And Now A Few Words From…The Antiplanners!

By Christian Probasco, 3-04-08

But let’s get one thing clear: Wendell Cox, a St. Louis-based public policy consultant, editor of Demographia and The Public Purpose websites, vice president of “Cooperation for urban mobility in the Developing World” (CODATU[!]), fellow at the Heritage Foundation, senior fellow at the Heartland Institute and senior fellow for urban policy at the Independence Institute (all conservative and/or libertarian organizations) does not consider himself an antiplanner, though some on the other side of the aisle (such as the Sierra Club) might. As he puts it:

“I am not an anti-planner. I am an advocate of the type of planning that created the automobile oriented suburb (responsive planning) and in so doing expanded the middle class in the United States, Western Europe and Japan to an unprecedented extent. There is a role for planning, but not prescriptive (smart growth) planning.”

So a better name for the article might be, “And Now A Few Words From…The Antiplanner!” who would be Oregon native Professor Randal O’Toole, senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, director of the Oregon based Thoreau Institute, author of Reforming the Forest Service (by Island Press, which also published William R. Travis’ New Geographies of the American West), The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths and most recently, The Best-Laid Plans, How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook and Your Future, and editor of The Antiplanner website. 

In my last installment I used Doctor William R. Travis’ new publication, New Geographies of the American West as a jumping-off point for a general critique of some aspects of the “planning” movement.  For this exciting episode, I provided a few passages culled from Travis’ book to the above experts to get their interpretation.  I cannot reproduce entire pages of the book here, though I have provided the relevant page numbers. If you want the entire context of each passage, you’ll have to buy a copy:

http://islandpress.org/books/detail.html/SKU/1-59726-071-1

Now, am I trying to stick it to New West’s upcoming “Designing the New West” conference?  Nope.  I am actually anxious to learn more about green design and especially about living off the grid, as being energy independent is one of my goals.  However, I do want to provide a forum for a point-of-view that probably won’t get much of a hearing at the conference.

Passages and responses:
P4 “Nothing seemed to express the region’s new, and newly problematic, economic dynamics better than Las Vegas, the nation’s fastest growing city at the millennium, which author Mike Davis labeled a ‘hyperbolic Los Angeles’…the advance guard of ‘an environmentally and socially bankrupt system of human settlement…’”

Cox: Los Angeles is the LEAST SPRAWLING major urban area in the US, with a population density of 7,068 per square mile… more than 30 percent higher than the New York urban area. I don’t know where you put 12 million people without taking up space.

O’Toole: Whenever planning advocates view things they don’t like that are very popular even with most everyone else, they begin to spew out vague terms like “socially bankrupt.” As Robert Venturi pointed out decades ago, Las Vegas is the future American city. With minimal land-use regulation, construction costs there are far lower than most of the rest of the West. So developers can experiment, tear down what fails, and experiment some more.

P23 “This economic transformation, still under way, can be explained as the inevitable outcome of globalization and the shift to a service-based economy in the industrialized countries. Some of its power comes from the decline of prices for commodities in a globalized economy…Western land is losing value as a vessel for resource extraction.”

O’Toole: I don’t know what “economic transformation” he is talking about, but it sounds like he is trying to embrace all the liberal bugaboos including globalization, industrialization, etc. What he fails to understand is that western land never had a lot of value for resource extraction. Now that most of the gold and other valuable minerals have been mined out, the most valuable use of the land is for recreation. The successful western cities are building themselves around those recreation attractions. Travis’ anti-exurb notions will do great harm to that recreation value.

P66 “The West also witnessed in the last two decades and insurgency of property rights and antiplanning attitudes and activism, culminating in Oregon’s Measure 37. If anything, the net drift in political culture in the West has been toward decreasing the shaping power of government land use planning.”

O’Toole:I wish! The sad fact is that the vast majority of Westerners live in cities, and they are more than willing to strip property rights away from the minority who live and own land in rural areas.

Cox: This is delusional. There has never been so much regulation, it has expanded significantly and has largely destroyed housing affordability in the three coastal states.

P100 “Land use research has firmly demonstrated that highways are enablers, if not outright drivers of sprawl because they often achieve their goals, at least temporarily: reducing congestion and making the commute to and from far flung suburbs easier.”

