 On Point Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages, writes his On Point column most weekdays. He is also an author and freelance writer. Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com. |
Carroll: A new look at sprawl
“I think we need to work together to minimize sprawl. It’s a desirable end to keep the urbanized area as compact as possible.”
—Lone Tree Mayor Jack O’Boyle, Rocky Mountain News, July 28.
O’Boyle expresses the dominant view among metro political and civic leaders, not to mention planners. Hardly a week goes by without some local luminary making a similar point in the press regarding the evils of sprawl.
One day it will be Mike Komppa, head of the Urban Land Institute Colorado, arguing that “people don’t want sprawl, and if you’re not going to sprawl, you’re going to have to grow vertically” — even if it goes against the wishes of neighborhoods, he goes on to suggest.
Another day it will be Michael Potts, chief of the Rocky Mountain Institute, congratulating himself for having moved from a “big suburban house” to a high-rise.
Or we read a column by the executive directors of the Colorado Environmental Coalition and the Front Range Economic Strategy Center regretting that “urban sprawl in California and our metro region has created an auto-dependent society leaving people no choice but to drive to work, the grocery store, and to pick up their children . ."
For years I’ve made the case that urban expansion is neither good nor bad but a matter of trade-offs — yes, it chews up some farmland, for example, but it also lowers housing prices. Sprawl is also inevitable, I’ve maintained, in any society whose affluence and population are growing.
Until recently, however, I’d missed the best single book written on the topic: Sprawl, a compact history (2005), by Professor Robert Bruegmann of the University of Illinois at Chicago. If our civic leaders would just bother to read it, their comments might not sound so glib and canned.
They would learn, for example, that people have always complained about growing cities. “Queen Elizabeth attempted to try to halt growth around London by issuing an edict prohibiting building at the edges of the city,” Bruegmann writes, while other European monarchs made similar futile efforts.
Nor is sprawl simply a result of the automobile.
In the United States, “The Los Angeles region had become one of the most decentralized, dispersed, multicentered urban places the world had seen already by the time of the First World War, well before the impact of the private automobile was felt in any really significant way. It was the steam railroad, the cable car, the streetcar, and the interurban rail system” — precisely the forms of transit that critics of sprawl love — “that had made this possible.”
It is mobility and prosperity that propel people to pursue their housing dreams outside of the urban core. And while autos obviously help, what’s striking about sprawl is its continuity: density declined “from nearly 60,000 [per square mile in developments on the outskirts of U.S. cities] in the late 19th century to less than 25,000 in the 1920s to less than 10,000 in the 1950s, a remarkably longterm and steady progression.”
A similar process has been at work around the world, including in cities erroneously hailed by critics of sprawl for supposedly bucking the trend. “The population of the central arrondissements of Paris . . . which had reached over 200,000 people per square mile by the mid-19th century, had dropped below 75,000 people per square mile by the year 2000,” Bruegmann notes. Meanwhile, residents of the massive, low-density Parisian suburbs rely on the private car almost as much as their supposedly car-obsessed U.S. counterparts.
Perhaps the biggest irony of the anti-sprawl mantra is how it misses current reality in America. “Today, densities are rising in at least half of the largest urbanized areas,” Bruegmann notes, a statement that clearly applies to parts of Denver. And while planners would like to take credit, the change is driven largely by demand for in-town housing by individuals with a host of motives.
Los Angeles has actually been getting denser for decades. As Bruegmann says, “The density of the Los Angeles urbanized area, as calculated in the 2000 census, was just over 7,000 people per square mile, nearly twice that of the Chicago urbanized area and significantly denser than the New York area.”
Yes, Los Angeles is in fact the high-density model that local proponents of “growing vertically” seem to have in mind for Denver, even as they profess the opposite. In my next column, I’ll tell you what else the anti-sprawl chorus typically gets wrong.
Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
As long as there are more people, and each ( family ) requires a higher standard of living, more energy consuming devices, more space and more vehicles, there will be sprawl. As long as we act like there are no limits to the Earth's resources, its liveable and productive space, and to its ability to cleanse itself and to maintain its balance, there will be sprawl - and pollution, shortages ( causing growing conflict and inflation, ) and eventual global warming/ climate change.
Am I guilty? Sure, we all are - but I can no more build a non-polluting auto, solar panels, or actually recycle my own trash than any other individual, so we need some bigger entity to help, but that doesn't seem to be a part of this administration's agenda. So why waste space and energy talking about the evils ( or the good - if you're in big business ) of sprawl - since obviously, we, as apeople, prefer its advantages to its disadvantages?