Suburbs, Status, and Sprawl

...Antigrowth sentiment is strongest in the most desirable urban and suburban real estate, the copper-pot districts where demand is greatest and new developments have the best chance of financial success...

...Improbable as the K Street lawyers who live around Our Lady of Mercy may be in the role of wretched of the earth, the pseudo-Marxist contraposition of developers to "the people" has become an unconscious assumption of discussion about land use...

...For not a few Takoma Park leftists, their walkable enclave is less an example to be copied than a badge of nobility that distinguishes its residents from ordinary suburbanites...

...BENJAMIN Ross is president of the Action Committee for Transit, an advocacy group in Montgomery County, Maryland...

...And when they fail to convince, the New Urbanists are inclined to appease their opponents, often yielding to the NIMBYs by locating their projects in outer suburbs far away from mass transit...

...Rarely do these groups grapple with sprawl development as a whole...

...Zoning rules that prevent competitors from building similar projects in the vicinity guarantee the profitability of Federal Realty's developments...

...Especially at the local level, environmental groups find it hard to abandon the outlook that sees density as the enemy...

...Yet it is in just these situations that resistance to development is most intense...

...Whether these choices are made in the marketplace or by the political system, a multitude of individuals and organizations participate, and density is just one of many factors they consider...

...The kitchen thus moves to the center of the contemporary house...

...Over the years, a stream of activists has emerged from Chevy Chase to provide political and organizational leadership to the antigrowth movement countywide...

...the owner risked being classed with the now-reviled suburban conformists...

...But these differences are labels pasted on similar goals of governance...

...But frequent homeowner opposition has made redevelopment of existing suburbs difficult and costly...

...The orientation toward status shows most clearly in the intensity with which single-family zoning is protected in prestige neighborhoods near suburban transit stations...

...The glittering pans demonstrate that the "island kitchen" is a room designed for show, not for use, like our grandparents' parlor with plasticcovered furniture where no one was allowed to sit...

...But the damage done by sprawl develop54 • DISSENT / Winter 2001 SUBURBS, STATUS, AND SPRAWL ment has set in motion counterforces that are pushing developers toward more humane patterns of land use...

...Even occasional appearances on a wider stage, as when California homeowner associations supported the Proposition 13 tax-cutting referendum of 1978, attracted little notice...

...But the arguments ordinarily used to keep apartments out of single-family areas lacked credibility...

...Governor Parris Glendening of Maryland has summed these concepts up in the term "smart growth...

...Their support for transit-oriented development often withers when there is a chance that something might actually get built...

...The suburban pattern of land use was created by governmental action through zoning rules and transportation policies, and without a conscious political choice there can be no reversal of course...

...The critique of a society that creates ticky-tacky boxes has mutated into a feeling of superiority over the people who live in the boxes...

...So the neighbors' attorney fell back on an esthetic argument—the proposed building had an "institutional character" that didn't fit into its surroundings...

...Any solution must induce people to live and work where they can do errands on foot and walk to mass transit for longer trips...

...In Washington, D.C.'s suburban Montgomery County, where I live, the wealthy single-family neighborhoods of Chevy Chase have waged a twenty-year battle to limit the growth of offices, upscale stores, and highrise apartments around the Friendship Heights subway station...

...Almost all environmentalists now say that development should be focused into dense nodes around mass transit stations...

...Mike Davis's research dates its appearance in southern California to 1972...

...Meanwhile, the minority of the middle class least able to stomach the sprawl environment will move inward, gentrifying poor urban neighborhoods and depleting the stock of affordable housing...

...As to the fashionable causes of the moment, they insist on purity and bitterly assail any compromise...

...Vertigo-inducing shifts of alliance occur when one community cuts a deal at the expense of another...

...Interest is rapidly growing in a return to urban development patterns, with less driving and more reliance on walking and mass transit...

...Writers such as Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, James Howard Kunstler, and Peter Katz show how suburban zoning creates inhuman environments...

...Farmland remains usable for house construction with far fewer restrictions than suburban property, and the resulting price differentials fuel the continuing spread of subdivisions despite homebuyers' dislike of long commutes...

...In the last two or three years, older suburbs in desirable locations like Chevy Chase have discovered a new problem...

...the New York Times recently described how schools, ball fields, and even a nature path have come under attack in the New York suburbs...

...Advocates of transit-oriented development argue that denser, pedestrian-friendly areas can be more pleasant places to live, work, and shop than traditional suburbs...

...big houses scream "nouveau riche" to neighbors who want to put themselves on a higher plane...

...This movement aims at advancing status far more than defending wealth, and to understand it we must lay aside Karl Marx and pick up Thorstein Veblen...

...Impressions from other cities point to origins in the seventies as well...

