Sprawl Costs Us All

[See also: Sprawl is not the best alternative]

Although newer developments may change this pattern, the vast majority of what California builds now is auto-centric sprawl--despite market premiums paid for the pedestrian-friendly mixed use of traditional neighborhoods. Since recent fires threaten sprawl, or edge-city housing throughout the state, it seems appropriate to remind people that fire danger is not the only cost of this development pattern, and that fire danger and several other problems will persist until we return to that traditional mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly development style rather than continuing to expand our suburbs at their edge.

More compact development is roughly half as expensive to maintain as sprawl, so sprawl costs local governments dollars they might need for other services, and just from a financial standpoint, sprawl degrades the public realm. Traditional development also means a reduction in vehicle miles traveled of roughly half what sprawl requires--something worth exploring in an era when CO2-producing commutes make global warming encourage those fires too.

The hallmark of sprawl itself is the mandatory automobile. Every driving age adult must own one, and every trip of any significance must be in a car. We build our cities for auto dealers, then. This requirement is also one of the most regressive "taxes," crushing the poor, and worsening the banana republic level of wealth inequality in U.S. society.

Besides separating different incomes into class mono-cultures--"No multi-unit buildings among the mansions, I tell you, harrumph!"--sprawl separates different uses--residences, commerce, offices, industry--connecting them only with auto-friendly streets. That is why the auto is not optional. It's the only connection between these uses.

Crossing sprawl streets is dangerous for pedestrians, too. The little tertiary street in front of my (sprawl) house is 40 feet wide. That's two 12 foot travel lanes and two eight foot parking lanes. The 12 foot travel lanes are as wide as freeway lanes, and unsurprisingly constitute an invitation to speed that is so difficult to resist that the County's standards for these streets require them to bend every 1,000 lineal feet. Otherwise speeding cars would mow down the neighborhood kids. This is one of the origins of the spaghetti streets that make sprawl difficult to navigate.

To give you a sense of how disproportionately wide these little neighborhood streets are, one of the biggest, busiest shopping streets in London (Oxford Circus) has only 40 feet of pavement for autos and buses (not counting the medians). Flanking Oxford Circus are several multi-story "malls," and the street itself is busy with four lanes of those double-decked buses and autos. The takeaway: sprawl streets include a lot of unnecessary asphalt. Narrower travel lanes would not only be cheaper to build, they would be safer, slowing down the speeding cars.

The subtler effects of sprawl derive from how it degrades the public realm. Traditional communities had public squares, or parks that were in important locations where you could encounter a critical experience: being a member of a larger society. Sprawl equivalents to the public realm are private malls, where the very walls shout "Buy me!" (Gosh, I wonder why our kids are so materialistic!), and parks that occupy unimportant land--often floodplain. The chance to actually experience being a member of society, strolling among the neighbors, diminishes as sprawl spreads. Is it any wonder that the public realm is a mystery to large portions of our population?

Even the treatment of those unable to drive is less-than-optimum in sprawl. In sprawl, viable, unsubsidized transit is impossible. Typically, not enough people live near the stops to provide riders, and even when enough people do live near the stops, the street design makes walking to those stops either undignified or downright impossible.

Note the lack of sidewalks connecting
this "bus stop" to nearby residences.

Interrupted sidewalks and other barriers to access--all land use decisions--make transit something that must be subsidized. It's designed to fail.

Take a look at the picture: That sign sticking in a hill on the side of Greenback at Kenneth is an actual bus stop. No sidewalk offers pedestrians access. Just to get to the stop, you must walk on the shoulder of a street with cars traveling freeway speeds (Greenback) to reach a bus that comes roughly every three hours.








About a half a block away you’ll see this:

Sidewalks, potential destinations (health club, doctors' offices), even a turnout...but no bus stop.

Why not move the sign (at least), and perhaps install a bench? Answer: Because Sacramento transit is designed to fail--and working as designed. Even if you manage to get on a bus, the destination is often just as unpleasant. The accommodation for pedestrians are often primitive, at best. Even if your destination is the Mall, you must often walk over an ocean of hot asphalt before you reach a store.

