Planning in The Age of Sprawl - Hamilton County, Ohio

“We must eliminate the two principal causes of sprawl: artificially cheap land and artificially
cheap energy”, advises Douglas Kelbaugh in Common Place -- Toward Neighborhood and
Regional Design. “The two most far-reaching corrections would be to make gasoline and
rural land more expensive, so that their market prices more closely reflect their true cost.
The capital costs of sprawl are high: new highways, roads, sewers, utilities, water systems;
new schools and school bus fleets; new stores and jobs that require the private transit of
automobiles with the attendant air pollution, congestion and lost time. Yet, we continue to
develop the urban fringe despite the high costs of improvement. Why Because it's so
profitable. The capital cost of land is still cheap and the burden of infrastructure can often
still be shifted to the public sector. Subsidized energy (for transportation and housing)
masks the high operating costs of suburbia.” He reminds us that legislative lobbyists
certainly know their bread is buttered on the suburban more than the urban side.
The European experience provides greater clarification of the complexity of “smart
growth” (i.e., compact growth without sprawl) and its unlikely fit in our American culture.
Pietro Nivola, in Fit for Fat City: A “Lite” Menu of European Policies to Improve Our
Urban Form, identifies key policies that have profoundly slowed suburban spread in
European cities. He dispels the conventional wisdom that European land use laws and
central planning agencies are stronger than in the US. Instead, Nivola points to several key
policies that have contained European sprawl:
• Large agricultural subsidies make it less likely that farmers will sell their land to
developers.
• Heavy taxation of gasoline and high rates for electric power and furnace fuels make it
much more expensive to live an American-style suburban life, with a large home,
multiple vehicles, a long commute, and the gigantic refrigerator and freezers that make
occasional shopping possible.
• The tax systems of most European countries make cars much more expensive and don’t
subsidize home ownership.
• Small neighborhood shops are protected by multiple restrictions on the penetration and
pricing practices of large retailers.
• Post-war building and rebuilding focused on mixed-income apartments, while the U.S.
encouraged home building with Federal Housing Administration and Veterans
Administration mortgage guarantees.
• Transportation spending in the post-war period was roughly balanced between passenger
railroads and highways, while in the U.S. spending on highways dwarfed spending on
alternatives by almost 6 to 1 in the same period.
In contrast to the European experience, the American smart growth ideology seems
simplistic. The magnitude of the required cultural “paradigm shift” is enormous. In The
Ecology of Place: Planning for Environment, Economy and Community, Timothy Beatley
identifies the cult of individualism that has so eroded community values in the U.S. For
example, consider the following excerpt. “Material use, energy consumption and
environmental degradation in the industrial world will have to be reduced by 90% to achieve
global socioeconomic sustainability. Yet material and energy consumption is still increasing
HCRPC
PLANNING IN THE AGE OF SPRAWL
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