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The Anti-Sprawl Movement: Hazardous to Our Wealth "People should have the freedom to live and work where and how they like." - Wendell Cox January 16, 2003 By Wendell Cox In 2002, California's San Joaquin Valley displaced Los Angeles as
the home of the nation's worst air. The Los Angeles Times reports
that not a single day of clean air was registered during June, July,
August or October in this Things are so bad that local officials are petitioning the federal Environmental Protection Agency for the nation's first "extreme noncompliance" classification, to allow more time to solve the problem. But the San Joaquin Valley's air pollution is not of its own making -- it is being exported from elsewhere. Part of it is exported every day from the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose (San Francisco Bay) area, where the activity and industry of seven million people produces smog that is transported by the prevailing westerly winds into the San Joaquin Valley. As a natural phenomenon, this is unavoidable. But the San Joaquin Valley's bad air is also being exported from the Bay area as a consequence of public policies that are both willful and avoidable. For years, cities and counties in the San Francisco Bay area have been imposing "smart growth" policies such as urban growth boundaries and hefty development impact fees in an attempt to control "urban sprawl." These policies significantly raise the price of housing by rationing land, politicizing land use decisions and restricting competition in home building. Today, the median house price in the San Francisco area is $525,000,
more than three times the national average. It is little better in
the San Jose area, at $450,000, and still well beyond the reach of
most households at A recent report by University of Pennsylvania Wharton School researchers
Edward I. Blaeser and Joseph Gyourko attributed the much of the inordinately
higher costs of housing in some metropolitan to the more restrictive
land use So, many families have been forced to look farther away for housing. And, the affordable housing they need is 75 to 100 miles away, in the San Joaquin Valley, where median house prices range from $160,000 to $220,000. As a result, over the past 10 years, the San Joaquin Valley grew more than 50 percent faster than the Bay area. And as a further consequence, people drove farther to work and produced more air pollution in the process. The 2000 US Census indicated a huge increase from 1990 in average journey-to-work travel times in the San Joaquin Valley counties closest to the Bay area. While average work trip one-way travel time was increasing 3.1 minutes nationally and 3.8 minutes in the Bay area, it rose 6.5 minutes in the three closest San Joaquin Valley counties. The greatest increases were in Merced County (Merced-Los Banos) at
9.1 This means that the average Merced County commuter spends the equivalent of 1.7 more work-weeks (68 hours) annually commuting than in 1990. The number of people traveling more than one hour to work tripled in Merced County and doubled in San Joaquin County. The one thing that San Francisco Bay area anti-sprawl policies seem not to have accomplished is controlling sprawl. Like London's Green Belt, which led to an explosion of urban development across 10,000 square miles of southeast England, Bay area policies are well on their way toward creating a hyper-sprawl that would not otherwise be conceivable, together with unnecessarily long travel times. Worse, Bay area politicians have locally repealed the American Dream, denying entry to the escalator of home ownership by artificially raising prices (Home equity represents about half the net worth of households below $50,000 in annual income). Worse yet is the fact that urban planners and politicians elsewhere are rushing to copy these policies that have made the air dirtier, limited wealth creation and retarded the quality of life in California. Perhaps the next Clean Air Amendments should limit emissions from naive policies that are both "hazardous to your health" and "hazardous to your wealth." DEMOGRAPHIA (Wendell Cox Consultancy) 618-632-8507 Fax: 810-821-8134 http://www.publicpurpose.com
-- WENDELL COX CONSULTANCY; International Public Policy, Demographics,
Economics & Transport. MISSION: To facilitate the ideal of government
as the servant of the people by http://www.demographia.com/index.html Demographia: Demographics, Development Impacts, Market Research and Urban Policy "Demographia is "pro-choice" with respect to urban development. People should have the freedom to live and work where and how they like." http://www.publicpurpose.com/dmx-usua.htm WEB'S MOST COMPLETE INTERNATIONAL URBAN DATA: Population & Density of Large International Urban Areas -- Population, land area and density data from various sources for over 110 international urban areas, including the largest 15. The table provides the largest single source of urban (urbanized) area data on the Internet. c) 2002 www.publicpurpose.com Wendell Cox was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. He attended the University of Southern California and earned a bachelor's degree in Government from California State University Los Angeles and a Master of Business Administration from Pepperdine University. Previous "The Public Purpose" commentaries are at http://www.publicpurpose.com/pp-index.htm Wendell Cox
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