Lance
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Garnet SpyIt tires me to hear so-called progressives whine about (sub)urban sprawl and how we’re destroying the environment. Their solution always leads back to some master design crafted by government planners. Centralization isn’t the answer folks, and neither is the government.
The cause of urban sprawl is the government.
When massive roads are built, people drive on them. The government gives extremely low interest loans and subsidizes a lot of these so that people can build houses they truly can’t afford (and often never pay off). Home prices skyrocket because subsidized demand for houses has went up. People move into land that is in less demand and build new houses there are lower, cheaper prices. Usually they move onto land that is off the site of a major interstate or highway.
Since the government has subsidized urban sprawl in the sake of “a home for everyone,” we now see the effects of it. Wasted use of hundreds of acres of land that otherwise would have not only looked nicer without ugly houses on it but also went to more efficient use.
Whenever you think of urban sprawl, remember it is the government’s fault. Subsidization of something (house building and travel in this case) always creates more of whatever is being subsidized.
Filed under: Economics, History, News, Politics | Tagged: Urban Sprawl
You complain about progressives, but you offer no solutions. Is urban sprawl and environmental strain just going to magically go away when a Libertarian gets elected?
I’d like to see more trains and advanced public transportation systems employed across the country, so that cars would be less necessary. These wouldn’t be cheap, but I don’t think it’s impossible either (which is probably what the automotive industry would tell you). What do you think, Lance?
Trains would only serve the same purpose as roads in current American society–people would live farther from the city in their new, subsidized homes, and just ride the train instead of a car (in some instances).
Cars are not the problem, but rather cheap, subsidized transportation.
If we lived in a society where government did not subsidize house loans, more people would live closer to cities and rent. The role of the landlord would important again.
And no, urban sprawl will not immediately end–you can’t fix what’s already been created, but I expect over time people will move back into cities and you will see ghost town suburban areas emerge all across the United States, much like abandoned towns that exist out in the Western states.
True, true. Trains can be abused as easily as cars. In my mind, I would like to see them used for city to city travel more, or for travel within cities. Many cities have good subway systems and I think they can help reduce car usage, but others are way behind the time. Baltimore, for instance, removed it’s trolley tracks but never replaced them with a proper subway out to the suburbs, so the only option is bus or car travel.
Of course, this could have been an incentive to move back into the city, but it didn’t work that way because crime is so bad and rent is so high. I guess I don’t really know what I’m talking about - I haven’t thought it out deeply, but seeing the situation in town sort of makes me an advocate for better public transportation. Most people live in the ‘burbs and the only way into town is by car anyway.
I have been told that Chicago has trains that go out into the suburbs, which of course doesn’t alleviate the urban sprawl–people will still build out as far away from the city as they can get as long as government subsidizes the home loans and further transportation.
If the market dictated things it would probably be more like Europe, living in closer quarters near to the city. Though if the market truly dictated things our cities would be bustling and quite nice as opposed to government-ran dumps.
This is one heavy number, Lance. You could do a whole series on this topic, and then probably a series from each installment of the previous series. I live in Atlanta, the Developer’s Playground. For more than 30 years there has been no—repeat, NO—governmental restraint on developers that a good ol’ boy caint’ hannel, if you take my meaning. And it shows. Sprawl-O-Rama.
In California, by contrast, one finds extraordinarily thick governmental control over land use. And one also finds the ruination of uniquely beautiful open spaces and, in built environments, the daily replacement of anything not new. California loves the strange, so these policies ensure that a person remains ever a stranger in ever stranger places utterly devoid of placeness. Sprawl-O-Rama.
With laissez-faire, sprawl. With central planning, sprawl. I could specify some of the mechanisms by which each has driven sprawl in the U.S. If I had to choose between the two—and I have done so, and expect to be able to do again—I’ll take the chaos and happenstance of unplanned growth over the centrally planned simulacra of authentic human settlements.
Centralized urban planning is another tool of human husbandry. I’m tired of living inside other people’s devices.
Laissez faire doesn’t lead to sprawl. I argue that Europe has less “sprawl restrictions” than most of the western states that are trying to control it, but people live in cities.
Because subsidized loans aren’t being made in Europe.
It goes back to the government subsidizing loans and making their interest rates artificially low, so people take up house building offers they previously would not.
A.P. Giannini, Founder of B of A, deliberately pioneered suburban sprawl with low-interest car loans coupled to home loans and innovative, suburban branch-banking. That was in the 1930s, before the G.I. Bill revolutionized the U.S. government’s role in sprawl. Developers have been known to kill people who get in the way of their kind of laissez faire. They make money when they build, just as lenders make money when they lend. These sprawl incentives would remain even were government to melt away.
Why has California been, since the 1950s, the national leader in over-regulation of land use? Because land use after the Spanish—and later Mexican—land grants was violently chaotic there. The true Wild West. The true California Gold. Wanton destruction, and fraud to rival even that of Florida. That state was settled overnight, and had no time to grow a Rome or a Paris “organically”, as the Parsonites would put it.
Personally, I’d really like to participate in running a laissez faire approach to ground by gaming it out, as I share your objective and also agree that government does far more harm than good in land use. When I play that game in my mind, it looks good. Still, castles in the air, and all that…