A culture warrior defends sprawl

Sprawl defender Wendell Cox appeared on MSNBC’s Up With Chris Hayes show leading into the Republican National Convention in Tampa to discuss the cultural divide on urban planning. The sprawling Tampa region, ranked second in pedestrian deaths nationally, made a good backdrop.

Hayes pointed out that the Republican Party owns the nation’s rural areas and the distant suburbs, Democrats control the cities, and the closer-in suburbs are battlegrounds. With such a sharp geographical divide, “basic issues like sprawl and land use turn into culture war proxies,” Hayes said.

If so, Cox is an eager combatant — accusing smart growth proponents of compromising freedom and home ownership. Cox is good at framing arguments, and his talking points echo other sprawl defenders like Randal O’Toole and Robert Bruegmann. On this show, Cox opened three lines of attack that are useful to examine.

Sprawl is organic?

Cox contends that “Sprawl is an organic, natural extension of the city” that occurs all over the world. Actually, traditional, walkable cities and towns, which persisted for thousands of years prior to regulation, are the organic variety.

When sprawl took hold in the US, it was supported by zoning laws, vast public investments in highways, and federal housing and finance regulations. Sprawl became ascendant just as land-use regulations grew more complex and demanding by orders of magnitude. Coincidence?

It is true that auto-oriented sprawl has been built all over the world to varying degrees. The same can be said of walkable, compact, places. In the US, the built environment is heavily influenced by regulations, and the regulations mostly serve to separate uses and reduce density. Therefore, they tend to create sprawl.

Cost of housing and transportation

Smart growth drives up the cost of housing, Cox says, and further argues that smart growth regulation was a primary cause of the housing crash. He makes this case particularly in Florida, a state with one of the nation’s worst housing bubbles in the last decade.

This argument conflates land-use regulation with smart growth. Smart growth is implemented largely through the principles and techniques of New Urbanism, and new urbanists have been fighting land-use regulations in Florida and elsewhere for three decades.

Florida’s built environment is mostly covered in sprawl created through density restrictions, parking regulations, setbacks, separation of uses, and street standards designed for automobile use only. These are light years away from “smart growth.”

Cox trumpets housing costs only, which is misleading, because if households have to spend 30 percent of their income on transportation — as they do in many distant suburbs — they are using up too much of their discretionary income. The evidence is overwhelming that housing and transportation costs combined are lower in mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods, and highest in auto-dependent sprawl.

Placemaking

Cox takes a swipe at Richard Florida when he says that “The history of urbanism is the attraction of people because of jobs and economic growth. Cities do no grow because of fountains and designs.”
This disdain for the utility of placemaking is a common theme among the sprawl defenders. This narrow view of cities and towns leaves little room for quality of life, beauty, art, culture, and diversity. These qualities have been sustaining civilization for millennia. They draw people together, which makes them productive.

Tradition has tended to produce the walkable, compact communities that are associated today with smart growth. Cox and others who push a similar agenda are not so conservative — they are true believers in 20th Century theories of urban planning that have now run their course.