In sprawl, those too young to drive do not even have a chance to demonstrate their own value to their family by going to the corner store. Single use sprawl separates residences from shopping by a car trip, typically, so youngsters need a ride to get that loaf of bread. Yes, sprawl is anti-feminist, turning moms into their kids' chauffeur. Those elders fortunate enough to live past their ability to drive must leave their neighborhood--because if you can't drive you can't shop--and move into that nice warehouse...er, I mean elder-care facility, where their assets are drained paying for their care.

Sprawl mentality instills in public servants a belief that we must pursue self-delusional public policy, too. We have plenty of evidence that un-subsidized transit in sprawl is impossible, yet to preserve the illusion that public policy takes care of those unable to afford cars, Regional Transit persists in providing extremely frustrating, designed-to-fail heavily subsidized transit, which rolls around a bunch of empty buses on three hour intervals. Even the vaunted light rail to Folsom is adjacent to a parking structure that has a three-hour time limit, meaning commuters with eight-hour jobs cannot use this parking if they plan to use light rail to go to work. Another delusional policy proposal: park-'n-rides. The new library design for Orangevale at least considered a 500-space parking lot for commuters to park, then take a ride on the bus. The only problem is that this is a proposal for Hazel Blvd, a street that sees 50,000+ cars per day. So...whoop-de-doo! We get to cut congestion by one percent.

Congestion is another failure of sprawl. Naturally it's much worse when everyone has to drive everywhere, but the remedies proposed--particularly road widenings--remain in the neurotic denial category. Widening roads produces what's called "induced demand." When everyone knows the street is wider, they start changing their route to include that street, and the congestion returns to the same level as it was previously. Unfortunately the road contractors do not refund the millions spent widening the road.

The Southern California Association of Governments mathematically modeled every congestion remedy, up to and including double-decking the freeways. Only one congestion remedy provided significant relief, given the possibility of induced demand: mixed use.

Sprawl costs us our health too. Even as little as a 10-minute daily walk leads to a significant reduction in late-life health problems. Sprawl builds that walk out of daily life, so we're afflicted with an epidemic of the diseases of chronic inactivity: obesity, heart and artery disease, type 2 diabetes, etc.

The insanity of sprawl land use afflicts us in many ways. It lengthens commutes, continuing our dependence on fossil fuels, making necessary our belligerent presence in the Middle East. It impairs the public realm, separating and alienating populations from each other. It impairs our health, and our families find children a burden rather than a help when they cannot drive.

It's bad.

Take another look at these costs:

• Fires threaten edge cities
• Doubled maintenance costs
• Double vehicle miles traveled
• Divide (and conquer) the population by income
• Requires autos - a regressive "tax"
• Discourage walking
   - Socially disenfranchise the elderly and young
   - Contribute to ill health, removing walking from daily life
• Degrade the public realm and the experience of being a member of society.
• Transit is, and will always be, lame.
• Discourage youth from contributing to their families
• Encourage dysfunctional public service (delusional transit plans, park-'n'-rides)
• Increase Congestion
• Encourages meddling in the oil rich portions of the planet (the Middle East).
• Markets pay premiums for the alternative.

So it's really bad. How much worse much it get before we do something different?

Religious Tendencies

Jesus' "Great Commandments" go like this:
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." He continued: "On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."


These are not just great commandments, though, they are also "Great Observations." After all, you are unlikely to love your neighbor if you hate yourself. Similarly, you know that thing you love wholeheartedly? That's your "God." Even further, I'd suggest humans have a built in devotional tendency, and are religious whether they want to be or not.

Historically, people fought wars about which God is the correct one, and their (of necessity irrational) allegiance to whichever God their nation or tribe adopted often inspired soldiers to heroic acts. But even today, people can do amazing things in their service to ... oh, the Oakland Raiders. Sure, that's not the church-recognized God, but it has that quality of devotion the Great Observations require.

