An acquaintance recently asked me to elaborate on my assertion that:
"David Brooks' naive conservative idealism ignores* the fact that much of existing metropolitan development patterns (um, "the suburbs"), which he wants to chalk up to the happy workings of a "free" American market, is actually the result of 60+ years of federal and local policies largely favoring low-density, car-oriented design..."
For some reason the request, at first, seemed overwhelming. I've learned and thought SO MUCH for the past five+ years about how the cities came to be shaped the way they are, but I have never, in two years of studying urban planning as a grad student and before that three years working at an Urban Design Center, ever had to write a succinct essay or deliver a quick, off-the-cuff explanation of said thesis, above.
Plus, I spend so much time associating with progressive planner activists, I get used to assuming I'm on the same political page with everyone else I find cool. (Bad Audrey!) Plus AGAIN, by now this stuff seems so obvious to me, I forget that others might actually still find this line of discussion novel!
So, for a little while I felt like a deer caught in headlights - WHERE DO I START?! What do I do?! Just ignore it and it will go awa- OOF!
Hence, it's probably a good idea to structure my understanding a little more on this topic, so that if a similar request comes up again, I'll have my arsenal of facts readied and feel like I really DO know what I'm talking about. And hey, why not blog about it!
For the sake of this story, let's start with the return of victorious troops from WWII in the height of the 1950s modern era, in which America thought itself to be striving for efficiency, economy and rationality in popular cultural life... All those soldiers returned to discover things like:
- A US federal loan policy dictating that low-interest mortgages were only available for single family houses on greenfield lots. (Comparable grants were not available for reconstruction of existing/urban homes:
"As a rule, [Federal Housing Authority (FHA)] guaranteed home loans only in low-risk areas. FHA guidelines defined low-risk areas as areas that were thinly populated, dominated by newer homes, and had no African American or immigrant enclaves nearby, areas that disproportionately tended to be suburban. For example, one FHA underwriting manual taught that the FHA should concentrate its efforts on newer, lower density areas because "crowded neighborhoods lessen desirability" and that "older properties in a neighborhood have a tendency to accelerate the transition to lower class occupancy." [...]
"FHA policies also favored new construction over renovation of existing homes. FHA loans for repair were smaller than loans for the purchase of new homes, so a family could more easily purchase a new home than modernize an old home. Because the newest suburbs tend to have the newest homes, this criterion also favored suburbs."(Source: Why Sprawl is a Conservative Issue)
- The federally subsidized interstate highway system contributed to ease of daily commuting back and forth between suburbs and city, making the suburbs seem like an even better choice. In addition to the ease of highway access, automobiles came to be subsidized in other ways (according to New Urbanist Andres Duany, by the year 2000, each car owner received an estimated $5,000 annual subsidy to drive). Subsidies for cars include things like free parking lots constructed in cities, which had the effect not only of facilitating driving/commuting in from the suburbs, but also began to contribute toward the deterioration of the urban fabric that originally made cities function.
- Public transit, meanwhile, was NOT subsidized (or worse - often, trolley tracks and operating services had been intentionally sold off by municipalities to General Motors/Firestone Tires, in a well-known scandal by those companies to purchase the trolleys, run the systems into the ground, and promote their emerging car technology as the more convenient alternative). Thus, by the 1960s-ish, cars seemed like even MORE of a logical choice to the average consumer, given the lack of any competitive alternatives for getting around.
- Racism - largely on the part of bankers and real estate agents - during the 1950s and 1960s caused redlining of neighborhoods containing poor minorities, meaning many city dwellers couldn't get loans or mortgages for improvements and their neighborhoods deteriorated. Whites, who could get loans, moved out as the urban neighborhoods declined, leading to the "ghettoizing" of inner cities (the "white flight" phenom - in fact, in spite of the Civil Rights movement, cities were more segregated at the END of the 20th centch). During the 60s and 70s, those neighborhood-scale ghettos were replaced by public housing projects under the guise of "slum clearing" and "urban renewal", another set of federal policies which further isolated the poor (in "the projects") and further contributed to the decline of cities. By fostering such socially unhealthy conditions, such policies continued to promote disinvestment from cities by the American middle class.
- Local zoning policies were developed - initially, around the idea that people shouldn't live next to very polluting factories as had been the wont in cities in the 1800s. In addition to protecting health, these zones were also largely developed to protect PROPERTY - eventually, they came to be applied in a protectionist manner, for example so owners of the single-family homes would be sheltered from possible devaluing of the neighborhood should someone want to build a multi-family apartment in their neighborhood. Single-use, exclusive zoning districts divided allowable uses in different districts into categories such as such as Single Family Residential (i.e. no apartments or traditional style row houses), or, Office Park (those huge towers with no housing, schools, or retail) - making it literally illegal to build traditional, "mixed-use" neighborhoods in which a resident could live above his office and walk to the grocery store. And with everything so spread out, how were people to get from place to place!? Car to the rescue!
- Further, the new "suburban" style building and zoning codes, such as requirements that buildings be set back a certain distance from the street, or that sites contain a minimum amount of parking, began to be viewed by city officials as some sort of mark of progress. The codes were applied to cities, too. This meant that historic urban buildings could often no longer be legally renovated to their original glory, and replacements were destined to be much more poorly designed than their predecessors. This led to the further decline of city downtowns, as historic buildings were replaced with parking lots. Cities continued to become generally less attractive places for reinvestment and suburbs continued to seem like the more "rational" or natural places to develop, live and work.
Given the combination of de jure and de facto federal and local policies described above, it is relatively easy to see how the suburbs, though not exactly FORCED upon Americans, were certainly not a creation of some magical free market nor were they some sort of inevitable step in our CONSTANT MARCH OF PROGRESS. Far from it, modern American cities and their suburbs represent the physical outcomes of private builders and buyers trying to heighten their self-interest within the constraints of decades worth of American politics and policies.
Had our policies been better, so might our contemporary landscapes - and hence, we train a new generation of planners optimistic about forging a better way in the future. :)
For further reading: Andres Duany in Suburban Nation; and the classic, angsty James Howard Kunstler in Geography of Nowhere, and of course the Planetizen All-Time Top 20 Planning Books.
*David Brooks' article ignored a lot of OTHER facts, too; a couple StreetsBlog bloggers (REAL ones!) picked up on the fact that cities like Portland and Seattle, which serve as models for good urbanism among contemporary planners, are in the top ten list of American city preferences - while Brooks was claiming that Americans all want our backyard and our two-car garage...
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