The National Review Is Wrong on Cities and Sprawl
Joel Kotkin and The National Review published an intentionally polemic and inaccurate headline. Here's my response.
Last week, demographer and urban economic trends writer Joel Kotkin penned a polemic in The National Review entitled Let America Sprawl. It quickly garnered 1 million views and was nearly ratioed by commenters. To those of us who follow land use debates across the political spectrum, all of this was wholly predictable.
Kotkin, Randy O'Toole, and Wendell Cox are the Three Horsemen of Suburbia. They are well-known contrarians. Often dismissed as conservatives, they mostly read to me as suburban apologists.
They are not wrong on a few points, which I will enumerate, but they are incorrect in their basic premise that people inherently prefer the suburbs in a free market.
What undermines their vast writings is the fundamental truth that cities are not free markets, nor anywhere near free markets. While this truth is not the obligation of The Horsemen to reveal, it remains disappointing that all three seem deferential to others to do the difficult work of returning cities to the genetic DNA of their origin.
THE FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX OF URBANISM
Kotkin is correct in identifying the fundamental paradox of urbanism. Urbanism promises that cities should be cheaper. Shared amenities, less space per dwelling and person, network effects, housing variability, consumer choice, and economic elasticity should yield a higher quality experience at a lower per-unit cost.
But cities are not cheaper. They are not cheaper for a variety of reasons, all defying the basic math: cities often have more poverty, leading to sizeable social expense loads. Urban diversity yields complexity. Cities are more likely to be subjected to unproductive bomb-throwing politics. And cities are more likely to be subjected to land-use ordinances that are parasitical to their promise.
All of these problems are solvable, and some are exacerbated by the type of policies that Kotkin and The Horseman recommend. Their most detrimental policy faux pas is the defense of suburban zoning applied to the urban form.
And this omission is the root of my response.
As zoning (which will always be a suburban construct) is forced upon urban grids, the market is not responding to great suburban options as much as it is rejecting bad urban ones. Humans are pushed and pulled; Kotkin believes the suburbs are pulling Americans. He forgoes that bad zoning (and the inelasticity inherently linked to it) may be pushing citizens, too. If San Francisco were not saddled with suburban zoning, it would have neither a housing shortage nor a mass exodus. Kotkin forgoes the fact that suburbs and suburban zoning are the primary constructs of the urban planning profession that he (and I) often critique.
The thing is that cities are not naturally zoned. Suburbs are; that’s half of what makes them suburbs. In this sense, Kotkin is too clever by half.
It is the suburbs, not the city, that are the magnum opus of the American planning profession.
Kotkin's thesis implies that the suburbs are less regulated than cities. This is inaccurate, historically so. American suburbs have always been built to what New Urbanists call a climax condition. From their genesis, suburbs have been built to conform to peak regulation.
Except for the natural growth of the landscaping, how a suburb looks today is precisely how it will look in a century. The suburbs offer no flexibility for growth. Generally, innovators cannot improve a neighborhood or even a house. Inasmuch, Suburbs are antithetical to the entrepreneurial spirit of rugged individualism.
Critically, conservative writers discount the harm done to great American cities through restrictive regulation. Kotkin thinks the suburbs offer a better product on balance, except there is no balance here. This is an unlevel playing field. A full-frontal assault from suburban planning has subjected American cities to toxic suburban coding. In more than a few instances, this has proven fatal.
While I will argue such planning is problematic even on its home turf of suburbia, zoning is both ruinous and anti-American when retrofitted onto an urban fabric for which it was neither built nor intended.
Suburbia is playing an away game, and breaking all the rules.
A conservative magazine like the NRO needs to point this out. The long tail of Woodrow Wilson's Administrative State (which conservatives loathe) is the American planning profession. Professor Wilson's dogma has been snuffed out of nearly every other profession and written off as a grandiose failure. However, the idea that highly educated non-vested "neutral" actors can govern the lives of everyone else predominately still exists only in one profession - land use. Zoning. The Museum of Wilson’s Administrative State is the American suburb. It leaves no oxygen for creative development. The suburbs are centrally-planned monotony, if not de jure, then de facto.
CONSERVATIVES ARE DEFENDING CENTRAL PLANNING, AND IT'S WEIRD
If defending traditional American values and the spirit of the founding, The National Review would argue that any suburb chartered after zoning's legal establishment in 1927 (via Euclid v. Ambler) knew what they were buying, but there are three moral truths about America's older historic cities:
Zoning was unconstitutional taking in 1927,
Zoning remains unconstitutional today, and
America's great cities should be returned to the pre-Euclid regulatory state so that urbanists can get on with their lives and suburbanites can get on with theirs
We could call it “The Great Sorting”. Urbanists and Suburbanists could each get what they want.
