anything resembling a normal life. Government builds roads that shift economic development to suburbs but mysteriously lacks the money to run bus routes to those suburbs (excepting the occasional expensive light rail system that serves a few blocks of suburbia well). Conservatives would certainly oppose a law ordering consumers to spend thousands of dollars a year on television sets, housing, or ice cream. It logically follows that they should oppose policies that have the effect, however inadvertent, of forcing consumers to spend thousand of dollars on automobiles.
Suburbia or else. Just as government policies have forced Americans to buy more cars than they might otherwise buy, government policies have forced Americans out of cities and into suburbs. The tyranny of the automobile arises in part from a second tyranny: the tyranny of suburbia. In many cities (especially older industrial cities in the Northeast and the Midwest), urban decay has advanced so far that cities are essentially not an option for any consumers but the most adventurous, and the shift of jobs to suburbia has made cities impractical even for many adventurous consumers.
This is reflected in the mainstream media: All too often, suburban is used as a synonym for White and urban for African American. In the most degraded cities, like Detroit and Newark, urban decomposition is so advanced that even single people are unwilling to live in the city. For example, an elite prep school in Connecticut, Choate Rosemary Hall (CRH), has dozens of alumni in New Jersey suburbs and hundreds in New York City but not one who lives in Newark. And in southeastern Michigan, CRH has about 20 alumni in Detroit's suburbs but not one who lives in the city of Detroit. By contrast, healthier big cities are jam packed with CRH alumni, especially younger alumni. For example, about 1,000 CRH alumni live in Manhattan, and 180 more live in New York City's other boroughs.
And when I moved to St. Louis in 1990, I asked a friend of a friend what neighborhoods I should look at. I thought he would recommend one or two chic city neighborhoods and one or two close-in suburbs. Instead, he virtually chanted at me, "I do not recommend the city," and understandably so. Among St. Louis area households earning more than $100,000, only 6% live in the city of St. Louis (which has lost more than 60% of its 1950 population).
Even where single people can live in the city, families often cannot. For example, in Cleveland, even the most open-minded Clevelanders were unwilling to stay in the city after marriage, both because of the condition of the city's public school system (which was unusually disreputable even by the low standards of urban public school systems) and because in Cleveland, unlike in other areas, nearly all of the area's private schools are located in the suburbs (except for a few Catholic and Lutheran schools). As a result, in Cleveland, only 4% of households earning more than $100,000 live in the city. Even people and institutions that would be urban in other communities are suburban in Cleveland. For example, the city's major bohemian- oriented shopping street, Coventry Road, is in the suburb of Cleveland Heights, as is the area's major alternative weekly (the Free Times).
In many metropolitan areas, suburban life is not an option but a virtual necessity, because of the absence of decent city neighborhoods or reputable city schools. So by fighting sprawl and preserving cities, conservatives will actually be expanding, rather than limiting, consumer choice.
Sprawl Means Higher Taxes
Over the past two decades, taxes have become a defining issue in American politics, like Vietnam in 1960s or the role of government in the 1930s. Conservatives and Republicans have generally opposed higher taxes; liberals and Democrats have not. As explained below, sprawl is more likely to raise local taxes than to lower them.
Taxes in the cities. Although suburban sprawl is not generally thought of as a tax issue, sprawl in fact means higher taxes and bigger government in city and suburb alike. The reason is that as cities lose middle- class residents and retain the poor, they become poorer. In the metro areas encompassing the 23 American cities that David Rusk (1995) designates as "zero elasticity" cities (that is, cities that have been unable to annex their suburbs and thus lost population), city per capita income is only 66% of suburban per capita income. And in many of these cities, the city-suburb income gap has widened over time. For example, in Buffalo city, income declined from 77% of suburban income in 1979 to 69% in 1989. Some other cities experiencing similar declines include Flint, Michigan (from 84% to 69%), Birmingham, Alabama (from 79% to 69%), St. Louis (from 71% to 67%), Chicago (from 69% to 66%), Saginaw, Michigan (from 81% to 66%), Baltimore (from 68% to 64%), New Haven (from 70% to 62%), Philadelphia (from 72% to 64%), Cleveland (from 63% to 54%), Hartford (from 62% to 53%), Detroit (from 67% to 53%), Trenton (from 65% to 50%), and Newark (from 48% to a stunning 42%).
