He has a talent–no, a virtuosity–for alarm, having pronounced our entire civilization ““dysfunctional.’’ Bill Clinton, too, is alarmed. His State of the Union Message–speaking of unregulated sprawl–advocated a ““Livability Agenda’’ to control growth. But Gore is the real revivalist of the aesthetic politics that blossomed in the 1950s, when liberalism began to look askance at middle-class America.
He proposes $10 billion of ““Better America Bonds’’ to prod communities to enhance their ““livability’’ by planning ““smart growth,’’ particularly to preserve green space. This will prevent what a Gore enthusiast at the Sierra Club calls ““low-density, habitat-gobbling, traffic-creating growth.''
Well. Seventy-five percent more families live in suburbs than in cities because they like using the freedom conferred by the automobile to make their habitats in low-density communities. This preference has long dismayed many liberals, who rather resent the automobile, which allows ordinary people to move around without the supervision of liberals. In the 1950s, liberals identified suburbanization with soulless bourgeois conformity, and flight from the stimulating social conditions (crime, poverty, filth, inferior schools, etc.) of the cities that liberals governed.
Now, green space is good and, within reason, government’s business. But Gore’s environmentalism seems to make everything government’s business: Society is manageable and so should be managed by the far-seeing and fastidious political class.
““Bad planning,’’ he says, ““has too often distorted our towns and landscapes out of all recognition.’’ Wait. What exactly has been ““distorted’’? Who cannot recognize what? ““Ill-thought-out sprawl,’’ he says, has turned ““what used to be friendly, easy suburbs into lonely cul-de-sacs’’ where ““kids learn more about Nintendo and isolation than about fresh air and taking turns.''
A ““livable’’ suburb is one to which one commutes quickly. (More highways? Environmentalists will get the vapors.) Gore is alarmed that Americans waste time in congestion. (But the average commute has not appreciably increased in any urban area in 20 years. Steven Hayward of The Heritage Foundation says congestion has increased largely because vehicle miles traveled have increased four times faster than the population, and that is largely because of women joining the work force and minorities joining the middle class and getting cars.) Gore says ““coordinated’’ growth (will the coordinators of our lives be nice?) preserves ““some family farms’’ and a ““natural ecosystem.’’ Otherwise, growth will be ““unsustainable,’’ meaning . . .
Meaning is not Gore’s forte. Does he worry that unsustainable growth will be sustained? Is a suburb without a family farm unlivable? Gore worries about traffic into and out from central cities, but most commutes are between suburbs, where most jobs are now created. And here we go again: President Johnson’s administration worried (Harry McPherson’s memoir tells us) about ““middle-class women, bored and friendless in the suburban afternoons.''
Government–highways and subsidized mortgages–fostered the suburbanization Gore deplores. Now he wants government, author of the disaster known cheerily as ““urban renewal,’’ to inflict suburban renewal. So liberalism is about to suffer an acute case of Portland Envy. Hayward says the Oregon city is using zoning and other measures to produce high-density living by promoting multifamily housing such as row houses and shrinking the average lot size. To preserve land for high-density housing, ““big box’’ retailers are discouraged. These include Wal-Mart, Price Club, Home Depot, but affluent liberals, including government planners, do not shop there. Predictably, housing costs are rising much faster in Portland than in rapidly growing but less regulated Western cities such as Phoenix, Las Vegas and Salt Lake.
At the beginning of this millennium, the world’s largest city may have been Cordoba, Spain, with a population of 450,000. If so, an Iberian Gore was probably alarmed by the sprawl of it all. Gore says America ““is losing 50 acres of farmland to development each hour.’’ Gracious. But suburban expansion consumes just 0.0006 percent of the continental United States annually. And Gore’s government says the amount of farmland has been fairly constant–more than 450 million acres–since 1945. To support commodity prices in the face of soaring agricultural productivity, Gore’s government pays more than $1.7 billion annually to make cropland idle–more land than is devoted to all the nation’s urban uses.
Analysts James D. Riggle and Jonathan Tolman note that New England woodlands now cover what once were thousands of family farms that could not compete with the more productive farms of the Midwest and Great Plains. Does that woodland depress Gore? The Department of Agriculture says: ““Loss of farmland poses no threat to U.S. food and fiber production.''
Economic analyst Irwin Stelzer says that as 30,000 people migrate to Phoenix every year, lawns replace desert at the rate of about an acre an hour. Is that alarming? When about 20 new houses go up every day in one of America’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas, Las Vegas, does Gore grieve for the gobbled-up ““habitat’’ of arid southern Nevada? ““In America,’’ Gertrude Stein said, ““there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is–that is what makes America what it is.’’ That is still true, and so is this:
The purpose of ““smart,’’ ““coordinated’’ growth is to prevent the masses, in their freedom, from producing democracy’s byproducts–untidiness and even vulgarity. And the bland notion of ““planning’’ often is the rubric under which government operates when making its preferences and prophecies–often meaning its arrogance and its mistakes–mandatory.