O’Toole: He says that like its a bad thing! Between 1940 and 1960, U.S. homeownership rates grew by nearly 50 percent. That’s because low-cost autos made low-cost land at the urban fringe accessible to an entirely new class of people who previously were penned up in high-density developments (which planners then called slums). Planning advocates today call this “sprawl” and their goal is to reverse this trend and force people back into high-density developments (which planners today call New Urbanism).

Cox: Indeed highways are enablers. They are enablers of prosperity and the reduction of poverty. Commuting is not so much to and from suburbs as it is between suburbs. The suburbanization of jobs and housing has kept travel times for commuting from increasing materially. The shortest commute times in the world among large urban areas are in the United States.

P112 “In terms of land use inefficiency and negative effects on natural habitat, exurbanization is the most geographically extensive offender among current development patterns.”

O’Toole: What inefficiency? Of the three basic factors of production (land, labor, and capital), land is by far the most abundant one we have. With “the death of distance,” i.e., reduced transportation and communication costs, more and more people can and do telecommute. Productivity and enjoyment both increase. What’s wrong with that?

P130 “Exurbanization not only is an enduring land use trend—and one subject to only minimal planning oversight—but also heightens urban and rural tensions in the West.”

O’Toole: These tensions increase only because planners have persuaded many people that they are entitled to have a say in how everyone else uses their land. A good example is a recent book, “The Land We Share,” which says that private land is shared by everyone, so everyone should have a say in how it is used. This is a new phenomena—50 years ago, almost no one believed that. If you don’t feel such an entitlement, you don’t suffer any tensions when other people use their land the way they see fit.

This is most visible in growing communities where it is common for people to say things like, “I just moved here last week, and I think we need rules to stop people from moving here.” Somehow, they always exempt themselves from those rules (the “grandfather” clause). As another example, I once visited an environmental activist and exurbanite who lived outside of Yellowstone Park. From his house you could look across a huge landscape of valleys and mountains. Sprinkled across the landscape were some homes on 5-acre lots.

“Those houses should never have been built,” he said. “They are all on prime elk habitat.” After a pause, he added, “Of course, our house is on prime elk habitat too, but we didn’t know that when we built it.”

As Peter Hall documents in Cities of Tomorrow, much of the anti-sprawl movement is really a class movement. The upper classes live in suburbs and rural areas, but when working classes move in, there are cultural clashes that the upper classes try to stop by keeping the working classes out. Essentially, they say, “We know how to appreciate this land, so we deserve to live here. You, who will drive snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles, obviously don’t know how to appreciate it, so we will keep you out.”

P176 “The development patterns analyzed here presage trends that will mark much of the twenty-first century.  Can we put western development on a trajectory more appropriate to the region’s values?”

O’Toole: Has Travis ever been to Connecticut? Connecticut has the highest rural densities of any state in the nation—something like 175 people per square mile, compared with around 10 in most western states. Does rural Connecticut look like an environmental wasteland? No, it is actually quite beautiful.

What does Travis mean by “the region’s values.” He already said that the West values property rights and is suspicious of big government. If so, then exurbanization is a celebration of those values. But here, by “values,” he seems to mean something quite different: government taking away people’s property rights so that some people can enjoy scenic vistas at other people’s expense?

Cox: If the region’s values are toward a more elitist society in which fewer people can own their own homes, fewer people can climb on the ladder of economic activity and minorities fall further behind, then the author suggests appropriate directions.

P184 “Worse, several state and federal policies, such as highway expansion and water provision, subsidize and encourage sprawl.  If the attention of local decision makers is too often captured by developers promising economic booms and the exigencies of public finance, in which growth appears to be the solution to budget shortages, then it is to the state and federal levels that we must appeal for discipline.”

O’Toole: It is funny how electric companies, telephone companies, UPS, FedEx, and other private companies can serve rural areas at a profit. But when the government serves those areas, it is “subsidizing and encouraging sprawl.” In fact, far more government subsidies go to cities than to suburbs and rural development.

If subsidies are a problem, why don’t we just privatize roads and water and sewer and let the private companies sort it out? Planning advocates like Travis never propose that, perhaps because they fear that, without any subsidies, many people would still choose to live in suburbs and exurbs.

“Discipline.” Sounds like liberal fascism to me. The problem with (or advantage of) federal or state government is that it is more distant from the average voter than local government and so more susceptible to special interests, including the interests of those who want to stop development to preserve their own private utopias.