Common sense dictates that as a city becomes poorer, its tax base will decline, and tax hikes will become more tempting. For example, between 1972 and 1987, Cuyahoga County (Cleveland and its older suburbs) lost $4 billion worth of payroll, whereas Cleveland's newer outer suburbs gained $1.5 billion. And as poverty and deteriorating services drive middle-class people away from cities, property values decline, which diminishes the tax base still further and creates an additional turn in the vicious circle of urban decay. And as a city (and more recently, its inner suburbs) becomes more dominated by poorer voters, its electorate will be more likely to be dominated by liberals and Democrats who will prefer higher taxes to reductions in the size of government. For example, between 1976 and 1996,
In the city of Buffalo, the Republican percentage of the two party presidential vote nosedived from 37% to 17%, a 20 percentage point drop that dwarfed the national 4 point drop in the Republican vote (from 49% to 45%).
In Buffalo's population-losing inner ring suburbs, Republicans suffered comparable drops. For example, the Republican nominee lost 14 points in Lackawanna (from 35% to 21%), Cheektowaga (from 45% to 31%), and West Seneca (50% to 36%), as well as 19 in Tonawanda (from 56% to 37%). By contrast, in Clarence, a still-growing outer suburb, the Republican nominee lost only 8 points (from 64% to 56%).
In the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., the Republicans suffered an 11 point drop (48% to 37%) in the mature suburb of Montgomery County, and only a 4 point drop (50% to 46%) in booming Howard County.
In Philadelphia, the Republicans lost 15 points (from 32% to 17%). The Republicans lost 12 points in Delaware County, a stagnant inner suburb (from 56% to 44%) but only 5 points in booming Chester County (61% to 55%).
In sum, suburban sprawl means that cities and older suburbs will become poorer, which means they have a smaller tax base, which means that (a) their politicians will be more tempted to raise taxes, and (b) their voters will be poorer, more politically liberal, and thus less fiscally conservative.
Taxes in the suburbs. It could be argued that even if city residents face higher taxes from the redistribution of people and jobs caused by sprawl, suburbanites do not. After all, suburbanites live in growing areas with few poor people to make demands on government or elect pro-spending politicians. But even in suburbia, sprawl's impact on the public fisc is as best ambiguous. A fast-growing suburb benefits from a larger residential and commercial tax base but suffers when its new residents demand additional schools and roads to serve them. For example, in rapidly growing Loudoun County near Washington, D.C., the annual tax rate increased by 11% from 1997 to 1998 to pay for new services. Likewise, Prince William County, another high-growth Washington suburb, has the highest real estate tax rate of any county in Virginia. Such tax increases arise from the infrastructure expenses caused by population growth. In Prince William County, for example, schools are so overcrowded with new residents' children that students are crammed into more than 100 classroom trailers. Some suburbs also try to temporarily limit or avoid tax increases by taking on huge debt loads. In Loudoun County, debt payments rose from 3.3% of the county budget in 1990 to more than 10% in 1999. In rapidly expanding Howard County, between Baltimore and Washington, debt nearly tripled from $130 billion to $384 billion from 1987 and 1997. In Montgomery County, Maryland, some areas are fast growing whereas others are shrinking. So to accommodate these population shifts, the county built 70 new schools during the 1980s, while closing 68. Thus, Montgomery County had the worst of both worlds: The money it spent building the now-closed schools was unmasked as a waste, yet the county also had to throw money at new schools.
Some suburban cities and counties try to finance the costs of increased residential development by encouraging increased commercial development. For example, Howard County's planning goals state that commercial development should account for 25% of the county's tax base because those developments provide revenue without adding students to the school system. This strategy, although helpful if it works, is quite risky: Because many commuters wish to live close to work, any increase in commercial development many create a demand for nearby residential development, which in turn, increases the costs of government services. And if a suburb tries to solve this problem by limiting such residential development, workers will have to commute from other suburbs, which in turn, means more traffic congestion, which creates political pressure for more roads, and which means higher spending and higher taxes.
The car tax. In 1995, the average American household spent $5,666 on car-related expenditures: $2,639 on new and used vehicle purchases, $1,006 on gasoline, $261 on finance charges, $653 on maintenance and repair, $713 on car insurance, and $390 on leasing costs, rental costs, and license fees. Households with teenage children must spend even more, because they "need" cars not just for both parents but for every child older than age 16. As explained above, Americans live in areas where autos are a daily necessity not because of free choices made in a free market but because of government policies that have made daily life without a car impossible for many drivers. It logically follows that American auto dependency is an unfunded mandate analogous to the thousands of pages of federal regulations contained in the federal register and that most auto-related spending is a form of indirect taxation just as much as if government enacted a law requiring consumers to spend $5,666 per household on automobiles (a sum equaling two thirds of the mean federal income tax payment). And if auto-related spending is a tax paid by consumers, it further follows that any efforts to reduce auto dependency reduce the burden of government on the American people. Or to put the matter another way, if the average American could avoid having to own a car, he or she would get the equivalent of a 65% income tax cut to save, invest, or spend on other consumer goods.
