No Light Rail in Vancouver!
Time and The New York Times Get It Wrong
Writers for both Time and The New York Times have recently pontificated on the need to rebuild American cities so as to stop “sprawl.” The authors of these articles completely fail to understand recent housing markets and urban trends.
Writer Bryan Walsh, who has previously written on environmental issues for Time, claims that “The American suburb as we know it is dying,” which is a good thing because the suburbs “left our nation addicted to cars.” (Which, of course, is backwards: cars allowed more people to live in the suburbs.)
Walsh quotes Arthur Nelson, a planner from Virginia Tech, who claims that “by 2025
there will be a surplus of 22 million large-
This, of course, is just smart growth clap trap. There will be no “surplus” of homes unless the government somehow interferes with the market place. Of course, it has shown that it is perfectly capable of doing so, but mostly to create shortages, not surpluses.
Meanwhile, New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff argues that we need to “reinvent” cities because they are “vastly more efficient than suburbs.” Excuse me, has he been to a city lately? Taxes are higher, homes and other real estate are more expensive, travel is more congested, and the metropolitan area with the nation’s best transit system has the highest average travel time to work. Just what is so efficient about all that?
Meanwhile, Ouroussoff describes the suburbs as “ecologically unsustainable gated
communities.” What is so unsustainable about a gate? More to the point, the Department
of Energy says that single-
Exhibit A in Ouroussoff’s review of how we need to rebuild our cities is New Orleans — which in fact is a prime example of why government needs to stay out of such reconstruction. New Orleans would be rebuilt today — not every building but far more than has been done — were it not for government planners and bureaucrats obstructing the way.
In the future, the Antiplanner hopes that publications like these will spare us architecture critics and give us more economists, like Edward Glaeser and Edwin Mills, who understand how cities actually work.