Jan 16, 2009
Traditional Urbanism and Conservatives
By: Kevin Buchanan
I often think it’s comical
How Nature always does contrive
That ev’ry boy and ev’ry gal
That’s born into the world alive
is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative.
–Iolanthe, Gilbert and Sullivan
When I go around talking about traditional urbanism and smart growth, one thing I see again and again is that people of a conservative persuasion are often almost violent in their opposition to anything outside of status-quo sprawl, or a characterization of traditional urbanism as “a liberal issue.” This puzzles me, because I see traditional urbanism as an issue that transcends political bias – in fact, a lot of the tenants of traditional urbanism are downright conservative in nature.
By its very nature (and even name), traditional urbanism is about reconnecting with America’s traditions. It’s about building neighborhoods, villages, towns, and cities like we did prior to the rapid rise of post-WWII auto dependency – places that are walkable, bikeable, transit-supporting, feature a mix of uses and a mix of different housing types and prices, and feature great public and community spaces. There should be nothing at all about that simple goal that runs counter to conservative ideals. For a group who is supposed to take pride in upholding the traditions of America, opposition to traditional urbanism is flat-out contrary to that goal. An ideology that values a strong and healthy community and family should embrace traditional urbanism with open arms, for it is in the traditional neighborhood that genuine community can grow more easily, and develop more fully, because in traditional urban neighborhoods we interact with the people around us multiple times a day.
Consider the day-to-day life of a resident of typical late 20th century American sprawl. Get up, eat breakfast (or not, as is often the case), and head out the door – not into your community, but into your garage, where you get in the car, crank up the A/C, turn up the radio, and back out. At best, you might see a neighbor outside picking up the paper (an act which in itself is becoming rarer and rarer these days) and may give him/her a wave or a nod as you drive past. You may see them outside a few times a week, but you may not even know their name and you certainly won’t have the chance to chat.
When you arrive at work, often in a strip center or sprawling office park, you’ll park your car and head inside. At lunch, you’ll either have to eat from a brown bag or get back in the car and drive to an eatery. You’ll have no chance to simply walk down the street with co-workers for a bite to eat. When you go home, you’ll repeat the morning’s routine in reverse. Perhaps you’ll stop somewhere along the drive for food, but it’s likely to be miles from your home. The people around you have all come miles in their cars to eat – they’re likely not comprised of people from your neighborhood, and you likely won’t know anybody.
Once home, you’ll probably wind up spending the evening at home, watching TV or working on the computer. If you’ve got kids, they’ll spend their time indoors playing video games, or else you’ll have to stage a small production to coordinate everybody’s schedule to get in the car and go somewhere, since they’re completely tied to you for mobility. They can’t walk or bike to school, the park, the baseball field, the store, or anywhere else kids might like to go. In fact, you can’t walk or bike anywhere yourself – the streets are wide and dominated by speeding cars, and often don’t have sidewalks at all – and inevitably, you’ll meet the high-speed collector street at the exit of the subdivision, and that’s even less pleasant. Because the streets are a mass of cul-de-sacs dumping into this collector, you have no option for a safer, slower street to walk or bike along. Besides, where would you go? There’s nothing around you but more houses.
It’s not difficult to see why genuine community is so hard to come by in the suburbs. You have no opportunity to meet people from your neighborhood casually, or in passing, because you’re all cocooned inside a metal pod moving at 45 miles per hour.
In contrast, life in a typical traditional town, village, or neighborhood can be quite different indeed. Grocery stores, restaurants, coffee shops, stores, churches, the library, the Post Office, and parks are all within easy walking and biking distance. Streets are narrower, with slower traffic, and they’ve all got sidewalks. Because there’s an interconnected street grid, there are always multiple ways to get from Point A to Point B, and you can easily choose a less-travelled path to bike along (it should be no surprise to tradition-minded conservatives that our ancestors layed out streets and towns far more intelligently than modern planners do). Work might be an easy walk down the street, or a few minutes on a bike, or you might just hop on the local rail line and take a brief train trip to the urban core. All of these activities draw people out of their homes, and out of their cars – and because traditional neighborhoods and towns are compact and mostly self-contained, the people you interact with most often on a day-to-day basis are usually your neighbors. You’ll get to know them more, because you’ll pass by them every day while walking, biking, or riding the train. Getting this daily interaction with your neighbors is one of the first steps in building community – and many conservative goals can be attained through strong community.