In sum, sprawl means higher taxes for city and suburbanite alike, plus a continuation of the car tax that squeezes so many American households.
Sprawl and Cultural Conservatism
Suburban sprawl also impairs two values commonly associated with cultural conservatism: social stability and the work ethic.
Sprawl Versus Stability
As Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation has pointed out,
Community is of significant value to most cultural conservatives, for very good reason. Without it, there are few mechanisms to uphold morals and maintain standards of behavior. Traditionally, when most people were part of a community, they behaved for fear of community sanctions. But where there is no community, community sanctions cannot exist.
And for community to exist, there must be stability: Today's stable, safe neighborhoods must be tomorrow's stable, safe neighborhoods, so their residents and their children and grandchildren can build a community rather than being driven out by the next wave of urban decay.
But sprawl creates constant instability: Today's suburbs can quickly become tomorrow's slums. Some of today's poor city neighborhoods were once rich, outlying areas comparable to today's suburbs. For example, in Cleveland, Euclid Avenue was once a street filled with the mansions of industrial-era millionaires (including John D. Rockerfeller's first "trophy house") and is now, in the words of author James Howard Kunstler (1993), a "weed-filled wasteland." (In fact, when I visit in Cleveland I go out of my way to take the Euclid Avenue bus so I can see the ruins of Euclid Avenue.) And in Detroit, 19th-century tycoons built mansions on Woodward Avenue, a street that is now, in Kunstler's words, "something worse than a slum" where the remaining "hopelessly damaged mansions stand in these blocks like inscrutable megaliths in a wilderness of rubble" (p. 190).
In turn, the decline of the oldest, closest-in city neighborhoods has set in motion a chain of events that endangers newer city neighborhoods and even suburbs. As the oldest neighborhoods decay, they become occupied by the poor, and nearby middle-class neighborhoods become uncomfortably close to city slums, which in turn, causes them to become less appealing and eventually decay, which in turn, starts the cycle in another nearby neighborhood. And by using its powers to drain cities of middle-class taxpayers, government has accelerated this cycle.
So in recent decades, urban decay has spread out beyond the central city line. The poorest suburban municipalities near cities as varied as Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, and Miami have murder rates far higher than those of the big cities themselves. For example, in 1998, Highland Park, Michigan, had 91 murders per 100,000 people (more than twice as many as nearby Detroit) and 1,117 robberies per 100,000 people (more than 30% more than Detroit). Similarly, Compton, California, had 51 murders per 100,000 people, more than four times as many as nearby Los Angeles. Although these municipalities are extreme cases, city crime has frequently spread to other inner ring suburbs. In 1991, for instance, nine of Chicago's suburbs had higher crime rates than the city of Chicago.
And even where suburbs are not quite as dangerous as nearby cities, they are often in decline. For example, most of Cleveland's inner ring suburbs have experienced dramatic declines in household income relative to other suburbs. In Cleveland's poorest inner ring suburb, East Cleveland, household income declined from 77% of the metro area mean in 1970 to 57% in 1990. Other suburbs experiencing similar declines include Bedford (101% to 87%), Bedford Heights (106% to 84%), Brooklyn (109% to 81%), Brook Park (127% to 101%), Euclid (101% to 82%), Fairview Park (136% to 113%), Garfield Heights (100% to 82%), Lakewood (99% to 93%), Maple Heights (103% to 85%), Mayfield Heights (103% to 85%), Middleburg Heights (138% to 114%), North Olmsted (124% to 115%), Parma (111% to 96%), Parma Heights (114% to 89%), Seven Hills (148% to 121%), South Euclid (117% to 106%), and Warrensville Heights (104% to 84%). All but two of these suburbs lost population during the 1990s, as did all of Cuyahoga County (which includes 77 square miles within the city of Cleveland and 381 square miles of suburbia), not because metro Cleveland as a whole lost population but because "outer counties" such as Geauga, Lake, and Medina Counties sucked away middle-class Clevelanders. In fact, Cleveland's decay is not limited to the inner ring of suburbs (that is, those suburbs that are contiguous to the city). Of the declining suburbs listed above, several (Bedford, Bedford Heights, Parma Heights, Middleburg Heights, Seven Hills, South Euclid, and North Olmsted) are second ring suburbs: They border inner ring suburbs but not Cleveland itself. Mayfield Heights is a third ring suburb: It does not border either Cleveland, nor does it border any of the inner ring suburbs.
