Over at Ezra Klein, guest blogger Ryan Avant looks at the ways in which high gas prices will (or won't) effect the suburbanization of America. It's in three parts, and you can find it here, here, and here (as well as an additional, if somewhat tangential, post here). There are, obviously, many benefits to higher-density living; as Klein himself points out:
It's a little bit hard to have a robust communal life when the usable public space is a three-foot wide strip of pavement flanked by massive blocks of concrete on one side and speeding hulks of metal on the other. Other cities figured this one out, decided to orient their streets towards livability rather than just driveability and, shockingly, found that people used, and loved, the new spaces. The fact that they also came with reductions in obesity, pollution, social isolation, and traffic fatalities was icing on the cake. [emph. mine]
Avant highlights a favorite straw man used whenever someone advocates for higher density. He writes:
Make an urbanist argument in a public place, and you can count in seconds the time it will take someone to angrily declare that people really like cars and suburbs and sprawl and why do you want to take all that away? The answer is, I don't! If people want to drive or live in a single-family home thirty miles from the center of town, then I certainly won't stop them.
But there is no reason for government policy and subsidies to so heavily favor that kind of growth. To the contrary, there are very good reasons they shouldn't.
Case in point, via Rustbelt Intellectual, Michelle Bachmann--representative of Minnesota's 6th district, and crazy person--gave this freakout:
I know it is hard to believe, it's hard to fathom -- but this is 'mission accomplished' for them....They want Americans to take transit and move to the inner cities. They want Americans to move to the urban core, live in tenements, [and] take light rail to their government jobs. That's their vision for America.
It was a fine day for America when Bachmann joined Congress.
|