...Until recent years, the political theater of the slow-growth movement could be observed from the audience, a distracting spectacle perhaps, but one that did little real harm...

...But the same alliance becomes more problematic in cities and older suburbs, where density must increase if the sprawl problem is to be addressed...

...The wife who can stay home to cook for the children has become a symbol of affluence...

...Advertisers aimed at differentiating a particular brand from what the conformist masses were buying...

...The old structures are torn down and replaced with big new houses that fill up lots and overshadow neighbors...

...Although frequently disparaged as NIMBYs—for "Not In My Back Yard"—the homeowner groups present themselves as innocent victims of oppression by greedy developers...

...Whether they place themselves on the left or right, slow-growth activists affect a similar tone of aggrieved indignation...

...it's too much work...

...Ever-worsening traffic congestion degrades the quality of life in many suburbs, and new roads, the solution long preferred by development interests and the powerful highway lobby, are becoming unaffordable...

...Communities like Santa Monica and Berkeley in California, and Takoma Park in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, are among the most stringent in limiting growth...

...Disabled seniors were unlikely to party noisily into the night...

...The decision to build livable communities in place of sprawl will not be made until we understand and confront the status-seeking that lies behind the suburban status quo...

...So What...

...Environmentalists work to stop bad highway and development projects, while planners and architects design better neighborhoods, and a minority of real estate developers tries to build them...

...Motivation A question addressed by almost no one is the motivation of the NIMBYs...

...In The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank describes how in the sixties American capitalism shifted away from mass marketing toward the promotion of branded products with images tailored to attract distinct market segments...

...The diverse population surrounding the brightly painted wooden Victorians of Takoma Park contrasts sharply with the stone exteriors and manicured lawns of Chevy Chase, but on the inside you are likely to find the same remodeled kitchen with open countertops and brightly polished copper pans hanging from the ceiling...

...The issue has begun to emerge out of local politics onto a larger stage...

...The New Urbanists, experienced in the real-world difficulties of getting something built in the suburbs, are well aware of the roadblocks suburban homeowners often put in the way of the mixed-use, mixed-income communities of their theories...

...And neo-traditional developers are not always unhappy about the obstructions they face...

...Not that the real estate industry is blameless for sprawl...

...Yet sprawl marches on...

...But there is more to this than just a way to keep something from being built...

...Slow-growth" homeowners are well established as a major political force in upscale suburbs and gentrifying city neighborhoods...

...This is the point where NIMBY homeowners become part of the sprawl problem...

...DISSENT / Winter 2001 n 55...

...While staffers involved with the issue see NIMBYs as a major obstacle to building communities that are less automobile dependent, they have trouble translating their organizations' theoretical commitments into action...

...Advertised images differ far more than the houses and the clothes...

...New owners understandably believe that a purchase price running upward of a halfmillion dollars entitles them to a big house...

...The archdiocese wanted to build an assistedliving home for thirty senior citizens on the church's eleven-acre property in an expensive Washington, D.C., suburb...

...Market forces are now sending a belated signal that change is needed...

...NEW URBANIST ideas have reached real estate developers who, perceiving a market demand for a less automobiledependent life, have begun to redevelop older suburbs into denser, more urban neighborhoods of stores, offices, and homes...

...The antigrowth politics that emerged in the seventies may be rooted in economic changes that began a few years earlier...

...But materialistic explanations do not do justice to the slow-growth movement...

...The few published 50 n DISSENT / Winter 2001 SUBURBS, STATUS, AND SPRAWL discussions of the issue focus on property values...

...Hanging over the discussion of suburban sprawl is the refrain that the fault lies with greedy developers, a term that is extraordinarily powerful because so rarely examined...

...If densities cannot increase here, new housing and jobs will be pushed into the outer suburbs, where there are no neighbors to object...

...a mansion next door is not bad for property values...

...The fancy kitchen sits as unused as grandmother's parlor...

...This reasoning, backed up by the volume of complaints, seemed to make headway...

...When Washington-area suburbanites are polled about housing preferences, they frequently respond that they don't want to live near a subway station because it's too expensive...

...From the beginning of suburbia, developers used status distinctions as marketing tools...

...When the county authorized a twenty-story apartment tower inside one nearby village, municipal boundaries were quickly redrawn to stop the residents of halfmilliondollar condos from voting in village elections...

...More often than not, in these middle-class families, the wife who owns an island kitchen works long hours to pay the remodeling bill, and dinner is ethnic take-out picked up on the way home...

...Stopping growth is almost never advocated for its own sake, but is justified in terms of some other concern—traffic congestion, preventing crime, saving trees, preserving historic buildings, or whatever else comes to mind...

...Federal Realty Investment Trust, the largest builder of street-front retail centers on the Main Streets of the nation's suburbs, sees "barriers to entry" as a favorable factor when it makes investment decisions...

