[PEN-L:3853] Re: subsidies for sprawl

[ROSSERJB@xxxxxxx]

To bill mitchell, matie mate:
     Well, fine, I've seen stuff like that too.  But that
does not answer it does it?  After all, the non-provision
of urban infrastructure has not stopped YOU from living
way the heck out.  Ah, so you deny that you are a part of
urban sprawl?  Well, I'm just a drongo.
     OK, you're pretty far out.  But, in fact you are emblematic
of exactly why this is hard to measure.  So the city planners
decide to limit infrastructure (sewers are the real key, but
roads, especially big ones, are a close second).  Will this
lead people to live in the inner city, especially if they are
a bunch of racists who want to "escape from crime, congestion,
pollution," etc. blah blah blah?  Hardly, especially if they
have cars.  And maybe they are just Unabomber wannabes.
     In fact the usual textbook (at least the ones in my office)
mumblings about "urban sprawl" go on about discontiguous development
(discussed at length in my first book), leapfrogging patches of
development over intermediate zones (greenbelts?  gee, they were
once in, even the old Soviet planners thought they were cool until
they trashed them in fact) of rural usage.  There a lot of reasons
why this leapfrogging occurs, such as when do farmers retire and sell
off the farm to a developer, etc.  But most of this stuff does not
have the usual package of infrastructure.  They do not have sewers,
(without which you cannot have really dense development), their roads
are not so hot, their schools are not so hot, etc.  They may even think
that they are in the country, just like a certain Ozzie econ prof I know.
     I cite an actual effort to accomplish what you have suggested that
failed to a large degree, Madison, Wisconsin, great center of US
progressivism under radical leftist Mayor Paul Soglin (he's back in
again, but "moderated" and running for Congress now) back in the 1970s.
Backed by state law, he imposed a ban on approving any subdivision
developments in any area within a three mile zone around the city which
was not already served by existing sewer infrastructure ("he who controls
the sewers controls the city").  So, developers just leaped over the
three mile limit where the city had "extraterritorial plat review"
authority and built fancy subdivisions on septic tanks just beyond for
the exurban sprawling escapees.  Whoops!  Nice try, Paul.
     Of course the other issue is jobs and where they are.  To maintain
people downtown you've got to keep the jobs downtown.  That may require
full blown command central planning including no building of any "beltway"
type highways (Just because you have the former does not guarantee the
latter as the existence of "ring roads" around Moscow proves) and probably
some very serious limitation on the use of automobiles in general, not
just in the cities.  If you don't restrict cars everywhere, then restricting
them in the city will just accelerate the outward movement to where people
can drive as they please.  Once you have cars and beltways then you get
"edge cities" with places of employment springing up at the intersections
of the beltways and the major highways coming out of the cities.  That just
makes it easier for those who want to move way out and sprawl, if they only
have to commute to an edge city rather than all the way downtown.  To prevent
this kind of development would take universal zoning so that one metro area
could not compete with another for jobs by saying "OK, you can build in our
outer fringe when that other metro area insists you must build downtown."
     Well, that's enough for now, probably more than enough (getting too
"effusive," eh Gary?).
Bahhhkley Rosser
you have