WaPo: Plan to reduce sprawl will boost health, environment

[marmar]

By Andres Duany and Jeff Speck
Saturday, October 16, 2010


From the billboard, a young woman's face smiles at us against a leafy background. Scrawled across the image in a jaunty white script is a promise: "I will leave the car at home more." The logo in the lower right-hand corner: Chevron. The ad -- the equivalent of an Oscar Mayer commercial saying "Enough hot dogs for me, thanks" -- is a sign of our times. Cynical "greenwashing," guilt and amnesiac denial dominate a public discourse short on realistic paths to energy independence.

There is a deeper irony behind the billboard. In much of America -- and almost all of the places built in the past half-century -- the smiling woman has no choice but to take the car. She lives on a cul-de-sac in a subdivision along a collector road that leads to a state highway, and that highway leads to another collector road that leads to the office, the school, the Walmart and the gym. Often, the voyage also requires using the interstate. This is sprawl, the dominant American pattern of settlement, and sprawl, more than anything else, has cemented our relationship with oil.

Ending our love affair with the automobile, no matter how unhealthy it has become, seems overwhelmingly disruptive. Although more and wider roads lead only to more congestion, states are loath to reject federal highway dollars such as those offered in economic stimulus packages. Highways are easy things to spend money on, so who cares if what they stimulate is sprawl?

The issue is not new for urban planners. We have been talking about it for 30 years, first as an aesthetic problem and then as a social concern: children and the elderly lacking independence, overburdened soccer moms and dads, massive income-based segregation and all that time wasted in traffic. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/15/AR2010101505197.html

[zipplewrath]

1. They avoid the most critical issue

"American suburbanization did not happen by accident; it was heavily subsidized by federal and state dollars, most powerfully in the form of highway funds."

Urban sprawl can be traced back to the post WW II generation. They came back to pursue middle class life styles, and wanted houses, homes really. And in urban centers those were very expensive. To a great degree even in the larger urban areas, the prices were steep. Builders offered less expensive homes, with more of the features and sizes that people wanted, at prices they wanted to afford. That put politicial pressure on the governments to build the roads that would allow those people to work in the cities, and live well outside of them where their immediate cash flow situation would be vastly better.

NYC has struggled with housing prices for centuries. It's always been expensive to live there. And all manners of methods for dealing with it have been tried, including the building of tenatments, public housing, and rent control. They met with various forms of success and failure. Cities around the world stuggle with similar issues. Sprawl isn't purely a US issue, although it may be worse here than anywhere else.

I'm not suggesting that sprawl is good, or desireable. I'm just suggesting that it didn't happen as some sort of corporate plot to make people fat, dumb, and unhappy. And the political response was to enable it with roads and highways because once the people were there, that's what they wanted. Other places have controlled this to a great degree by making it expensive to drive. Others have built the mass transit infrastructure to help keep people closer to cities without being IN the cities. But it takes the political will to make people unhappy about the choice of where they have to live. That's not particularly common in US politics.