Needless Fuss about Land Use
Bruce-Briggs, B.
B. Bruce-Briggs Needless Fuss about Land Use • • Considering land use as a national problem is very recent. For most of U. S. history the national goal was to occupy what were perceived as vast...
...Take for example the most widely publicized emissions—the hydrocarbons, carbon monoxides, and oxides of nitrogen produced by internal combustion engines...
...Give each household slightly under 2 /3 of an acre...
...But when one examines the calculations one finds that almost all of this "cost of sprawl" is the additional cost of having a large single-family house rather than a smaller apartment, of driving a car rather than sharing a bus or a subway train...
...The usefulness of land is a question of economics, not of engineering feasibility...
...By this time the reader may be asking, if our land use problems are so miniscule and/or misunderstood, why has this false perception penetrated so deeply into the minds of journalists and politicians...
...These experiments have nothing whatever to do with the intensity of space occupation in the United States...
...The next "problem" of the existing system is said to be "suburban sprawl...
...Most of the land in the United States is "open space"—privately owned, but in custom and practice open to anyone who does not abuse the privilege...
...This is not a bane but a blessing...
...government planning) could only come up with such a tiny increment of added efficiency...
...The reasons for the American lust for land can be traced far back into our national history...
...There is an ugly strain of narrow class interests involved in the wilderness issue...
...Simply stated, it cannot be demonstrated that any one pattern of local land use is necessary for man's survival and prosperity...
...From my point of view it would be excellent if ten million other people moved away...
...Every poll of the housing and land desires of Americans reveals an overwhelming preferencefor this life style...
...The same club strongly advocates the use of horses in the same areas...
...is urbanized...
...It is difficult to think of more inhospitable land than the tundra of Alaska, yet the oil under the ground gives it value...
...Why is it assumed that the land no longer exists or is degraded because people live on it...
...It is a poor reflection on the intelligence of our journalists that this study was so widely celebrated.* Actually, complex studies are unnecessary: simple arithmetic is adequate to put the land use problem in perspective...
...With very low population density, flushing raw sewa1ge directly into running streams rarely causes any problem...
...This question is especially pertinent when we consider the sort of "urban development" that is taking place...
...Individuals and groups sensitive to these problems have been strongly advocating much more comprehensive land use controls, and politicians sensitive to these constituencies have been proposing far-reaching legislation, especially the Jackson and Udall bills which would establish and finance state land use planning under federal guidelines...
...Prices of some waterfront properties have reached such astronomical heights that heirs cannot pay the inheritance taxes, so they have strong incentives to donate them to the local government or, more likely, to subdivide the property so that more people can enjoy and pay for it...
...The shore can be reserved for the few—those few presumably being the rich or those designated as worthy by some government arbiter...
...I for one would advocate a massive investment in park acquisition by the established means of eminent domain and donations from philanthropists and/ or tax avoiders...
...Another land use "problem" is strip mining, which 'often leaves ugly scars on the landscape...
...The tiny amounts alleged to be converted to subdivisions and shopping centers are well within the margin of error in estimating agricultural land...
...Former President Nixon called the existing system of land "misuse" "perhaps the most pressing environmental issue before the nation...
...If so, this problem is rapidly being alleviated because the populations and densities of our most crowded cities are rapidly declining...
...The motorcycle is a favorite mount of young blue-collar workers...
...To minimize costs, it is desirable for the states to have long-range acquisition plans for recreation...
...Now, it has sometimes been argued that most of our land is useless—deserts, swamps, mountains, and tundra...
...Certainly there is something to be said for ecological balance, particularly if man is included in the equation...
...The editorial page of the New York Times, that font and litmus of establishment opinion, foresees the nation "on a disaster course...
...The amount of farmland as estimated by the Department of Agriculture has fluctuated slightly over the last fifty years, but still remains at approximately 1 billion acres...
...Indeed, this is well known to persons who regularly fly along this Northeastern corridor...
