In Defense of Sprawl? A Choice.

What!! You say!!  Sprawl!  Even the name itself is ugly, bringing images of concrete extending endlessly over the horizon, 12-lane superhighways flowing through smoggy vistas with gas powered chariots spewing pollutants.  Spraaawwwwlll… How can that compete with its opposite “Smart Growth” or a more accurate descriptor, “density”, or as I would say “jamming people on top of each other like rats in a cage”.

Sprawl is not new.  It has been in existence for as long as there have been cities.  In early Rome, the density of humanity was 500,000 people per square mile, and they didn’t even have indoor plumbing.  Pretty nasty.  As a result, as soon as they could, Romans would move out of the city walls to get more space and then run back in when the Goths came to sack the city.  A choice…. More space vs. the chance of being dead…hmmm…and a lot of Romans rolled the dice for more space.

I could go on with historical examples but to shorten your read for today, let’s go to America in the 20^th Century.  There were three general periods of expansion/sprawl.  The first expansion was after the first World War which ended with the Great Depression.  The second came after WWII until the early 1970s, and the last beginning in the early 1980s to the present.

Post WWI sprawl was encouraged by the advent of the motor car.  By the late 1920s, most families in Los Angeles and Detroit, which were the first precursors of American sprawl, had at least one car and with it, the ability to live in places farther away from work.  This trend extended to the rest of urban America by the 1950s.  Many in the middle and upper working classes were happy to make the choice to trade the congestion and noise of the cities for the relative calm of the suburbs.

The biggest expansion of housing and therefore sprawl occurred after WWII, when the soldiers came home, decided to get married and have babies all at the same time.  They don’t call it the baby “boom” for nothing.  To respond to that housing shortage, developers sprang into action to solve the demand for housing, creating suburbs throughout the country. The building of Levittown was emblematic of the time, creating prefab housing that could be constructed relatively quickly and cheaply.  Many who could afford these basic units would then go on to put sweat equity into their properties, building their own garages, finishing their own basements, and installing their own landscaping, enhancing the value of their properties that they owned while creating single family housing communities for their families to enjoy. 

After a brief decline in the seventies during the periods of fuel shortages, high inflation and economic stagnation, growth continued in the 1980’s generally to the present when the population expanded and shifted from the Northeast and the rust belts of the Midwest to the warmer and more hospitable business climates of the south and southwest.

What all of these growth movements had in common was that they occurred during good economic times.  When people…(I mean people other than the rich who always have had the ability to get away from the stinking cities) began to accumulate wealth, they chose to spend that wealth on housing that gave them and their families more space and what they perceived to be a better life.

Although we are a communal species, we have always sought to secure more space for ourselves and our families.  In the Middle Ages, farmers housed their animals with their families in one room.  As they became more affluent (and raiders did not keep coming back to burn their crops and homes), the animals got their own building.  We call it a barn.  Next, the parents got their own room leaving the children in the other room in the home maybe to sleep in front of the fire. Next, the kids got their own room to be followed by different rooms assigned to different sexes.  In recent memory, it was not uncommon for children to share beds with their siblings, while now, society (at least our society) has moved to the principle that children having their own private bedrooms is a human right.

One would think that if there was something that a vast majority of citizens craved (space), which they believed would make their lives better (space), and they were willing to pay for it (space), that they could do so with the well wishes and encouragement of everyone in our society.  One would be wrong.

The anti-sprawl movements, although always present in some form, came to the fore with a ferocity against decentralization and suburbanization in the 1950s about the same time that everyone had their own car.  This movement arose initially among intellectuals and academics living primarily in the Northeast.  Over time, Malthusians, sustainability advocates, radical environmentalists, automobile and highway haters, public transit enthusiasts, and people who thought that single family housing designs for the middle and lower middle classes were just plain ugly, joined in.

Arguments in addition to looking ugly included that suburban housing destroyed farmland, created pollution, increased traffic congestion; encouraged global warming, and was inequitable. Anti-sprawl advocates even contended that suburban sprawl created high levels of dissatisfaction and alienation which is exactly what a prior generation of intellectuals had associated with life in high density urban cities.  Each contention was not only debatable but ultimately subject to the question of “what business is it of yours?” 

Very few people believe that they live in sprawl. Sprawl is where other people live, particularly selfish people with less taste and good sense than themselves.  It appears that much of the anti-sprawl activism is based on a desire to reform other people’s lives.

Maybe my argument here is not so much in defense of sprawl but in defense of choice.  However, to complicate the debate further, the right to live as you want and where you want for the price you want is not absolute. 

On one side, one can allege that a person who owns property should be able to do with it what they want.  But is that really true?  Would it be ok to turn a single-family residence in a suburban subdivision into a cattle feed lot or a pig farm?  Ok, we admit; maybe not that.  How about your neighbor turning his property into a junk yard or maybe just three junked cars and a broken washing machine on the front porch? From these examples, hopefully, we are getting the hint that mere ownership of property may not give the owner an absolute free rein as certain uses may unreasonably infringe on their neighbors’ enjoyment and value of their property.

So, while I would lean toward the principle that a man can do what he wishes with his castle, common sense suggests that while living in society, he cannot.  And the more people who live in close proximity, the more restrictions on our ability to use our property as we arbitrarily deem fit.

This brings us to Homeowners Associations and local zoning which are the societally created vehicles for determining the appropriate balance between complete freedom of property owners and unreasonable burdens placed on their neighbors.   If we want to live in a community that regulates what color we can paint our house, and that is important to us (or at least we don’t care), we have that opportunity.  If we want to live in a community that allows only single-family residences, we can buy into such a location that is zoned by our municipality reflecting the will of its citizens to have a place for only single-family residences.  If we want to live in an area that allows bars and strip clubs on every corner, we can do that as well. Get it? 

We also understand that due to the lack of our economic resources, our choices may be more limited, and that my friends, is life.  We do not have the choice to live anywhere in the quality of housing of which we desire for free.

On the other side are the activists and legislators who believe that by decree in the name of affordable housing, they can change the character of neighborhoods made and protected by zoning and HOAs.  We have heard the accusation.  “How much space does a person need anyway” as if they have been blessed with the omnificence to decide that question for the rest of us.  

I would suggest that if we allow others to decide “how much space one needs”,  then it is only a short step to deciding that the homeless should be allowed to camp in our yards. (After all, you’re not using it at night anyway) or that we all should live in Soviet style concrete apartments on the basis of equity and inclusion so that those financially less fortunate don’t feel bad.

The people who currently occupy a majority of the Colorado and California legislatures believe that they have the moral and intellectual authority to allow anyone in their favored groups to live wherever they want at whatever price they want ignoring the interests of those people who already live there. 

The housing market is an accumulation of decisions of millions of people making choices and compromises acting in what they believe to be in their best interests.  This is a much better way to dispense housing justice rather than for a few governmental bureaucrats and housing “experts’ to impose their biases on society.

For the time being at least, we are currently a society based on free but not unlimited choice. In response to the movement to change this and transform America, I would suggest that we go with the system that has been in place for some time which allows for the balance of freedom to choose within the current zoning constraints set by society.  Simply put, there should be sprawl for those people who want to have more space and urban living for those who want more density.

For me, sprawl is good.