“Pushing a stroller along the sidewalk, you naturally meet the eyes of other parents similarly occupied; after running into them again and again at the butcher’s, the bakery, the supermarket, you’re bound to strike up acquaintanceships. You can’t make those kinds of connections when all your travel time is spent in a car, your shopping done in a vast mall nowhere near your home.”
– Wendy Smith, Preservation
“Public policy should encourage compact, pedestrian-scale development with shopping, services and employment close to home. If we follow this course, many other benefits are likely to follow. Communities would be less fragmented. Parents would be less coerced to spend their leisure time as chauffeurs for their offspring. Children would have more opportunities to become self-reliant and to gain experiences that prepare them for responsible adulthood. The elderly would find fewer obstacles to staying in their longtime neighborhoods.”
– Philip Langdon, A Better Place to Live
Conservatives wish to preserve traditional culture and traditional morals. Surely these things are easier in the presence of a strong community than in isolation. Families, churches, and schools are all important parts of preserving traditional values – and churches and schools work better when the people inside them know each other outside them. Which would you imagine has the stronger, and more fulfilling, spiritual and community environment – a smaller church in a traditional town filled with people who know each other and who interact on a daily basis, or one of today’s suburban megachurches filled with thousands (or these days, tens of thousands) of people who drive from miles and miles around and who may know only a miniscule fraction of the people around them? Smaller local schools with local workers and strong local communities that are sited in neighborhoods and designed so that kids can walk or bike to them can offer better experiences than can vast, centralized facilities, fed by buses and run by educrats. And besides the churches and schools, a strong traditional neighborhood community can provide strong peer pressure to do the right thing, even in the face of the pop culture media that many conservatives decry.
Choice, and the Market
Traditional urbanism is not about reducing the “freedom” to have a big house or a big backyard – it simply seeks to organize said things into forms and locations where they are appropriate, and provide more choice in the form of smaller homes, rowhouses, flats and lofts above stores, and the like. It seeks to provide more choice when it comes to places to live – sure, not everybody will want to live next to the store. Then again, some people do want to live next to the store, or even above it. Traditional urbanism provides that choice and gives all of these people a community where they can interact and belong. Post-WWII sprawl provides no choice. Nobody can live near the store. Nobody can live without having to dump a significant amount of their income into at least one, and often multiple, cars.
It’s a constant refrain I’ve heard, both locally and in the media. Sprawl is the “choice we made.” Sprawl is “the market at work.” Being 100% in use of the car is “the freedom to go where you want, when you want.” Even as gas prices spiked over $4.00 per gallon and many people couldn’t afford to go “where they wanted, when they wanted,” they still called sprawl and cars “freedom.” In reality, the gas price spike (and I don’t expect it to be the last) revealed the fundamental flaws and weaknesses in this so-called “freedom.” In building places where nobody can walk or bike, nobody can use transit, nobody can live near shops or work, and nobody can exist without the car, our endless sprawl became shackles.
The notion that sprawl is the “market at work,” often used in conservative circles to justify their opposition to anything else, is itself a fallacy. The domination of auto-dependent sprawl is not at all a free market outcome. Since World War I, the government (at all levels) has poured massive amounts of money into highways, and later the Interstate system. These huge and free-flowing highways and Interstates became the driving force of sprawl, enabling development to move ever farther away from the center and into more and more auto-dependent forms. These highways competed with what was, at the time, a vast network of streetcars, interurban lines, and long-distance passenger trains which were almost all privately owned, payed taxes, and were not subsidized. It should be little surprise that the subsidized mode (the car) won out over the non-subsidized rail systems.