...In these hothouses of environmental activism, opposition to the automobile rarely extends so far as to support building anything new close to public transit...

...even Davis's penetrating analysis too often accepts the assertions of angry homeowners that their objective is to maintain the worth of their homes...

...Transparently self-interested propaganda by developers and their friends serves only to reinforce the NIMBYs' image as suffering victims, and rare efforts at serious analysis, such as Mike Davis's lacerating account of Los Angeles homeowner associations in City of Quartz, make little impression...

...But questions of traffic and development that directly affect real estate bring forth the rankest opportunism...

...However, economic and political trends set in motion by the continuing spread of suburban sprawl no longer permit a detached view...

...Vigilant to protect against the intrusion of lower-income and lower-prestige neighbors, townhouse residents fight apartments while single-family householders combat townhouses...

...But they view opposition to their plans as nothing more than a misunderstanding of their ideas, a consequence of miseducation if not plain stupidity...

...Homeowners sought psychological differentiation in neighborhoods as in soft drinks, clothing, and automobiles...

...In some cases, homeowners would reap an enormous financial windfall if their neighborhoods were rezoned to allow greater density...

...The added expenses reinforce the normal tendency of the real estate market to concentrate on upper-income sectors, limiting most neo-traditional developments to the high end of the market...

...The aggrieved residents quickly collected money to hire a zoning lawyer, and two evenings of hearings were filled with bitter protests against maltreatment at the hands of the power structure...

...Where Chevy Chase projects an aristocratic image—columnist George Will lives next door to one of the homeowner leaders—the style of Takoma Park is funk...

...Clearly, money is not at stake here...

...After fifty years of metastatic growth, the effects of suburban development have become inescapable, and land use questions are moving into the center of public debate...

...ALTHOUGH SUBURBAN homeowners have organized civic associations since at least the 1920s, the slow-growth ideology is a more recent phenomenon...

...On an overt level, by limiting the number who can live in upscale subdivisions, the antigrowth movement satisfies the need of wealthy homeowners to distinguish themselves from their neighbors...

...Organized homeowners largely kept out of state and national politics, hobbled by the mixing of Democrats and Republicans among their membership and by a localism that Davis brilliantly compares to the worldview ascribed by Karl Marx to the French peasants of the 1840s...

...These traits are most visible in the copperpot neighborhoods, where strongly branded real estate generates an intense slow-growth politics...

...The monotony of suburban subdivisions creates a demand for urban public spaces...

...Big houses with yards were no longer unambiguous badges of success...

...He works as a consultant on ground water and soil pollution...

...But toward the end of the second night of hearings, a simple question was asked: Aren't some single-family houses in this neighborhood bigger than what the church wants to build...

...In outer suburbs, where the task is to stop sprawl development, this philosophy expresses itself very logically in alliances with homeowner groups whose social bases are quite similar to their own...

...But its two sides—the encouragement and subsidization of low-density construction in outer suburbs and the stifling of concentrated growth in existing communities— are attacked separately...

...Environmentalists, too, have a mixed record in confronting the obstacles to transit-oriented redevelopment...

...In short, the sixties were when consumers began DISSENT / Winter 2001 n 51 SUBURBS , STATUS , AND SPRAWL to buy the designer label rather than the clothing itself...

...To make walking practical, new developments must be built with greater density than suburbanites are used to...

...Demand for suburban real estate is now most intense near transit stations, and buyers flock to New Urbanist projects...

...Clearly, smart growth won't happen unless it can happen in places where people want to live...

...DISSENT / Winter 2001 n 53 SUBURBS , STATUS , AND SPRAWL They advocate, design, and occasionally build "neo-traditional," mixed-use communities from the ground up...

...Local governments have been quick to respond to this crisis with "antimansionization" rules that protect the existing scale of neighborhoods...

...People who cook regularly in copper pots don't keep them polished...

...However convincing these arguments may be in the abstract, decisions about what actually gets built and lived in are made about particular places and not about categories...

...As these words are written, owners of restored Victorian houses in Takoma Park are righteously waging battle to prevent construction of townhouses on an empty lot next to the local subway station...

...Oregon's long-established rules limiting the spread of suburbs have attracted new attention, a less far-reaching program has now been enacted in Maryland, and Al Gore embraced the issue at the national level...

...When ordinary mothers who stayed home and prepared family meals felt inferior to rich women who had cooks, the parlor signified middle-class status and the kitchen was hidden in the back...

...With infill development banned from most land near mass transit and made difficult where allowed, the supply of transit-accessible housing in middle-class neighborhoods falls far short of the growing demand, and prices shoot upward...

...Builders of early subdivisions encouraged the creation of civic associations to enforce restrictive covenants, and from the forties through the sixties real estate interests opposed racial integration and public housing in close alliance with homeowner groups...

