The Pleasantville Solution

The war on "sprawl" promises "livability" but delivers repression, intolerance--and more traffic.

Virginia Postrel from the March 1999 issue

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The anti-sprawlers have something entirely different in mind when they talk about dealing with traffic or protecting quality of life. They want to pile everyone on top of each other, make traffic as slow and congested as possible to discourage driving, and keep housing out of farmland. Such anti-sprawlers want everyone to live the way I do: in an urban townhouse off a busy street, with no yard but plenty of shops and restaurants within walking distance. (Portland, Oregon's Metro planning authority, among the most influential "smart growth" authorities, has in fact acknowledged that Los Angeles "displays an investment pattern we desire to replicate," with its high density and low per capita road mileage.) That lifestyle appeals to cosmopolitan professionals with no kids and no particular desire for peace and quiet, but it is not how most Americans want to live.

To anti-sprawl technocrats, the single-family home is almost as evil as the automobile. Thus a study highlighted on the Sierra Club's smart-growth Web site, "The Conservation Potential of Compact Growth," celebrates multiunit housing: "Sharing walls shares and saves heat. Exposing less wall and roof area to the sun reduces summer air conditioning loads.... The single family houses consume 4 times as much land for streets and roads and 10 times as much for the houses themselves. The single family houses use nearly 6 times as much metal and concrete, the mining of which threatens many of our natural areas." The study's ideal city is San Francisco, with densities of 50 to 100 units per acre, but it also praises the wonders of New York City, which "even with its bright lights and cold climate...uses half as much energy per capita as the US average."

This conflict is not, as Dionne would have it, simply a matter of unintended consequences. It is a conflict of visions. Smart-growthers have no sympathy for suburban family life, which they find wasteful and sterile. They disapprove not merely of the congestion generated when people flock to a new area, but of the reduction in congestion in the city created at the same time.

And they hate the automobile, which they view more as a source of sin than as a mode of transporation. Rather than reduce traffic, they seek to increase it, blocking new roads and putting transportation money into unused mass transit, especially rail. Given enough pain, they hope, people will get out of their automobiles. "As traffic congestion builds, alternative travel modes will become more attractive" is how Minnesota's Twin Cities Metropolitan Council put it, justifying a decision not to build any roads for the next 20 years. Congestion "signals positive urban development," notes Portland's Metro. (See "Dense Thinkers," January.)

"Smart growth" encourages transportation priorities set by noisy political action groups, with no consideration of demand. The pressure works. "We expect a 100 percent increase in our population by 2020, but our plan calls for only a 33 percent increase in highways," brags Texas state Sen. Gonzalo Barrientos, chairman of the Austin Transportation Study, which has developed a 25-year plan for the area. Responding to a Sierra Club critic, he says ATS has also "set aside 15 percent of our discretionary funds for bicycle and pedestrian projects although only 5 percent of the adult public reports using those methods to get to school or work."

The anti-sprawl campaign isn't just a bunch of slogans. It's a vision of one best way to live, and the determination to impose that way by political action. Like the black-and-white establishment in the movie Pleasantville, the anti-sprawlers are upset with the changes unleashed by other people's choices. And as in the movie, they intend to convene the right sorts of people to pass "democratic" regulations to keep everything "pleasant"--with no room for deviation. Instead of banning double beds and colored paint, as the movie's establishment did, they'll ban free parking and new single-family houses. They, too, will make sure there's nothing "outside Pleasantville," no homes outside their jurisdiction or control.

William McDonough, dean of the University of Virginia school of architecture and a leading advocate of "smart growth" planning, describes an example of the process. In Williamsburg, he had "140 citizens working at 10 different tables to articulate 10 different plans....The plan that we ended up with is their plan....You now have 150 citizens who are key players in each sector walking around with the same mental image of what the plan is. If somebody says, `What's the plan?,' they can say, `Well, that's going to be our night life center and this is going to be a place for a series of nice five-minute walks and here's our transportation system.'"

In other words, well-connected "key players," with the time and patience to sit in meetings, will decide just what the future will look like. The other 12,000 or so residents of Williamsburg have no say in the matter.

The anti-sprawl campaign is about telling Americans how they should live and work, about sacrificing individuals' values to the values of their politically powerful betters. It is as coercive, moralistic, and nostalgic as anything Bill Bennett, Robert Bork, or Gary Bauer ever proposed. It is just a lot less honest.

For more background on the sprawl debate, see the new Breaking Issue on Reason Online, at www.reason.com/bisprawl.html.