The long national nightmare of big box shopping centers may be ending

Date: 8/5/2008

by Dan Pohlig

(photo credit: Flickr user millicent_bystander used under a Creative Commons License)

What do you think the Greater Philadelphia region will look like in 30 years?  If you had asked a South or West Philadelphia resident that same question back in 1949, it is doubtful that they would have been able to envision the sprawled out metropolitan region that we have today.  The "American Dream" having been put on hold for nearly two decades by the Great Depression and World War II was transformed by the spread of the automobile.  The late 19th century and early 20th century glorified the frontier mentality that led hundreds of thousands of settlers to "go west" in the hope of finding some land to farm, some gold to pan and few cows to raise.

In the second half of the 20th century our manifest destiney became large backyards with swimming pools, 4000-square-foot homes and an SUVs the size of African elephants.  All of which was made the availability of cars and cheap gas.

In 1950, it may have been difficult to predict what this transformation would do considering that the United States was just on the verge of a massive shift in policy to encourage the suburban lifestyle.

We have reached one of those moments again.  No discussion of "our city" would be complete without trying to imagine the future of the built environment, the infrastructure and policies needed to get us there.

A qucik tour of the news and blog landscape reveals that journalists and activists in other cities are already deeply immersed in this kind of thinking.  Reporters are finally starting to put the pieces together: cheap gas led to suburban sprawl led to automobile dependency led to greater demand for gas led to an increase in gas prices which is now forcing folks to rethink their dependence on the gas-powered car.

One of my favorite blogs, Greater Greater Washington, pointed out that the "end of of the exurbs" stories that have been making their way across metropolitan regions has reached the Washington DC area with this Washington Post article. The article consults with one land use experts who says that there's no going back to the way things were done from 1950 to now:

Cheap oil, which helped push the American Dream away from the city center, isn't so cheap anymore. As more and more families reconsider their dreams, land-use experts are beginning to ask whether $4-a-gallon gas is enough to change the way Americans have thought for half a century about where they live.

 

"We've passed that tipping point," U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said.

Washington, like most metropolitan area engaged in a series of policy choices that came down from on high as the federal government did everything it could to encourage people to pursue the new manifest destiny:

Since the end of World War II, government policy has funded and encouraged the suburban lifestyle, subsidizing highways while starving mass transit and keeping gas taxes much lower than in some other countries.

 

Americans couldn't wait to trade in the cramped city apartments of the Kramdens and Ricardos for the lush lawns of the Bradys. Local land-use policies kept housing densities low, pushing development to the periphery of metropolitan regions and forcing families who wanted their dream house to accept long commutes and a lack of any real transportation choices other than getting behind the wheel.

Government policy in some suburbs has begun to shift away from requiring low-density, single-family housing while discouraging large-scale, mixed-use commercial development.  Suburban leaders, at least in DC, are recognizing that they want a community in which their residents can live, work and play without leaving town and without getting in the car.

According to the WaPo article, the private market is also jumping on board and starting to look back into the long abandoned urban areas as the new, old frontier:

That is also the model that Tom Darden, chief executive of Cherokee Investment Partners, is betting on. His Raleigh-based firm snaps up urban land, often used industrial sites, near transit stations and transforms it into housing.

 

He said the days of building giant houses on former soybean fields on the outer fringes of metropolitan areas are over.

The article concludes with the example of a Republican - yes, an actual Republican - suburban Denver mayor who has actually caught some flak from his fellow party members for coming to grips with this new economic order:

Mayor Randy Pye, mayor of Centennial, Colo., a suburb of Denver, has been called a socialist by fellow Republicans for his pro-density and pro-transit views. He was a supporter of the Denver area's new light-rail system, a system built largely without federal funds.

 

Pye said he doesn't see a way out of high gas prices and our collective national traffic jam that doesn't involve higher-density development and mass transit.

 

"We hate density; we hate sprawl," he said. "But we can't continue doing what we're doing."

Greater Greater Washington is right in pointing out that we're not likely to be tearing down our suburbs and replanting those soybean fields and cow pastures but at the very least, all of the government policies that tipped the scales so heavily towards the suburbs are likely to be reversed.

One of those policies has been the favoritism shown to highways over mass transit. If the federal government reversed the 4 to 1 ratio of highway to transit spending that has characterized the last several decades, we could start see the kinds of transit systems necessary to effectively and reliably move people around their metropolitan areas.  Given the number of folks who still depend on highways and the amount of money needed to keep them in good repair - a number that's not even being met now - it's unlikely that the feds will be giving a windfall to transit systems.

According to this column pointed out by Streetsblog, the future for metro transit systems depends on the metropolitan areas themselves coming together and doing the heavy lifting:

Political reality says few if any state legislatures will enact statewide taxes to finance metro transit systems. But they can give the green light to their metro regions to tax themselves. Then it's up to regional business and civic leaders, in this increasingly metropolitan nation, to make a sufficiently compelling case to city and suburban voters alike. With long commutes increasingly unaffordable, and with city-suburb antagonisms much milder than in past times, selling well-conceived regional transit plans should be achievable.

What are the odds that everyone in this Philadelphia region would be able to get together and decide that we would be willing to part with our money - through taxes - to fund capital improvements for SEPTA?  The Philadelphia region is already light years ahead of places like Denver which recently established just such a regional transportation district. 

We're not building from scratch.

In Philadelphia, our decision needs to be whether we will commit the region's dollars to expanding and improving what we already have.  We need to decide what we think this region will look like in 30 years, what we want this region to look like in 30 years and how we're going to transport people around.

Finally, a lot of this narrative requires nothing less than a rethinking of the American dream.  Should our goal be to have that big house and big yard?  As Atrios points out, there's now a definite tradeoff involved with that decision.

Or is the American dream now a nice 2-3 bedroom condo in a high-rise apartment near a transit hub or a 1500-square-foot home where your "backyard" is the local park?

Once we figure that out, we can get to lobbying our local and state elected officials to figure out how to make this more readily available to everyone.

Dan Pohlig is the Senior Producer of Web News and Information for WHYY and writes at WHYY's Y-Decide 2008, The Sixth Square and It's Our Money blogs.