Even beyond the transportation issue, though, sprawl is not a free-market outcome. It’s the result of the market working within the intensely regulated and strict world of zoning. For many years, and to this day in most places in the country, traditional urbanism isn’t being built, not because the market has wholly decided on its own to reject it, but because it’s flat-out illegal to build. In most places, zoning mandates that commercial zones be entirely commercial, that residential zones be entirely residential, and so forth (it even gets broken up more than that – apartments must be separate from townhomes, which are seperate from single-family homes, etc.). Everything is segregated from everything else, making traditional neighborhoods, towns, and villages impossible to build without running a gauntlet of red tape, regulations, and variances. Even income gets segregated – try to build a $300,000 house in a subdivision of $450,000 houses, and watch the neighborhood association go crazy. It all reminds me of a tale I once heard from one of the planning groups I’m a member of, related by Michael Lewyn, an assistant professor at Florida Coastal School of Law and veteran urbanist: in Ramapo, New York, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi tried to create a mini synagogue in his home, so that a few dozen local worshippers could walk to synagogue (Orthodox Jews want to walk to synagogue because they believe the Bible forbids them to light a fire on the Sabbath, and they believe that internal combustion engines constitute lighting a fire). Obviously, in this case there was zero chance of any greater traffic congestion – but the neighborhood blocked the synagogue because it would “detract from the residential nature of the neighborhood.” Later, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals thankfully threw out that ruling, but the same sort of problem persists all across the country.
It makes sense to have zoning that prohibits a slaughterhouse or chemical plant from moving into a residential neighborhood – but is it as clear that a coffee shop, a mom-and-pop grocery store, or a church or synagogue are equally detrimental to the neighborhood?
This is on top of another anti-free-market rule in most places in the country: government forcing developers to provide a certain minimum amount of parking, often quite a bit more than the market would demand. This is further government subsidy of the car and sprawl and counter to free market ideals.
In contrast, traditional urbanism’s most popular zoning manifestation, the Smart Code, bans very little. Rather, it’s concerned with how buildings relate to each other and the street, not about use. It’s broken up into the “transect,” a gradual densifying code that runs from natural land to dense urban cores (because in traditional urbanism, it’s important for neighborhoods, towns, and villages to have actual edges as well as centers). Here’s a brief rundown of traditional urban zoning:
T1 – Natural – Unbuilt private land and preserved natural land such as parks and state forests.
T2 – Rural – Mostly farms and homesteads.
T3 – Sub-urban – Big lots and extensive green areas, but still walkable
T4 – General Urban – Mix of single-family homes, rowhouses, small apartments, small shops and offices. Think a “streetcar suburb” like the Magnolia Avenue/Fairmount area here in Fort Worth.
T5 – Urban Center – Businesses, rowhouses, large apartment buildings, civic buildings; most buildings are attached, as on a main street.
T6 – Urban Core – The city center, with tall buildings, almost all attached. Large businesses and shops, and tall residential buildings.
Beyond the form and relationship of buildings, and walkability, the traditional urban code isn’t overly concerned with uses. These traditional codes should be very interesting to conservatives – compared to the current rigid and excessively-structured zoning, they provide far more freedom for developers and buyers/renters. Somewhere within each zone of the transect, a builder can build and a buyer can buy pretty much anything. Parking is still provided, but it’s on-street and at the rear of buildings so that cars do not dominate the landscape over pedestrians and cyclists.
Thus far, traditional urban developments have not had much trouble finding buyers – the problem has been wading through the morass of anti-tradition zoning and codes to be allowed to build it in the first place. That is not conservative, free market economics.
Many conservatives I’ve talked with about these topics mistakenly think that traditional urbanism is here to dismantle the “American Dream,” defined for some reason as a house in a sprawling subdivision. I argue that that is not the American Dream – that in fact, it’s become a nightmare for a great many people in this country. The American Dream could signify again what it used to – traditional neighborhoods of walkable design with a mix of uses and strong community. That ought to be a goal that both sides of the aisle can support.
(For the record, I consider myself neither liberal nor conservative – I’m part of that middle ground that takes elements from both sides, and my viewpoints shift depending on the topic and level of government.)
I realize politics can be a bit inflammatory, but I see no reason for it in this post – so everybody, try and keep the comments friendly. Thanks.
Kevin, do you ever want to move to a city that is more urban such as those in the Northeast? Boston, Philly, NY? A lot of the older neighborhoods in those cities have preserved much of the traditional urbanism.
I don’t especially want to move, no. I like it here in Fort Worth. We have made great strides advancing traditional urbanism here in this city – the life returning to the Near Southside and West 7th is a great example.
