A Brookings Institution scholar has recently examined the density debate and found that many of the arguments of sprawl opponents are specious. Still, Pietro Nivola's new book, "Laws of the Landscape," recommends a number of policies aimed at reducing suburbanization.
Nivola asks why the U.S. is sprawling more than other countries, specifically those in Europe and Japan. He provides many answers, most of them not related to government policy.
At the same time, Nivola says that some government policies do promote sprawl. Curiously, many of these policies are not subsidies to low density but the U.S.'s failure to distort the market with taxes and regulation.
Nivola is not convinced that highway construction seriously promoted sprawl. He places more blame on the U.S.'s failure to tax fuel more heavily (he has a table showing that fuel taxes per gallon are five to eight times higher in Europe than in the US). However, he never really says WHY the US needs to maintain parity with Europe on this issue.
He also notes that US housing policies, such as the mortgage interest deduction, contribute to sprawl. But he regards European public housing policies (which subsidize people in apartments regardless of income and which subsidize renters more than homeowners) as much more decisive.
He says that zoning the segregates housing from businesses contributes to sprawl. But he suggests that sprawl would take place in Europe without this zoning if Europe did not have many other draconion restrictions on businesses, such as laws creating red tape for large stores but exempting small ones and laws forbidding large stores from selling things at a discount and being open long hours.
He notes that European and Japanese farm subsidies are much greater than here, helping to protect farms from urbanization. But he is not much convinced that U.S. farms need any protection.
And he says that tax policies, particularly a reliance on income and property taxes rather than consumption (value-added) taxes, promote suburbanization.
To a lot of this, he says "So what?" He is not convinced that infrastructure costs are greater in low density areas, or that we are losing anything when we "abandon" assets in the cities. Sometimes the cost of reusing or recycling is greater than the value, he says. He also doesn't think we are running out of natural resources. Although he is worried about global warming, he agrees that health-related air pollution problems are alleviated by suburbanization.
He thinks suburbanization promotes traffic congestion by encouraging people to drive more, but thinks better road pricing is the answer.
He shows that people in the suburbs tend to be wealther while a higher percentage of people in the cities are poor. But this doesn't mean, he says, that any other arrangement would be better. In particular, urban-growth boundaries would be worse for the poor because their housing would be worse and more expensive.
Nivola is critical of traditional urban cures, which he calls "shopworn solutions": revitalizing cities with public investments; mass transit; growth management; and municipal reorganizations such as city-county consolidations. He slips on growth management by citing Portland as an "exemplary case," basing his mostly wrong facts about Portland entirely on two newspaper articles and one magazine article. But ultimately he notes that Portland's growth management is driving up housing costs.
Nivola concludes by recommending eight policies: