Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb

The American Conservative(!) educates ideology-for-hire "reporter" John Stossel

 
ABOVE: John Stossel's "market-driven" heaven on earth (From the book Retrofitting Suburbia, 2009).

News Flash: To conservatives whose paychecks and livelihood are not intrinsically tied to protecting the interests of industries who grow fat on the sprawl-based policies, the concepts of Smart Growth and sustainable development are entirely consistent with their core values.

"Journalist" John Stossel -- a demagogue for whom "facts" are very malleable, to say the least --  proclaimed sprawl a "myth" (see "Myth #2"; he has since moved to FOX, which is entirely fitting).

GEOGRAPHY OF NOWHERE author J. H. Kunstler has nothing nice to say about Stossel and his slippery ethics. But you expect that from a lefty, right?

However, it is refreshing and worth noting when a conservative writer at a conservative web site points out the truth:

For the 101st time: sprawl — an umbrella term for the pattern of development seen virtually everywhere in the United States — is not caused by the free market. It is, rather, mandated by a vast and seemingly intractable network of government regulations, from zoning laws and building codes to street design regulations. If Stossel wants to expand Americans’ lifestyle choices, he should attack the very thing he was defending, namely, suburban sprawl.

Read the rest at The American Conservative » Sprawling Misconceptions.

Perhaps the best distillation of the reality of the situation comes from E.D. Kain at True/Slant:

Sprawl is a result of massive statist interventions into our culture and society, and its symptoms are equally enormous.  Everything that conservatism has historically stood for is undermined by sprawl.  It is not only the physical manifestation of our decline, it is a poison which continues to contribute to that decline.  Its repercussions can be felt in our discourse, in our speech, in our way of thinking.  This is not merely a matter of aesthetically pleasing communities, but of communities which allow individuals to be a part of the whole.  I doubt this is sustainable, this suburban maze – in any way: fiscally, socially, spiritually.  It is, as James Howard Kunstler called it, “a peculiar blip in human experience.”

See also the Atlantic Wire, and Andrew Sullivan.

"Not all growth is created equal. Some kinds of growth are more valuable than others. Where dumb growth is unsustainable, unfair, and brittle, smart growth is sustainable, equitable, and resilient."

Perhaps the statement above, by Umair Haque of the Harvard Business Review, encapsulates the conflict between "growth at all costs" economic development and Smart Growth approaches that are scarce in suburban enclaves like Franklin.

It should be noted that, not too long ago, some Franklin elected officials were ousted because they were deemed "anti-development" by a band of leafleters who felt no particular obligation to the truth. Though many officials who were either members of or supported by "Franklin Citizens for Responsible Leadership" have since distanced themselves from the group, "institutional memory" is strong and bow-to-the-developer habits are hard to break. I see it - and often confront it - at every city meeting I attend as a spectator or participant.

Consider Haque's four pillars of smart growth for economies, communities, and corporations:

1. Outcomes, not income. Dumb growth is about incomes - are we richer today than we were yesterday? Smart growth is about people, and how much better or worse off they are - not merely how much junk an economy can churn out. Smart growth measures people's outcomes - not just their incomes. Are people healthier, fitter, smarter, happier? Economics that measure financial numbers, we've learned the hard way, often fail to be meaningful, except to the quants among us. It is tangible human outcomes that are the arbiters of authentic value creation.

2. Connections, not transactions. Dumb growth looks at what's flowing through the pipes of the global economy: the volume of trade. Smart growth looks at how pipes are formed, and why some pipes matter more than others: the quality of connections. It doesn't just look at transactions at the global, regional, or national level -- how much world trade has grown, for example -- but looks at how local and global relationships power invention and innovation. Without Silicon Valley's relationships powering the development of personal computing and the internet, for example, the volume of trade between Taiwan, Japan, and China, would be a fraction of what it is. Smart growth seeks to amplify connection and community -- because the goal isn't just to trade, but to co-create and collaborate.

3. People, not product. The next time you hear an old dude talking about "product", let him know the 20th century ended a decade ago. Smart growth isn't driven by pushing product, but by the skill, dedication, and creativity of people. What's the difference? Everything. Globalization driven by McJobs deskilling the world, versus globalization driven by entrepreneurship, venture economies, and radical innovation. People not product means a renewed focus on labor mobility, human capital investment, labor market standards, and labor market efficiency. Smart growth isn't powered by capital dully seeking the lowest-cost labor -- but by giving labor the power to seek the capital with they can create, invent, and innovate the most.

4. Creativity, not productivity. Uh-oh: Creativity is an economic four-letter word. Why? Because it's hard to measure, manage, and model. So economists focus on productivity instead -- and the result is dumb growth. Smart growth focuses on economic creativity - because creativity is what let us know that competition is creating new value, instead of just shifting old value around. What is economic creativity? How many new industries, markets, categories, and segments an economy can consistently create. Think China's gonna save the world? Think again: it's economically productive, but it's far from economically creative. Smart growth is creative -- not merely productive.

Read the rest at The Smart Growth Manifesto - Umair Haque - Harvard Business Review.

CNU's Norquist in Hartford Courant: Fund real main streets — not highways — with the "Jobs for Main Streets" bill now in Congress | Congress for the New Urbanism

From the Congress for the New Urbanism website:

The rollout of Congress' latest stimulus bill has been all about "Jobs for Main Street." That's a great message, argues CNU President John Norquist in a timely op-ed in the Hartford Courant, except for one problem. When it comes to the jobs bill's largest expenditure — $27.5 million for highways and roads — Main Streets are largely missing. Writes Norquist:

The $27.5 billion isn't targeted to rebuild streets at the heart of older cities and towns, the cherished settings for Memorial Day parades and holiday light displays. No, the money will primarily go to projects that government knows best — the expansion of wide, motor-vehicle-only highways that go hand-in-hand with energy-wasting sprawl. This follows the earlier stimulus bill that favored massive highway projects, including a batch of expensive "highways to nowhere" that an examination by the Infrastructurist website concluded "make no sense."

The new bill does reserve $8.4 billion for transit and $800 million for Amtrak. But just when U.S. real estate markets are turning to Main Street and traditional neighborhood design, Congress throws $27.5 billion at the infrastructure — road widening — that supports sprawl.

Whether the setting is small towns like Guilford, older suburbs like West Hartford or bigger cities like New Haven, the traditional Main Street in Connecticut and other states is proving to be a model around which to build livable and energy-efficient communities. A report by economist Joseph Cortright for CEOs for Cities is the latest to find homes within walking distance of shops, schools and other amenities commanding significantly higher prices than sprawl counterparts.

And in the world of commercial real estate, the hot trend — named by Time Magazine as one of "ten ideas changing the world" — is "retrofitting suburbia" with walkable, mixed-use development. None other than Tyson's Corner, Va., the largest sprawl commercial complex in the country, is due for a multibillion-dollar urban makeover complete with traditional main streets.

The article goes on to extol the benefits of reinvesting in main streets and neighboring networks of walkable transit-served streets — benefits that include saving households hundreds of dollars monthly on transportation costs, promoting physical activity and reducing obesity, curbing greenhouse gases, and supporting more diverse economies. The research behind these conclusions is impressive and will be explored in greater depth at CNU 18  in Atlanta, "New Urbanism: Rx for Healthy Places" which is being oraganized in cooperation with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Writes Norquist:

Evidence shows these networks save money — and they save lives. Research by engineering professors Norman Garrick of the University of Connecticut and Wes Marshall of the University of Colorado-Denver reveals that traffic injury and fatality rates are three times higher in California cities with sprawling streets than in those with compact, connected networks.

Brookings-backed research from the Center for Neighborhood Technology shows that highway-served sprawling areas in region after region have the highest household transportation costs and highest per-capita carbon emissions. Each months, residents of walkable, transit-served neighborhoods save hundreds of dollars in average transportation costs.

