Privatized Lives: On the embattled ‘burbs
Harvard Design Magazine, Fall 2000
(Continued - 5 of 5)
The War Between the Suburbs
Growing social polarization has set suburb against suburb, and the ethos of privatism not only exacerbates the conflicts but also impedes their resolution. Mamaroneck, New York, recently proposed a law–over the objections of adjacent Mount Vernon, Yonkers, White Plains, New Rochelle, and Port Chester–that would require developers to obtain Mamaroneck's approval for projects just outside its borders. Attempting to preserve its slow-paced, small-town feel, Mamaroneck wants to stop construction of an Ikea superstore in New Rochelle because it would generate additional traffic within Mamaroneck. Poorer New Rochelle needs the tax proceeds. Not far away, Mount Vernon is in a border war with adjacent Pelham, which wants a Target store. Nearby Yonkers, a struggling industrial river town, had to defend a superstore development in a dispute with neighboring Greenburgh, Hastings-on Hudson, and Ardsley.
Why can’t these communities work together to resolve their differences? Or, more rationally, why isn’t Westchester County (which encompasses all the towns) planning to equitably distribute the burdens and benefits of growth? Because the affluence and indeed the very existence of privileged communities depends upon their home-rule autonomy (and, not incidentally, upon their rich tax base). So Mamaroneck pursues its legally questionable strategy and the disputes go on and on–just as they do in community after community across America.
In other ways, too, the cultures of individualism and privatism undermine the very values that animate the suburban dream. “Big box” stores–the gigantic warehouses surrounded by asphalt acreage like Wal-Mart or Price Club–have become the vanguard of urban sprawl, shiny, brand-name blemishes on suburbia’s civic aspirations. However, such projects generate so much sales tax revenue that communities compete desperately to lure them. Fulton documents how the post-Proposition 13 political landscape in California (in which sales taxes have become the most important local tax) has all but forced three communities into a cutthroat battle for large-scale retail that its growth-averse citizens didn’t even want.
Although the neighboring cities of Oxnard, Ventura, and Camarillo had planning policies supporting reinvestment in their older downtowns, Ventura, in the 1980s, encouraged big-box retailers to line its freeway frontage in order to harvest desperately needed sales taxes from passing drivers. Oxnard followed, first subsidizing the development of an auto mall, then underwriting the construction of a “super regional” mall (which predictably but ironically threatened two existing malls, one of which was in Oxnard). The proposal collapsed, a victim of the real estate recession (though the city was left holding the bag on a multimillion dollar infrastructure investment and bonds), but it was succeeded by a “power center” proposal comprising a collection of large-scale discounters (again partially underwritten by the city), and a factory-outlet strip. Then Camarillo joined the fray, subsidizing an outlet center of its own.
By the early 1990s, Ventura’s 1970s Buenaventura Mall was reeling under pressure from its new competition. The city offered to turn over to redevelopers up to $30 million in tax revenues that would be generated by doubling the size of the mall. Oxnard countered with a proposal to build a new “town center” mall. Both proposals ultimately withered, but each entailed costly lawsuits, contentious hearings, and local votes. Three cities that had hoped to maintain a less urban, quasi-agricultural landscape at the edge of the Los Angeles megalopolis ended up with ten miles of traffic-generating could-be-anywhere sprawl along their freeways. Governments gambled taxpayers dollars playing retail poker–a game they were ill-equipped to play, one forced upon them by the fragmented “small town” governance landscape of America.
In the Darwinian environment of modern suburbia, the most affluent communities would seem to come out the winners. But even amid the once pastoral landscapes of privilege, life is hardly sanguine these days. A very high percentage of the nation’s growth is occurring in these precincts, and so the green spaces that for decades defined their laid-back, bridle-pathed atmosphere are disappearing, replaced by ever-larger-scaled construction (McMansions et al.) and road-rage inducing traffic. (And since the privileged sector has more jobs than residents, its “migrant” workers–crossing the 30-mile width of the Twin Cities metro area to Minneapolis’ western suburbs, or pounding the 75 freeway miles from Moreno Valley, in Riverside County, to Universal City, in Los Angles–clog the local expressways and parkways.) While America at large has experienced impressive economic growth in the last few years, the growth rate in the privileged sector has been torrid. Across the nation, urban development has gobbled land at a much faster rate than population growth alone would predict. Americans are driving many more miles than they used to. In response to the development pressures this has brought, affluent Americans–those that have benefited most from urban sprawl–have been in the vanguard of the anti-sprawl movement.