...Three hundred million people occupying land at a density of 2,000 per square mile would occupy 150,000 square miles or 5 % of the area of the continental United States, leaving 95% for other purposes...
...Indeed, the tendency is strongly in the other direction—toward government ownership of waterfront lands obtained through eminent domain and donations...
...There is no foreseeable limit to sub-urbanization...
...Americans have had the ideal of the freedom of the frontier...
...Westchester has a density of 2,000 per square mile...
...Or the shore can be used by no one at all, a superb solution if one prefers sea gulls to people...
...This is the dominant theory taught in planning schools...
...Approximately 1% of our land area is now devoted to highways (though by no means all of these are paved...
...Fortunately, the concern with the aesthetic problems of open-pit mining has led to serious and intensifying efforts to restore the landscape when the job is done or to devise other uses for this property...
...Emissions are the amounts of obnoxious material that a facility or activity produces...
...Presently this territory is organized very much like other property in the United States—most of it is owned by individual families, purchased for the private use of themselves and their friends...
...Fortunately, they can have just about all the land they want...
...Time joins the chorus of complaint...
...We are a rich country and can afford to be generous with nature...
...Given this historical background, it would seem strange that there has been so little public debate as to whether or not land use is indeed a national problem...
...We do not want all of our nation to turn into a vast Disneyland...
...There is no foreseeable limit to suburbanization...
...Recent demographic trends put the lie to the concept of Americans packing into larger and larger "megalopoli...
...some is owned by clubs, schools, and other private organizations which reserve it for their members...
...The same is true for "open space...
...And still other millions are retired people who once owned land or are young people who intend to own land later...
...The dwindling availability of recreation areas would appear to be a concrete problem...
...During the last generation the acreage of our national and state parks has increased by one-third while usage has increased almost fivefold...
...In large cities such a practice can be (and in the past has been) fatal to tens of thousands of people...
...The density of the U.S...
...This practice is so reasonable that some states have been doing it for over fifty years...
...A few of the densest areas of the United States, such as older San Francisco, Greenwich Village, and the East Side of New York, are among the most * Sometimes introduced into the discussion of alleged problems of "overcrowding" are descriptions of experiments with rats who became neurotic and vicious when packed into tight spaces...
...This amounts to just under 2 billion acres...
...Emissions in themselves are not a problem if the production from any activity is small relative to the reservoir into which it is introduced...
...This sounds horrid, until we apply the most credible sort of analysis—simple arithmetic...
...To take the most glaring example, very rarely in any discussion of how our land is being "used up" does one see the very simple number of how much total land we have...
...The amount of pollution that they produce is a function of their design and/or the facilities provided to clean up their effluents...
...But the area devoted to 8 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1976 open pit extraction has been overly dramatized...
...Actually, the terms of the discussion have been extremely one-sided and often incomplete...
...The United States has just over 3'h million square miles of land, of which just slightly less than 3 million square miles are in the "lower 48" or "coterminous" United States...
...A thousand people per square mile is about 1 1/2 people per acre or about one house for every two acres...
...Of course, Canada and the USSR have much lower densities, but most of their land area is totally vacant and the occupied part of each country has approximately the same density as the United States...
...Marshes have value as wildlife preserves...
...Provided access is available(usually by road) almost all types of land are usable and used...
...valuable agricultural land is disappearing under urban development...
...A familiar complaint of environmentalists is the filling-in of various wet lands and swamp lands...
...We have so much land in the United States that we can indeed preserve individual wet lands, swamp lands, etc., if it pleases us to do so But, of course, we cannot afford to preserve all of them...
...our wilderness is being overrun by recreational exploitation...
...It is interesting to note that the most glaring inefficiencies of land use are the results of past government planning mistakes...
...In terms of area, agriculture and grazing are the most important uses of land...
...In the last 50 years this liberty of land use has been modified only slightly by local zoning and subdivision ordinances which put some modest restraints on the rights of real property...