Read the rest at: Norquist in Hartford Courant: Fund real main streets — not highways — with the "Jobs for Main Streets" bill now in Congress | Congress for the New Urbanism

Passenger rail needs to pay for itself? Take off the transportation blinders

From Dave Zweifel of Madison's Capital Times: Plain Talk: Take off the transportation blinders

It’s long been a myth that the streets, highways and bridges that accommodate our love affair with the automobile are all paid for by highway taxes.

Far from it. Just check your local city and county budgets and see how much general purpose tax revenue is siphoned into street repair every year. Property taxes help fund a lot of those orange trucks you always see on the roads.

Or how about the $8 billion that the Bush administration funneled into the highway trust fund in 2008 and the $7 billion that the Obama administration ponied up in 2009 because the gas tax money is falling short? And that’s not counting the $3 billion of taxpayers’ funds that went into the “cash for clunkers” automobile fix or the $81 billion in federal aid to GM and Chrysler.

So it’s always with some amusement that I hear politicians insist that — come hell or high water — passenger rail improvements need to pay for themselves. They’re demanding from rail what they don’t demand from every other mode of transportation, airlines included.

It’s a primary reason that America’s public transportation systems lags the rest of the developed world’s.

There was reason to rejoice earlier this year when President Obama announced that $8 billion of the country’s massive stimulus program would go to help build “high-speed” rail projects, which, hopefully, will include a Chicago-Milwaukee-Madison segment that has been on the drawing boards for years now.

But even our high-speed projects are laughable when compared to those that exist elsewhere. Japan is running its “bullet” trains at 188 miles an hour. France’s new high-speed railroad runs at 125 mph. Israel’s new Tel Aviv-to-Jerusalem line is upgrading to 120 miles an hour. China, which recently committed a trillion dollars to develop fast trains, plans on running them at 235 miles an hour.

Should the “high-speed” train between here and Chicago ever come to fruition, it will probably run at 79 miles an hour initially, but could be upgraded eventually to 110 mph. That’s because our rail infrastructure is designed mainly to handle freight trains, which operate at much lower speeds and don’t need the tighter standards and banked corners that faster trains need.

Ironically, our passenger trains in 2009 are slower than they were in the 1940s. According to Woodrow Wilson Center fellow Mark Reutter, “streamliners” such as the Super Chief, 20th Century Limited, Denver Zephyr and Hiawatha routinely topped 90 to 100 miles an hour between stops. And that was with the old steam locomotives.

“While the rest of the world has advanced, America’s passenger rail has stalled, if not reversed direction,” he says.

Most of Amtrak’s routes today are lucky if they average 50 miles an hour. Even the acclaimed Acela Express along the East Coast, the nation’s supposed answer to the bullet trains, averages only 67 mph along much of its route, even though it can hit 150 miles an hour on some short stretches of improved track.

This should be a national embarrassment, yet there are strong special interests in the country that fight passenger rail development, fiercely protecting transportation funding for more and wider roads that serve only to promote yet more automobile traffic.

If we’re ever going to develop a balanced transportation system in the United States, we need to take the blinders off. Rail, for all the efficiencies it represents, needs to get the monetary assistance that other modes of transit routinely receive. Once the infrastructure is brought up to snuff, then passenger rail can actually work to pay for itself.

Dave Zweifel is editor emeritus of The Capital Times.

[email protected]

Top 10 Books - 2010 | Planetizen

If I haven't already read them, they're very likely on my Amazon Wish List. Not included on the list, surprisingly, is Retrofitting Suburbia by Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson, which I found excellent.

From Planetizen:

Planetizen is pleased to release its ninth annual list of the ten best books in urban planning, design and development published in 2009. This year's assortment ranges from an impassioned argument for making transit fun to a low-key and practical guide to smart growth. And of course, Jane Jacobs makes an appearance.

The Planetizen editorial staff based its 2010 edition list on a number of criteria, including editorial reviews, popularity, Planetizen reader nominations, number of references, sales figures, recommendations from experts and the book's potential impact on the urban planning, development and design professions.

This year, historical analysis dominates the list, with five or more books reaching back into the past for insight. Erik Sanderson reaches back all the way to 1609 in Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, and Mark Ovenden digs into the history of the Paris Underground with a lushly illustrated coffee table book. But the future and present are not forgotten, with several books tackling today's realities and strategies for improvement.

