Privatized Lives: On the embattled ‘burbs
Harvard Design Magazine, Fall 2000
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Individual versus Community
Within the apparent tranquility of their tract-house realms, suburbanites rarely recognize that the individualistic, privatized ethos so powerfully embodied by the house on a lawn is exactly the ethos that regularly up-ends the sense of carefully constructed gentility and orderliness that constitutes one of the chief attractions of suburbia. The culture of privatism allows the citizen to consider one’s house one’s castle, but the gates and deeded covenants can’t prevent Merrill Lynch from moving in next store. Writ large, the rights of owners to do whatever they want to do with their property has produced the freewheeling growth machine that now produces the same relentless and upsetting change that people left the city to escape.
Private-sector real-estate investment and development are forces propelling worldwide urban growth, but the relationship established between the private and the public sectors in the United States is unique, and has never found wide acceptance in the rest of the world. To varying degrees other countries see city form and growth as something that should represent community values rather than simply result from the accumulation of individual decisions. So government is empowered far more directly in planning and guiding growth. Some countries and cities have a long history of centralized control of development, for example. Other cultures, such as Japan’s, place the values of the community much higher than the interests of the individual or the family. Indeed, the American emphasis on the independent action of the individual is still regarded as dangerous in many religious cultures; others regard the extended family as more important than the nuclear family.
Even in democratic and capitalist countries–Holland, Germany, and Scandinavia come to mind–government often determines which cities will grow, where they will grow, how much they will grow, and by what design they will grow. Dutch people needn’t move every few years in search of a less-degraded landscape, because private development is channeled by the public sector to maintain an ordered community. America has never entrusted such powers to public agencies. Although local, national, and state governments in the U.S. all employ city planners, their powers, never impressive, have been eviscerated over the last decade or so as the public distrust of government intervention has waxed. Even places like Portland, Oregon, where a consensus supports such innovations as urban growth boundaries and transit-oriented development, planning remains largely a reactive enterprise. Thus privatism remains the underlying driver of American city-making, even as urban growth brings together more and more people who share fewer and fewer values, thus creating sharper conflicts. In the meantime, the enormous scale of corporations and the world economy has enabled landowners and developers to bring equally immense resources to the task of altering the landscape to privatized ends.
The End of the “Ponzi Scheme”
The failure to reconcile the role of a privatized economy with the desire for an ordered, pleasant, and harmonious city continues to diminish the quality of urban life in the United States. The “creative destruction” of capitalism has everywhere left its mark on the landscape, whether in the obvious form of abandoned malls, or the dispiriting and enervating disjunction of opportunistic development or in the more subtle failure of many communities to build parks, schools, and libraries. Too often these marks are permanent. And so suburbanites, increasingly overwhelmed by the disturbing forces of large-scale development, have begun to react the way city dwellers once did. Some, like the Ferrys, keep moving farther out, undergirding an immense, stunningly inefficient and apparently perpetual population shift.
Others choose to stay and fight. Some communities have adopted anti-growth initiatives, imposed moratoriums, planted a thicket of regulations, and tacked on impact fees (requiring developers to pay for the infrastructure associated with their projects) and exactions (requiring developers to pay for this new school or that new park).
William Fulton, a chronicler of Southern California’s perpetual land-use battles, sees the real estate industry as a victim of the very American dream that has made it rich. Developers are eager to point out the hypocrisy of the residents of Pine Knoll Estates who organize to stop the development of nearby Pleasant Meadow Manors. Yet, as Fulton notes, it was developers who promoted the “anti-urban bias, the small-town atmosphere, localized governments . . .” of the privatized suburban realm. So when the Irvine Company, which built much of Orange County, California, lured buyers with the slogan, “Come to Irvine to hear the asparagus grow,” should it have been surprised when residents tried to stop the company from plowing under those fields?
Indeed, according to Fulton, the anti-sprawl movement is simply the most obvious sign that the consensus that made suburbia easy and affordable to develop is evaporating. “Current property owners and residents,” Fulton explains, “paid higher taxes to support the debt-financed construction of new facilities (roads, water pipes, parks, etc.) to be used by newcomers who would then help finance the next phase, and so on.” (Fulton calls this an urban-development Ponzi scheme–an unwitting civic version of the classic bunko racket invented in the ¬å20s by Charles Ponzi, who fraudulently paid old “investors” with money from new “investors.”) In the late 1970s, the passage of California’s Proposition 13–the vanguard of 1980s tax revolts–took the first shot at this consensus. It shielded existing residents from dramatic tax increases; in doing so it deprived developers of the infrastructure-extension cash on which it depended. Lacking alternatives, says Fulton, local governments have pushed these costs onto developers, who must pay for all the community infrastructure related to their developments, which can be $30,000 to $40,000 per housing unit.
Developers have lamented that these kinds of tax initiatives push housing costs beyond the reach of average people–that is, those people who didn’t yet own a nicely mown piece of the American dream; but long-term residents, whose tax bills had been spiraling ever upward to pay for new people to move in and “ruin the place,” would retort that it was only fair that the costs be borne by those who would encroach upon their idyll. Similar battles have been fought in community after community across the country. Whichever side wins a given battle, the costs are high; the outcome is too often produces greater spatial and income divisions as well as sprawl as developers look ever farther for land developable at lower cost and with fewer regulatory barriers.
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