 “...People think that current development is the result of the free market, which is absolutely wrong. Everything that happens is because of a regulation that exists. '...”Tim Keane, Charleston City Planning
What, you may asking by now, does all this have to do with my dismal social life, occasional bouts of road rage and jaded appetite for the latest in multimedia gadgetry?
Planning Commissioner Ellison diagnosed the problem, even if she isn’t fond of the cure.
In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Harvard Political Science professor Robert D. Putnam paints much the same picture of contemporary society. Inventorying a vast array of statistics about American social habits, he found that we have become increasingly disconnected. “Television, two-career families, suburban sprawl, generational changes in values--these and other changes in American society have meant that fewer and fewer of us find that the League of Women Voters, or the United Way, or the Shriners, or the monthly bridge club, or even a Sunday picnic with friends fits the way we have come to live,” he writes.
If bowling leagues and bridge clubs seem like leisure-time luxuries that society might reasonably get along without, Putnam connects the waning of our sociable instincts to the falling levels of volunteerism, civic engagement and voter turnout that threaten to undermine the foundations of American democracy. “Our growing social-capital deficit threatens educational performance, safe neighborhoods, equitable tax collection, democratic responsiveness, everyday honesty, and even our health and happiness.”
Although some people like to blame television, I would argue that the de-evolution of the American city into a far-flung tangle of automobile-based sprawl is the greater culprit. For most of the last half century, bulldozers and builders have swarmed into the countryside around every American city, cranking out subdivisions the way Henry ford turned out cars.
The heyday of mass production brought material plenty but a great loss of variety. The consumer was allowed choose from a very limited range of options: three television networks, a Ford or Chevy, Coke or Pepsi, “taste’s great” or “less filling.” Homebuyers were offered ranch homes, cape cod cottages and split levels tricked up in their choice of Tudor, Spanish hacienda or Colonial Revival details. If they wanted to venture out into the world, they could wheel right up to the door at a strip center or leave their car behind in an enormous asphalt parking lot to enjoy the air-conditioned delights of an enclosed shopping mall.
As with many ideas that are outliving their usefulness, the segregation of land uses was refined into ever more narrow niches. Residents of single-family homes came to regard residents of apartments and condominiums as undesirables. Moreover, the owner of a $265,000 house could not be expected to endure a $235,000 house next door. Isolated from the friendly round of community life, retailers increasingly relied on franchising and television advertising rather than personal relationships.
In the new automobile ecosystem, retailers evolved like dinosaurs from superstores into megastores. The holy grail of retail became the “category killer,” a store so dominant in one area of consumer goods that it would literally destroy all competition and monopolize customers within its reach. Every time they shed their skin and headed for greener pastures farther out in the suburbs, they left behind vacant big-box stores that were often too large for other users. Take a drive down Folly Road. You can count the hulking skeletons of outdated superstores, check out the vacant K-Mart or enjoy an unobstructed vista of the vast treeless expanse of parking lot from the windows of the Sunspot Café.
It didn’t take long before a vague sense of dissatisfaction set in. Everyone might like to pal around with Ronald McDonald, but sitting in the drive-through waiting for some Happy Meals proved a less sociable experience. Walmart, the T-Rex of chain retailers, tried to personalize its image by hiring elderly greeters to accost shoppers as they enter the store, an experience sometimes as creepy as encountering a talking robot face on an ATM machine.
Bad omens began to accumulate that seemed plausibly related to the sprawling isolation of modern cities. Teenage suicide skyrocketed across the suburbs. Drunk driving increased. Taxes and insurance spiraled upward. Attendance at PTA meetings grew sparse. Americans earned the distinction of the “fattest” people on earth. Disinvestment, poverty, drug addiction and crime made the term “inner city” a scary one for Americans who watched the carnage on the nightly news and vowed to avoid downtown like the plague.
And then there were the steadily worsening traffic jams that plagued suburban areas everywhere. Nothing gets Americans’ attention faster than being stuck in traffic. Despite pouring billions upon billions into road widening schemes and other transportation improvements, commute times soared and automobile-related air pollution thickened. The once bucolic city of Charlotte, NC now regularly announces bad air days when it is deemed unsafe to breathe too much of the poisonous atmosphere.
Zoning policies in cities across the country not only abetted this process, but made it practically inevitable. Indeed, zoning laws soon made it illegal to build anything but sprawl, even in areas that had formerly been rich pedestrian environments. Planner Keane explains, “People think that current development is the result of the free market, which is absolutely wrong. Everything that happens is because of a regulation that exists. You are told how many parking spaces you must have, the setback of the building, what kind of signage you can have... Through our codes we are telling people what to build, and we are getting exactly what we asked for, even if its not what we really want.”
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