[Apa-pbc] The End of Sprawl?

[George Jackson]

Outstanding op-ed from Sunday's Washington Post, written by a land use law
professor.

-George

*The End of Sprawl?*

By Eduardo M. Penalver
Sunday, December 30, 2007; B07

The collapse in the housing market and high gasoline prices are bad news for
middle-class homeowners left to sift through the wreckage. But if there is
consolation to be found amid the rubble, it may be that the inexorable
spreading out that has characterized American life since World War II might
finally be coming to an end. Given the connections between car-dependent
suburban development and social ills from climate change and the destruction
of wetlands to obesity and social isolation, the end can come none too soon.

American sprawl was built on the twin pillars of low gas prices and a
relentless demand for housing that, combined with the effects of restrictive
zoning in existing suburbs, pushed new development outward toward cheap
rural land. Middle-class Americans, not able to find housing they could
afford in existing suburbs, kept driving farther out into the countryside
until they did. Gridlock in the suburbs and the expense of providing
municipal services to sparsely populated communities imposed their own
limits on how far we could spread. As a result, the density of metropolitan
areas, which fell steadily in the postwar years, had begun to creep back up
in the 1990s. Despite these infrastructural restraints, however, the
now-defunct housing boom and cheap gas kept exerting centrifugal pressure on
living patterns, pushing the edge of new development farther out into rural
America.

Over the past year or so, both of these forces have dramatically weakened.
With credit tight and the demand for housing drying up (sales of new homes
fell last month to the lowest level in 12 years) new construction in the
exurbs is grinding to a halt. The result is a decline in the building
industry's appetite for rural land on the urban edge. The question now is
whether that decline will last. In the past, a sudden drop-off in demand for
housing in the exurbs would have represented merely a hiatus. Builders would
have bided their time until the housing market recovered, and the outward
push would soon have begun again. But persistently high gas prices may mean
that the next building boom will take place not at the edges of metropolitan
areas but far closer to their cores. People are more willing to drive 20
miles each way to work every day, burning a couple of gallons of gas in the
process, when gas costs less than milk. But as gas prices climb, long car
commutes become a rising tax on exurban homeownership, and the price people
are willing to pay for homes in remote areas will fall.

Increasing gas prices may not be enough to cause people to move, which is
why demand for gas proves so inelastic in the short term, but it can
influence where people choose to live when they are forced to relocate for
other reasons. The evidence that this is already occurring is, at this
point, still somewhat anecdotal, but it is very suggestive. As the New
Urbanist News reported this fall, during the present downturn, accompanied
as it has been by high gas prices, homes close to urban centers or that have
convenient access to transit seem to be holding their value better than
houses in car-dependent communities at the urban edge. A recent story in the
Minneapolis Star Tribune blamed flagging growth in the Twin Cities' outer
suburbs on rising gas prices. If prices at the pump continue to increase, as
many analysts expect, the eventual recovery of demand for new housing may
not be accompanied by a resumption of America's relentless march into the
cornfields.

The death of sprawl will present enormous challenges, chief among them the
need to provide affordable middle-class housing in areas that are already
built up. Accommodating a growing population in the era of high gas prices
will mean increasing density and mixing land uses to enhance walkability and
public transit. And this must happen not just in urban centers but in
existing suburbs, where growth is stymied by parochial and exclusionary
zoning laws. Overcoming low-density, single-use zoning mandates so as to
fairly allocate the costs of increased density will require coordination at
regional levels. This in turn will require overcoming the balkanization of
America's metropolitan areas. This shift toward a more regional outlook will
force broad rethinking of how we fund and deliver services provided by local
governments, most obviously (and explosively) public education.

Although the end of sprawl will require painful changes, it will also
provide a badly needed opportunity to take stock of the car-dependent,
privatized society that has evolved over the past 60 years and to begin
imagining different ways of living and governing. We may discover that it's
not so bad living closer to work, in transit- and pedestrian-friendly,
diverse neighborhoods where we run into friends and neighbors as we walk to
the store, school or the office. We may even find that we don't miss our
cars and commutes, and the culture they created, nearly as much as we feared
we would.

The writer is an associate professor at Cornell Law School, where he teaches
property and land-use law.

-- 
George Jackson
Innovation Planning Now

Innovation Planning Now Homepage-
http://innovationplanning.googlepages.com
Blog for Innovation in Community & Environmental Planning-
http://bicepbulletin.blogspot.com
innovationplanningnow at gmail.com
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