To a dictionary, religion is a "body of dogma"...but real religions have changeable dogma (an oxymoron? a doggymoron?). Typically priests preserve traditions, but prophets question and sometimes overturn or transform that preserved dogma in ways the priesthood abhors. After all, the priests were rooting for the Romans to crucify Jesus.

This is devotional tendency is true even in science-olatry. Those who worship science as the genuine way to access the truth first of all ignore the endorsement of experiment in traditional religions. Buddhists often hear disclaimers that the final authority is experience, not some pronouncement from a monk. Jesus himself told his disciples that they would know his true followers "by their fruits." In other words, see how their actions turn out. Sounds like an endorsement of experiment to me.

But secondly, science-olaters ignore how susceptible science is to the human tendency to cling to tradition or dogma, even though experiment proves it wrong. Max Planck's quanta (of "quantum mechanics") was one such case. Planck discovered energy came in discrete packets, and was, at the atomic level, not continuous. Nevertheless, the Newtonian physicists of Planck's time would not change their minds, even though quanta explain several things Newtonian physics cannot. Said Planck: "The truth never triumphs, its opponents simply die out. Science advances one funeral at a time."

As Planck predicted, quantum mechanics ultimately triumphed, but not before lots of scientists disputed it. Several science-for-pay scandals in pharmaceuticals and climate science continue to plague us today, so declaring some conclusion as the result of "science" is no guarantee of purity or truthfulness. I'd suggest the envy of the simplicity of Newtonian physics motivates lots of simple-minded pseudo-science, too. These types of advanced superstition remain a current concern.

The great world religious all have some equivalent of the of the golden rule (that second "Great Commandment"), and all have some disclaimer that experience trumps religious declaration. The first of the ten commandments forbidding idolatry says to stop worshiping symbols, and start worshiping and respecting reality, at least in some sense.

In any case, George Carlin's critique of religion aside, one of the side effects of rejecting religiosity is that people sensibly reject religious abuse, but throw the baby out with the bath water, rejecting wholesale the wisdom, the history and traditions of religions. They are certainly not perfect, but if the recent past is any indication, neither is the anti-religious secular science-olatry or the advanced superstitions which declare some Newtonian truth.


One other religious principle that remains perennial, declares how people get saved. Is salvation earned (salvation by works) or a gift (salvation by grace)? Orthodox religions throughout the world assert it is the latter, so we can't claim we deserve where we landed, but an all-too-human sense of how life is supposed to be leads men to embrace the former.

Lots of New Testament parables go over this ground: the prodigal son gets something far beyond his just deserts. The parable of the workmen who get the same pay whether they worked eight hours or one says something similar.

But, in truth, we cannot claim to have earned our current circumstances. We didn't earn the right to be born where we were rather than, say, Somalia. We didn't earn the right to mental or physical health, such as we have, even though our sense of advanced superstition leads us to punish the mentally ill as though they have done something to deserve their disease. How else can we account for the insane amount of incarceration in the U.S?

We can't lord our superior wisdom or dental work over our inferiors because we earned the right with our correct actions or better judgment. In fact, we can't even claim we earned the knowledge of the difference between right and wrong.

It may let air out of some people's self-esteem, but I have it on divine authority. We are blessed with many gifts. Even the curses we have to manage can turn out to be blessings.

So...Is "The Donald" really that bad, after all?...😉

How Political Fights are Distractions

(c) by Mark Dempsey

 Both Sasha Abramsky's recent Bee column decrying the treatment of immigrant children and the  comments from the political right in response aren't so much lying as changing the subject. Currently, 40% of America's population does not have $400 in savings to deal with an emergency. Medical bankruptcy threatens sick people. Poverty, joblessness, and their knock-on effects in crime, incarceration, homelessness and even starvation and opioid overdose are much bigger problems than Abramsky's worry about "thugs" in power and the intrusive government those opposing him decry. Separating immigrants from their children, right or wrong, is small potatoes in comparison. But whenever possible, the officious, [ahem!] I mean "official" commentariat and their sanctioned opponents prefer straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel.

