Green Building Law Blog
The Freakonomics Of Place--We Have Seen The Sprawl And It Is Us
I have posted on many occasions about the importance of place in green building--green buildings on unsustainable sites are simply not green. But it is never really true until the Grey Lady--The New York Times--says it is. Today, on the Times' Freakonomics blog, James McWilliams had a nice little piece on the fundamental issue of building LEED buildings in an unsustainable, car-based infrastructure.
Take the long view. From the moment of European settlement onward, American faith in Manifest Destiny has inspired aggressive development driven by land acquisition and individual choice. Sprawl started to become ingrained in the American character over two centuries ago and, as a result, middle America has inherited cities that value expansion over intensification. To an extent, this vexed inheritance turns our cork floors and compost bins into empty expressions akin to the sun-starved solar panels adorning the Merritt Center.
What McWilliams does not acknowledge is the role that regulation and tax policy has had in developing the infrastructure the way it is. Two give just three examples--the mortgage interest tax credit encourages homeownership outside of the urban core. For many years, urban neighborhoods, the most sustainable, were red-lined--you simply couldn't get a mortgage. Funding highways over mass transit means that more highways are built, making it possible to move further from the urban nodes. Finally, funding schools through property tax assessments mean that inner cities with multi-family housing and greater rental concentrations will have less money to provide excellent education, driving families with children to the suburbs.
McWilliams uses the passive voice--" Sprawl started to become ingrained in the American character over two centuries ago "--as if sprawl simply appeared, like a cancer on the landscape. Not so. Regulatory and monetary policy implemented by elected representatives caused the unsustainable circumstance Americans now find ourselves in.
We have seen the sprawl, and it is us.
http://www.greenbuildinglawblog.com/admin/trackback/191893
Interesting pick-up Shari. There was a parallel discussion on Andrew Sullivan's blog with some commentary by Matt Yglesias on sprawl and land use policy and sustainability. Very interesting to see these topics percolating through policy driven political blogs as opposed to construction, real estate and land use blogs.
> Finally, funding schools through property tax assessments
> mean that inner cities with multi-family housing and
> greater rental concentrations will have less money to
> provide excellent education, driving families with
> children to the suburbs
I don't follow this. Why does a rental community imply lower property tax collection? The landlords pay the property taxes, it isn't as if a rental unit is free from school taxes.
Do you believe if schools had been funded a different way, say, by parents having to pay per child (rather than per square foot) that suburban schools wouldn't be better than urban schools, and suburban sprawl would not have happened?
I personally disagree with the mortgage tax deduction (it is not a credit, as you state), but for other reasons. It needs to go away, but it never will.
As for funding highways over mass transit, had the government done the opposite, it is quite possible that trains and busses would have also helped encourage sprawl. Certainly, in Europe, where mass transit is much more heavily funded than in The United States, they have a suburban sprawl "problem" as well.