Designing the city

Christian Century, June 20, 2001 by Norman B. Bendroth

IN THE SPRING of 1976, I took my New Hampshire youth group to Philadelphia for the bicentennial celebrations. Not wanting to break the bank on hotels, we slept in a church hall in a suburb north of the city. There, for the first time in my life, I encountered row after row, block after block, street after street of identical beige cinderblock houses. Even the church we stayed in was beige cinderblock. I was appalled and remember telling myself, "If anyone suffers from an identity crisis, it must be these people." I could easily imagine one of them walking into some one else's home and thinking it was his or her own.

Today this phenomenon is described as urban sprawl and demonstrates that urban society includes both the central city and the surrounding suburbs. The Bureau of Census uses the term Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area to refer to a central city of 50,000 or more and its contiguous counties or towns. Thus, when the word urban is used it describes not only the central city but also an entire metropolitan area. Cities and suburbs are symbiotic; they rise and fall together.

Urban sprawl is a familiar concern in cities across the country, and it was an early item in Al Gore's presidential campaign. While the suburbs have long been the target of social satire for their nondescript strip malls and cookie-cutter housing, only recently have city planners begun to look seriously at alternatives. A new breed of architects, planners and developers--known collectively as the New Urbanists--are questioning old orthodoxies. To understand why, we first need to understand the conditions that created sprawl.

After World War II, the mortgage policies of the Federal Housing Authority and the Veterans Administration focused almost entirely on the creation of 11 million new single-family homes. Most of these homes were built in suburbs, in part because the FHA did not make capital available to renovate existing structures or to construct row houses, mixed-use buildings or other types of urban housing. Furthermore, this was the era of the automobile. Under the interstate highway program of the 1950s, 41,000 miles of new roads were created. Government subsidies were available for road improvement, while public transit was neglected. General Motors, Standard Oil and Firestone conspired to buy up many local urban transit systems, then shut them down to eliminate competition. The new highway system gave unprecedented mobility to the middle class, enabling workers to live in subdivisions on the edge of town and commute to jobs downtown.

During the 1960s and '70s, new construction became highly segmented. Following the design model of those years, shopping centers were put in one location, housing pods in another, and office parks in yet another. A matrix of collector roads connected these developments. Ironically, adjacency didn't necessarily mean accessibility. For instance, a homeowner living 50 yards from a shopping center might still have to get into a car, drive a mile to exit the subdivision, drive another half a mile on the collector road to the shopping center, park and walk to the store. What might have been a pleasant five-minute walk down a tree-lined street became a trek that used gasoline, required a roadway and took up space for parking.

Current critics of this kind of sprawl blame the engineers and the bureaucrats who codified everything---curb size, street widths and setbacks--and who zealously developed zoning laws that enforced segmented development. While it makes sense to separate heavy industry from housing, it doesn't make sense to outlaw mother-in-law apartments and corner stores in residential areas. Yet lending requirements and mortgage tax credits limited the flow of dollars to one type of housing "product."

Thus, people used housing subdivisions strictly for residential purposes, shopping centers only for commercial uses, and office parks only for work. Instead of placing civic institutions where they would serve as magnets of social and communal activity, planners would put them on the margins. (Consider the vast regional high schools built on the edges of town, the office complexes located away from downtown, and the churches built next to freeway exits.)

The result was, and is, an inefficient use of land, segmented development that depended on an unsustainable infrastructure, and traffic congestion on the roadways needed to connect these "pods" of activity. Sprawl further exacerbated social isolation by excluding those who don't or can't drive, and created economic segregation by building housing developments according to exclusive income levels.

Taking pot shots at the burbs is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. They are widely assumed to be, as in the movie American Beauty, dysfunctional, congested and socially isolating places. Urban activists blame the decay of our inner cities on "white flight," which leaves once vital neighborhoods abandoned and siphons off tax dollars needed to solve the problems suburbanites leave behind. Environmentalists are equally critical of sprawl for gobbling up the landscape and endangering wildlife.