America's net worth declined by 40% in the wake of Lehman's bankruptcy in 2007. Meanwhile, although Clinton's signature on financial deregulation enabled this, the same banksters whose Ponzi capitalism crashed the economy are not in jail. They're at large and doing pretty much what they did before. Letting them off with cost-of-doing-business fines was one of Barack Obama's big crimes.

Not his biggest crime, though; after all, he didn't prosecute the war crimes of Bush/Cheney, either... and yes, it's still a war crime to torture. Obama didn't prosecute the torturers, he promoted them and prosecuted the whistle blowers.

Boss Tweed's saying "I don't care who people vote for as long as I can pick the candidates" seems to apply here.

Meanwhile, from the political right, critics of government believe they can simply ignore systemic problems and attribute all genuine progress to individual effort only. What's a systemic problem? If you throw 95 bones out your back door, then let 100 dogs retrieve them, no matter how responsible, skilled and law-abiding those dogs are, five are not going to get a bone. We're short of jobs. No matter how well-trained and responsible are job seekers, both wages and labor participation are not going to rise until that shortage declines.

Another systemic problem: those "illegal aliens" (actually "undocumented workers"). The U.S. has been attacking its neighbors south of its borders literally for centuries. Between 1798 and 1994, the U.S. was responsible for 41 changes of government in the Caribbean, Central and South America. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even persuaded the Obama administration to tolerate a military coup in Honduras. Their democratically-elected government was going to raise the Honduran minimum wage from 60¢ an hour (the nerve of those people!)...so the generals had to take over, obviously. Meanwhile, 30,000 unaccompanied Honduran minors came north to avoid the ensuing chaos.

The U.S. attacks economically, too. Conspiring with Newt Gingrich, Clinton signed NAFTA, and real wages in Mexico declined 34%. One has to return to the Great Depression to find a wage drop like that in the U.S. and that prompted no great migration...oh wait! the Okies!

One might guess that shipping a lot of subsidized Iowa corn to Mexico would adversely effect  Mexican subsistence corn farmers. Sure, corn is only arguably the most important food crop in the world, and those Mexican corn farmers were keeping the diversity of the corn genome alive, but they weren't making any money for Monsanto, darn them! So ... let them come north to mow our lawns and paint our houses.

The right-wing critique of government also doesn't mention the advantages of big, enlightened sponsors of research, either. For example: 75% of pharmaceutical innovation comes from government-sponsored research. Most of the iPhone components that matter (transistors, microprocessors, lithium-ion battery, touch screens, the internet, GPS, etc.) are the product of government-sponsored research (see the graphic here).

 Government is the way we handle systemic problems; individuals cannot do that.

I do regret U.S. aggression, but, like racism, religious prejudice and xenophobia, the undocumented are a distraction.  Calling each side of the political aisle names ("thugs" "liars") is also a distraction.These distractions divide and conquer the population so that ignoring systemic problems can remain respectable, and ignoring the crimes of one's own party can continue. The debate between pro- and anti-immigrant factions are distractions, and distractions win as long as we don't get some candidates Boss Tweed didn't pick.

How to Tell (Political) Left from Right

Despite the constant drumbeat of antagonism between the political Right, or conservatives, and the political Left, or liberals, the U.S. political scene muddies the distinction, often intentionally. Generally speaking the political right allies itself with capital, or property, and the political left allies itself with labor, or consumers, but that distinction is not ironclad. For example, “lefties” like George Soros supposedly balance the right-wing Kochs’ money, or at least so say conservatives, but no one is more of a capitalist than Soros.

What did Kochs spend? - $889 million in 2016, while Soros spent $25 million. With contributors like Soros, Hillary Clinton spent more than Trump in running for president. Trump was reportedly 64% self-financed, but spent less than Clinton only if you ignore the immense subsidy of all the free media Trump got.