The crucial part of this vision, the re-upping of free markets in land use, is a level playing field. Kotkin does not discuss the level of this field nor the disease that zoning is to a city. He needs to. Otherwise, his writing comes off as suburban boosterism: win at all costs, damn the torpedoes.
THE SUBURBS AIN’T MANIFEST DESTINY
Kotkin is partially correct on the issue of manifest destiny and themes of ruralist redemption that presents through writers as vast as Wendell Berry and Paul Kingsnorth. But it is a stretch, to say the least, to conflate a DR Horton starter home with 'going back to the land'.
This is not manifest destiny.
The pastoral attraction to new homeowner stakeholding, which drove the country's id for the better part of two centuries, is not the same as suburban homeownership, with its carbon copy housing, inflexibility, and genetic coding for stasis.
While land holding is a critical component of Lockean liberalism - the American Dream - there is no minimum lot size qualifier applied to the construct. Nor should there be. Survey stakes can be hammered into the ground for an urban tiny home as they can for a suburban McMansion. Both are valid.
THE GREAT SORTING
If the cities are to be abandoned, as Kotkin seems to suggest, why not let them be? If they are the unredeemable hellholes he presents, why defend the oppressive zoning regulation that seeks to suburbanize urban residents against their will? Wouldn't a proper market advocate position demand that cities be returned to the system when great American cities and practically all our historic districts were constructed? All of which were built before the advent of zoning?
Why wouldn't Kotkin argue for a 'Great Sorting', a bifurcation of lifestyle, where the suburbs can be suburbs and cities can be cities? His writing might have more reach if he did.
THE SUBURBS ARE A CHOICE
I split from some of my hard-core urbanist friends by acknowledging that the suburbs are a choice. It's not one I like, and I've spent most of my life fighting to restore the urban alternative. But I fully recognize that, as Loeb Fellow Charles Buki once said to me matter-of-factly, "Perfectly good people raise perfectly good kids in the suburbs." There are valid reasons people should want to live in the suburbs.
Kotkin fails to defend a countervailing choice in cities. He fails to recognize the appeal and benefit of cities. He regularly pejoratives those who do. There are valid reasons people should want to live in the cities, too. And not all are elite, wealthy, or childless. Most are motivated by things other than maximizing the square footage of their home.
In his exclusive reliance on data, Kotkin falls prey to the same fallacies of modern researchers doing modern research in the modern world: data discounts all that cannot be measured.
In relying exclusively on data, Kotkin discounts what cannot be measured, which is often what matters most. This is especially true in cities.
Cities are more than economic engines. They represent history, trade, innovation, love, excitement, wonder, and the American spirit - things that are incalculable yet significant. The (urban) University City Loop offers more excitement and wonder than (suburban) Chesterfield Mall ever will. Cities are simply more representative of the American spirit, and that is a thing that is both incalculable and does matter.
My main critique of Kotkin is that he may be confusing what is actually a southern thing for a suburban thing. He may be confusing southern migration for suburban preference. People are moving South, but not exclusively to the suburbs. And, again, I suspect he is falling prey to a data signal trap.
There is no way to track southern migrants who want to live in the city but cannot find anything, so they settle for the suburbs.
Kotkin's data cannot track urban-preferring migrants settling reluctantly in the suburbs.
Lastly, Kotkin is unnecessarily polemic in disparaging cities as places where we "force people back into denser areas." There is no forcing. People can and do choose where to go (The average American moves 12 times in their lives, many to urban areas).
Many do want walkable communities. Even if it is a minority who craves this lifestyle, who cares? Why advocate for conformity to the majority?
Why couldn't 40% of Americans live in the mixed-use communities they want to? Or 4%? Mixed-use traditional neighborhoods are overwhelmingly popular when built; most are urban constructs in suburban settings, which tells us something about what people want.
Kotkin is right that people leave highly-regulated, elite-driven, primarily blue states in favor of less-regulated, distributed, and incremental, primarily red states. But he is clearly discounting how many migrating transplants seek the urban life.
A whole mess of people moving to North Carolina from New York and California want to live in the city. I take phone calls from them almost weekly. To dismiss them as irrelevant is a disservice to urbanists and suburanists alike.
It is reasonable for some to want predictability that no-changes-ever HOAs promise. I will give the suburbanists that. But it is unreasonable for a self-identifying free marketer to hoist such a vision on those seeking urban living. Urbanists should take a more forceful free-market stand against such invasive ideologies, particularly when peddled by ostensibly conservative magazines. The future of American cities depends on a defense of such urban values.