...Places like Chevy Chase and Takoma Park are blessed with especially powerful brands...

...And, ignoring labels altogether, the NIMBY politicians of Takoma Park and Chevy Chase are close allies at election time...

...The no-growth movement drew scant attention from students of politics...

...Aiming to reinforce the brand image of the locality with matching political signifiers, they care little whether their engagement will accomplish anything beyond that...

...In this environment, NIMBYs become the crucial obstacle to smart growth...

...When less affluent areas join in, they can at least share the feeling that someone or something is being kept out...

...The one "traditional" and the other "subversive," they are the real estate equivalents of Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein...

...The shine on the copper betrays the kitchen's function as an emblem of status...

...When, as in one recent local example, angry homeowners rally to preserve an outstanding specimen of the strip-mall architecture of the 1940s, it is easy to be cynical...

...With housing being such a large part of the economy and so closely tied to its consumers' self-image, this transition was inevitably reflected in the real estate market...

...As traffic congestion pushes some to road rage, others choose to leave their cars at home...

...A different type of NIMBY can be found in the suburban enclaves of post-sixties radicalism that have grown up around some cities...

...Sprawl now draws wide attention as a social problem...

...What is threatened, rather, is the image of the community...

...nurses' aides and kitchen staff arrive for the morning shift before the lawyers and lobbyists of the neighborhood pull out of their driveways...

...National environmental groups like the Sierra Club sponsor anti-sprawl campaigns...

...Chevy Chase Republicans favor intrusive government regulation of land use, while many Takoma Park leftists support a high-priced country club's efforts to obstruct construction of mass transit through its golf course...

...In today's working-class families, both parents have jobs, and mealtime is a run to McDonald's...

...The homes in these communities are sometimes modest in size, having been built when the area was less expensive...

...By separating land uses, forcing buildings away from the street, and requiring enormous amounts of subsidized parking, the zoning rules desiccate public spaces and force people into automobiles...

...The most sustained attention to the impoverishment of the human environment by suburbanization has come from the architects and planners of the New Urbanist movement...

...The excuse, whatever it is, gives the neighborhood the equivalent of a brand identity...

...The essence of the sprawl problem is the creation of new jobs and housing in a spreadout pattern to which the only practicable access is by automobile...

...Antipathy to developers has no relation to their degree of avarice—if anything, more hostility is directed at nonprofit builders of low-income housing than at the truly greedy...

...Even today, the mechanisms of the real estate market make it easier to develop empty land than to redevelop, and lenders insist on layouts with too much parking and too little access by foot...

...The adjective functions not to convey meaning but to disguise it, allowing one to criticize the wealthy entrepreneur who builds new houses when the real target is the ordinary people who will live in them...

...With air polluted by increasing automobile traffic and rivers threatened by runoff from lawns and pavement, national environmental organizations have made the fight against sprawl a major goal...

...So ended one small skirmish in the development wars that have become a staple of local politics across the country...

...New distinctions had to be fabricated, even as old-style exclusion of racial and religious minorities was being suppressed by force of law...

...Beyond that, the arguments used to fight new development allow suburbanites to distinguish themselves from fifties-style conformists...

...Why, after decades of suburban development, did an antigrowth movement arise then...

...Conflict with labor was muted, perhaps because the segments of construction affected by growth controls are largely nonunion...

...Ideology varies to match the local style: opponents of development in Chevy Chase led 52 n DISSENT / Winter 2001 SUBURBS , STATUS , AND SPRAWL a successful campaign to pass county-wide tax limits, while the most strongly anti-development member of the Takoma Park City Council is a leftist who advocates massive increases in school spending...

...Just as the ideal of beautiful skin changed from pale to tan when poor people came in from the fields to work in factories, changing social conditions have reordered the hierarchy of rooms in the house...

...And traffic congestion was not a problem...

...In sunbelt cities such as Dallas and Atlanta, where sprawl is at its worst, real estate interests are even toning down their long-standing support for highway transportation and lobbying for expanded mass transit...

...Developers are willing to make a profit wherever it can be made, and as walkable places to live and work are increasingly sought after, builders of traditional suburbs are retooling to construct "infill" projects in cities and older suburbs...

...But both types of NIMBYs share the same objective, that of protecting distinctions that allow them to feel superior to outsiders...

...The automobile-centered model of metropolitan growth is collapsing under the weight of traffic congestion...

...The key to decoding this phrase is that the word "greedy" lacks semantic content...

...As the years pass, almost anything that might be built near someone's house has become an object of wrath...

...RDOTED AS IT IS in status differentiation, NIMBY politics has developed a distinct style...

...Long after suburbs had been scorned in folk song as the setting of "boxes made of tickytacky," their land use remained a subject of serious study only by those directly involved...