Cleveland is not alone; suburbs in other metro areas, especially slow-growth areas in the Midwest and Northeast, are experiencing similar problems. The major inner ring suburbs of Rust Belt cities such as Buffalo, St. Louis, and Chicago lost population during the 1990s. The Jewish community may present a classic example of how suburban sprawl destroys traditional values.
The Jewish community has traditionally been even more footloose than other ethnic groups, moving up and out every generation. For example, in Buffalo, most of the Jewish community originally lived in the East Side of the city, near downtown, and near the East Side's African American population. Almost a dozen synagogues stood in the area by 1920 (about as many as can now be found in the entire Buffalo metropolitan area), and even now, one can occasionally see barely legible Jewish names on storefronts that are now boarded up or owned by African Americans. Over the next few decades, the Jewish community abandoned the East Side for North Buffalo, a city neighborhood several miles north of downtown. And in the past few decades, most Buffalo-area Jews have moved to Amherst, a northern suburb. In the 1950s, virtually the entire Jewish community of Cleveland moved to the inner ring suburbs of Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights; in the 1980s and 1990s, Jews have begun to abandon these racially integrated suburbs for relatively lily-white outer suburbs such as Beachwood and Solon. Similarly, in my parents' lifetime, the center of the Jewish community has moved from now-depopulated areas near downtown Atlanta to the Morningside neighborhood northeast of downtown to the city's northern suburbs, where a child has to be driven just to meet his or her neighbors.
As Jews have moved every generation, the once-tight bonds of Jewish community have frayed. In greater numbers every generation, Jews marry non-Jews and abandon their faith. As late as 1968, Albert Vorspan, director of the Commission on Social Action of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (an association of Reform Jewish synagogues) wrote, "Many more Jews are marrying out of the faith than anybody had realized" because about 20% of all marriages involving Jews were mixed marriages. By contrast, today, among the generation of Jews who mostly grew up in suburbia, as many as half of Jews marry non-Jews, most offspring of mixed marriages are non-Jewish, and the future of American Judaism is thus in doubt. It cannot be proven that suburban life causes intermarriage, but common sense dictates that if children grow up in areas (even disproportionately Jewish areas) that require them to be driven almost everywhere, they will have weaker ties with their Jewish neighbors than if they grew up in a traditional urban neighborhood, especially if that suburb is likely to be deserted by the time they grow up. It further follows that those Jewish neighbors will therefore be less likely to grow up to be Jewish wives and husbands, and their ties to a geographically defined community will vanish. In such a situation, it is certainly possible for a single person to go out of his or her way to associate with Jews and to become part of the Jewish community, but it will take the kind of effort that will deter all but the most motivated, and as with the Jews, so with every other type of community.
In sum, suburban sprawl, like the French Revolution, devours its own children. Sprawl creates inner ring suburbs, only to destroy them a few decades later by creating outer suburbs to skim off their elites. So as long as sprawl is the status quo, no community is truly safe from the ravages of neighborhood decay, and no stable community can long endure.
Sprawl Versus Work
Conservatives tend to believe that people should be independent and work for a living rather than relying on government for handouts. For example, it took a Republican Congress to enact the welfare reform bill that limited the amount of time anyone can spend on welfare.
But sprawl punishes work and rewards welfare dependency: Thanks to suburban sprawl, most low-skill jobs are located in areas that are inaccessible by public transportation or nearly so. For example, in small cities such as Macon, many jobs are inaccessible without a car either because the public transportation system does not reach major employers or because the buses stop running early in the evening. And even in the relatively transit-friendly Boston metropolitan area, just 32% of entry-level employers are within 1/4 mile of transit, 43% are within 1/2 mile, and 58% are within 1 mile. Just 14% of entry-level jobs can be reached by transit within an hour from Boston's poorer neighborhoods. So to get off welfare and get a job, a welfare recipient often needs a car that she probably cannot afford (otherwise she would not be on welfare in the first place). The recipient may be stuck in a vicious cycle: She needs the car to get a job, but she cannot get a job unless she has a car first. Thus, the dispersion of employment opportunities caused by sprawl frustrates welfare reform and encourages welfare dependency.
