Copyright 1999 The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Editorial: A Matter of "Sprawl"
February 10, 1999

If you throw a communist out the front door, he comes back through the window as an environmentalist. If you throw an environmentalist out the door, he comes back through the window as an urban land-use planner. We borrow this strident characterization, with permission, from Jake Haulk of the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy. It's designed to get your attention. For the assault on "surburban sprawl" has begun in earnest in Harrisburg.

And so, too, perhaps has the assault on basic property rights.

"Sprawl" is that nebulous concept that's being used to blame many of our modern woes. Our city cores are rotting? Blame sprawl. Traffic congestion is up? It's sprawl, again. The environment is, oh, so stressed. Sprawl. Urban poverty rates continue to outpace those in the suburbs? Damn sprawl. The "haves" have too much; the "have nots" have less and less. We've got to stop sprawl.

What sprawl is is growth. It's growth fueled by man's age-old desire to migrate out of population centers. Some contend it is no better than a cancer. But the debate over that growth and migration is distorted by a high degree of misinformation, concludes Peter Gordon and Harry W. Richardson, both from the University of Southern California's School of Policy, Planning and Development. They find that not only has "sprawl" never been satisfactorily defined, but that many of the "problems" associated with it are myths:

o "Suburbanization has turned out to be a traffic safety valve," not the cause of congestive traffic failure, the USC researchers found. "Increasingly footloose industry has followed workers into the suburbs and 'exurban' areas, and most commuting now takes place suburb-to-suburb on faster, less-crowded roads."

o The anti-sprawl lobby bemoans a massive loss of American famlands. Citing the research of the late Julian Simon, Messrs. Gordon and Richardson say it is "the most conclusively discredited environmental-political fraud of recent times." For the record, U.S. cropland peaked in 1930; each year American farmers grow more crops using less land and labor, they found.

o Those combating sprawl insist high-density development, more indigenous to urban areas, is more cost-effective than the low-density suburbs. But the duo from USC caution that the "compactness equals efficiency" argument doesn't hold automatically.

Similarly, other research soundly debunks the notion that mass transit "cures" congestion or pollution. And some of the "solutions' likely are more deadly than the disease. Take for instance the legislation that state Rep. David J. Steil plans to intoduce this session.

The Bucks County Republican talks of controls that "would protect private property owner rights" and "private market mechanism(s)" within "a comprehensive land-use package." But Steil's outline also includes this: "proposed statutory authority to establish 'growth boundaries' and inter-municipal comprehensive plans."

The former, of course, is notable for its failures eleswhere; both suggest the very worst of central planning. Pennsylvania can afford neither.

USC's Gordon and Richardson maintin that the goals of the anti-sprawl position are unattainable. And they're correct. The Soviet Union provide the perfect object lesson.