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Chapter 6 Legacies of Sprawl: A Witch’s Brew The ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time is, ironically, a lowgrade uniform environment from which escape is impossible. —Lewis Mumford, The City in History, 1961 All Americans pay for sprawl with increased health and safety risks, worsening air and water pollution, urban decline, disappearing farmland and wildlife habitat, racial polarization, city/suburban disparities in public ­education, lack of affordable housing, and the erosion of community. —Robert D. Bullard, Sprawl City, 2000 What a strange and dysfunctional metropolitan America we have created. Five­ decades of efforts to “manage growth” have amounted to the equivalent of “whistling in the wind” against the suburban sprawl engine driven by government and corporate technocracy. Sprawl has continued to flourish like kudzu, paving and building over farmland, forests, desert, wetlands, prairie, mountainsides, barrier islands (see figs. 4.1, 4.2). Disparate swatches of yesterday’s sprawl, scattered among a myriad local government fiefdoms, share little except their physical linkages via labyrinthine highway networks on which tens of millions of drivers of cars and trucks waste time and money struggling from one place to another. The United States has tragically squandered its wealth and talent in failing to provide a better model of metropolitan growth for itself and the developing world. We won World War II, reached the Moon, and outlasted the Soviet Union—but our own people cannot easily travel between home and work (assuming they have both), or fulfill their daily needs with reasonable speed, comfort, and economy. Furthermore, the miseries of the current recession—especially home foreclosures and unemployment—relate in part to the massive miscalculation of builders, lenders , and their government enablers regarding the type, design, and location of new development over the recent past.1 Today we are faced with the worst of both possible worlds: on the one hand, local governments and the private market reject centralized planning control to achieve more rational land use patterns; on the other hand, local government fiefdoms through their zoning and tax strategies, and social preferences, distort the potential efficiencies of a purely private market, such as the “streetcar suburbs” of the 1870s to 1920s beloved by New Urbanists. 132 Chapter 6 The ugly or monotonous appearance of sprawl (alluded to in Mumford’s epigraph above) has aroused decades of outrage from urbanist critics. William H. Whyte in the late 1950s wrote in his essay “Urban Sprawl”: “Aesthetically, the result is a mess. It takes remarkably little blight to color a whole area; let the reader travel along a stretch of road he is fond of, and he will notice how a small portion of open land has given amenity to the area. But it takes only a few badly designed developments or billboards or hot-dog stands to ruin it, and though only a little bit of the land is used, the place will look filled up.”2 In 1993, James Howard Kunstler voiced a similar outcry against the visual clutter of sprawl in his city, Saratoga Springs, New York: By any standards, South Broadway looks terrible. No thought has gone into the relationships between things—the buildings to each other, the buildings to the street, the pedestrian to the buildings. . . . The absence of trees planted along the sides of the street lends it a bleak, sun-blasted look, which the clutter of signs only aggravates. . . . The fastfood strip follows, all the little cartoon eateries in a row: McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, Long John Silver, Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken. As a sort of crescendo to this long avenue of junk architecture, we arrive at the Holiday Inn . . . [with] all the formal charm of a junior high school.3 Clutter along streets and highways today has no more visual appeal than it did when Kunstler grumbled about it two decades ago (fig. 6.1). But not everyone hates sprawl. In his contrarian 2005 (pre-foreclosure crisis) book Sprawl: A Compact History, Robert Bruegmann describes critics (like Whyte and Kunstler, presumably) as driven by “a set of class-based aesthetic and metaphysical assumptions , almost always present but rarely discussed.”4 Bruegmann blandly dismisses race as a factor in driving sprawl, claiming that if “affluent enough to do so, African Americans have been just as willing as their white counterparts to move out to the suburbs.”5 He disregards, however, the pervasive redlining and “steering” of minority households away from white suburbs long after the 1968 Fair Housing Act banned such practices. With similar...

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