Suburbs still a haven of selfishness and racism

Probably the biggest obstacle in America to an environmentally sustainable society (other than maybe meat-eating) is the low density of our cities. There are a handful of high-density cities built in the 19th century, but the fastest-growing cities like Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix, and Las Vegas are almost completely composed of sprawl, and even the dense cities are surrounded by their own sprawling (and rapidly-growing) suburbs.

The main problem is that building and maintaining sprawl is an incredibly inefficient use of resources. It takes more land and covers it with concrete, strip malls, and TGIFridays; it uses more raw materials to build and heat so many one-family homes and to extend the roads, sewers, and electrical lines; and worst of all it requires that cars be the main form of transportation. Public transit is only feasible under conditions of high density, when ridership is high enough to sustain regular bus and train routes, while walking or biking the extended distances of the suburbs is usually not realistic for many people.

Long Island is the birthplace of sprawl, where the first true suburbs emerged after World War II. It is also an unusually progressive suburban area, electing more Democrats than Republicans and county leaders who argue for denser, more vertical development. But the impulses that have always led people to move to the suburbs - a desire for a big home with access to good schools and a neighborhood without any minorities or poor people - are still strong even there, even in the face of an impending crisis in housing affordability. A recent survey found that

Fifty-nine percent of Long Islanders could never imagine themselves living in an apartment. Asked which type of neighborhood they preferred — one where you could walk to stores or one that required driving — 56 percent said they would rather drive. Meanwhile, only 7 percent agreed that “creating ethnically and economically diverse neighborhoods” was the major advantage of building more affordable housing. Asked what the worst disadvantage was, 20 percent said “bringing in the wrong kinds of people.”

If I were optimistic I'd say that once we get a carbon tax or its equivalent, a lot of this problem would go away. If the price of fossil fuels started to reflect their real social costs, the building of new sprawl would cease, cities like Houston or Phoenix would collapse economically and become the Detroits of the next generation, and high-density development would take off. But reading comments on Chicago Tribune articles related to transit, as I am wont to do, makes me think otherwise. Here's a fairly typical example, which the comment service identified as originating in Oak Brook, Illinois (errors of spelling and spacing preserved):

Maybe you can send all the illegals from your state [he is responding to a poster from California] and they can drive the buses and trains for $2.00 HR! Never mind we have way to many already!I hope the CTA goes down the toilet if you cant run a business with the money you have shut down we in the burbs are tired of bailing out Chicago! I'm lucky i dont buy anything in the collar counties so the only money they will ever get from is the money i cant control them from getting!I will be moving shortly from crook state!

The heady mix of antitax selfishness and anti-immigrant racism is pretty telling, and I think once the attack on car culture and sprawl starts taking off the backlash will only get worse. My fear is that we might be facing a new culture war, not over religious issues (fundamentalists may even prove to be allies), but over the sacrifices needed to combat global warming and the particular brand of anti-egalitarian, neoliberal individualism that could be called the ideology of the suburbs. It's a confrontation that will have to be made at some point, but I'm worried that getting bogged down in it might fatally delay urgent steps needed to control greenhouse gas emissions.