Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser

Author:Edward Glaeser
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781101475676
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-01-19T10:00:00+00:00

What’s Wrong with Sprawl?

In the nineteenth century, economics drove the growth of America’s cities. People moved to places, like Chicago, that were economic engines. In the twentieth century, an increasingly affluent population started making choices based on quality of life as well as wages. Los Angeles’ early growth came from its oil wells and its port, but also from the allure that its climate had for retiring Midwestern farmers or footloose authors, like L. Frank Baum and Edgar Rice Burroughs. When people move to places that are more productive, the country as a whole becomes more economically vibrant. When people move to pleasant places, they enjoy life more, and when they move to more temperate climates, they use less energy.

But in the late twentieth century, public policies, both national and local, started playing an outsize role in urban change. As we’ve seen, the fastest growing places in the United States—Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix—are growing not because of high wages and temperate climates but because their governments are friendlier to new development than older communities in California and the Northeast. The path of America’s future is being determined by the whims of local zoning boards that don’t want more people living in their highly productive, pleasant communities.

A different set of policies has played an equally important but largely hidden role, pushing people to suburbanize. I am sufficiently unusual that I’m always cautious about using my own life to infer anything about anyone else’s, but my decision to suburbanize was a conventional one, driven for the most part by common factors. At the start of this chapter, I listed the forces that brought me to a suburb: living space, soft grass for spill-prone toddlers, a desire to diversify my life with greater distance from my employer, a fast commute, and good schools. Of these five factors, only two—the grass and distance from Harvard—are independent of public policies.

My wife and I were pretty sure that we wanted to live someplace where we could eat out anonymously, but that didn’t necessarily imply living in a suburb. We could have moved to Boston, which is a charming and pleasant city. One of the factors that pushed against Boston is that a five-mile commute from an urban apartment across the Charles River would have been no quicker than a fifteen-mile drive in from the suburbs. If I leave early enough, that drive takes me less than twenty-five minutes, thanks to the interstate highway system, which was generously subsidized by the federal government. My commute itself is on a highway that was funded by tolls, but when I drive to the airport, I rely on a recent expensive extension largely funded by state and federal largesse. As a matter of public policy, I remain skeptical of the $15 billion Big Dig, but I’d be foolish not to use it when I drive to Logan. My commute is also cheap because American governments have, unlike their European counterparts, decided not to heavily tax gasoline.

Another factor that pushed us to the suburbs was the cost of living space.

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