There’s a bit of advice that governors pass down, like fathers to sons. It was trotted out by Jim Edgar on his farewell tour, and it says something about the sheltered life of politicians.
You know you’re not governor anymore when you get in the back seat of the car and it doesn’t move.
Ah, no more chauffeur. No more escort. No more perks.
That came to mind when I saw what Al Gore had to say this week at the Iowa coming-out party for his presidential campaign. After test-marketing it for the last few months, he proclaimed the theme for Gore 2000 will be a “more livable” suburban world.
The vice president, excuse the expression, feels your pain.
“The person who deserves to be our next president is the one who understands how tired working parents are,” Gore said. “We’re seeing the daily commutes get longer and longer. And for people who don’t think that it’s a problem that parents are caught in traffic jams that are lengthening each day, I’ll tell you, they haven’t been in traffic jams and they don’t know what it does to the desire to balance work and family.”
Al Gore’s going to tell me about traffic jams? This is a man who grew up as the son of a U.S. senator, who was a senator himself, who has been vice president for the last six years. Is there any chance Al Gore has experienced a delay in his daily commute to the White House? Maybe the day Monica Lewinsky was throwing a fit at the northwest gate because Eleanor Mondale was inside?
Nevertheless, Al Gore intends to ride suburban sprawl to the presidency. Now, there’s a traffic jam.
The good news is that Gore is going to take suburban sprawl out of the rarefied air of urbanologists and make it the focus of his campaign. It’s an important issue.
The bad news is that Gore is going to take suburban sprawl out of the rarefied air of urbanologists and make it the focus of his campaign. Now it will get the same thoughtful treatment from politicians as Social Security and Medicare have.
Here’s how the debate has gone so far. Gore’s answer to sprawl is to throw Washington money at it, specifically, $10 billion in something he calls “Better America Bonds.” Gore’s marginalizing his presidential campaign by reducing it to talk about traffic jams, and he has concocted no better solution than bushels of money.
The conservative counterattack is hardly more inspiring. It was set out last September in a piece in the Heritage Foundation’s Policy Review. The answer to suburban sprawl, according to Heritage, is to blame the liberals. Suburban sprawl, the article said, is the liberals’ “new scapegoat for their urban failures.”
Well, that’s a start.
Sprawl is a good issue. It’s just not one that belongs in a presidential campaign. It belongs in your backyard.
The fear is that suburbia is being transformed from a land of nice three-bedroom homes and spacious yards to one big expanse of fast-food restaurants, choked roads and smog. It’s true that the suburbs are growing fast, too fast for some tastes.
Now, what are you going to do about it? The urbanologists have prescriptions.
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Impose a boundary on growth–no house shall pass this point. Force people out of their cars with higher gas taxes. Pass zoning laws that forbid development on private land. Stop building roads on the suburban fringe so people can’t get where they want to go. Hike the cost of houses so people can’t buy them. Demand townhouses go up instead of half-acre homes, so more people occupy less land.
There is one big hurdle to all that. People like the suburbs. They like big yards and driving to the mall. All the urbanologists’ talk about how miserable life has become in the suburbs doesn’t seem to have stopped people from moving there. But they might get their way if government demands city-style dense housing and $4-a-gallon gas.
Where the sprawl solutions seem to score is with suburbanites who would be very happy to have the suburbs to themselves. Solutions that would prevent the next mini-van-load from arriving and cluttering up the place have some resonance. When you restrict the housing supply, you raise the cost of buying a house. And so fewer people would have the option of moving to a nice house in the suburbs, the land of denied opportunity.
First thing to do is, relax. There is still plenty of land out there. And if the suburbs were such miserable places, people wouldn’t be flocking to them.
Create urban-style mass transit and housing in the suburbs where there’s a market for it, not because urbanologists think you need it. Spend money on mass transit in the city so people have an incentive to move or to stay there.
Buy land, they’re not making it anymore. If people want to spend their money on woods and fields, by all means let them. And that’s what suburbanites are doing. Voters in DuPage County approved $75 million in bonds to buy land to keep as forest preserves. Voters in Will, Kane and Lake Counties will have the chance to do the same thing next month.
Encourage suburbs to cooperate on zoning, so one town isn’t plopping its new mall next to your house. But don’t expect the towns not to compete for business or housing–monopolies wouldn’t work any better for suburbs than they do for the electric company.
And keep it local. Obviously, Al Gore has public opinion polls that tell him suburban sprawl is a political opportunity, and the Republicans will be foolish to ignore it, or worse, blame it on the liberals. But they should encourage these to be local decisions, not Washington decisions.