Cox: Actually new highways are paid for by gasoline taxes --- which is a price added to gasoline buyers for the purpose of building and maintaining roads. These drivers also subsidized mass transit services to a considerably degree with their federal gas tax funds.

Here we have the “sprawl” bogeyman, which appears to be whatever a particular writer doesn’t like about urban development. I have seen Hong Kong and Mumbai, the two most dense large urban areas in the world described as sprawling. To paraphrase the late Premier Deng of China, whatever we don’t like we’ll call sprawl.

P194 “Many planners assumed that U.S. land use policy would eventually ‘mature’ to the European model, with its strong national role in everything from urban design and architecture to countryside protection.”

O’Toole: Yes, and how well has that worked in Europe? About 84 percent of all U.S. travel is by car. In 2000, 80.7 percent of all U.S. passenger travel was by automobile. In the same year, those “green” Europeans drove for 78.3 percent of all their travel. Peter Hall, in both Cities in Civilization and Cities of Tomorrow, describes how Europeans revolted against the government strictures that promoted compact cities in the 1970s. Since then, European urban densities have steadily declined and today, he says, the suburbs of Stockholm and Paris are indistinguishable from those of Los Angeles and Philadelphia. If national planning didn’t work there, why would it work here?

Cox: The European model is as much myth as reality. All of Europe’s urban areas have broad suburban and exurban expanses. Virtually all urban growth in the last four decades has been in the suburbs in Europe.

P215 Guiding Principles for Seattle’s Open Space Plan: 5. Quality, Beauty, Identity and Rootedness—Use Seattle’s many natural strengths to create an exemplary, signature open space system.  Build on intrinsic qualities, both natural and cultural; reflect, respond to and interpret geographic, ecological, aesthetic and cultural contexts; address emotional and spiritual needs; and inspire a deep connection to place.”

O’Toole: As a University of Washington economist recently reported, those kinds of policies have made housing unaffordable in Seattle—see http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=362

On the other hand, it is really hard to find any benefits that these policies have produced. Is Seattle really more livable than cities that don’t have these policies? See http://www.crosscut.com/mossback/1863/ for a view from a Seattelite who says no.

Cox: Emotional and spiritual needs? Who are architects and planners to make such judgments?

P220 “In something approaching a cynical manipulation of social capital, the forces arrayed for business-as-usual growth are happy to see community effort poured into master plans with little political power and few land use teeth.”

O’Toole: Hard to comment on this out of context. But “master plans” was a term used for city plans written in the 1920s through 1960s. These plans tended to focus on land that was already developed and aimed to provide landowners of that land a sense of stability, that is, knowledge that they could invest in their properties without worry that some incompatible use would be sited next door.

Today, planners want much more power. First, they want power over undeveloped land to make sure that no one is allowed to develop it except in ways that the planners approve. Second, they want the power to impose incompatible uses ("infill") on existing developed areas. For example, they want to rezone single-family neighborhoods for multi family and to rezone neighborhoods dedicated to residential uses for mixed uses. All to serve a utopian ideal that does not exist in reality (people living in higher density urban areas don’t drive less than people in lower density areas; people living in mixed uses are not automatically healthier than people living in separated uses, etc.)

Cox: Few land use teeth? The over-regulation of land use in the west coast states have driven housing prices to from double to nearly four times historic norms.

P222 “We need, first, to build a roster of standing land use watchdog groups in the West, and we need to develop a recruitment and support program to seed such groups where they are needed…”

O’Toole: Brownshirts, anyone?

P226 “Still, some planning and growth management efforts at least partly spurred by Sonoran’s stewardship forums have run afoul of pro-growth, antiplanning, and pro-property rights attitudes.”

O’Toole: It may sound extreme to refer to “liberal fascism.” But it is actually unfair to equate American planners with fascists—unfair to the fascists, that is. In “Building New Communities: New Deal America and Fascist Italy,” USC architecture historian Diane Ghirardo examined new towns built in 1930s America and Italy. In Italy, she found, the government built the towns and turned them over to the residents to do with what they will. In America, the government use the new towns to try to control everyone’s behavior. If anyone got out of line, they were expelled as not being appropriate members of the community. Given a choice between Italian fascism and American planning, the Italian version sounds much more appealing.