Even if one assumes that the welfare recipient could somehow obtain a car, the costs of auto ownership encourage welfare dependency or even crime at the margins. For example, suppose that welfare recipient A can earn $700 a month on welfare (by engaging in some illicit activity, or through a combination of the two) and $900 after taxes at work but would have to spend $250 a month on a car if she gets a job. On balance, A would be better off on welfare because the cost of a car reduces her overall pay to $650 ($900 in wages minus $250 in auto expenses). Thus, the auto dependency caused by sprawl discourages work and has helped to turn the uneducated but law-abiding and hard-working working class of the 1940s to the uneducated, lawless underclass of the past few decades.
What Conservatives Can Do About Sprawl
Conservative hostility to anti-sprawl measures exists for a good reason: When environmentalists propose to fight sprawl, their remedies often involve a bigger, more intrusive government. For example, in his first major "anti-sprawl" speech, Vice President Gore endorsed $700 million in newtax credits to entice state and local governments to issue bonds to "build more livable communities," $6.1 billion in public transit spending, $1.6 billion for "state and local efforts to reduce air pollution and ease traffic congestion," and a $50 million "Regional Connections initiative." At the state level, environmentalists have often endorsed regulating land use and development more intensely, rather than trusting the market. Conservatives should learn, however, that even if they must agree to disagree with environmentalists on some fiscal and regulatory issues, they can still fight sprawl in other ways consistent with conservative values.
For example, conservatives can focus on (a) eliminating highway spending that encourages sprawl, (b) breaking the link between residence and schooling, so that families can live in cities without being trapped in crumbling urban schools, and (c) limiting sprawl by reducing rather than increasing government regulation of land use and property rights.
No New Roads
If state and federal policy caused our urban crisis, the logical solution is to stop the policies that led to the crisis. Because highway spending has been a major cause of suburban sprawl, we can take a significant bite out of both sprawl and big government by eliminating sprawl-generating highway spending.
Specifically, the state and federal governments should prohibit the use of their funds to build or widen roads in or near suburban areas. Because highway spending totaled $77 billion in 1995, such a "paving moratorium" would give taxpayers a significant break (including, ironically, drivers, whose fuel taxes pay for more than half of government highway spending). A paving moratorium would not prevent settlement in existing suburbs but would prevent government from creating new suburbs by building more highways and thus would prevent government from turning today's suburbs into deserted slums.
Government justifies new and widened roads on the ground that more roads, not fewer, are needed to deal with traffic congestion. But the claim that new roads eliminate congestion is at best speculative and at worst laughable. I concede for the sake of argument that if new and widened roads did not affect development patterns, a new or widened road might reduce traffic congestion. But in reality, highway building affects where people live and work. If government builds highway X to suburb Y, homeowners and businesses will soon move to subdivisions near X's interchanges, thereby increasing traffic along the interchanges. Thus, new suburban highways typically fill up with cars almost from the moment the ribbon is cut. Even people and groups generally identified as pro-sprawl admit as much. As Joel Garreau (1991) of the Washington Post has written, "The more capacity you add, the more likely you are to make the place more popular . . . creating more traffic" (p. 128). Garreau is hardly an anti-sprawl activist; for example, he has described the status quo as the "manifest pattern of millions of individual American desires over seventy-five years." Similarly, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) conducted a survey that reveals that highway access would influence 55% of respondents to move to a new community, more than any other community. By suggesting that highways encourage movement to areas with highway access, the NAHB has effectively conceded that highways shift development to suburbs (thus making those suburbs more rather than less congested). Similarly, Alan Sipress (1999) of the Washington Post apparently defends sprawl-induced traffic, claiming that unspecified "researchers agreed that building roads can still be crucial for fostering economic development, even if the potential for easing congestion is limited" (p. B1), in otherwords, that road building is good because it promotes sprawl (a.k.a. "economic development") even if it does not stop congestion.
Numerous studies have documented that "induced traffic" eliminates some or all of the reduction of congestion caused by new roads and road widenings. For example, Mark Hansen, a professor of transportation engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, used statewide California statistics in concluding that new road capacity is almost entirely offset by induced traffic within five years. He found that a 10% increase in capacity leads to a 9% increase in miles driven. A study conducted by Robert B. Noland, a former transportation analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency, similarly found that a 10% expansion in roads produced a 2.8% rise in travel more than 2 to 4 years. In fact, studies such as Hansen's dramatically overestimate the benefits of new roads by failing to account for the long-run changes in development plans caused by new and widened roads.