We present our list in alphabetical order, and are not assigning rank. And now, on to the list!

• “The Bicycle Diaries,” David Byrne (former lead singer of The Talking Heads, and now solo artist). Viking Press 
• “The Smart Growth Manual,” Andrés Duany, Jeff Speck and Mike Lydon. McGrawHill Professional
• “Wrestling With Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City,” Anthony Flint. Random House
• “On Private Property: Finding Common Ground on the Ownership of Land,” Eric Freyfogle. Beacon Press
• “Building Up and Tearing Down: Reflections on the Age of Architecture,” Paul Goldberger. The Monacelli Press
• “The Architecture of Community,” Léon Krier. Island Press
• “The BLDGBLOG Book,” Geoff Manaugh (writer of the well-know BLDGBLOG). Chronicle Books
• “Paris Underground: The Maps, Stations and Design of the Métro,” Mark Ovenden. Penguin
• “Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability,” David Owen. Riverhead Books (also read “Urban is Good,” a New York Times review of this book).
• “Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City,” Eric W. Sanderson. Abrams Books (also read "Island in the Stream,” a New York Times review of this book).

Read detailed reviews of each book at: Top 10 Books - 2010 | Planetizen

Sad Suburban Reality: Investment in anything beyond the area patrolled by your riding lawn mower is socialism

Why are today's suburban landscapes devoid of public spaces, connective roadways and trails, and other shared amenities? Because each house aspires to be its own gated community.

We've been made to believe that, somehow, $4,500 for a personal Rainbow Play Structure in the backyard is preferable to an $35 yearly bump in shared property taxes to fund, for instance, a network of community parks that would in turn attract commercial development capable of easing the tax burden on private property owners. (The play structure in my backyard, by the way, is a Rainbow knock-off. The "soon-to-be completed" park promised nearby is now a dozen years late.)

But, "You take care of your own."

Almost imperceptibly, the societal idea of what it means to be a resident of a community seems to have changed; it is more common now to speak of taxpayers than of citizens.... In gated communities and other privatized enclaves, the local community that many residents identify with is the one within the gates. Their homeowner association dues are like taxes; and their responsibility to their community, such as it is, ends at that gate.... One city official in Plano, Texas, summed up his view of the attitude of the gated community residents in his town: "I took care of my responsibility, I'm safe in here, I've got my guard gate; I've paid my [homeowner association] dues, and I'm responsible for my streets. Therefore, I have no responsibility for the commonweal, because you take care of your own."

- Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States, Edward Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder

The Smart Growth Manual: An Interview with author Mike Lydon

My copy of the Smart Growth Manual arrives today. If it's even half as good as Suburban Nation, it'll soon be bristling with post-it notes.

Mike Lydon, co-author of the new Smart Growth Manual, is a member of the Next American Vanguard, a group of 34 young advocates, planners and policymakers representing America’s next generation of urban leaders. He formerly worked at the planning firm Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company alongside Andres Duany, who wrote Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream along with Jeff Speck, another prolific planner and urban designer. Lydon helped the two write and edit The Smart Growth Manual, a “companion volume” to Suburban Nation that seeks to thoroughly define “smart growth” and provide advice and best-practice examples of how to translate the idea into urban reality. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has called the book an “indispensable guide to city planning,” and the website Planetizen recently named it as one of the 10 best planning, design and development books of the year. Here, Lydon tells NAC about working on the book.

Tell us a bit about the history of the project.

The Smart Growth Manual was originally conceived as the follow-up to the highly successful Suburban Nation, written by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, published in 2000. Jeff set out to write the The Smart Growth Manual as a user-friendly guide to combating the problem of suburban sprawl so clearly identified in Suburban Nation. Jeff, who was still the Director of Town Planning for DPZ at the time, took a sabbatical to write the first draft. As Jeff tells it, Andres read the draft but felt that there was just too much changing in the planning field for the book to move forward; too many smart growth projects just coming out of the ground; too many new policies whose outcomes could not yet be measured; and too many related movements—such as green building, global warming/environmental groups, public health advocates, smart growth, New Urbanism, etc.—that had not yet achieved the traction that they have today. So they decided to hold off on the project and observe, while also continuing to refine and advance their own work.