...millions more own business, vacation, and retirement properties, inherited lands they often make little use of, and, of course, other properties to satisfy that ancient American passion for land speculation...
...Many Los Angelenos think the same way about their metropolis...
...The above article is reprinted by permission from No Land Is an Island, a collection of essays on land use published by the Institute for Contemporary Studies, 260 California Street, San Francisco, California 94111...
...True, some choices will have to be made...
...It is people that pollute...
...At the rate described by Jackson, it would -require 400 years to "absorb" 10% of the nation...
...Fortunately, this is not the case...
...This means a total urban land usage of 300,000 square miles or only one-tenth of the continental land area of the United States, leaving 90 % for agriculture, wilderness, outdoor recreation, scenic preservation, resource extraction, and environmental protection...
...For every unit of residential land add two units for highways, commerce and industry, parks, and public uses...
...Americans have long wanted and still want land...
...People manage to live very well in the almost entirely artificial environment of Hoiland...
...2% of our land area is 40 million acres...
...In England, unlike on the continent of Europe, society If urban "overcrowding" is a problem, which it is not, it would be diminishing, because the populations and densities of our most crowded cities are rapidly declining...
...Another calculation goes like this: At the end of the century America will have about 100 million households...
...Almost all of the immigrants to North America came from rural peasant stock...
...However, it is very interesting that a group of researchers deeply committed to "planning" (i.e...
...As cities spread out more, people will drive more, but the increase in automobile emissions will be smaller than the increase in absorption capacity that results from the greater volumes of air under which they will drive...
...This is certainly true, but is grossly misunderstood...
...But let us assume that overcrowded cities are bad...
...In relating land use to air and water quality, one must distinguish between emissions and pollution...
...It has agricultural value only because of its close proximity to markets, so within a few hours' range of a metropolitan city truck and dairy farms will be found...
...It would seem to me excellent that our waterfronts are "cluttered" with vacation resorts...
...It is possible to go into any community in the country and find wasteful practices...
...In other words, even in our worst slums, people are less crowded than they were before...
...What are the alternatives...
...Fortunately, that is the direction we are go-ing because of the individual planning choices of American families and the planning decisions of the developers and builders who profit by satisfying their wants...
...Small wonder that many thoughtful and concerned Americans are disturbed about the implications of the continuation of the present system and have been primed to lend a responsive ear to proposed government plans and programs which promise to alleviate the problems of land use in America...
...At present, it is widely believed and strongly advocated that the old dispensation no longer applies...
...Since the vast majority of Americans, for reasons obvious to all but ideologically-blinded analysts, prefer single-family houses to apartments and automobiles to collective transit facilities, it is difficult to understand the point of this study, unless it was intended to be an intellectual weapon in a campaign to discourage the bulk of Americans from having houses and cars...
...Senator Henry Jackson, one of the most vigorous promoters of federal land *Any definition of "urban" is necessarily arbitrary, but it is reasonable to make use of the U.S...
...irreplaceable wet lands, swamp lands, and other environmentally necessary areas are being destroyed...
...Those people who already have vacation colonies on secluded lakes in the Sierras do not want them to be intruded upon by large developments that cater to the masses...
...Let us run briefly through the supposed problems of "unplanned land use" listed above...
...The populations of high-density cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, St...
...The social origins of the leadership and membership of some of the leading conservation organizations indicate a serious attempt by the prosperous to bar the rabble and preserve the wilderness for themselves...
...We are the first society so rich that we have been able to preserve such places merely because they are considered works of nature's art...
...It is not terribly expensive, apparently not incredibly difficult, and certainly has hardly any connection to the supposed need for overall statewide land use planning...
...Viewed from a historical perspective, these demands for strengthened governmental land use controls would seem to be almost revolutionary...
...What seems to be happening is fairly straightforward...
...Most people already drive to most of their activities...
...He might have added that the head of the research organization that performed this study is similarly well situated in a posh suburb of Chicago...