Modern suburbia is rich in such ironies. The business community that is often fingered as the instigator of sprawl has begun to recognize that unfettered, low-first-cost urban development may kill the economic goose that has laid America’s golden eggs. Consider Silicon Valley, the forty-mile corridor of office parks and executive housing south of San Francisco. Computer and software businesses have created an economic juggernaut of unprecedented size in this emblematic low-density landscape, an economy based upon an ethos of easy auto access and cheap, garaged-based creativity. Today, this vast conurbation reels in the face of sclerotic freeways, declining air quality and open space, and median house prices pushing half a million dollars. While highly paid software engineers can afford the stratospheric prices of nearby homes, all kinds of support jobs go begging because people cannot get to them from affordable communities. (Only in Silicon Valley could the New York Times find people earning $50,000-per-year who cannot afford housing. ) Today business and civic groups support the anti-sprawl agenda of affordable housing and greater transit access–exactly the kinds of incursions such communities have long fought. It is, in fact, unclear whether business groups can get residential communities to accept change that has historically been regarded as threatening to their property values and generous public services.
Still Fleeing
For suburbia to evolve to a more stable and satisfying urban form, the nation must be prepared to consider the true field of suburban concern as larger than the subdivision or village. It must also recognize that suburban towns and cities are parts of larger regional conurbations that must be participated in, planned for, and governed as such. Americans must put aside their knee-jerk anti-urbanism and consider what kind of urban place they would really like to inhabit, and, like city dwellers through the ages, consider what they’re willing to give up for what they’ll get. Suburbanites have resisted higher density, multi-family housing, and mixed incomes and mixed uses, because these are emblems of the chaotic and disordered city. But the disorder of urban life has long been threatening suburbia precisely because Americans have been unwilling to reconsider the lack of order implicit in the purely mercantile model of city making. The unit of simplistic real estate development is the increment by which the suburbs grow, but it is also what prevents the attainment of traditional urbanity or civility. America need not attempt to recreate a nostalgic urban vision, nor follow modern European models. The nation may well develop a unique, new path if it is willing to try.
Urban planning as currently conceived is not up to the task at hand. Planning in modern urban America is almost entirely reactive, almost entirely devoted to promulgating regulations intended to prevent the last problem from repeating itself. Thus has the nation created a regulatory apparatus as complex and unwieldy as it is ineffective. Policymakers have proposed tax-base-sharing among adjacent suburbs or metro-area governance as a means to coordinate development among communities, but the ideal of small-town home rule is so deeply embedded in the suburban psyche that any such solutions face extraordinary hurdles. Even Portland, Oregon, long held up as a model of sensible planning, has had to fight three attempts by initiative to undo its regional-planning process.
There are those who welcome America’s privatized urban-growth model, because they believe it encourages creativity and innovation. Certainly it has incidentally provided such durable urban forms as the loft building and the townhouse row. But it is clear that a high proportion of Americans seek more order and predictability in the urban environment, and it is precisely this group that empties older communities as it fills new ones on the developing edge. Their desires must somehow be accommodated.
Growth pressure is not letting up, and, like a river, it flows over and around obstacles, seeking the path of least resistance. Rather than battle anti-growth activists or jump through ever more constricting regulatory hoops, developers simply move outward until they find a place more congenial to unimpeded growth. In Southern California, says Fulton, that means “halfway to Las Vegas,” if not Las Vegas itself. Indeed, Fulton sees the desert metropolis, 250 miles east of the Hollywood Bowl, as a satellite of Los Angeles, flung a once unimaginable distance from its parent. In Las Vegas, acres of tile-roofed new housing march into the red rock desert, filling with legions of immigrants who seek the dream Los Angeles no longer promises. How long till their numbers swell to the point that, like the Ferrys, they seek yet another place of refuge?