The Anti-Sprawl Book
by Anders Hove

"Once There Were Greenfields" — the title taken from a 1960s folk song by The Brothers Four — markets itself as a toolkit or sourcebook, and there's merit in the approach, which amounts to a compilation of statistics, anecdotes, and excerpts of formal reports and news stories on sprawl, car culture, congestion, the urban environment and everything in between. When the book, written by Kaid Benfield, Matthew Raimi and Donald Chen, came out it rated No. 2 among EPA buyers at Amazon.com.

There's not much new here. These compilations have been done before, and everyone who is concerned about the issue has already accumulated an adequate mental image of sprawly atrocities. But just in case you forgot what a congested highway looks like, "Greenfields" litters its text with thumbnail photos portraying America in its most unflattering light. Yes, you can make any vista ugly by shooting it in black and white from below eye-level, surrounded by early-80s model Rabbits, Golfs and Volvos.

The rise of the anti-sprawl book coincides with the rise of sprawl as a political issue nationwide. Localities facing "sprawl brawls" have experimented with growth boundaries, green space protection and conservation subdivision design. More widespread still are debates about whether transportation dollars should continue to go toward highway construction at the fringes of cities: Boston's Big Dig project, for example is designed not to reduce congestion overall, but to shift congestion to the suburbs.

And for the first time sprawl has become a national issue: Al Gore has made smart growth a campaign platform, albeit under the saccharine phrase "livable communities," and Bill Clinton has pushed funding for sprawl-blocking land purchases under the Lands Legacy Initiative. That the Democrats have felt safe in claiming ownership of the sprawl issue is an indication not only that the issue has gone mainstream, but that it is mainstream among suburban voters themselves — Clinton having won election twice by adopting a suburban strategy.

"Greenfields" is the latest installment in what has, in the last decade, become an established non-fiction genre: the anti-sprawl cultural critique. The path is a well-worn one. James Howard Kunstler's "Geography of Nowhere" continues to lead the market it created; "Edge Cities" by Joel Garreau still finds plenty of space on book racks in Borders and Barnes and Nobles everywhere. There are anti-sprawl photo essays in book form. The more academic types can delve into the historical roots of the movement sometimes loosely called New Urbanism (actually the term for smart planning advocated by New Urbanism guru Peter Calthorpe and others), or just urbanism. The genre traces its ancestry back to "The Rise and Fall of the Great American Cities," by Jane Jacobs, a classic read in every Planning 101 nationwide. On the boundary between academia and new age philosophy is "A Pattern Language," by Chris Alexander.

These books speak to a general disaffection toward American city design and sprawl, but none provides any real solutions. Indeed, they seem to be steeped in a helplessness that is both practical and political. The purpose of the anti-sprawl book is usually polemic. Anti-sprawl writers advocate that we see sprawl in a different and more critical light. Although the public policy dilemmas posed by sprawl are massive, the fundamental issue raised by the anti-sprawl writers is one of style. They want Americans to modify their reaction to cars and suburbs and wider highways from one of tolerance, if not adulation, to one of intolerance.

But while many localities have rebelled against congestion and development, there are no signs that the car culture is waning. From 1969 to 1990, a time when the U.S. population grew by 21 percent, annual person miles per capita grew by 65 percent. The number of cars per capita is rising, and increasingly Americans are making separate trips for individual errands. Some of this is due to the self-perpetuating nature of sprawl, which forces ever more trips as the city spreads. The public policy dilemma, as Jacobs noted in 1961, is that "there is never a good or obvious point at which to swear off [road building and development]; for as the process proceeds, from its small and apparently innocuous beginnings, it becomes continually harder to halt or reverse it and ... more impractical to do so."

In most cities, even the minority that would like to walk or take public transportation finds it impossible. And despite evidence that widening roads induces more traffic than it alleviates, road building is still equated with progress and justified as a way to "ease congestion." Judging from home prices and the popularity of SUVs, is there any evidence at all that Americans don't want the cities they've built for themselves? I live in a walkable city, but even my urban neighbors are wedded to driving.

One friend who proclaims a great love of city life takes public transit to work — but occupies her free time driving on single errands to her favorite strip malls distant from work and home. A coworker complains that the repair bill on her family's second vehicle prevents her from putting money away for retirement — then admits she only uses the car to shop in bulk across town at Price Club. Even downtown dwellers are willing to subsidize cheap strip-mall construction by socking their own time and money into car travel. It would seem the political and economic basis for sprawl is as unassailable today as ever.

In some respects the battle against sprawl mirrors the fight against smoking. You've got the big entrenched interests (developers, car-makers, the highway lobbies) and a product many find a sexy way of demonstrating freedom and sophistication (The allure of fire is big for both cigs and cars.) But with smoking there was a tipping point — when the Surgeon General declared smoking hazardous to health. It's hard to imagine a similar tipping point for sprawl — hard to imagine physically, let alone politically. After all, L.A. is larger than the building-destroying 10 psi blast-radius of a 1 megaton nuclear warhead — what gradual political, economic, or stylistic change could undo what even the most horrific weapon can only dent?

Even the anti-sprawl books themselves are caught in a policy mire — the problem being that the blanket condemnation of sprawl sets the policy bar too high. Then there's the law of unintended consequences. If you put in mass transit (good), you increase capacity (bad — it induces still more sprawl and traffic). Invent non-polluting cars or intelligent transportation systems (good) and you reduce the political pressure on drivers to mend their wasteful, sprawly ways (bad).

The saving grace of "Greenfields" is that it provides some new information on the fiscal impact on communities of sprawl. Residential and commercial development has often been justified as a means of growing the tax base — "progress" to local development types. But on average, it argues, expenses can outrun new revenues by a massive margin — more for the big-box development often touted as the biggest cash cow.

In fact, the more spread-out the development, the more it drains the coffers. This adds to the argument of Myron Orfield's "Metropolitics," which illustrated the extent to which low-density suburbs benefit from inequitable subsidies paid for by neighboring suburbs and cities. Unless you live in an exurb yourself, your tax bite is draining invisibly toward your own region's fringe.

Chances are that local suburbs won't learn their lessons. They haven't in the past. Again, witness new road construction marketed as congestion-alleviation. Voters and businesses want sprawl too much to listen to incremental data piling up on sprawl's negatives. And even if sprawl is growing as an issue nationwide, when it comes to their own backyards Americans continue to want more roads and larger lots.

And that means that the anti-sprawl book will continue to be the only outlet for the anti-sprawl movement.

E-mail Anders Hove at hove at rand dot org.