The headlines are filled with references to global warming, rising oil prices, the War in Iraq, and the bursting housing bubble. All of these stories have an underlying connection to automobile-dependent suburban development patterns. Few leaders in politics or the media acknowledge this connection, so we don’t hear much about it on TV or see it on page 1 of our major newspapers. America is in denial about many things, but chief among them is this: The oil dependency that is the root of so many of our problems is directly related to our suburban way of life.
As an article starting on page 1 of this issue makes clear, there is no way that we can seriously address the problem of carbon dioxide emissions without a radical shift to smart growth and New Urbanism. This shift doesn’t have to be all that painful, according to the authors of a report sponsored by the Urban Land Institute. There’s no need to herd Americans into high-rise apartments, for example, or ban detached single-family houses. Rather, the authors propose higher “blended” densities of new development with interconnected street networks and a mixture of uses. In other words, a major solution to global warming is a return to development patterns that worked fine in the US for hundreds of years before planners in the second half of the 20th Century took a 180-degree turn into suburbia.
MORE IMMEDIATE LIMITS
But more immediate limits confront the McMansion and shopping mall way of life than rising sea levels and melting glaciers. Alan Greenspan recently said that the War in Iraq is mainly about protecting access to oil, the lifeblood of our economy. Greenspan wrote what is rarely acknowledged, but he didn’t take the idea to its next logical step. We’ve spent $600 billion and thousands of lives without solving the underlying problem of petroleum dependence. Meanwhile, oil prices are hitting record highs, topping $80/barrel in early October, and world oil production has been declining over the last year. Most of what we have built in America over the last six decades is predicated on sustained low-cost and abundant oil that is unlikely to return.
We are deluded in the belief that global warming, dwindling petroleum reserves, and conflicts in the Middle East will be effectively addressed with any combination of hybrid cars, windmills, better-insulated buildings, and biofuels. For a start, the planning and zoning that calls for tens of millions of new large-lot houses served by shopping malls all across America will also have to change.
Now let’s look at the housing recession, analyzed in the other page 1 article of this issue. Compact urban housing is now generally outperforming suburban large-lot development. Some analysts believe we are seeing the beginnings of an historic shift in the market. “Family-oriented exurban houses in many markets may never regain their peak values,” says Todd Zimmerman of Zimmerman/Volk Associates. The housing market is telling us the same thing as the oil market and the scientists — and that is that our development patterns are unsustainable.
So we have a choice. We can voluntarily move decisively as a society toward compact, mixed-use development patterns. Or, those patterns will be forced upon us by a combination of high oil prices, market upheaval, and environmental crisis. It looks like we’re heading for door number two.
This article is available in the October/November 2007 issue of New Urban News, along with many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue. |