...If someone wants to do something with a piece of land badly enough to pay for it, it can be done...
...No land use in itself creates a pollution problem...
...Another misleading study is the recently published The Costs of Sprawl commissioned by EPA, HUD, and the Council on Environmental Quality...
...I'he Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1976 11...
...How else can a maximum number of Americans enjoy the water...
...Seventy percent of our population is approximately 145 million people...
...Quite a different picture appears, however, if we look at the census data carefully—even if we use the more populous 1970 census data...
...An Opinion Research Corporation survey found that one-third of Americans would prefer to live in open country...
...The Rockefeller Brothers Fund calls for the emasculation of historical property rights in order to deal with these problems...
...But whatever the rate, why is it bad that land is so absorbed...
...has a density of 70 persons per square mile—U.K...
...It is possible to make crude projections of the future demand for these facilities...
...That was written on the basis of the 1950 census...
...Scammon and Wattenberg have pointed out, the typical American family resides in a city the size of Dayton, Ohio, which has a metropolitan population of about 600,000 persons...
...the sea shores and lake fronts are cluttered by vacation resorts...
...If one were to design a low-pollution America, one would design a low-density America...
...But actually, the typical urban American does not live in a great city...
...Because most of the city planners believe in the superiority of this system, and see quite the opposite occurring in the nation, they conclude that there is something fundamentally wrong with the American system,• that democracy has failed...
...Land ownership, and therefore land use, is acentral institution of American civilization...
...As we know, Westchester is one of the most desirable and fashionable suburban counties with a wide range of communities varying from fairly dense Yonkers City to the swank open exurbs of the northern county...
...The most casual "windshield survey" will find streets that are misaligned and too wide or too narrow, will reveal misplaced and even unnecessary parks in many locations and inadequate parks in others, will show stupidly crowded subdivisions, mislocated water and sewage facilities, and miserably placed public facilities...
...Consider, for example, the image of "Megalopolis" made popular by Jean Gottman in the his famous book of that name...
...It works out to 30,000 square miles or 1% of the national land area...
...For example, the draining of swamps in our southern states has eliminated many of the breeding grounds for malaria- and yellow fever-bearing mosquitos, which has reduced the prevalence of those diseases, thus "upsetting the balance of nature," making the South a good deal more hospitable to man...
...A leading western-based "club" agitates to keep motorcycles from wilderness areas...
...For most of U. S. history the national goal was to occupy what were perceived as vast empty spaces...
...We are so generously endowed with land in America that we can retain huge areas for pure and unspoiled wilderness if we so desire, and yet can develop equally huge areas for the outdoor amusement of our populace...
...When emissions are concentrated, problems can exist...
...But counting only park lands grossly underestimates the amountof recreational land in the United States...
...Since we have already noted that the natural direction of urban development in America without planning is toward lower and lower densities, it would appear that even without direct efforts to control emissions at their source, pollution would be gradually alleviated...
...When automobiles are concentrated in high-density areas, then the amount of emissions relative to the available atmosphere creates noticeable, annoying, and potentially noxious air pollution...
...The northeastern seaboard of the United States," Gottman wrote, "is today the site of a remarkable development —an almost continuous stretch of urban and suburban areas from Southern New Hampshire to Northern Virginia and from America is so generously endowed with land that we can retain huge areas for unspoiled wilderness and also develop huge areas for the outdoor amusement of our populace...
...Urban problems are exacerbated by overcrowding...
...Bureau of Census definition of the "urbanized area" which is a city of 50,000 inhabitants or more plus adjoining areas developed at a density of 1,000 per square mile or more...
...No agricultural expert seriously doubts that we could increase production fifty percent with existing technology on existing lands, if there were sufficient demand...
...On the very-low-density fringes of the metropolitan areas—the areas that are the wave of the future of exurban development—the addition of a home hardly affects the land...