For example, in 1991 Montgomery County, Maryland (a suburb of Washington) widened Interstate 270 to as many as 12 lanes to reduce traffic congestion. According to Sidney Kramer, Montgomery County executive from 1986 to 1990, "You saw a tide of development go forward because of that improvement." One of the high-growth suburbs created by the I-270 widening, Germantown, Maryland, grew from just more than 41,000 people in 1980 to 70,000 people in 1998. In turn, the growth of Germantown and nearby suburbs caused traffic to increase. In fact, traffic along I-270 has surpassed the levels state highway planners forecast for 2010 in their 1984 study of the proposed widening. The Maryland highway department reported that the 1997 volume at Route 28 in Rockville was 193,000 vehicles per day-2,000 more than the 2010 projection. According to David Palank, an area real estate broker, "With all the lanes that are there, it just doesn't seem to be moving that quickly. . . . I haven't found any relief at any time. It seems like it was congested and continues to be congested."
If I-270 were an aberration, areas that increased road space would have experienced a reduction in congestion during the 1990s, or at least less congestion than areas that did less road building. But recent studies show otherwise. The Hartford, Connecticut, and Providence, Rhode Island, areas experienced similar population growth (13% and 9%, respectively) over the past two decades. But Hartford actually reduced its road capacity, whereas Providence increased its road mileage by 59%. If road-building reduced congestion, Providence would have far less congestion than Hartford. But a study by the Texas Transportation Institute revealed that the two areas had similar levels of traffic growth and traffic congestion. In 1997, the cost of congestion per eligible driver was $390 in Hartford and $360 in Providence (Numbers 49 and 50 of 68 areas surveyed). Rush-hour congestion increased by 200% in Hartford and 225% in Providence between 1982 and 1997. Annual delay per driver increased by 283% in Hartford and 320% in Providence between 1982 and 1997. In other words, Providence built far more roads, yet congestion increased by slightly more in Providence.
The correlation between free-flowing traffic and free-spending road builders is equally weak in fast-growing metro areas. For example, Charlotte and Fresno had comparable population growth rates (64% and 57%). But Charlotte increased its highway mileage by 113%, whereas Fresno's road-building lagged behind its population growth (with only a 27% increase). Charlotte's congestion cost $680 per driver, whereas Fresno's cost only $315. Annual delay per driver increased by 356% in Charlotte and only 171% in Fresno, whereas peak hour congestion increased by 229% in Charlotte and 225% in Fresno.
In sum, both common sense and actual experience lead to the experience that suburban road building creates sprawl without mitigating congestion. Thus, continued road widening and road building is nothing more than a boondoggle.
Ending the School Crisis
In recent decades, middle-class families have fled cities to avoid public school systems full of low-achieving students from low-income families. As explained above, a "bad" school (one with a low reputation) is typically bad not because of its teachers, its school board, or its principal but because of its disadvantaged student body. It logically follows that even if government can improve poverty-packed urban schools slightly by spending more, raising expectations, or other reforms, it probably can never make such schools as attractive to middle-class families as suburban schools filled with middle-class children. It logically follows that if government wishes to stop driving middle-class families out of cities, it must stop forcing parents to choose between middle-class schools and city living. The most market-oriented remedy for the urban education crisis (other than the complete abolition of government-funded education in city and suburb alike) is the policy commonly known as the voucher system.
Vouchers
The obvious remedy for government's anti-urban education policy is a voucher system. Under a voucher system, children can obtain free, or partially free, education in private or suburban schools regardless of their mailing address. Under a voucher system, the government provides parents with a voucher or chit (analogous to food stamps) to pay for the child's education at the school of their choice. The parents then give the voucher to the school officials when the child is enrolled. The school then returns the voucher to the government, which in turn, sends the school a predetermined amount of publicly raised tax dollars. The purest form of voucher system would require the government to pay for a student's education in any public or private school that accepts the student. Less radical voucher plans might require the government to pay only part of a student's private school tuition, just as college students obtain tuition assistance through government- backed loans and grants.
Any form of voucher program (other than one limited to the poor) would discourage middle-class flight by ensuring that parents could live in the city and send their children to private or suburban schools. Such a plan would also encourage residential desegregation because some parents unwilling to send their children to poverty-stricken city schools might be willing to live in diverse neighborhoods or at least live in the same jurisdiction as diverse neighborhoods.
Some criticize the voucher system as a repudiation of the American ideal of the "common school" where children of different backgrounds cross paths and learn about one another. In pre-suburban America, this argument might have had some relevance to reality. But in major metropolitan areas, the common school concept has been assassinated by sprawl: Middle-class families live in middle-class suburbs with homogeneously middle-class schools, whereas poor families live in cities or poor suburbs with homogeneously poor schools. By contrast, a voucher system will increase children's exposure to diversity by enabling parents to live in or near diverse neighborhoods without sending their children to widely feared urban schools. For example, suppose Mr. and Mrs. X are willing to expose their children to city life but fear city schools. Under today's educational system, when the X children reach school age, they would reluctantly leave the city to avoid city schools. Under the voucher system, Mr. and Mrs. X would be able to live in a diverse city neighborhood and send their children to the same schools that their children would attend if they lived in suburbia.
