Alex Steffen at WorldChanging in January, with My Other Car is a Bright
Green City (edited
for publication in
BusinessWeek),
and Allison Arieff at the New York Times’s By Design blog on Monday,
with Is Your House Making You Look
Fat?,
take involved and interesting looks at the environmental, energy, and
health consequences of America’s love affair with sprawl. In Steffen’s
words: “The best car-related innovation we have is not to improve the
car, but eliminate the need to drive it everywhere we go.” Arieff
mirrors his sentiment: “First, let’s talk about cars. Stop designing
for them.“
Their excellent essays have spurred varied responses.
Ezra Klein at the American Prospect, yesterday: How We Live
Now:
There’s often a tendency to assume that the status quo is the most
“natural” way for things to be, and that rejiggering the relevant
subsidies is somehow more artificial and presumptuous. But the current
system was built atop a massive structure of subsidies and tax breaks.
The mortgage tax deduction advantaged bigger homes; funding schools
through inequitable property taxes encouraged families to move out of
cities where the property taxes were low and into richer suburbs where
the schools would be wealthy; putting billions into costly and
little-used roads made far-flung developments appear cheap to those
who only saw the finished product; underfunding public transportation
heavily influenced development patterns, and so on and so forth.
Matt Yglesias picks up at the Atlantic:
Dense:
What’s particularly astounding about this stuff, in my view, is that
fixing the problem would hardly require some totalitarian density
police to come around and force us to all live closer together.
Instead, the main step we would need to take would simply be to allow
people to build more densely if they want to. As a secondary measure,
scrapping or limiting the tax code’s weird and destructive subsidy of
big houses would
do some good.
Other blogs that picked the thread up include Duncan Black’s
Eschaton,
2020
Hindsight,
Urban Grounds,
Dove’s Eye
View,
Trinifar’s Some Maintenance
Required,
The Vigorous
North,
and The
Velorution.