...Perhaps many of the complainers about overcrowding really mean that they perceive many of our cities to be too large both in population and in area...
...homes are even built right on top of well-known earthquake faults...
...The deserts of Arizona are irrigated and built upon...
...the scenery is being chewed up by strip mining and other forms of obnoxious resource extraction...
...Gallup polls found that only about one in eight Americans wishes to live in the cities, with about 30% preferring suburbs, about the same choosing small towns, and a quarter of all Americans preferring to live on a farm...
...10 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1976 The Costs of Sprawl study mentioned above estimated that "planning" sprawl would increase efficiency by 4 %. We may disregard this number altogether because the quality of the data manipulated in this study had margins of error of 10-20% so a 4% variation is meaningless...
...land area (excluding Alaska...
...land is even created where none existed before—much of present-day Boston was originally tidal marsh, and hundreds of acres of land have been added to the tip of Manhattan island since colonial days...
...Some of these losses in population have been due to clearance for urban renewal and highway construction, and to ordinary attrition of buildings by fire, sometimes aided by arson, but most of the drop is simply due to fewer people living in the same units...
...There was also a clear and almost undisputed notion of how land use decisions are to be made—by the individual or corporate owner through the right of freehold property restricted only by laws which prohibited certain activities as immoral or antisocial (e.g., brothels), but not restraining the use of land as such...
...Nevertheless, I do not believe that any observer would deny that our land could be much more efficiently used...
...For several hundred years Americans have taken for granted that they had the right to do pretty much what they pleased with their own land and that, in contrast to the situation in many foreign countries, the ownership of land in America is not the preserve of a narrow oligarchy...
...This sounds terribly serious until we remind ourselves that the nation has 2 billion acres and that 5 million acres is a quarter of 1% of the total land area...
...This is particularly the case in urban centers...
...Without access land is useless and therefore worthless...
...the American landscape is being gobbled up by uninhibited suburban sprawl...
...Even aesthetically such development is more pleasing than row housing or urban renewal housing projects...
...Small wonder, then, that we sometimes hear the very same people complain both about "overcrowded" cities and about the "sprawl" that is relieving that situation...
...Recreation is another major land use...
...William H. Whyte writes of The Last Landscape...
...One hundred million times .64 acres is 64 million acres or 100,000 square miles...
...To duplicate the conditions of the rat experiments it would be necessary to jam a dozen humans into a small bathroom...
...However, it is not necessary to go into the ecological argument in any depth because it is easy to defer to the ecologist at almost every point...
...The mountains of Colorado are of increased value because people wish to ski and hike there...
...If the citizens of a state desire more property to be owned by the government for these purposes, they will presumably elect and re-elect officials who will take the necessary steps to obtain these recreational facilities for public use...
...Many people merely like to look at them, so various governmental and private organizations have put them aside for their scenic beauty...
...For example, I think that metropolitan New York is much too big, even though I live there...
...some is owned by commercial enterprises which limit its use to their patrons...
...Furthermore, only in our highly developed urban centers is a large amount of land devoted to highways—as much as 25% in places like Manhattan, San Francisco, and Los Angeles...
...Americans want single-family houses, they want land, and the only way to achieve this is by "suburban sprawl...
...The most rapid declines tend to be in the most densely occupied sections...
...This should not surprise us...
...use policy with "a big stick," has commented that "each decade new urban growth will absorb 5 million acres...
...The "overcrowding argument- is often made in these terms—" 70 % of our population lives on 2% of our land...
...Keep in mind that this is a very generous definition of urbanization...
...The "swinging singles" who swarm in New York's Yorkville obviously love it—hut, as we shall see, most Americans prefer much lower densities and are achieving them...
...A glance out of the window of an airplane reveals that this "urban strip" is almost all green...
...The problem of agriculture is usually stated in these terms—"a million acres of agricultural land are being converted to urban development every year...
...Disturbing, perhaps, but hardly intolerable...