A related argument is that competition between city schools and private schools would be "unfair," because private schools could exclude the least desirable students, such as disabled students and those from low-income households. This argument is beside the point, because suburban schools can also exclude some of the least desirable students by using zoning and the resulting high property values to exclude low-income households whose children are more likely to be slow learners. Whether upper middle-class children go to exclusive urban schools or exclusive suburban schools, those schools will be segregated by class and/or ability: But under the status quo, this segregation creates the additional evil of urban decay. In other words, the status quo equals segregation plus sprawl, but vouchers would at worst create segregation minus sprawl. Because two social evils are worse than one, the voucher system is obviously preferable to the status quo.
Voucher critics predict that an increased demand for private schools might cause private schools to raise tuition and make vouchers so fiscally impractical as to make private schools financially unaffordable and that vouchers will naturally lead to government over-regulation of private schools. These arguments overlook the fact that the United States already has a modified voucher system at the college and university level: the intricate web of grants and loans that help Americans attend college. If vouchers reduced access to college or made colleges worse, America's college and university system would be smaller to and inferior to that of other countries. In fact, Americans attend college in greater numbers than citizens of other affluent countries, and our university system, far from being burdened by government regulation, is so superior that in 1995, 23,276 foreign students came to American universities to learn. Thus, vouchers have worked well at the university level and accordingly should be provided for younger students.
Another common anti-voucher argument is that vouchers violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment by subsidizing church-run schools. As long as vouchers subsidize both religious and secular private schools, this argument borders on the frivolous, because under the First Amendment, government need only treat religion and irreligion equally rather than favoring the latter. A modified version of this "church/state" argument (recently endorsed by a federal judge in Cleveland in the case of Simmons-Harris v. Zelman [1999]) is that in areas in which most private schools are religious, a voucher system would favor religious schools so heavily as to effectively favor religion over irreligion. This argument rests on the assumption that vouchers will not change the size of the private school market: an assumption that may make sense when (as in the Cleveland program) vouchers aid only a small number of students but not when vouchers would affect every student in a city. If, thanks to government aid, millions of consumers entered the market for private schools, new secular private schools would probably spring up to meet this demand, just as developers built homes to satisfy the demand for suburbia created by government-funded highways.
To give governments a chance to evaluate the validity of opponents' concerns, any voucher plan that includes private schools should be limited to the group that needs vouchers most, residents of cities where the school system drives out the middle class. Thus, a state or federal voucher plan might give vouchers only to residents of cities above a certain size that had lost population in recent decades. If the voucher system worked as intended, governments could follow up by expanding vouchers to all children.
Vouchers Lite
A less radical plan would be a "public schools only" voucher plan. Under such as system, the federal or state government could radically expand consumer choice by enacting the following statute: "No publicly funded elementary or secondary school receiving state [or federal, depending on who enacted the statute] shall discriminate in its admissions on the basis of residence." Under a "public schools only" voucher plan, parents would be free to send their children to suburban or urban schools, no matter where they lived. This plan would increase individual freedom without creating the practical, constitutional, and fiscal difficulties of a voucher system that included private schools. However, a "public schools only" voucher plan would do less to combat sprawl than a pure voucher plan, because parents with children in suburban schools might be tempted to move to suburbs to reduce their commutes to suburban schools.
No More Coercive Zoning
As explained above, traditional, walkable neighborhoods have been outlawed in most of suburban America, thanks to dictatorial zoning laws. Under zoning laws, a command-and-control bureaucracy, aided and abetted by suburbanites who wish to use government to limit their neighbors' property rights, dictates that almost nothing may be within walking distance of anything else, that commercial streets must be built for the happiness of cars rather than people, and that densities must be lower than a free market could tolerate.
One remedy to this policy might be the complete abolition of zoning laws (excepting perhaps restrictions on pollution-spewing industrial sites). The abolition of zoning would maximize individual freedom and reduce housing costs by allowing developers and homeowners to build as they please, without any interference from government. On the other hand, the abolition of zoning would eliminate sprawl-limiting ordinances (such as those limiting development in newer suburbs) as well as sprawl-creating ordinances.
