The Cost of Sprawl?
California is a mess, and even the Terminator appears helpless to turn it around.
Is California’s economic and social collapse a result of unique actions by the golden state, or is there a warning here for any city or state or state that has embraced unbridled sprawl?
The Guardian takes a look at the state’s misfortunes and raises some issues that should provoke some discussion for our own 622-square-mile city:
For some campaigners and advocates against suburban sprawl and car culture, it has been a bitter triumph. “Let the gloating begin!” says James Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, a warning about the high cost of the suburban lifestyle. Others see the end of the housing boom as a man-made disaster akin to a mass hysteria, but with no redemption in sight. “If California was an experiment then it was an experiment of mass irresponsibility – and that has failed,” says Michael Levine.
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Comments
No offense to anyone who enjoys The Guardian, however, this British newspaper very rarely prints anything that would be useful or applicable to Oklahoma. Their political views are just this side of Soviet-era Pravda and environmental views could just as well have been re-printed in Greenpeace’s monthly newsletter. To make the statement that California’s problems are due to its “sprawl” and environmental policies is vastly simplistic and naive. California’s problems have weaved themselves into a vast tapestry of inefficiencies, political stagnation and gridlock of which “sprawl” and environmental policies could be thought of as two tiny threads…if anything.
Much like The Guardian intimates, the political situation in California is a mess. The legislature is impotent, the governor can get nothing done and their Constitution makes it supremely easy for inane citizen initiatives to rule the state with almost no way for them to be challenged in any meaningful fashion (if we think there are too many on our ballot, they are nothing compared with what CA deals with all the time). CA almost thinks of itself as the independent nation many compare it to, with their tax and regulation policies. Thus you have companies fleeing the state.
Sprawl is a miniscule problem compared to everything CA has going against it, and is only one factor in its real estate collapse. Building many single-family homes had little to do with the collapse, it was the speculators and financiers who built the homes that were the primary contributors. For example, Florida had much of the same speculation and resulting collapse, but although they had some of the same problems with single-family homes, they have dealt with large high-rise condos/apartments sitting vacant. This housing problem had little, if anything, to do with sprawl and mainly with speculation, thus Oklahoma has been largely spared despite our spread-out city. The Guardian just makes the statement without any evidence or true facts to back it up. It hopes that just by stating the conclusion with a few stories that tug the heart-strings, you won’t think what may be behind the conclusion. It is bush-league reporting in my opinion and really infuriates me, if you can’t tell.
In response to the comment above, I’m glad that Steve posted the Guardian article, and I believe its insights are useful in terms of the broader points about urban sprawl.
We are arguably in the midst of the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression. One of the effects, in addition to laying low certain industries and regions of the country, is exposing some fundamental weakness that underlies our economic model, of which California is a rather great example.
To build wealth this last decade, we mostly bought and sold homes to each other with money we were borrowing from China and a few other big creditors. The speculation and loose lending standards fueled ever more McMansion housing additions and suburban shopping malls until the whole edifice fell in on itself.
That we haven’t suffered an iota as badly in Oklahoma as those in California is no reason not see it as a cautionary tale. To use a personal example, I clock around 25K miles per year on my car and do so because I changed jobs within the last two years. My house in the burbs isn’t easy to sell since it has declined in value, thus I have to maintain the expense and hassle. Of course, the difference here versus California is that I have a job and can tread water just fine.
However, I can see easily if a few things were too change what I pickle I’d be in, and I imagine that would be the case for most people as well. Personally, I would love having the choice of living in a centralized spot, close to where the jobs are, near mass transit and places to grab a bite. In addition to liking the idea of living urban, I think of how much money I could save and how much easier it would be to weather economic storms should they arrive.
So for now I’ll keep the dream alive as I hop in my car on the way to the Starbucks drive thru.
Most of that collection of Tales of the Formerly Golden West weren’t even slightly applicable to us down here on the plain: it’s not like Pacoima and Riverside, the two examples of “sprawl” that are singled out, suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Pacoima is technically part of the city of Los Angeles anyway and has been since the early 1920s; Riverside is viewed as a suburb of L.A. only because everything in between has since been filled in. (Think Purcell, 20 years from now.)
More to the point, while we spend an ungodly amount of money in this area, we tend not to spend more than we take in, a practice which in California is honored mostly in the breach.
This is not to say that we can’t learn anything from the California experience: ultimately, their saner environmental policies – the ones that pay off in better resource control and/or cost reduction – will filter down to the rest of us, and the more egregious failures can serve as perennial Bad Examples.