...Nevertheless, even according to this very low density definition of urbanization, just over 1% of the continental U.S...
...So the question of land use in America is not one of land availability but of how the land is to be allocated most efficiently...
...People have, according to their lights, attempted to maximize the usefulness of that land to themselves...
...and Senator Jackson's own Pacific Northwest, the homes are rarely visible from the air (or even from the road...
...A house with a 2,000-square-foot foundation occupies about 3% of a two-acre lot...
...In other words, in the lower 48 states are nearly ten acres for every man, woman, and child...
...Messrs...
...Senator Gaylord Nelson has written that existing surface mining occupies a strip of land 100 feet wide and 11/2 million miles long...
...The "problem" of the wilderness being overrun by recreational exploitation rests fundamentally on values and class interests...
...Most of it is merely putting down houses on existing landscape...
...Waterfrontage is more limited...
...The total emissions produced by automobiles are unimportant so long as they are scattered over a wide area...
...The most dedicated opponents of ' 'suburban sprawl" are the city planners who, heavily influenced by nineteenth-century European ideologies, seem to hold the view that the bulk of the population should be jammed into high-density cities and the rest of the countryside should be left open for carefully supervised recreation and carefully managed agriculture and resource extraction...
...the Atlantic shore to the Appalachian foothills...
...Almost all Americans want suburban sprawl...
...Through some reasonable and also some inappropriate calculations, the distinguished research corporation that performed this report concluded that "sprawl" was 40% more expensive than more concentrated developments...
...has only an estimated 85,000 miles of salt water shoreline to which must be added tens of thousands of miles of river and lake frontage...
...Moreover, urban development is not always the highest and best use of land...
...The amount of the agricultural land in the United States depends in no way on the degree of urbanization, but rather upon the international market for agricultural commodities as modified by government policy...
...As for the "inefficiencies" of private land use, while they may appear wasteful to me or the reader, these apparent inefficiences were the result of someone's private planning...
...Approximately half of our national land area, or 1 billion acres, is estimated to be devoted to agriculture of one sort or another...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1976 7 desirable living places in the country...
...Another famous slum —central Harlem—has lost half its population in the last generation...
...Very few of them are doing anyone else any harm, so who am I or you to tell them they are wrong in their planning...
...compares very favorably with that of most of the other prosperous industrialized nations of the world...
...pollution is an unacceptable concentration of emissions...
...Since the point of going to most of these parks is to be away from people, it would seem that crowding degrades the value of parks for those who use them...
...is in smaller cities and selected rural areas...
...Large areas of the country are not ideally suited for urban development, but when the demand exists cities are built on the most unpromising land...
...Louis, Cincinnati, and New Orleans are dropping precipitously...
...In recent years, however, a new attitude toward the use of land has evolved...
...To them, land meant security, status, wealth, and power...
...It is machines that pollute...
...This sounds terrible until we convert the dramatic statement to more traditional ways of measuring land area...
...The U.S...
...That example will sound facetious only to those whose concern for mosquitos overrides concern for humanity...
...The waterfront issue is very much like the recreation issue...
...Instead of a continuous stretch of urban and suburban areas, more than a third of this population is in the New York urbanized area, another quarter is in the urbanized areas of Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, and a fifth of the population is in the other urbanized areas...
...Some claim that these are necessary to maintain the ecological balance...
...A University of Michigan survey of the late 1960s found that 85 % of urban families wanted single-family homes on good-sized lots...
...the countryside is paved over by highways...
...The same is true in the case of water pollution...
...As Messrs...
...has 600, West Germany has 650, Italy has 470, and France 250 persons per square mile...
...Since the turn of the century it has been accepted that large areas should be set aside for wild fauna and flora, but most human beings seem to feel that people are more important than animals and the "overrunning" of wilderness areas indicates that better use of them is being made by men...
...Doubtless there are many reasons, but one that I find of great professional interest is that for a long time now we have been deluged with a long series of misleading yet widely publicized studies written by distinguished scholars or bearing the imprimatur of distinguished organizations...
