JOEL KOTKIN: Let America Sprawl: Planners’ preference for urban density should not supersede Americans’ preferences for suburban or exurban living. “America today is overwhelmingly a post-urban nation heavily concentrated in suburbs, exurbs, and even small towns. Across the entire nation, 92 percent of the population lives in counties with typical suburban population densities. In contrast, the urban cores, with population densities of at least 7,500 per square mile, accounted for barely 4 percent of the population, mostly located in and around New York City. These trends reflect deep-seated preferences. . . . These trends horrify many academics, city planners, big-city developers, and environmentalists. Opposition to car-oriented suburban development, notes historian Robert Bruegmann, reminded him of the Duke of Wellington’s complaint that trains would ‘only encourage the common people to move around needlessly.'”
Urban planners have not shown any particular skills at, you know, urban planning, as the squalid state of our cities today indicates.
Flashback: Learning to Love Sprawl. A column based on William Bruegmann’s Sprawl: A Compact History. “Rich people have always wanted to sprawl. . . . Sprawl didn’t become a problem until the wealthy and powerful were joined by the hoi polloi. Thanks to greater wealth and improvements in transportation, they were able to move from teeming tenements to less-urban settings. Once this started to happen — before the automobile hit the scene, and beginning outside the United States — social critics began to complain that sprawl was ruining pristine landscapes, and destroying the charm of urban life.”
It’s always been this way.
But that’s been the history of environmental activism from the beginning: rich white people doing well at the expense of the lower classes. In a 1977 Harper’s article, William Tucker explored the history of what’s regarded as the first big environmental movement in America: the opposition to Con Edison’s Storm King pumped-storage project. The project was designed to save energy costs and make it easier for Con Ed to handle summertime peak demand. It would also have provided a lot of jobs in a depressed area.
The catch is, it would have spoiled the views from rich people’s estates in the nearby mountains. As Tucker reports at length, those affluent landowners constructed an entire edifice of opposition to Storm King, for the most selfish of reasons. He quotes a local mayor, who was told by one of the landowners, “We’ve got it nice and peaceful up here, why do you want to spoil it?” The mayor reported, “I bit my tongue and didn’t say anything, but what I wanted to say was ‘What about all the little people down there in the village who need this plant? Did you ever think about them?’” No.
Hiring big law firms and elite PR firms, along with enlisting celebrities like Pete Seeger, who wrote a song about the mountain, the landowners managed to turn a selfish desire not to have to look at electric power lines that would benefit millions into a quasi-religious crusade on behalf of Nature. The plant was stopped, property values were protected and only the little people suffered.
It’s always the same. “Green Jim Crow,” as some call it.