If Austin’s right, then Houston, Texas, should be a hotbed of new urbanism -- for its people are totally unencumbered by “restrictive commercial codes”; Houston, indeed, actually has no zoning ordinances whatsoever. But as we know, Houston is sprawling, more so than most cities.
And outside Manhattan, there’s actually plenty of residential living space available in downtowns. Go try and rent a apartment in the heart of Houston, you’ll easily find tons of chic apartments that rent for under $1000 a month. When I was a graduate student at Duke, it took me no time at all to find a condominium in a converted tobacco warehouse that was livable and pleasant. And with its 10-foot high ceilings, wood floors, and large windows overlooking the old Durham Bulls baseball stadium, it was made of the “industrial,” “authentic” Stuff White People Like.
How was a 27-year with a modest net worth able to make a down payment on such a pad? Well, the place wasn’t very expensive. Very few people actually want to live in downtown Durham, mainly because they don’t want get caught in a gang fight or have their children experience the Diversity of Durham’s public school system. Virtually all of the nice people living in my apartment building were under 30, retired or empty nesters, gay, or childless yuppies and professor types.
This situation in Durham repeats itself around the country. There is a national surplus of urban housing, especially now in places like Chicago, Pittsburg, and Durham as America is (sadly) de-industrialized and former manufacturing concerns are converted into Yuppie paradises.
“White flight” from the cities coincides with urban rioting, the ‘70s crime wave, the deterioration of public schools, and explosion in the cost of private education, not with the implementation of new zoning codes.
Sprawl is created by government, in the sense that it's government schools and government welfare recipients that people are running away from. But this isn’t what Austin is arguing. My guess is that the kind of tinkering with population density that people like Matthew Yglesias desire would have an effect that‘d be, at most, trivial.
Suburban sprawl is also impossible without the automobile and cheap gas -- neither of which are exactly welfare line items. A vast array of roads is also indispensable, though I doubt Austin would want to argue that the federal highway system should be dismantled. Moreover, even if we were able to actualize Walter Block’s dream of private roads across the country, I’m not sure that we’d have less suburbs or that they wouldn’t look any less “homogenized” than they do now.
A factor that drives up demand for suburban homes that is vastly more significant than zoning is the availability of easy credit over the past quarter century. FDR got the ball rolling with government backed mortgages; Bill Clinton and George W. Bush turned it into a science. And after a bubble in housing, Virginia Tech researchers say that there’s a surplus of 22 million “large-lot homes” (also known as McMansions) around the country. The strip malls, which Austin also laments, followed right along, with a bubble in commercial real-estate that rivaled that of subprime. In my view, a lot of the financing behind all this is about to explode, and I expect great tracts of “ghost malls” blighting the countryside, but this won’t necessarily mean that more people move to the big city. Indeed, I expect a growth in gated communities, for a variety of factors.
Though I generally advocate “laissez-faire,” I’d be remiss not to mention that a certain kind of statism has greatly increased the allure of the great cities. The beautiful Brownstones of New York might be the product of the free market, but wonders likes Central Park (and similarly stunning Prospect Park in Brooklyn) are definitely not -- they were public works begun back in the time when the administrations and mayors were more interested in making the city beautiful than increasing the entitlements gravy train. Munich, which lacks the kind of underclass one finds in New York, was able to spend lavishly on an up-to-date, non-urine-smelling public transportation, beautiful English Gardens, opera al fresco and more.
This being said, I’d defend the ‘burbs against a lot of what Austin has to say. I sympathize with families who want to have a house with a yard for a dog and want to live near a school where their kids won’t get shot. Society is an organism: much as plants will bend to reach light, society will adjust and mutate in order to survive and flourish. The key to this is what Steve Sailer calls “affordable family formation.” And certainly one reason European Americans have been able to raise children in contemporary America has been their ability to escape its big cities.
A lot of sprawl is cooky-cutter and ugly, and maybe even a little stifling, but this has little to do with commercial zoning and "statism" and a lot to do with the saddening lack of imagination, taste, and charm in our contemporary culture.
And let’s not forget what real government housing looks like...