If I were to move somewhere, it would probably be Portland, Oregon, but I’m not planning on moving any time soon. This is a great city and there is still a lot to be done in the name of traditional urban design and transit in this town.
I am a conservative who loves “traditional urbanism” (I sure don’t think of Ft. Worth when I think of it, though–Portland, SF, Seattle to name a few). I just don’t think it should be a forced lifestyle–some love it, some don’t–variety is great!! I would, however like to see more urban transportation available in so many US cities—that may keep the sprawl from getting worse.
Kevin,
There are some conservatives who are defintely pro-urbanism. Rod Dreher, for instance, is one conservative voice who fights against the culture of over-consumption and so is a proponent of the new-urbanist movement.
Nice post, Kevin. I’m often amazed that some of the spaces in FW–say, the Neil P. or the Tower–are somehow incongruous with the “American Dream.” Walking out the front door and into to the theater, a nice restaurant, or your office sounds pretty dreamy to me.
So you have been told that “sprawl is the market at work?” By no means. Sprawl is the result of corrupt, or at least uncivic minded, real estate developers. Have you ever seen the movie “Chinatown?” If not, you might want to see it and reflect on the lengths and, I hate to say, lack of honesty some will go to to make big bucks. And make no mistake, suburban real estate development makes big bucks for a few people. The reason for suburban home design is all “front end,” that is things that make people buy homes, not that make the homes nice to live in. Therein lies a whole ‘nother issue.
A thought about why conservatives might not support traditional urbanism — they might identify it with government spending, for public transit, or with the “liberal base” long identified with the city’s residents. In your basic point, however, you are correct. There is no *legitimate* reason why conservatives should not support traditional urbanism. Perhaps as time goes on, there will be a more bi-partisan base for this movement.
Sonja, you are correct in your second post. I think they do equate public transit, etc. with government spending. But for some reason they have no problem pouring tax dollars into building more highways and widening roads.
[...] I consider myself to be a fairly conservative person, more of the Ron Paul persuasion lately, I was a bit upset when I read a recent post from Fort Worthology. [...]
Unfortunately a lot of more traditional conservatives inherently want to preserve the “past” as they understand it. It is time to move forward responsibly. What really upsets me is hauling energy execs in when prices are high, and then completely forgetting about it when prices are low. A.) They were being martyred for something they can hardly control B.)It is time to use those periods of price spikes to look towards a more resposible future.
I consider myself to be fairly conservative. Bummed we missed out on an opportunity in Ron Paul.
I just read this long post a second time and it was better the second time than the first. I think what I would like to say about conservatives is there are different types and they have different issues that drive their conservatism. I know conservatives whose big issue is “family values,” and some others from a whole different perspective whose motivation is to keep taxes low. Both these groups could, theoretically, support modern urbanism, if they understood that family values and reasonable taxes could be maintained with smart urban design.
However there are others in the conservative block who don’t want new urbanism. They are owners of big business. Why do they not want it? Because new urbanism is a threat to everything they do. And unfortunately, these big business owners are much of the weight funding campaigns, and when the campaign is over, it is these conservatives who seem to drive much of the Republican party agenda.
[...] week, Kevin at Fort Worthology had a pretty thoughtful essay about traditional urbanism and conservatives that makes some very interesting points. But even though I’m interested in topics such as [...]
Excellent post and comments…
As a non-American living in (almost) Fort Worth I can see its potential to become a thriving community driven by dynamic urbanism. I can see it going in that direction. If anything depended on me, I would promote more coffee houses. (I wrote on my blog how a coffee place, even if it is the chainy Starbucks, provides a focus for people to get together.) Maybe I am culturally biased because I come from a coffee shop culture where people meet friends over a cup of coffee. But think about it: as it is now in suburban areas, people don’t cross paths if they don’t already know each other, and even that happens if they have planned a meeting for some specific purpose.
I am thinking that maybe casual interaction itself somehow gets typecast as “liberal”.
Modern (post Nixon) conservatism is all about race. Less government spending is code for less spending that benefits minorities. Lower taxes is code for less money available to spend on minorities. Devolution to the states is code for devolution of power to the level of government with a poorer record of protecting minorities, etc. etc. Conservatives like the suburbs because they segregate them from minorities.
