Libertarians Against Sprawl
Posted by Kevin Carson on May 29, 2009 in Commentary • 11 commentsA couple of days ago liberal blogger Matthew Yglesias described how zoning laws prohibit mixed use neighborhoods. Rather than having neighborhood groceries, bars, and small businesses within easy walking distances of residences, we have a monoculture pattern of development in which homogenous bedroom suburbs are separated by considerable distances from the places we work and shop, and the only way to get from one to the other is by negotiating a series of Checkpoint Charlies at one cloverleaf after another. “I really and truly wish libertarians would spend more time working on this kind of issue,” Yglesias said.
Well, certainly there’s a highly vocal libertarian contingent (”You’ll take away my car when you pry my cold, dead foot off the gas pedal”) that defends sprawl as the result of free market forces, and equates opposition to sprawl and the car culture with statist paternalism. John Stossel, for example, attacking the “myth” that “urban sprawl is ruining America,” strongly implied that the current pattern of suburban development reflected the average person’s preferences, and dismissed opposition to sprawl and suburban monocultures as a movement of elitist social engineers. And he cited James Kunstler as an example of that breed.
Interestingly, though, a libertarian need go no further than Kunstler’s book “The Geography of Nowhere” to get a clear idea of the role of the state in promoting suburbanization and the car culture. Kunstler devotes an entire chapter to the role of Robert Moses’s intergovernmental authorities in the first large-scale experiment with urban freeway systems on Long Island.
Since then, local governments have been almost universally dominated by an unholy alliance of real estate developers and other commercial interests whose agenda centers on building new freeways. Where I live, the primary responsibility of the Arkansas Third District Congressman is to bring home highway pork. U.S. Hwy 471, the “John Paul Hammerschmidt Expressway,” is named for our former Congressman (and its chief landmark, the Bobby Hopper tunnel, honors a former highway commissioner–and before that a Ford dealer–of that name). In a typical election, all the candidates for city council give “building more roads” as their top priority–which means building new roads to “relieve congestion,” most of it generated by the housing additions and strip malls that sprang up along the last new road they built to “relieve congestion.”
You’d have to be pretty obtuse to miss a central point of Kunstler’s book: suburbanization and the car culture were central to urban planning in the decades after World War II, and were in fact mandated by the planners.
The typical urban design platte excluded all businesses from residential areas, and mandated large setbacks and enormous front lawns. An amusing (if appalling) illustration of the latter is Georgetown. The old prewar houses, with their front porches cozily situated fifteen feet or so from the tree-lined sidewalks, were grandfathered in to the post-WWII plattes. But when a house burned down, a new house built on that lot had to follow the new mandates: so one house on the block was a Brady Bunch-style split-level ranch, set far behind its neighbors, with a front lawn like a golf course.
We see the same pattern endlessly repeated. Not only is the corner grocery or drug store prohibited in the suburbs, but affordable walkup apartments are also prohibited over downtown businesses. (Incidentally, Amory Lovins and the other authors of “Natural Capitalism” cited a study’s estimate that reinstating the corner grocer woud by itself reduce gasoline consumption by 6%.)
An article in The Freeman several years back remarked on the way cities and regulated utilities subsidized outlying development at the expense of the older part of town. Centrally located residents are charged above cost for electricity and water so that utilities can be extended below cost to new developments, and pay higher sales taxes to subsidize the building of roads to serve the new housing additions.
And libertarians are far from universally being cartoonish defenders of sprawl like Stossel. For example Michael Lewyn, in “A Libertarian Smart Growth Agenda,” advocates an anti-sprawl coalition focused on eliminating government subsidies to the car culture and regulatory impediments to mixed use development.
Fighting sprawl isn’t a matter of imposing new government mandates. It’s a matter of scaling back existing restrictions on mixed use development, and prying the mouths of the real estate industry and the automobile-highway complex off the taxpayer teat. It’s not clear that can be done without abolishing government completely.
YES!!! I was dismayed on Earth Day when many of my libertarian friends mocked our planet and all I wanted to do was honor it.
It’s in the state’s interest to pave our planet over with slave roads and keep us dependent on oil so that they have an excuse for lining the pockets of corporate interests through war. If we don’t fight this crap, who will?
Thank you for your post.
