RALEIGH — Low-density growth — typically suburban, typically auto-friendly, typically detached-dwellings with sizable lots — is viewed by many “experts” as the cause of lots of serious problems for local governments and their citizens.
“Sprawl” leads to too much driving, which pollutes the air and creates congestion. Sprawl makes homes less affordable for lower-income families. Sprawl creates more service needs for local governments and raises the tax burden. Sprawl leads to corpulent commuters who never get any exercise and thus develop heart and lung disease. Sprawl reduces public interactions and weakens our democracy. And so on.
Challenge this orthodoxy and you will, as befits the term, be treated as an apostate. It truly is an article of faith among politicians, bureaucrats, policy analysts, journalists, activists, and others that sprawl is a social evil to be combatted.
Well, count me in on that apostate gig. Another of my deviant kind, Randall O’Toole of the Thoreau Institute, has discovered some interesting new information about an angle on sprawl — or more precisely, on its “New Urbanism” apotheosis — that hadn’t occurred to me before. It seems that the kind of development many Smart Growthers dream about, including high residential densities and plenty of common areas, is particularly well-suited for one class of urban dwellers: criminals.
O’Toole points to a report out of England than probed the impact of New Urbanism designs. It concluded that policing such communities would require three times the police resources and still result in five times the losses to theft and other crimes. For example, growth patterns that minimize privately owned property in favor of parks, greenways, public squares, and the like take away the incentive many property owners have to look out for suspicious characters and take sensible precautions. Cul-de-sacs? Transit planners may hate them, but police departments like the fact that they obstruct easy getaways by criminals. The same goes for well-lit and accessible parking lots, which New Urbanists want to break up and hide away but which the police find relatively easy to patrol.
Perhaps these negative implications for public safety could be justified if high-density, Smart Growth concepts had other offsetting economic and social benefits. Unfortunately, the case evaporates with the sunshine of careful scrutiny. Sprawl reduces traffic congestion by spreading out origins and destinations, creating various centers of employment and shopping, and generating sufficient highway capacity to accommodate the inevitable rise in auto commuting as societies become wealthier. Sprawl reduces the per-capita need for services overall, when you factor in functions such as law enforcement, and reduces the need to raise property-tax rates by generating more tax revenue per person (the only kind of residential growth that doesn’t appear to “pay for itself” is low- to moderate-income multifamily housing). Sprawl reduces tailpipe emissions from automobiles by minimizing the time they spend idling in traffic jams or creeping along in central cities. Sprawl increases opportunities for homeownership among lower-income families by offering attractive new properties for those with rising incomes to purchase in the suburbs, thus moderating the prices of the existing housing stock closer into town, which would otherwise soar (as it has in Smart Growth enclaves such as college towns and the cities of the Pacific Northwest).
And on that “sprawl causes heart attacks” headline you may have read a while back, Team Locke is already on the case. Another rhetorical cul-de-sac.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.