Eleiva, I am with you on the coffee shops. The more the merrier. I wish we had one on Magnolia.
Late to the party here, my RSS reader (or perhaps my weary eyes) overlooked this blog article.
I agree wholeheartedly with Andrew – Rod Dreher is a fantastic example of a conservative new urbanist. Kevin, if you want to borrow it, I’ll lend you a copy of his book – Crunchy Cons – next time I’m in town. Here is an exert from the last chapter.
I completely disagree with Sam, his opinion of conservatism captures a very small population of the whole. Though, I suppose it is easy to stereotype.
My take on conservatism: your run-of-the-mill conservative has the gut-instinct to provide the same (or better) quality of life and opportunities that they had in life for the next generation.
For the majority of conservative baby boomers and every generation that has followed, that means preserving a stereotypical suburban lifestyle: two working parents (no stay-at-homes), automobile dependent “loops and lollipops” designed neighborhoods.
Now I would wager that just about everybody that reads this blog is familiar with an urban environment; either having lived (or currently living) in one, or at least through traveling and vacations. A great deal of suburbanites, however, have yet to be exposed to a truly urban environment; to see for themselves what benefits such an environment has to offer.
I think we need to come up with a better pigeonhole than “conservative” for these people you are labelling. I definitely consider myself conservative and I am trying to figure out who these people are that you are lumping me in with, especially Sam. Your understanding of conservatism is completely different from mine and mildly offensive. I could wax poetically about misconceptions on what liberalism is or what progressives believe in, but I think that is exactly what the moderator asked us to avoid.
I recognize that urban living represents to me advantages and cost savings over surburan life. I don’t want to spend two hours in a car anymore driving my life away. It is a quality of life thing and I think more and more people will rediscover city living in the near future as economies change.
I think a larger part of the populace is generally unconcerned with what goes on around them. They get the basics of job, house, entertainment and do what they need to do to live their happy little lives and get home in time for American Idol. They don’t actively think about the dynamics of the world around them and they only react to the loudest idiot on TV or radio. The input they receive is filtered by the media sources they are comfortable with. I think that a lot of these people are conservative, because if you are living comfortable why would you want to do something different? But I know people who hold strong liberal values who act the same way.
Then there are those of us, both liberal and conservative, that take an interest in things going on around us and are plugged in. Thats probably why you read Fortworthology. And I do too.
I didn’t mean to offend, nor lump all conservatives together. Nonetheless, the great big Democratic party split up after Johnson got congress to pass civil rights legislation. Johnson himself said as much. The southerners in the party began a process of defection to the Republican party that was complete (at least at the federal level) by the 1980s. More than a few Republican politicians, Reagan for instance, have used phrases like “state’s rights” as code to convey to white voters their opposition to civil rights as well as government programs that are perceived to disproportionately benefit minorities. This is known as the “southern strategy” and is a well studied phenomenon in campaigns and elections.
My point is that race is a huge underlying and unspoken issue in American life and one that motivates people whether they admit it or not. Suburbanization and local government fragmentation are the indisputable trends of our metropolitan development since WWII. They are also the trends that have enabled us to remain a very segregated country.
To say that Conservatives as a whole are against traditional Urbanism is such a sweeping generalization. As a conservative and a huge proponent of Fort Worth’s urban movement, I have to disagree.
Family units trend conservative and education for their children is a family units’ main concern in housing consumption. Inner city ISD’s like FWISD doesn’t come close to competeing academically with the ISD’s outside it’s borders. Venture down Monticello Dr. and check out the number of houses with private school banners. Most people can’t afford that, and it’s not necessary in Keller, Mansfield or the Mid Cities even if you have to commute. Competitive schools. Smart Urbanism. Vouchers Rock.
Sam, I disagree with your assertion about Reagan speaking about state’s right as code. I don’t really want to get into it, but the bottom line is that the idea of a state’s right is an attempt to get back to the basic formation of our nation. The states formed the federal government – not the other way around.