Libby
I’m a fan of cars, but like everything else transportation would be better in a freed market. I doubt that we would see as many homogeneous residential developments, retail outlets, and office parks with cars-only transport between them if development reflected market demand and not central planning. If a lot of daily commutes and grocery trips were taken off the roads, they would be a lot more pleasant.
I noted some other negative social effects along these lines in an article I did last year.
The entire enterprise of road building is statist on the face of it, at least on roads that are public. This reminds me of the old canard of a gentleman asking a lady if she would marry him if he gave her a three carot diamond, to which she responded yes. He then asked her for a quickie for fifty pounds, to which she replied indignantly “what kind of woman do you think I am?” His response was, “what you are is obvious, now we are simply negotiating the price.”
Abolishing government is not the first step toward liberty – it must be the last. The first step is take away the need for government intrusion and then to find non-governmental means to do these things. Only then can we actually abolish government.
Aside from the last bit, however, everything else in the article rings true. I suggest that finding a way to better integrate employers into housing and urban planning is the key to this equation.
I’m glad to see this discussed more in libertarian circles as of late. This is the topic of focus at my blog, “Market Urbanism” http://marketurbanism.com where I discuss government’s roll in sprawl and unaffordability. On this subject, I agree that free market folks have more in common with the likes of Kunstler than with Stossel. (But, we differ in solution…)
Currently, I’m writing a series of posts about Murray Rothbard’s thoughts on the subject.
Hey, I’m in the ”You’ll take away my car when you pry my cold, dead foot off the gas pedal” crowd but am opposed to zoning laws that encourage sprawl. I’m not fond of government transportation and prefer the independence, empowerment and convenience of using my own car most of the time. Granted, I live in Nebraska which doesn’t suffer from much congestion, so I’m not bothered much by rush hour traffic. However, as you know, government transportation isn’t a libertarian solution to the sprawl-caused-by-zoning-laws problem. If we didn’t have so much sprawl and I could get to where I wanted to go most of the time without using my car, then I would happily do so. But given that sprawl exists, I’ll prefer to use my car and oppose government attempts to interfere. Of course, like you, I’m also opposed to government attempts to reverse sprawl, since that too would constitute aggression. Just get government out of the way and let nature takes it course.
Well spoken my friend. I am looking forward to a new revolution, one that takes place in our codes of our cities and towns. We need to remove the influences of cookie cutter DC planning initiatives and incorporate a system of strong freedom in land use and local solutions/demand.
You might be interested in The Fallacy of Locally Grown Produce (found via this). It rather misses the point by asking “what is the optimal way to distribute from these suppliers?” and concluding “it isn’t optimal to source locally” – there is an inadvertent bait and switch between “distribute” and “source”, since the former assumes the sources themselves are given. The proper question would have been, “what sources should we set up to make supply optimal for the demand?” (as this, this and this reply seem to understand). With that perspective, it’s pretty obvious that it makes sense to switch to producing in the locality of the consumers, even if current sources aren’t set up to make local distribution optimal. In fact, when that sort of suboptimality happens, it shows that producers aren’t yet in the best places for the consumers (or vice versa). And, of course, you get more of that kind of suboptimality from regulating where the consumers live and where the producers work to keep them apart.
PML: Critics of the food mile movement, who argue that it takes less fuel per pound to ship factory farmed produce in trucks or container ships than to ship much smaller loads locally, make a similar mistake: they count the “last mile” distribution system twice against local production. Once that factory farmed stuff gets trucked in, it still has to be distributed by pretty much the same last mile system as the local stuff.
Fighting sprawl, suburbanism, and car culture by rolling back government: the problem is how to simultaneously pitch this to libertarians and liberals.
Very interesting.
Although I feel compelled to add that one can hold that existing restrictions on mixed use development should be eliminated (along with the state) and simultaneously say, “You’ll take away my car when you pry my cold, dead foot off the gas pedal.” I don’t think there’s a contradiction here.
Cheers,
Alex Peak
I agree fully. I have become in my old age sick and tired of urban planning; in south florida, it’s taken to such an extreme degree that one might think the houses are actually modeled in plastic and airlifted into their new lots. Lo and behold, it is the politicians who do the community planning and they do not hide this fact from the public.
One of the most ironic aspects of urban and community planning is that it infringes on the natural wildlife and destroys the environment of the everglades. Yet, the same politicians take up environmental causes and discuss climate change as if they had nothing to do with the sprawling communities pushing ever westward into the sea of grass.