A narrower (and thus more politically feasible) remedy to zoning-generated sprawl would be a developer's bill of rights, which would target zoning laws that most directly encouraged sprawl. Such a statute would limit localities' zoning powers by eliminating many of the most onerous sprawl-creating zoning restrictions.
First, states should outlaw government-imposed minimum lot sizes, yard sizes, house sizes, or setbacks (that is, the distance between a house and the street). Where lots, yards, and setbacks are humongous, houses are so far from each other that their occupants cannot walk from one house to shopping or even other houses. If people want to live in such an environment, they have a right to, but there is no reason why government should force them to by ordering developers to create unwalkable subdivisions.
Second, states should outlaw municipal restrictions on residential development in commercial zones and allow some retail development in apartment buildings and other residential areas. Under the status quo of single use zoning, suburbanites who would like to walk to work or to shopping often cannot do so, because the dead hand of government prohibits would-be landlords from building or renting apartments in commercial zones. By contrast, if shop owners or office park developers were consistently allowed to rent surplus space to residential tenants, more Americans would be able to walk to work, shopping, and other opportunities. Similarly, states could allow some commerce in residential areas while preserving their residential nature by allowing retail development in residential zones up to a certain percentage of a subdivision's or apartment building's square footage (up to, say, 10%) so that homeowners could walk to some amenities without having their neighborhoods completely transformed.
Third, duplex homes and apartments should be permitted by law in all residential construction. If a homeowner wants to rent out his basement, he should be allowed to do so. Restrictions on rental use of homeowners' property are far more intrusive than similar restrictions on commercial use and increase auto dependency by artificially reducing population density.
Fourth, municipalities should be required to permit home offices and telecommuting not involving show windows or exterior display advertising. Just as Americans should be allowed to walk to work, they should be allowed to work at home.
Fifth, states should preclude municipalities from discriminating among permitted structures (such as apartments and homes) on the basis of the number of housing units contained therein or on the basis of form of ownership (e.g., homes vs. condominiums vs. rentals). In other words, if developer A wants to build an apartment building on its own property in suburb X, it should not be prevented from doing so merely because a vocal minority (or even a vocal majority) of X's residents do not like apartment buildings. Such a statute will not preclude the market from making such distinctions; there will always be significant separation of income classes that depending on consumers' choices, may be related to population density. However, the market should be allowed to make less land-consuming forms of development available.
Sixth, municipalities should not be allowed to require more free parking than the market would dictate. If a business believes it will benefit by encouraging customers to park for free rather than parking on the street, it will build free parking without government encouragement. This rule prevents government from subsidizing drivers by artificially increasing the supply of free parking and makes streets more pedestrian- accessible by encouraging on-street parking (which buffers pedestrians from traffic).
As a rule, metro areas with few zoning restrictions have cheaper housing. For example, Houston has no zoning at all and is far more affordable than other cities of comparable size. It logically follows that in addition to making American cities and suburbs more walkable and increasing property owners' freedom, zoning deregulation would have one other beneficial side effect: increasing the supply of low-rent, affordable housing, and thereby limiting the demand for public housing (which as explained above, has turned cities into dumping grounds for the poor).
Conclusion
Suburban sprawl is not an invention of environmental extremists but a serious problem that conservatives can and should solve. Sprawl exists in large part because of government policies favoring suburbia and forcing auto dependence and can be at least partially remedied by policies that make government smaller and less intrusive. More important, sprawl offends values that conservatives should care about, such as consumer choice, because when an American family moves to a suburb because they feel that they have to do so to educate their children decently or buys an extra car because they think they cannot live without one, we are all a little less free.
References
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
Garreau, J. (1991). Edge city: Life on the new frontier. Washington Post, p. 128 Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, 391 U.S. 430 (1968).
Jencks, C. (1972). Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America. New York: Basic Books.
Kunstler, J. H. (1993). The geography of nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape. New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster.
Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974). Hayward, S. (1999, March 22). Suburban legends. National Review, pp. 35-38.
Postrel,V. (1999, March). The Pleasantville solution. Reason, p. 4. Rusk, D. (1995). Cities without suburbs. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press.
Sipress, A. (1999, January 4). Widen the roads, the drivers will come. Washington Post, p. B1. Simmons-Harris v. Zelman, 54 F. Supp. 2d 725 (N.D. Ohio 1999). Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 (1971).
Traub, J. (2000, June 16). What no school can do. The New York Times, p. 52.
Utt, R. D. (2000, January 20). Cities and suburbs [Online]. Available: http://www.heritage.org/issues/chap13.html
Michael Lewyn is an associate professor at John Marshall Law School, Atlanta, GA.
Back to the Walkable Streets home page.
