Is Economic Immobility Due to Sprawl?

For the second time in a week, Paul Krugman has written about sprawl. This time he is as wrong as the last, when he blamed Detroit’s bankruptcy on sprawl. Now he blames Atlanta’s entrenched poverty on urban sprawl. “The city may just be too spread out,” he says, “so that job opportunities are literally out of reach for people stranded in the wrong neighborhoods.”

Krugman quotes a study that finds that one of many factors reducing social mobility include “areas in which low income individuals were residentially segregated from middle income individuals.” But income segregation is very different from sprawl, and can take place in communities of any density. New York City, for example, has pretty high economic segregation.

Krugman adds that Atlanta’s sprawl “would make an effective public transportation system nearly impossible to operate even if politicians were willing to pay for it, which they aren’t.” He obviously doesn’t know the history of mass transit in Atlanta, which had a great transit system until regional leaders decided to build an expensive rail transit system. Since they aimed the rail lines at middle-class neighborhoods and sacrificed bus service to low-income neighborhoods to pay for the rail lines, transit’s share of commuting has fallen by more than 60 percent and per capita transit ridership has fallen by more than two thirds.

Only 7 percent of Atlanta households lack a motor vehicle, which is actually less than the national average. Only 3.7 percent of people with jobs live in households that lack cars, which again is less than the national average. So jobs are not really out of reach to most people regardless of incomes. Krugman might argue that low-income people in Atlanta are forced to own cars because of sprawl, but for most people cars cost less and provide far better mobility than transit, so this is irrelevant.

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The study lists a lot of factors that seem to correlate with low economic mobility, but none of them are related to population density or sprawl. The most important factors appear to be tax rates, racial residential segregation, K-12 school quality, and the percentage of single-parent families. The South scores particularly high on racial residential segregation and low on K-12 schools, which goes much further toward explaining its relatively low economic mobility than urban sprawl.

Residential income segregation, which Krugman focuses on, is only one of several other factors mentioned, and far from the most important one. Even if sprawl were one of the factors, the study itself notes that “all of the findings in this study are correlational and cannot be interpreted as causal effects.” By blaming low economic mobility on sprawl, Krugman is relying on fabricated evidence while ignoring the real problems.

Why is Krugman suddenly pandering to the anti-sprawl community? Back in 2005, Krugman correctly identified anti-sprawl policies as the cause of the housing bubble. He must be aware of research showing that minority homeownership rates are higher in sprawling regions than compact ones (mainly because housing is more affordable in the former than the latter). All else being equal, including quality of schools and racial segregation, sprawling areas are likely to have more social mobility than more expensive, compact areas.

Update: For more on what makes a city work for people of all incomes, see Joel Kotkin’s and Wendell Cox’s report on Aspirational Cities.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

5 Responses to Is Economic Immobility Due to Sprawl?

  1. LazyReader says:

    To be fair the South was always in economic situations worse than it’s Northern neighbors. Even when they had tons of “free labor” they struggled to pay off debts.

  2. Dan says:

    Putting land-use policies aside for the moment. Dixie’s economic immobility is due to a number of factors, and land-use is an effect of that place, not a cause. It is almost its own nation.

    DS

  3. OFP2003 says:

    I’m not sure I can muster the strength to read Krugman again. The last one was just awful!

  4. Frank says:

    Libertarian John Stossel makes a compelling case that excessive government, cronyism, nepotism, corruption, etc. bankrupted Detroit.

    Krugman simply has a permanent hard on for big government.

    Oh, and Sandy Springs, GA has no long-term public debt because the city has contracted with businesses to provide services efficiently.

    As for K-12 school quality, you may be aware of the standardized test cheating scandal that occured in Atlanta. This is a direct result of Federal intrusion into local schools and the politicization of a service that was once delivered effectively through the free market. Government has destroyed education and relies on an outdated, one-size-fits-all model that emphasizes rote memorization and treats creativity as useless. Government also inefficiently delivers this service, with as little as 60% of funds in my district making it to the classroom.

  5. msetty says:

    The Antiplanner spaketh:
    Back in 2005, Krugman correctly identified anti-sprawl policies as the cause of the housing bubble.

    The Antiplanner gets it wrong, again, as usual. perpetuating a hoary, ugly myth. In the “Zoned Zone” on The Coasts as Krugman called it, historically almost all zoning applied was DOWN ZONING, which fueled sprawl, and emphatically was NOT intended as an anti-sprawl measure.

    Over most of the suburban period, the elected officials that implemented DOWN-ZONING thought Sprawl Was Good. The DOWN ZONING that facilitated sprawl was and still is the typical suburban response to growth pressures, and is a very effective way of keep “them” poor and people of color out of your precious suburban town.

    Of course, The Antiplanner still doesn’t counter the LIE that “New” (Old) Urbanism and similar efforts to let the real estate markets actually function and meet all housing needs–not just those for single family housing–are somehow responsible for all the ills caused by DOWN ZONING.

    And don’t tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about–I was born and raised in Coastal California–the Monterey Peninsula, to be precise–where DOWN ZONING was the standard practice to keep up property values and supposedly reduce the environmental impacts (sic) of new development many decades before anyone ever heard of urban limit lines or the attempt to make traditional American urbanism respectable again..

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