Kevin Delaney 12/29/1999
Wednesday, December 29, 1999
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Clinton on Wednesday proposed adding 120,000 new families to a housing subsidy program aimed at helping low-income workers move closer to jobs in the booming suburbs.
This morning, I intended to go outside for a short run. Unfortunately, Salt Lake's famed temperature inversions had trapped enough emissions from the million plus cars choking the suburban streets to make the air too poisoned to complete the run.
Perhaps I could find console on the Internet. I logged into Lycos, clicked on the news, and found our illustrious leader flushing $690 million tax payers' dollars into a plan to push even more people into the traffic clogged streets of our poorly conceived suburban nightmares.
Like many Americans, I have watched thousands of square miles sucked into the bottomless hole of the American suburb. I have watched the suburbs built in the 50s and 60s turn to slums, as new suburbs sprout on their outskirts. The new suburbs destined to be slums in twenty to fifty years.
It is absolutely amazing, the great American suburb has a shorter life span than the average American! We have plowed under the future of our nation for an unsustainable system of suburbs that will have degenerated from model community to slum within a single lifetime. Already in Salt Lake, the older suburbs have become far more dangerous than downtown city streets. Downtown streets, have police and community services to keep order. The burbs have only gangs.
As historians begin to study the cause of this self-destructive suburbanization. They have discovered that suburban sprawl is not simply a case of the free market gone horribly wrong. In the last fifty years, cities and states have subsidized growth in the suburbs, while raising taxes and passing restrictive zoning laws which prevented the redevelopment of cities.
Perhaps the best example of government subsidies of the suburbs is the billions of dollars spent on roads and freeways. However, we also find high sales and property taxes encouraging new businesses to built outlets just outside city limits. Even less subtle actions, such as subsidizing the building of sewer systems, and the building of schools, have helped move Americans from the cities to the burbs.
The massive suburbanization that we have seen in the last generation is not natural. Looking at the ancient cities of Europe, we see that the natural tendency has been for continuous rebuilding and regeneration of the city. As the cities prosper, the inefficient older structures are torn down, and replaced with new, higher valued structures. Yet in the US, we pass laws to prevent developers from tearing down 60 year old houses, claiming them to be historic landmarks. Taxes and zoning laws prevent the construction of more valuable structures.
Yes, there are free market forces that have led the development of the burbs. But as we look at tax policies, zoning laws, and government subsidies, we find our governments policies have accelerated the process, and created a completely unnatural environment. The suburban lifestyle is not sustainable. The 40 mile daily commute cannot last forever. We are already seeing the transformation of 30 year old suburbs turning into crack houses, meth labs, and slums.
But as I try to hide from the smog covered Salt Lake valley, I hear President Clinton spending $690 million dollars to push another 120,000 people into the burbs. The influx of tax payer money, and pressure of 120,000 people will cause developers to plow under several thousand American farms, and further add to the unsustainable suburban sprawl which has consumed already too much of our nation.
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