PASADENA – I’m here in Los Angeles County, the exemplar of all that is said to be wasteful and disastrous about urban sprawl in the United States. The soaring mountains ringing the valley are hard to see clearly through the mid-afternoon haze. But do I feel like Dante exploring a sprawling level of Hell? Not in the slightest.
For one thing, Pasadena is a bit too gorgeous, populated, and thriving to fit the definition of a waystation on the road to urban-planning perdition. For another, it is like the other Southern California communities I have previously visited (and briefly lived in): it is not suburban in any way recognizable to someone from a true suburb.
Indeed, the Smart Growth minions who warn about the Los Angelezation of their own cities suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding. They believe L.A.’s traffic and other problems stem from a low-density, inadequately planned development strategy too fixated on the automobile to the exclusion of other forms of transportation. In reality, Los Angeles, at more than 7,000 residents per square mile, is by far the most densely settled metropolitan area in North America (only select portions of a few other metros, such as Manhattan, boast higher density rates). And as Robert Bruegmann, University of Illinois-Chicago professor and author of the new book Sprawl: A Compact History, explains in the context of transportation policy, L.A. has among the fewest miles of superhighway per resident of any large area in the country.
Most of what many people think they know about Southern California and growth, in other words, is simply not the case. Traffic congestion plagues the region in large measure because California has failed to invest in adequate highway capacity. And far from allowing uncontrolled development to thin out the settlement pattern, L.A. has actually seen densities increase over time. In 1950, there were only 4,000 people per square mile.
While I haven’t had a chance to read Bruegmann’s book from start to finish, I have read several interviews with the author as well as a couple of sample chapters. From what I’ve seen, it’s terrific. Analyzing the history of urban settlement, he points out that the desire to live in a detached dwelling with plenty of land is nothing new. It isn’t the creation of savvy marketers or demonic developers. Since ancient times, the wealthy have enjoyed the luxury of moving out of crowded cities into the countryside to make their homes (or at least their second homes). What has changed is that economic development and technological innovation allowed average people, and increasingly those at the lower end of the income distribution, to purchase a lifestyle once reserved for those of privilege.
Low-density, auto-based settlement patterns – what critics call “sprawl’ and I prefer to describe as “freedom” – are hardly limited to the modern American context. They are preferred by most consumers in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere (which is not to say that all can yet act on their preference). What is really going on in much of the Smart Growth literature, and the political movement it describes and propels, is an attempt by elites to impose their own, different aesthetic and social preferences on a largely unwilling population.
Wouldn’t it be great, they ask, if people could have the option of a Manhattan lifestyle in downtown Charlotte or Raleigh? Perhaps, just as it would be great if I didn’t have to hear a single bar of rap music for the rest of my life. But to accomplish my aesthetic goal, I’d have to make lots of other people sacrifice something they strongly prefer. I have no right to demand that, nor any reasonable expectation of success. And as for the notion that current growth patterns impose higher costs and externalities on Smart Growthers, Bruegmann is persuasively dismissive.
I’ll be reading his book soon. But not today. It’s just so rare that I get to visit Hell.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.