Articles by Clark Williams-Derry

Don’t steal this book

This Slate book review (found via Brad Plumer) covering the history of sprawl is so infuriatingly silly, it's hard to know where to begin.

In a nutshell: Slate architecture critic Witold Rybczynski reviews a book by University of Illinois at Chicago professor Robert Bruegmann that argues -- quite correctly -- that suburbs have been part of urban life for millenia. In ancient Rome, wealthy patricians escaped to exurban villas. Just so, the walled cities of medieval Europe were surrounded by noxious industries such as slaughterhouses, as well as many of the people who worked there. Since cities have always had low-density outskirts, Bruegmann argues, it's simply inaccurate to characterize "suburban sprawl" as entirely an invention of 20th century American car culture.

All that's fair enough -- the suburbs have always been with us, in one form or another. And for good reasons: Some folks prefer not to live in the city, and some cities prefer to locate public nuisances outside of town.

But from this, the article (I'm not sure whether it's Rybczynski or Bruegmann who's responsible) draws conclusions about sprawl that are hard to fathom -- and even harder to square with reality.

Taxation without privation

This is days old now -- an eternity in blog years -- but the blogosphere was all a-twitter earlier in the week about this paper by economist Jayanta Sen, arguing that a stiff tax on crude oil, far from bankrupting the US economy, would actually transfer more than $100 billion a year from foreign governments to U.S. consumers.

Yes, consumers would pay steeper prices for gasoline. But since all of the oil-tax revenue stays within the U.S., that money continues to stimulate the economy. Meanwhile, we'd import less oil -- and, as a consequence, we'd export less money to pay for it. I'll let Sen explain things:

[T]he wealth transfer savings for the United States ... should be in the range of $108 to $152 billion a year. The new tax revenues ... can be returned to the U.S. consumers as a lump sum, thus providing the economic stimulus. The reduction in crude oil consumption ranges from 7.13% to 10.30% while providing a stimulus (defined as additional purchasing power to consumers) to the economy of $95 billion to $133 billion a year.

The title of Sen's paper: "A Tax to Save the US $100 Billion a Year and Solve Global Warming?" Now, cutting back U.S. gasoline consumption by 10 percent won't solve global warming by any means. Still, it sounds like a nifty plan to me. Any takers?

A southern Idaho reservoir is contaminated with mercury

Yoiks: A southern Idaho reservoir is contaminated with mercury at levels up to 180 times higher than those found in lakes in the Northeast U.S. From the Idaho Statesman:

"Nobody's ever seen a hot spot like this before," said Mike DuBois, an air quality analyst at the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality.

The likely culprit: four gold mines across the border in northern Nevada, which emitted 15,000 pounds of mercury in 2002 alone. Of course, the mines are patting themselves on the back for reducing their mercury releases to just a couple of tons per year as of 2004. But that's still a huge amount of mercury for just a handful of mines. The 1,000-odd coal-fired electricity industry generators in the U.S. emit a total of 48 tons of mercury each year; so those few Nevada mines make up a disproportionately large share of the nation's total mercury output.

And just in case you need a reason to care about this: mercury contamination early in life can knock a few points off a kid's IQ, which, in addition to being grossly unfair, costs nearly $9 billion a year in lost earnings.

Maybe

This is less of a big deal than I had thought at first, but it's still worth noting: new research (full PDF here) suggests that sprawl may be linked to higher home prices.

The authors looked at housing prices in 452 urban areas across the U.S., along with measures of a couple dozen factors that can influence housing prices -- including urban form, but also education levels, weather, demographics, recent population influx, the size of homes, and employment factors, among others. Controlling for other variables, cities that have a higher share of total housing in their "central areas" (as defined by the U.S. census) tend to have slightly lower median home prices, and fewer very-expensive homes, than cities that are more sprawling and decentralized.

This, of course, runs counter to the intuition -- and the much-touted arguments from the anti-smart growth set -- that housing is cheaper in spread-out, poorly bounded metro areas.

That said, as careful as this research seems to be, there's good reason not to read too much into it.