...so this "crowding" is three to four people (the size of an average family) per acre...
...today the population and density are less than a third of that figure...
...largeamounts are owned either by local governments which usually restrict it to the taxpayers who paid for it, or by state and federal governments which generally open it to all citizens...
...Udall and Jackson cite them in support of their various proposals...
...If the area is wooded, as is the case in most of the eastern U.S...
...There is somewhat more merit to the complaint that America is being "paved over" by highways...
...the most rapid growth in the U.S...
...Two-thirds of American families own their own homes and the land upon which they stand...
...and the very physical environment of the nation is threatened...
...One exception was the syndicated columnist Lew Koch who rather unkindly pointed out that the heads of EPA, HUD, and CEQ all live in nice big suburban houses...
...While it is possible to add to the amount of waterfront by building artificial lakes, and while the effective amount of waterfront can be increased through improved access, it certainly is the case that if all waterfrontage were privately owned, only a few of our citizens could enjoy it...
...But this is not really a serious problem...
...The planners always paint these as "residential" on their land use maps—for some reason only government-owned land can be designated "recreation...
...This "waste" was widely heralded in the press as a great revelation...
...Only riders in rush-hour subway trains experience such crowding...
...What we now call suburbanization can be traced back to the beginnings of American cities and even before then to the English cities of the late middle ages...
...The land around our growing metropolitan centers, except perhaps in California, is rarely the best The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1976 9 agricultural land...
...was dominated by the rural gentry and no dynamic civic, urban spirit evolved...
...The coterminous U.S...
...Overcrowding is a subjective evaluation...
...On the issue of "overcrowded cities" it is interesting to note that no one has ever made a credible case that any of our urban problems are exacerbated by crowding...
...Even New Jersey, the most intensely urbanized state, is half wooded...
...the swamps of Florida are drained...
...The hills of Vermont are precious because of the combination of their beauty and their proximity to the metropolitan centers of the eastern seaboard...
...It is no mistake that every city in America (and Canada, and England, and Australia, and Sweden, and now France) is moving toward suburban sprawl...
...The great classic slum of the U.S.—the Lower East Side of New York—had 200,000 people per square mile in 1920, probably one of the highest densities in history...
...Americans have long wanted and still want land...
...But these highways give access to the other -99% of the land in the country...
...development creeps up the shaky hillsides of Los Angeles...
...But this is a misrepresentation of both fact and potentiality...
...Assume a total population of 300 million, which according to present population trends should be achieved in the first half of the next century, and assume people wish to live at densities very much like that of today's Westchester County, New York...
...if so, this issue largely boils down to a question of individual tastes and trade-offs...
...The relationship between land use and environmental quality is very poorly understood...
...Fortunately, they can have just about all the land they want...
...True, agricultural land is lost, but this is low-quality land compared with the great grain-producing areas of the western plains or the staple-producing areas of the South...
...At such densities, as shall be discussed later, air and water pollution are negligible to the point of being for all practical purposes nonexistent...
...Urbanized areas," according to the 1970 Census, covered only about 1.15% of U.S...
...The charges listed earlier have been almost unchallenged in testimony before Congressional committees, in academic publications, and in the national media...
...The most important and most intensely used outdoor recreation areas in America are the backyards of our 45 million homeowners...
...The heightened demand for waterfront property has the effect of promoting the latter solution...
...Other land areas have aesthetic value...
...Eighty percent of the population is using 13% of the area, while the other 87 % of "megalopolis" is occupied on an average density of only 175 per square mile or about one house for every 12 acres...
...Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a more practical method of harmoniously integrating man and nature...
...Even The Economist, that usually prudent and well-informed journal, points with alarm to the "problems" of American land use and the need for state action to correct them...
...As the metropolitan cities expand, these lands are developed and the truck and dairy farming moves farther out...
Vol. 9 • June 1976 • No. 9
