We Want What We Want

Once, when asked by a reporter what he thought of the vocal opposition to his plan for building an expressway across Manhattan through Greenwich Village, Robert Moses said, “The common man very often doesn’t know what’s in his own best interest; he isn’t smart enough to visualize what you’re going to do.”

Now, Moses was a Son of a Bitch of the highest order, and he had a myopic take on what made a great and livable city. But he was smart and in his own condescending way he was right. At least in this particular observation. For proof that Moses spoke the truth, look no further than the ever-expanding belt of cornfield development around Chicago. From Monee to Elburn to McHenry, developers are building ridiculous homes in places with no future in a world of $100 per barrel oil. And yet, they build. Why? Because the houses sell. Why? People want them.

And there, in those three words—“people want them”—is the foundation on which all attacks against so-called Smart Growth are built. Take Joel Kotkin’s recent column in the Online Wall Street Journal. The title says it all: “The War Against Suburbia.” Kotkin helpfully reproduces the entire bleating rant on his website, joelkotkin.com .

Kotkin is a Los Angeles resident, which helps explain why he feels his suburban way of life is under attack. L.A. is famous for its sprawl and you can’t have sprawl without people to populate it. More and more, however, there are voices other than those who would push the boundaries of development ever farther. Joining the chorus is Los Angeles’s new mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, whom Kotkin quotes in his piece thusly: “This old concept that all of us are going to live in a three-bedroom home, you know this 2,500 square feet, with a big frontyard and a big backyard – well, that’s an old concept.”

Kotkin disagrees, calling such viewpoints “imposed vision.” And it is here, in the second paragraph, that his argument begins to fall apart. “From Australia to Great Britain (and points in between), there is a drive to use the public purse to expand often underused train systems, downtown condominiums, hotels, convention centers, sports stadia and “star-chitect”-designed art museums, often at the expense of smaller business, single-family neighborhoods and local shopping areas.”

This is so far from the truth, and provably so, as to threaten Kotkin’s credibility and standing in the academic world. How many tax breaks have big-box retailers like Wal-Mart and Target weaseled out of cash-strapped villages, towns and cities willing to prostitute themselves for a ride to the end of the sales tax rainbow? According to one website, 244 subsidized Wal-Mart facilities in 35 states have received tax incentives totaling $1 billion.

And how much money have federal and local governments spent building and maintaining interstate and local highway systems, not to mention local roads serving sprawling subdivisions?

Oregon, and Portland in particular, rate special scorn from Kotkin. The target of his ire is the urban growth boundary that the state drew around Portland in the 1970s. It was designed to promote more dense development in the city limits and to discourage massive subdivisions on the urban fringe, preserving that land for farming. It was a move that envisioned the end of the 5,000-mile salad and the need for cities to grow more of what they consume locally.

There are arguments to be made that the urban growth boundary has had unintended consequences, among them pushing unchecked growth to the outskirts of towns beyond the boundary, towns like Newberg, Woodburn and Boring. This is part of the reason that Kotkin can claim that 95% of the region’s population increase occurred outside the city limits. No word on whether Kotkin includes Vancouver, Wash., in that statistic, and if so whether he accounts for the onetime annexation of a huge chunk of land in Clark County in the 90s that basically doubled the population of Vancouver overnight.

Kotkin’s point comes down to this: People like the suburbs. They have voted with their feet and with their money. In a capitalist society, money talks, and people should be allowed to live where they want and how they want. If they want to build communities in the middle of the corn and drive 80 miles each way to work every day, so be it. It is not government’s place to dictate lifestyle.

Which is a fine argument, except. . . . People are hypocrites. They want it both ways. They want government to leave them to do as they please, until something goes wrong, when they want government to fix it.

That, plus the fact that what people like and what’s good for them aren’t always the same thing. People like McDonald’s, for example. They like it because there’s a lot of fat in the food there and the fat helps it taste good. The Indignant Citizen likes the texture half & half adds to his coffee. That doesn’t mean he should go drinking half & half at dinner.

It’s about moderation, really, and as a culture we’re not very good at that. Is there anything wrong with single family homes? No, of course not. Is there anything wrong with the odd person here and there opting to live in the middle of nowhere? No. But when everybody decides he wants a single-family house on five acres, scarcity of land becomes a reality.

Kotkin tries to put the Fear into his readers by suggesting that a cabal of city planners has emerged from the anti-sprawl propaganda-spewing planning schools and are invading city halls across America, hatching ways to squash spawl—and property rights in the process. It’s another of the laughable conclusions he draws.

Contrary to Kotkin’s argument, city governments are not suddenly clamping down on sprawl. For evidence he need only drive through the hinterlands of Chicago. Despite the fact that dozens of condominium buildings are under construction throughout the city, houses are rising from the fields unabated. The push outward has continued with no ill effect felt from a resurgence in city building.

Kotkin also slams the media for writing stories about how some people think cities are still good. As an example he points to an article in the Jan. 8 New York Times headlined “Goodbye, Suburbs” about couples who moved to the ‘burbs, decided they didn’t like it, and moved back to the city, sometimes selling their suburban homes at a loss. Kotkin thinks this kind of reporting ignores demographic trends, and worse, ridicules them. But Kotkin’s own statistics suggest that people are choosing the suburbs despite newspapers occasionally writing stories about how some people prefer the city.

Kotkin, begins his screed by describing suburbia as “the preferred way of life across the advanced capitalist world,” and he concludes, “It is time politicians recognized how their constituents actually want to live. If not, they will only hurt their communities, and force aspiring middle class families to migrate ever further out to the periphery for the privacy, personal space and ownership that constitutes the basis of their common dreams.”

The bottom line is that the time is coming when living in far-flung suburban developments, with all that entails such as five-mile drives to the store, will be impractical. When that happens, all those people who insisted that the American Dream consisted of the right to a house, a yard, and SUV and a boat will be asking their politicians why nobody warned them the end of the cheap energy era was nigh. They’ll want to know why they were allowed to live in places that are no longer viable. They’ll be demanding compensation of some kind, no doubt.

Then the government, which Kotkin now complains is doing too much, won’t be able to do enough.