Worse than that 35-to-1 imbalance between Koch and Soros, though, is the idea that Soros is a friend of labor. He’s a currency speculator, and really one of the most capitalist of politically interested plutocrats. He is not funding any lobbying for improved labor policies, or single-payer healthcare. So if that is the “balance” of the Kochs right-wing spending, it’s very much to the right of someone like Bernie Sanders.

Soros was a big donor to Hillary, so how far left is she, really? She voted for the Iraq war, and for the tightening of bankruptcy law Wall Street wanted. That law favored capital, excluding student loans from even the possibility bankruptcy. Right now, Social Security checks are being garnished to pay off student debt.

"I don't care who people vote for as long as I can pick the candidates" - Boss Tweed (a Democrat)

On the Right, the Koch brothers fund an enormous political campaign apparatus that guarantees party discipline. If a legislator does not follow Koch-approved policy in the next election s/he will face a well-funded resource-draining opponent that does obey the Kochs.

Bernie Sanders’ game-changing breakthrough was his ability to mobilize the small campaign contributors enough to mount a credible presidential campaign. Unlike that pseudo-lefty Obama, Sanders has kept his populist campaign organization intact; Obama dismantled his populist outreach once he was in office. Sanders’ “Our Revolution” continues to lobby to move policy leftward...an actual balance to the Koch’s rightward bias..

How far right are the Kochs? They were raised by Fred Koch, a clever chemist whose method for refining crude oil into useful products led him to found Koch Industries, a company that built oil refineries all over the world--including refineries for Stalin and Hitler. Fred Koch hated the Russians but loved the Germans. In fact, he hired a German nanny to raise his boys. She was literally a Nazi. So...Kochs imbibed right-wing politics from an early age. Heck, a Nazi raised them! Fred Koch also founded some of the extreme right-wing think tanks and organizations, including the John Birch Society--an organization that condemned Dwight D. Eisenhower as a communist, or communist dupe, so he hardly contradicted that nanny.

At least part of Fred Koch’s animus toward government came from his experience in the courts. The Rockefeller oil empire (Standard Oil) started using Koch’s processes to refine its products, but refused to pay the patent royalties they owed. Koch sued...and lost! Later, Kochs found out that Rockefellers bribed the judge in that trial, and Koch re-sued and won, but retained a lasting distrust for government. (Can you blame him?)

Another signature distinction between Right and Left is the refusal by the Right to acknowledge how effective collective action can be. For the political right, all productive actions, all responsibilities, originate with the individual. Conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously said that society does not exist, only individuals and families--a statement roughly equivalent to saying your body does not exist, only cells and organs. Thatcher’s policies reflected her “anti-collectivist” understanding of society, though, and poverty roughly doubled in the U.K. under her supervision. The fight against “collectivism” is explicitly what Kochs say they fund.

What the extreme right misses, however, is that some problems are systemic, not individual. Here’s an example Modern Money Theorist Warren Mosler cites: Imagine throwing 95 bones out in your backyard, then releasing 100 dogs to retrieve a bone apiece. Five dogs will come back “empty-handed” no matter how well trained they are. Teaching the dogs a sense of personal responsibility, training them in bone retrieval techniques will never change that picture, even though it may change which dogs return with a bone. The solution is systemic, not amenable to individual solution.

Solutions to some current social problems are systemic-only, too. Preaching about individual responsibility, telling people to lift themselves up by their bootstraps does not lower the unemployment rate or make more paying jobs appear automatically if the economy’s pessimism tells employers not to expect profit from expanding their hiring. The idea that collective action or government can effectively address some of these problems is fairly new, too, so resistance is understandable. For example, Keynesian economics says government can literally spend the economy out of a depression.

The opponents of “collectivism” decry such government “intrusion” because they fear a government that popular and effective could impair their property rights. The Kochs may say they are “libertarian,” and eschew social conservatism (outlawing gay marriage, or certain drugs), but they are extremely careful to protect property. It does not matter whether property was obtained honestly or not. Dumping toxic waste on your own property is perfectly OK, just as Roman slave owners could legally murder their slaves. Property rights are paramount, no matter how “libertarian” are Kochs. The record high fines levied by the EPA on Koch Industries demonstrates just how absolute they believe are their property rights, too.

