Confronting the Causes of
Urban Sprawl

The list of causes of urban sprawl should begin with the market preference for large houses and lots, leading to recent over-building. We should stop right here and say that the recent mortgage, financial, and economic crises may have slowed down this cause considerably, but we're going to keep writing as if that's a real threat. We're afraid people will revert to their previous behavior when their immediate crisis is over.

Other causes and contributing factors include ignoring the consequences of unplanned growth of metropolitan areas, smaller cities, and towns.

To get to the point, average new home square footage grew dramatically in the last 20 years. These new homes reflect the desire for luxurious master bedroom suites, large closets, "get away" space for the man of the house, extra bathrooms, home theaters or exercise rooms, and a great room adjacent to the kitchen in addition to the formal living room. Also the need for three- and four-car garages.

Our unwillingness to put up with the decision-making and trade-offs required for housing renovation to current tastes, coupled with the lack of patience to wait a few months while this rehabilitation occurs, has made new housing feel essential to many families.

It's as if we want to substitute more privacy from each other in the family, and more privacy from neighbors, for the hard work of relating to and getting along with other people. Maybe one of the causes of urban sprawl is that we aren't learning enough interpersonal communication and tolerance for diversity.

Ignorance of the Impact of Individual Actions

It's tough to say whether we mean ignorance in the common sense, or whether we really mean "ignoring." Either could apply.

We meet many people who just don't seem to understand (or care?) that what they want and thought they could afford in the way of new housing means a real blow to their old neighborhood. Or if their old neighborhood still experiences good demand, there's another neighborhood that people are leaving because of the construction of the new house. That's providing that overall demand in the metropolitan area remains stagnant.

This is the easiest assumption to illustrate the point, although on this website, we're willing to admit that the urbanized area could expand proportionately if the population is expanding. So in areas that actually are growing in population, new housing can be built, but care should be taken to assure that the inner core and inner suburbs are in terrific repair and current for today's market before allowing growth at the periphery.

The ignorance or ignoring goes on in other areas as well. Developers have to develop new land into housing because that's what they do. We need government to be willing to crack down and say, "We don't need any more new housing right now. What we do need is for the building trades to retrofit and recycle older housing to meet the demands and needs of today's families."

That's easier said than done in most metropolitan areas, simply because of governmental fragmentation. If there are many suburbs with separate governments, plus a central city with no power over its suburbs' land use decisions, the negatively affected governments can't regulate the area where the problem lies!

So this is why we say the causes of urban sprawl are a regional governance issue, and one to be tackled at the regional level.

Inefficient Regional Shopping and Employment Centers

A severe regional problem aggravating the causes of urban sprawl is the lack of coordination in most parts of the U.S. on where major shopping centers and employment centers may be placed. Shopping malls tend to compete for the newest and therefore the one with the most buzz, without regard to whether the next closest center will be forced into a major slump.

The formula is to request public subsidy in the form of tax increment financing or whatever is popular in your area, remodel, bring in a few stores that haven't been seen in the area before, make some stores more glamorous and outrageously pro-consumption, sponsor a huge media blitz, and try to dominate for a few years. Then let things run on auto-pilot until it begins to look dowdy again, or until someone does the same thing to you that you did to the adjacent mall.

The fact is that very few metropolitan regions and states exert any control over this shopping center redevelopment process whatsoever, and in fact the state highway departments usually fall all over themselves trying to accommodate the extra traffic, providing the new mall subsidizes those improvements.

The same thing happens on a less glitzy basis in terms of employment centers. Office towers and complexes too are in fierce competition with one another, and try to outdo one another in glass frontage, park-like setting, and proximity to appropriate restaurants. But there is no provision for whether the construction of a new complex will steal enough tenants from the older one nearby to make the older office buildings start to become a community problem and eventually face excess vacancy.

Builders argue this is democracy, about 98% of the citizens think this is "just the way things are," and a small number of us are left to scratch our heads and ask why this kind of thing is allowed to go on.

Just as with residential development, we think it isn't a substantial inhibition of a developer's freedom to suggest that he has to rehabilitate older office buildings rather than build new ones. Merely because rehab causes a little more brain damage (which we know in reality is actually brain exercise, and it's good for us), we somehow think it's inferior to new construction.

The argument frequently is made that new construction is actually less costly than rehabilitation. That depends widely on conditions, of course, but let's just say that it's true in a particular situation.

The problem with this logic is that it isn't taking into account the public sector and utility costs, as well as the private transportation costs over the life cycle of the building. If those items were accounted for, we would see that it's way too expensive to build new buildings on the edge of the urban area!

If we started with better true-cost accounting practices, suddenly the only causes of urban sprawl remaining would be stupidity on the part of a few individuals.

Bowling Alone

It's time to be a bit serious about the fact that some of us just want to bowl alone, as the Robert Bellah book title would have it. We really want to live like we're in the country, where we can do what we please, but we want to have all the amenities an urban salary can bring us.

So if you're really a country person wanting to cheat and borrow an urban income, what you do is find yourself a single-family home on as large a lot as you can afford, fence that three-acre lot off from everyone, and come home every night, park the SUV in the garage, and refuse to be neighborly. That's one of the sociological causes of urban sprawl, I think.

A similar related factor may be simple racism. Where I live, it's alive and well, President Obama notwithstanding. We want to get the heck as far away from where there are very many people of a different color, what with crime, boom boxes, meth labs, loudness, loud colors, and all. Since race still is associated with poverty in the U.S., part of it just may be anti-poverty prejudice as well. Nevertheless, white flight is among the causes of urban sprawl, I'm afraid.

Why Can't We Have Smart Growth?

This summary of the causes of urban sprawl should be short and sweet, because just a few reasons account for the apparent popularity of sprawl:

1. Changing tastes in housing, shopping areas, and employment centers lead people to the erroneous simplistic conclusion that building new will be less expensive than recycling existing buildings to meet current needs.

2. In most urban areas, no single governmental entity, public interest private group, or coalition is strong enough to stand up to real estate developers to tell them that they are not allowed to make a new housing development, shopping center, or employment center until all of the existing stock has been refurbished to meet today's needs and is occupied.

3. We don't want to be around people who are different, ethnically, sociologically, or economically.

We can't address these causes of urban sprawl successfully until we have a great public relations campaign and outstanding coalition building, as detailed in urban sprawl solutions.

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