To the main topic, I think it’s an interesting discussion. As a conservative myself, I find it hard to debate that conservatives are more likely to be urbanists. It probably stems from the idea that individualism > collectivism. Liberals tend to have a more collectivist viewpoint (again, I am being very general here), and I think it all comes back to that point. The interesting paradox is that the suburban model is most likely not the free market at work. We seem to have been programmed into thinking that newer and bigger is better. It’s a bit sad.
Whereas I don’t necessarily agree with the details of Sams argument, I think we can’t ignore the notion that race has and still does play a roll in the development and growth of conservative populations in suburbia. Furthermore, I am somewhat in agreement with Witherspoon D about the effect schools have in the movement of conservatives to the suburbs.
The correlation between large conservative populations and the suburbs is 99.9% caused by education and schools. White, conservative suburbanites perceive that large minority populations represent poor quality education. Unfortunately, this perception is not completely unfounded. The lack of value placed on education by many minority communities has been talked about by everyone from Chris Rock to Thomas Sowell.
If the inner city community begins to place greater value on education, the inner city schools will fix themselves and the inner city neighborhoods will fix themselves.
As the husband of a former educator at a local suburban high school, I can say one myth suburbanites need to understand is that “white school” does not equal good education. Given the systemic nature of the problems with public schools, I would even venture to say that if your kid is attending a public school and they are not in a gifted and talented program or honors class, they are receiving a sub par education. And, if they are in a G and T program, then the education they are receiving is just merely adequate.
To totally switch gears, I found Joes following statement somewhat puzzling, “The interesting paradox is that the suburban model is most likely not the free market at work.”
How is this not the free market at work? Are you saying there aren’t any other houses to buy outside of the suburbs, hence, if the buyer wants to buy a house they are being “coerced” into buying into the suburbs? Are you saying that government regulations place undue restrictions on a homebuyer buying a house or a seller selling a house outside of the suburbs or vice versa? Please elaborate on your paradox because I don’t understand where the paradox is.
I firmly believe when a home buyer buys a house in the suburbs, the homebuyer believes they are making an informed decision and are acting in their perceived best interest. I believe that most of the time they are wrong, but the wonderful thing about utility is that it is valued differently by everyone. Markets can not exist without this freedom.
Great post and comments!
I completely agree with the sentiment expressed in this post.
For the record, I consider myself an economic conservative. However, I believe in environmental responsibility, smart development, public transit, etc. etc.. and I’m definitely not a fundamentalist Christian!
I also agree that although it is not the rule.. In the south, many Republicans would actually align more with the Democrats if not for deep seeded racisim… And, no, Bush does not hate black people!
Because the suburban model only works b/c of government supported infrastructure. Look around – our model for developing cities goes against all common sense, and things you would normally find in other parts of the world. Why is that? Are we the first to utilize a free market or has the government setup a system that would allow for irregular development (towns with a ton of homes but little non-consumer related businesses). It may appear to be the free market, b/c it is the system we are used to now. In my opinion, it’s obviously greatly influenced by government and more elite developers.
Hmm. Interesting comments and broad paint brushes. In my life, the biggest racists I know live in the suburbs and are hardcore Democrats. I just don’t understand the desire for you all to link racism strictly to conservatism. It is a pernacious remnant of earlier times, the practitioners of which are dying off.
As for the urbanism issue, I suspect that as more urban housing product is developed, more people of all political persuasions will reoccupy the city center.
AndyN I have also met racist Democrats… Trust me, there is plenty of racism to go around in this country. It has just been my personal experience that more of the self professed racists tend to lean Republican. My own grandfather once told me that he had to switch to the Republican party in the 60′s b/c of Kennedy and Johnson’s equal rights views… what I find ironic, is that when you really get into the details of what makes someone conservative or liberal, more of the racist conservatives actually align closer to liberals… My 1.5 cents…
Well it sounds like most of you might agree on one point: Post WWII suburban sprawl is an arrangement that is heavily subsidized by paying for road construction out of many different taxes at all levels of government. In economic terms you could say that for individuals, prices (of living out in suburbia and driving everywhere) are artificially low and costs are externalized to the rest of society.
So my questions are: Is using the government to force the internalization of these costs back onto the producers and consumers fundamentally liberal? Or are conservatives willing to accept that government ought to play this role? And do you think that your view on this would be consistent with that of most other conservatives?