THE MYTH OF SUBURBAN SPRAWL.

• Author: DILORENZO, THOMAS J.

TO MILLIONS of Americans, a house in the suburbs with a nice yard, garden, and a little open space is the American Dream. To environmentalists and urban planners, though, it is a nightmare. The invectives they use to describe suburbia reveal a visceral hatred of it:

* Urban affairs writer Neal Pierce has referred to "suburban sprawl" as "a virus eating us from the inside out."

* The Arizona Republic has called the suburbs "insane," "destructive," and "nightmarish."

* The Sierra Club views suburban development as a "menace" and a threat to Americans' "rural legacy" that must be eliminated.

* Urban planner Andres Duany believes suburban sprawl is "a cancerous growth" on society.

* Suburban living is "something to be opposed instead of welcomed," according to Vice Pres. Al Gore.

* New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman compares the war against suburban sprawl to the struggle against communism: "This time the enemy isn't the Soviets, but sprawl."

Its critics have compiled a list of alleged disasters caused by suburban living that verges on the hysterical. They claim that it is responsible for profound environmental stress, intractable traffic congestion, expensive housing, loss of open space, the virtual destruction of U.S. cities, isolated lives, racial segregation, ugliness, destruction of wetlands and recreational areas, higher taxes, asthma among children, vehicular accidents, unemployment and poverty, destruction of the family farm, demise of the public schools, and, according to Sprawl Watch Clearinghouse, even the menacing spectacle of "neo-Nazi young people." Vice Pres. Gore has even stated that, in contrast to the calm serenity of, say, Manhattan traffic, driving in the suburbs is the root cause of "road rage."

Many of the problems the critics of suburbia are concerned with have been either greatly exaggerated or simply fabricated. Moreover, the proposed "solution" to these problems--centralized governmental planning of where people live and work and how they commute (i.e., regulatory sprawl) is bound to be economically inefficient, harmful to growth, and inherently inequitable.

Smart growth is the environmental movement's chosen euphemism for centralized governmental planning. The essential idea is that the free choices and careful lifestyle planning done by individual families in cooperation with the housing industry and local public officials are inherently "stupid" and socially destructive, whereas the coercive planning schemes favored by environmentalists and urban planners are "smart" and socially enlightened.

The "Smart Growth Network" is a coalition of environmental organizations, urban planners, and city politicians. The ultimate aim of the latter group is apparently to force people to move back into the metropolises where they can pay city, rather than suburban, taxes. It is a "bootleggers and Baptists" kind of coalition, to borrow economist Bruce Yandle's phrase that he used to describe the coalition in favor of alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. The Baptists favored prohibition for moral reasons, while the bootleggers wanted it for purely economic motives--it eliminated their competition. Similarly, the attack on suburbia is an important element of the secular "religion" of environmentalism, whereas urban politicians are in it for the (tax) money.

In order to correct all of the supposed inefficiencies of suburban development, smart growth proponents have proposed an ever-growing list of regulations, taxes, and myriad other governmental interventions. The charge that suburban development is economically inefficient ignores the most elementary of economic principles. Allocative efficiency means that, in competitive markets, resources tend to be used by those who value them most highly. Those people who value a particular parcel of land more than the current owners do, for example, will offer the owners a price they find too attractive to refuse. It is in this way that resources tend to be allocated to the most highly valued uses.

Smart growth advocates are using a bogus definition of "efficiency" that ignores...