Does sprawl bring happiness?

Sprawl, Justice, and Citizenship: The Civic Costs of the American Way of Life. A book by Thad Williamson. Oxford University Press, 2010, 416 pp., $35 hardcover

The rightness or wrongness of sprawl has been debated for decades, but I don’t think it’s ever been studied with the thoroughness that Thad Williamson brings to it. Sprawl, Justice, and Citizenship: The Civic Costs of the American Way of Life is an extraordinary piece of logic.

Does sprawl bring happiness? Is sprawl efficient? Is it fair? Williamson, assistant professor of leadership studies at the University of Richmond, asks these questions and others as he explores, with outstanding rigor, America’s experience with low-density, automobile-dependent development.

Writers such as Robert Bruegmann (Sprawl: A Compact History), William Bogart (Don’t Call It Sprawl), and David Brooks (“Patio Man and the Sprawl People”) have argued that sprawl is by and large a good thing because in their view “it fulfills Americans’ preferences for privacy and mobility and provides a spatial context in which millions of citizens can access the American dream of comfortable private home in a safe, pleasant neighborhood,” Williamson says. “Those are serious arguments,” Williamson acknowledges, “and it is the aim of this book to provide a serious response.”

What he concludes, in a text reinforced by 118 pages of notes, data sources, regression tables, and other documentation, is this:

Sprawl does benefit millions of Americans who prefer lower-density environments and would rather not live close to the concentrated social problems characteristic of US cities.

But it does so at a significant moral cost. Suburban sprawl as currently practiced is fundamentally hostile to the aspiration of achieving a society capable of meeting even modest norms of equal opportunity. The ultimate civic cost of the US way of life, as exemplified by sprawl, is a political culture characterized by weak citizen participation, a declining capacity to provide equal opportunity to citizens, and an inadequate response to the challenges posed by climate change.

Libertarian arguments in favor of unimpeded individual decision-making, “civic republican” arguments in favor of collective well-being, utilitarian consideration of costs versus benefits — these and other perspectives receive careful attention from Williamson, who embarked on this project as a Harvard doctoral student under professors including political philosopher Michael Sandel and Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone.

To test sprawl’s effects on social and civic well-being, Williamson used Harvard’s Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, a compendium of information from more than 29,700 people in all parts of the US. The survey enabled him to systematically explore the relationship of population density, neighborhood age, automobile dependence, and urban residence to such important matters as local quality-of-life, social trust, political ideology, and political participation.

Happiness and social trust are greater in lower-density and non-urban places, he discovered. “Sprawl — in its fundamentals, if not in every excess — does seem, on average, to satisfy the widespread desire for secure, pleasant neighborhoods,” he says. People who live in central cities or in dense or older neighborhoods rate the quality of life in their neighborhoods lower than the residents of newer, more outlying, and less dense places rate their own surroundings.

But is that enough to justify sprawl? Williamson doesn’t think so. We need to examine “the goodness and moral worthiness of the way of life sprawl promotes,” he asserts. In carrying out precisely that kind of examination, he found grave problems.

Sprawl has been defended by libertarians on the ground that that each individual should be free to make his own choices (though most zoning requires low-density, single-use development). Yet as Williamson makes clear, choices made by individuals may affect other people and places — and inflict great harm on them. Moreover, he questions “the very idea that there is such a thing as a pure ‘market outcome’ detached from the specific rules and regulations in which markets operate.”

The perpetuation of inequality

An especially troubling effect of sprawl is the perpetuation of inequality. When people separate themselves geographically by income, race, and other characteristics, social inequality becomes harder than ever to overcome, Williamson says. He quotes political scientist Margaret Kohn: “It is difficult to feel solidarity with strangers if we never inhabit places that are shared with people who are different. The privatization of public space gradually undermines the feeling that people of different classes and cultures live in the same world.”

The US pattern of suburbanization guarantees that opportunities are not fairly distributed, says Williamson; “key elements of sprawl are linked to the formation of a body politic that is incapable of implementing the sorts of social and economic reforms that could correct those inequalities.”

 “The history of suburbanization in the United States has been driven by exclusionary impulses,” he emphasizes. It “has had the effect of locking in and reinforcing racial and economic inequalities and of weakening (if not eliminating) the possibility of meaningful redress of social and economic inequalities within metropolitan regions.”

He describes suburbanization and sprawl as “a kind of inequality machine: Households of means move to the suburbs to escape problems associated with the central cities, then they construct barriers to exclude poor and working-class families from joining them; they escape fiscal responsibility for coping with urban social problems, and become more likely to support the political status quo and to resist efforts to alter the structure of opportunity in the United States in the direction of greater fairness and equality.”

Sprawl is a cause of environmental damage as well. “Sprawl appears to be ecologically unsustainable,” Williamson says. Automobile-centered development “is deeply complicit in America’s prodigious generation of climate-threatening greenhouse gasses.”

This book began as a doctoral dissertation, and it shows. Williamson proceeds in a painstaking way, building his argument bit by bit, quoting philosophers ranging from John Stuart Mill to John Rawls and citing a slew of academics. Sprawl, Justice, and Citizenship is methodical in the extreme, which makes for slow going. I’d like to see its main points boiled down to a dozen pages that could reach a broad audience. Williamson’s conclusions are too important to be restricted to grad-school seminars.