Read the rest at NAC Daily Report: The Smart Growth Manual: An Interview with Mike Lydon

METROBURBIA, USA: Community-building and "Intersubjectivity"

Asphalt, concrete, parked cars, and -- benches notwithstanding - - no life.

From the excellent METROBURBIA, USA, by Paul K. Knox:

The basis of both individual lifeworlds and the collective structure of feeling is intersubjectivity: shared meanings that are derived from the lived experience of everyday practice. An important part of the basis for intersubjectivity is the routinization of individual and social practice in time and space. A positive and distinctive sense of place stems in large part from routine encounters and shared experiences that make for intersubjectivity. This requires plenty of opportunities for informal, casual meetings and gossip; friendly bars and pubs and a variety of settings in which to purchase and/or consume food; street markets; a variety of comfortable places to sit, wait, and people-watch; a sense of ease with changing seasons; and, above all, a sense of belonging, affection, hospitality, vitality, and historical and cultural continuity: not the attributes that anyone associates with American suburbia.

Alex Marshall: "Community--the network of formal and informal relationships that binds people together--is a thin, tepid brew in this country."

"Downtown" Franklin, Wisconsin.

An excerpt from HOW CITIES WORK: SUBURBS, SPRAWL, AND THE ROADS NOT TAKEN by Alex Marshall. See if you agree (more excerpts here):

Coming Home

It's a Saturday night and my house is filling with people. Some carry musical instruments. Some have sheets of poetry or fiction by their sides. Some carry nothing, but are prepared to stand up before a crowd of people and dance, perform theater, or tell a story.

We call it the Coffeehouse. We've been doing it now for seven years. The first Saturday of every month, friends and friends of friends come to our house to entertain and be entertained. Usually about fifty people show up. It's a great time.

This coffeehouse is the highlight of the month, both for me and many of the people who attend. It's not just the music, poetry, and other acts that bring people back, although these are good. It's the chance to meet, connect, and talk with other people during the breaks. Through it, my wife and I have met many of our now good friends, and other people have made similar friendships and bonds. In a city where people come and go, it provides us a mechanism to make new friends as older ones leave town.

Why do I mention it? Because our coffeehouse is a replacement for what does not exist in the outer world. And the fact that it does not exist says a lot about our society at this stage in its history. I would prefer that a corner tavern or bar be down the street, where I could magically meet my friends and make new ones. I would prefer to be held up in a naturally emerging web of friends and family, growing out of the physical place where I live and the work that goes on there.

Our situation is ironic, because if anyone should have community "naturally," it's my wife and I. We live in Norfolk, Virginia, a port city on the Elizabeth River, the Chesapeake Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean. Huge carriers make their home here, as do huge cargo ships that freight millions of tons of coal all over the world.

It's been the home of my family on my father's side for five generations. My great-grandfather came here before the Civil War. He was the first publisher of the newspaper where I started my career in journalism, The Virginian-Pilot. My father grew up one block from where I write this. My wife is a native of the area as well. My newest niece lives down the street.

Looking at my background, one might think that I live a life rich in contacts with the past and the world that molded me, a place where an intricate and perhaps suffocating web of family and friends who have centuries of combined experience support, argue with, and love each other. Which is not the case. I have no close friends from my childhood or high school years that still live in this town, or even the state. Most of my siblings have scattered themselves around the country, as is the wont of professional people these days. Various relatives--second cousins once removed and so forth--do live near me. I know none of them well. As one commentator remarked about Europeans in contrast to Americans, "They still have cousins." Americans do not.

Various forces operating in the country and world today have pulled apart my "natural" community and scattered it to the winds. My own more cosmopolitan bent figures into this. I lived in Europe for a few years, attended college and graduate school in Pittsburgh and New York City. I am not able, nor do I desire, to sink back into the old-boy culture that does still exist here to a degree. I have a community around me, but it is one that I created or sought out, more than one I was born into. My community is in my coffeehouse, in the arts organizations I belong to, and in the civic work I do.

