This is about the website of a group in the USA calling itself the American
Dream Coalition, at http://www.americandreamcoalition.org.

Most of the positions are found in the "Journalists's Guide" section at
http://www.americandreamcoalition.org/guide.html, and can be fairly
summarized as follows:

1.  Most Americans prefer a lifestyle involving cars, secluded houses, and
lots of parking spaces.  2.  This preference isn't enough to prevent the
construction of multi-level apartment buildings and rapid transit lines, so
a coalition is needed to fight such proposals.  3.  To convert a farm into
ranch houses on large pieces of land is OK.  To convert any residential use
to a higher density residential use is not OK.  4.  "Smart Growth" has made
an obvious mess of areas where it's been tried, but vigilance is needed to
stop it being used elsewhere.

The first point is debatable, but surely it's reaching too far to say that
everyone who drives a car does so by choice.  If that's true, why are the
four most commonly seen words in help-wanted ads "must have own car"? If
cars were always people's natural preference, you'd think that specifying
that would be unnecessary.  And as far as people preferring secluded living
quarters, think of the opposite: What residential areas in the USA are the
*least* secluded? Neighborhoods like Boston's Beacon Hill and North End,
and San Francisco's Telegraph Hill come to mind.  Here there are upwards of
60 units per acre.  But these places are hardly slums housing the
underclass.  To the contrary, almost without exception, places like this
are a premium, lived in by people who are far more successful, and who have
more control over their lives, than the average American.

To be sure, when you get above about 20 units per acre (roughly, a
population of 20,000 in a square mile), parking gets tricky and driving
slow.  But, there's less of a need to drive long distances, or drive at
all, and neighborhoods can offer more specialized amenities.  Nobody, not
me nor the American Dream Coalition, can know how the public would respond
to such a choice, for the simple reason that the choice is simply not
available to the majority of Americans.

The vocabulary used in the Coalition's site is heavy with words like
freedom and choice, but it becomes clear that one particular lifestyle is
being defended.

For the record, I have nothing against people living the lifestyle this
group defends.  But what amazes me is the degree to which they consider it
under attack.  A casual glance around most places shows that they've
already won what they claim to be their fight.  Almost all new housing
construction I've seen is large single-family homes on large lots.  The
density is at most 2 units per acre, and usually a lot less.  The "cluster"
model some areas have adopted, meaning townhouses, isn't different in any
substantial way.  The cluster is not big enough to be support even a corner
store, and is surrounded by enough open space to make the overall density
about the same.  Usually these new developments are far from a town center,
and often the road leading to the townhouse development doesn't even have a
sidewalk.  The website would have you believe that somehow this is under
attack by ominous intruders that want to take it away and force everyone
into a high-rise! I wish they'd mention who these intruders are.

The situation with transportation is similar.  I don't know the exact
figure, but surely the portion of USA passenger miles traveled in private
cars must be upwards of 85%.  Again the site's tone is that somehow this is
under attack, and again the site is not very specific about where the
threat is from.  The "CAFE" mileage standards? Whatever the figures are
these days, it hasn't prevented the roads from being full of huge SUVs.  Is
the building of new rapid transit lines - a rare event in most areas -
somehow an assault on car drivers? Last I checked, there was nobody forcing
people to ride the lines.

I grew up in a residential area in Massachusetts that was built at about
0.4 units per acre, which is roughly the overall average for the state.
Despite the vast stretches of woods surrounding everything there, extremely
little of it was accessible to the public.  The town's only municipal park
was a tiny sliver of land called the "common" which is smaller than even
the smallest city parks.  This wasn't a problem as a child, since I had
access to the backyards of playmates, but adults there are essentially
limited to their own yard.

The Coalition's site ("Open Space") calls people's backyards a "valuable
open space".  More valuable, to the public, than a public park? Give me a
break.  As an male adult, I'm sure anyone seeing me in their backyard would
instantly notify the police.  So, if I want someplace to breathe the air, I
have to either use a park, or buy and maintain my own private park, that
would be empty and unused most of the time.  The site seems to consider the
latter option always the better one, without any discussion.

Perhaps because the site so constantly uses the terms "choice" and
"freedom", though, there is a small gesture of tolerance: They think it
would be OK for "developers to try innovative design concepts such as
walkable communities" ...  but only in "undeveloped areas".  This is
absurd.  How walkable would life be in a development of (probably at most)
a few hundred people, out in the middle of nowhere? It's unlikely it would
even have stores, let alone workplaces.  Would the Coalition approve of a
rapid transit link from such a place, after disapproving of rapid transit
in more metropolitan areas?

One of the rhetorical techniques the site uses is to cite the situation in
Portland, Oregon, and imply that this going to spread to the rest of the
USA unless the Coalition leads a fight against it.  I should state that
I've never been to Portland.  But the contradictions on the site's page
about Portland ("Smart Growth Disasters" -> "Portland") make it hard for me
to take their argument seriously.  After complaining that housing there is
unaffordable, the site complains about high apartment vacancy rates! That
is a "problem" many Boston and New York apartment-seekers would love to
have.  The site complains about "few roads and lots of rail transit".  Care
to give some numbers about this? How many miles of road, and how many miles
of rail transit?

The main bogeyman seems to be a concept called "Smart Growth" which the
site doesn't really precisely define.  I've heard that term used here in
New Jersey, when Gov.  McGreevey announced a plan whereby development would
be encouraged in some areas of the state, and discouraged in others,
apparently by tweaking the environmental permit process.  Nowhere were
there plans for evicting people from their 2-car garage ranch houses to
build apartments! In New Jersey, as in most of the USA I've seen, new
rental apartments under construction are a very rare sight - probably for
reasons having to do with neighborhood protest and variance requirements.
The New Jersey plan would not override any controls municipalities have on
building, so the main effect probably would be a slowing down of
construction in more pristine parts of the state.  Anyway, it's not clear
whether this plan is even still in effect.

This site probably wouldn't be worth the effort to argue against, except
that the effects of the thinking the site represents are pernicious.  For
example, for cars to be an effective way of moving people around, they
apparently have to be virtually everywhere.  This is not true of rapid
transit.  You can get off a rapid transit line, go where you are going, and
not have to look at rapid transit again until you're ready to go back.  The
same is not true of cars.  They are constantly in your face, surrounding
every building, a presence in virtually every place the public is allowed
to go.  To step outside, usually, is to enter a world where you have to
constantly cower and cringe and duck against oncoming traffic.  Sadly, this
probably isn't going to change anytime soon.  But what amazes me is the
extent to which protests form against the establishment of even a token
refuge.  Set up a couple miles of walk or bike path in a township that has
dozens of miles of auto roads, and wham! To see the reaction in protest,
you'd think a new nuclear plant had been proposed.

Anyway, a careful reading of the site reveals the limits of how far they
believe "choice" should go.  What if someone owns land and WANTS to build
multi-floor apartments on it, and, surprise, people actually want to live
there? Maybe that's a bit too much choice for the American Dream Coalition.
Or, what if someone wants to skip building a parking lot and build right up
to the edge of the street? Let people take the bus there, or park on the
street? The owner is willing to bet that prospective tenants/customers will
do that.  Isn't this choice also? I've seen very few cases of either of
these in the Eastern USA, it's usually strictly prohibited by local laws.
But the Coalition still thinks someone is attacking their lifestyle.

    Julian Brookes
    June 25, 2004
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