A quick scorecard (from Pew polling):






I take a back seat to no one in criticizing the wasteful stupidity of government, but unfortunately, because systemic problems exist, collective action is really the only way to solve such problems, as awful as that sausage making is sometimes.

Trump, Trump, Trump

“Politics is a lot like coaching football. You have to be smart enough to actually do the job, but stupid enough to think it makes the slightest difference.” -- (Senator) Eugene McCarthy

What to do about Trump? The whole idea that politics can make a difference is open to question. Eugene McCarthy’s saying is not the only way politics frustrates us. I’ve talked to legislators who spent their entire careers in (California) government, and they tell me they accomplished relatively tiny things. One lobbyist told me he would like to take credit for the successes he enjoyed, but he couldn’t even do that. “Maybe I just got lucky, and our opposition got tired of fighting us.”

So frustration is rampant in American politics, and Trump’s ability to turn that into the material for a reality show (while, sub-rosa, he gets his way in important matters) is a nice change of pace.

The bottom line about Trump: he enjoys the attention. I plan to ignore him as much as possible.

The Job Guarantee

Huffingtonpost covered this proposal recently, and it's interesting to see the objections to guaranteeing employment...

According to this story, managing "random flows of labor" somehow elicits skepticism from even "Progressives."

Yet, regarding the CCC..."President Roosevelt promised if granted emergency powers he would have 250,000 men in camps by the end of July, 1933. The speed with which the plan moved through proposal, authorization, implementation and operation was a miracle of cooperation among all branches and agencies of the federal government. It was a mobilization of men, material and transportation on a scale never before known in time of peace. From FDR’s inauguration on March 4, 1933, to the induction of the first enrollee on April 7, only 37 days had elapsed."

As for the cost considerations, somehow we can buy surplus agricultural products (soybeans, cheese), and even buy surplus Wall Street products ("Quantitative Easing" or QE), but buying surplus labor is taboo. According to its own audit, the Federal Reserve extended $16 - $29 trillion in credit to Wall Street to cure its Ponzi schemes. The illegal war in Iraq and Afghanistan costs $3 - $7 trillion (say Nobel laureate economist Joe Stiglitz). The Fed still has $4 trillion of Wall Street dreck on its books, thanks to QE. Why can we fund all this other stuff, but not take care of ordinary people? [crickets]

The inflation concern is a complete red herring. Only a bidding war between the public and private sectors would lead to inflation, but who else is competing for the unemployed?

For more, see https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/.../jobs-guarantee-make...

Personally, I'd say the JG is a real game changer. It transforms work from a burden borne out of fear into something desirable. The savings in prisons and social safety nets alone should pay for a lot of it, but I'd suggest the transformation available will increase labor productivity and redirect human activity in beneficial ways.

The resistance will largely come from firms who claim they can't pay $15 (you know, the firms who said seat belts and catalytic converters would put an end to their industry). Even those firms could participate in such a program if government partly funded their jobs (so McDonalds pays $10/hr, and the government pays $5).

The objections are, in short, trivial. The *real* objection is that this would impair "labor discipline." In other words, the objectors in business wouldn't get to boss people around, or threaten job loss, poverty, homelessness, prison, starvation... Remember: Ending this threat would remove the whip from the hands of the plutocrats...and make life in our economy far more pleasant.

Turtles All The Way Down

Theatrical director (and M.D.) Jonathan Miller lectured to a British audience about science, and stayed afterwards when he was approached by a petite white-haired woman. She said “Your lecture was alright, but you’re wrong about the earth being suspended in space. It’s on the back of a giant turtle.” “Really,” responded Miller, “But what is under the turtle?” “Young man,” replied the woman, “it’s turtles all the way down.”