Community--the network of formal and informal relationships that binds people together--is a thin, tepid brew in this country. It has declined to the point where improving it, saving it, nurturing it have become slogans of a variety of movements in different, seemingly unrelated fields. In urban planning, New Urbanism promises to revive community through building subdivisions more cohesively. In political theory, Amiti Etzioni hopes to reduce crime and improve social health through his philosophy of Communitarianism. In journalism, the philosophy of Public Journalism, sometimes labeled Community Journalism, promises to rebuild community and a newspaper's circulation base by having the press foster public dialogue and political participation. Our politics, our places, our press--all of these things run across power lines that jolt us with the message that something is missing in too many of our lives, some sense of cohesion and togetherness.

This desire many people have for richer, more connected lives is a valid one. I believe that a society grows out of its social, religious, and political compacts, on which ultimately even market relationships depend. But like the construction of coherent physical places, the construction of coherent communities is not something to be attempted directly. Rather, one has to understand what produces both places and communities, and what weakens them, and address those forces.

Most of what we call community in the past has been produced as a byproduct of other things: making a living, shopping for food, keeping ourselves and our families well, protecting them and our society from physical harm, educating them. We shopped for groceries, served in the military, and went to a doctor and along the way got to know the butcher, the fellow soldier, and the local doctor. All of these actions have become less communal, and so our society has become less community-minded. We buy our food at the warehouse-style supermarket, do not serve in the military unless we volunteer, and go to the impersonal HMO to get our cholesterol checked. If we want to revive community, then we should look at the trade-offs involved in making some of our decisions more communal again.

Place has something to do with all this as well. Walking to a neighborhood cafe for breakfast is a more communal thing than using the drive-through at a McDonald's for an Egg McMuffin, although relationships can occur at either place. Driving on the freeway is less likely to generate relationships than riding a streetcar. Living in an older neighborhood fashioned around the foot is more communal than living in a contemporary one fashioned around the car. But the physical makeup of our places is just one factor in this trend.

John Perry Barlow, computer sage and former Grateful Dead lyricist, commented once that community is largely generated by shared adversity. This gets at the notion, true I believe, that our social ties, while beneficial, are not necessarily produced by situations we would choose. Although many of us miss community, we don't miss poverty, disease, and war, things that produce community with some regularity. The problem for contemporary Americans is that enhancing social cohesion may mean giving up some things we really like, like personal mobility, low taxes, and a footloose economic structure. We have not figured out yet that creating wealth is not the same as creating community.

I speak without any sentimentality or nostalgia for the past. I believe, however, that the generally fragmented lives so many of us lead break up marriages, disturb childhoods, isolate people when they most need help, and make life not as much fun. We live, to speak frankly, in one of the loneliest societies on earth. If we are to change that, then we should look more closely at the various relationships in our society--political, social, economic, and others--and attempt to construct them in more communal ways. Deciding how to structure these relationships comes back to what I increasingly believe is our most fundamental relationship--politics.

James Howard Kunstler: The "suburban project" and Ralph Kramden's apartment

The suburban project was not a conspiracy by the likes of Robert Moses, Walt Disney, Frank Lloyd Wright, and President Eisenhower to produce a living arrangement with no future. It was the emergent, self-organizing result of special circumstances in a particular time and place: post World War Two America, with an immense supply of cheap oil, cheap land, and the industrial capacity to churn out all the necessary components for a car-dependent development pattern. Suburbia was spawned out of a couple of persistent themes in American cultural history: 1.) that cities and city life were no good; 2.) and that the romance of settling the wilderness could be reenacted, at great profit, in all that space beyond the towns and cities. It would be silly to deny the appeal of this arrangement at its inception. By the end of WW II, city life in the popular imagination was reduced to one potently awful image: Ralph Kramden’s apartment in “The Honeymooners” TV show.

James Howard Kunstler in Ruinous Debt to Create Futureless Suburbia - Contrarian Stock Market Investing News: