Red v. Blue states? No, Urban v. Rural counties

So here's Bernstein's Civil War what-if in a nutshell:

Suppose instead that Southern politicians had decided not to leave the Union but to stay and fight—in the halls of Congress. Suppose that they had pursued a politics of obstruction, a political counterpart of trench warfare—blocking every measure, stalling every policy, jamming the works of government to prevent even appointments of federal postmasters in Southern states. What might have happened?

The result might well have been a cycle of frustration and resistance that would have made today’s brawls look like child’s play. 

This is all moot because the real divide in today's America is not Red vs. Blue States, but Rural vs. Urban, as the article, Red State, Blue City: How the Urban-Rural Divide Is Splitting America, clearly shows: "Partisan lines that once fell along regional borders can increasingly be found at the county level":

The new political divide is a stark division between cities and what remains of the countryside. Not just some cities and some rural areas, either -- virtually every major city (100,000-plus population) in the United States of America has a different outlook from the less populous areas that are closest to it. The difference is no longer about where people live, it's about how people live: in spread-out, open, low-density privacy -- or amid rough-and-tumble, in-your-face population density and diverse communities that enforce a lower-common denominator of tolerance among inhabitants.

The voting data suggest that people don't make cities liberal -- cities make people liberal. 

Check out these voting maps from 2012 if you don't believe me.  Suddenly the Red States don't look so red, do they?  Even Paul Ryan admitted it in November 2012.

This truth has tremendous implications for urban development and retail politics alike. If conservative politicians realize -- and I think they do -- that they cannot win over America's cities, then their policy choices will favor rural communities and suburban sprawl over urbanization. But if conservatives try to fight the urbanization trend, either by gerrymandering or by depriving cities of the infrastructure that they need to flourish, then they'll be swimming upstream, to say the least, against global economic trends.  And in the process they'll also be restraining America's economic and social dynamism. I put nothing past their selfish desire for political power.

The Sequester and the Civil War

By R.B. Berstein

March 11, 2013 | Daily Beast

URL: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/03/11/the-myth-of-bob-woodward-why-is-this-man-an-american-icon.html

Red State, Blue City: How the Urban-Rural Divide Is Splitting America

By Josh Kron

November 30, 2012 | Atlantic

URL: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/red-state-blue-city-how-the-urban-rural-divide-is-splitting-america/265686/

White suburbanites get judge to close soup kitchen

Just another example of why we can't rely on private charity to alleviate poverty: Even when churches are willing to help, greedy white people in the suburbs order poor people to stay on the other side of the tracks.

Judge Orders Phoenix Church To Stop Feeding Homeless

By Victoria Fine

November 12, 2009 | Huffington Post

URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/12/judge-orders-phoenix-chur_n_355902.html

Suburban sprawl and its defenders

Suburban Cowboys

As smart growth gains ground among academics and activists, conservatives are whipping themselves up into a frenzy over the perils of what they term "anti-sprawl policy."

Ben Adler | June 12, 2007 | The American Prospect

You know your conservative pet cause has arrived when it gets an event at the Heritage Foundation. Every kooky right-wing crusade, from denying global warming to teaching creationism in public schools, will eventually have its moment in the sun at the conservative think tank.

So it is no surprise that the honor was recently granted to a growing group of reactionaries who think that America's sprawling, post-war development pattern is actually a good thing -- and that the nascent anti-sprawl "smart growth" movement needs to be stopped. These pro-sprawl views have begun to find their voice on the op-ed pages and, on May 22nd, with a discussion at Heritage modestly titled "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life."

The event took its name from the title of a new book by Wendell Cox, a public policy consultant (critics call him a "hired gun for the roadway industry") and visiting fellow at Heritage. Cox was introduced by another Heritage fellow, Ron Utt, who is perhaps best known as the man who led the Reagan administration's privatization efforts. The two are longtime colleagues (Utt boasted at the outset that they have "co-authored more papers than I can count"), so there was no alternative view presented.

The new right-wing bogeyman that Utt and Cox devote considerable energy to destroying is the smart growth movement. Smart growth advocates seek to present an alternative to the suburban-sprawl model of development. They suggest that local governments undo restrictions that require separation of residential and commercial property and requirements that every business be surrounded by a massive parking lot. Simultaneously, they seek to redress the severe imbalance of public funding that currently favors highways over mass transit. The desired result is a walkable, transit-accessible, mixed-use community that is more integrated and has less environmental impact than its suburban counterparts.

But commentators like Utt and Cox counter that sprawl enables home-buying by constructing cheap new houses in cornfields, and cuts down on congestion by dispersing traffic into ever-expanding networks of new highways. Of course, there are elements of truth in both propositions, but Utt and Cox never address whether their preferred pattern is environmentally sustainable or culturally desirable.

The shallow logic of the pro-sprawl propagandists is apparent in listening to the audio recording of Cox and Utt's discussion that's available on the Heritage website. Utt noted in his introduction that housing prices are lower in Houston and Atlanta than in Washington, D.C. or Chicago, implying that the greater affordability of the Southern cities can be explained by their sprawling development patterns.

This is an interesting inversion of the typical conservative faith in the efficiency of the market. Says Dan Emerine, project manager for the Smart Growth Network, a coalition of non-profits and governmental agencies devoted to assisting local communities in developing in a smart growth pattern, "One of the problems that isn't being addressed in such a claim is simply the desirability of living in those locations. To the extent that there is a premium for living in such locations as D.C. or Chicago, it's because those locations are scarce. If you have a scarce good, simple economics tells you that you will get a higher price than otherwise might exist." He went on to explain that smart-growth advocates want to level the playing field to ensure that all communities can develop in ways that allow "many more opportunities for people to live in communities that are transit-oriented and pedestrian friendly."

The pro-sprawl movement, like most right-wing cultural reactions, is remarkable for the paranoia of its worldview. Even as the exurbs continue to grow uncontrollably, they are threatened by the existence of a few authors, architects, and non-profits pushing, mostly unsuccessfully, for smart growth policies. Cox began his speech by characterizing his opposition as a "hysterical anti-suburbanization movement out there, led by people like James Howard Kunstler."

Kunstler is the author of several books on sprawl, most notably The Geography of Nowhere, and an ardent opponent of sprawl on aesthetic, spiritual, and ecological grounds. (Cox quotes Kunstler calling the suburbs "a trashy and preposterous human environment with no future.") Kunstler told the Prospect that Cox is part of "an interesting cohort of observers whose basic argument is that suburbia is OK because people seem to like it." He fingers New York Times columnist David Brooks, Peter Huber of Forbes magazine and the Manhattan Institute, Robert Bruegmann of the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Joel Kotkin of the New America Foundation as other members.

"The interesting thing is that their argument doesn't go beyond that," Kunstler says. "It absolutely fails to take into account whether circumstances will permit us to keep living this way. The fact that people like something doesn't mean it's sustainable." Like many smart-growth advocates, Kunstler argues that the era of cheap oil cannot last forever, and that the environmental impact of paving over ever more land and driving greater distances is devastating. Even if the suburban lifestyle offers a higher quality of life, as Cox maintains, it simply cannot be accommodated indefinitely.

Cox (who had to correct himself at one point when he accidentally referred to "anti-sprawl" policy as "smart growth") has become omnipresent in the growing anti-anti-sprawl reaction. He has been cited repeatedly by the libertarian former New York Times columnist John Tierney, and by other reporters in pieces on the various downsides of suburban sprawl.

Cox's contributions generally take the form of misleading observations, such as his estimate, quoted in The New York Times, that tripling federal mass transit funding would only reduce the average driver's commute by 22 seconds. This is not very meaningful. First, since mass transit funding is so anemic, tripling is not as significant an offer as it may seem. (It would need to go considerably higher than that to approach parity with highway funding, and would still be a tiny fraction of, say, the defense budget.) Second, averaging the savings out over all drivers isn't very informative. Drivers in rural locales where mass transit isn't feasible would see no benefit, while those in or near cities would see an enormous one as they would be able to stop driving in favor of taking the train or the bus. The benefits can be measured in more than just commute time: many commuters feel that taking a train to work, even if it takes just as long as driving, is psychologically beneficial because they can sleep or read on their way to work.. Empirically, it's better for the environment and it's safer than risking a traffic accident.

Utt, meanwhile, was once quoted in the New York Times denying that the sedentary lifestyle of suburbia contributes to obesity. Instead Utt points his finger at the washing machine, arguing, "you're fat for a lot of reasons, like the fact that you don't do laundry by hand." This kind of deliberate obtuseness typifies pro-sprawl advocates' style of argumentation. Of course Americans are gaining weight for a wide array of reasons, including the picayune one that Utt chooses to harp on. But the fact that the lifestyle that accompanies suburban sprawl is one factor in the obesity epidemic -- and a greater one than the rise of the laundry machine -- should be undeniable to anyone without an ideological predilection towards strip malls and highways.

The same article that quoted Utt noted, "In Atlanta, at the lowest-density levels 68 percent of white men were overweight; at the highest-density levels, 50 percent were overweight. At the lowest density, 23 percent were obese; at the highest levels, 13 percent were obese." If that does not prove the intuitively obvious point that living in an environment where you walk more means you burn more calories, it's hard to imagine what evidence an ideologue like Utt would accept.

Ultimately the pro-sprawl reaction, a sort of Reagonomics of urban planning, betrays many of the peculiar traits of modern conservatism: the impulse to demonize any opposition, no matter how minimal or common-sense, and a proclivity to selectively pull bits of information out of context (Cox mentioned at the event that the world's largest freeway -- 20 lanes wide -- is in Bangkok. This is proof, he says, that the entire world is heading in the same direction we are, but he fails to note that Bangkok has notoriously horrible traffic nonetheless.)

As the Smart Growth Network's Emerine argues, "I think the criticism stems from a real misunderstanding of what advocates of smart growth and better community planning are trying to accomplish. I think the evidence shows that we are really about leveling the playing field for the market and types of development that there is a real market demand for." The question is, why don't pro-sprawl conservatives like Utt and Cox want to allow the free market to work?

Ben Adler is editor of Campus Progress.org at the Center for American Progress. Prior to joining Campus Progress, Ben was a reporter-researcher at The New Republic and an editorial intern at The Nation. His writing has also appeared in Newsweek and The Next American City, among other publications.

Cities are the answer to global warming

America needs to realize it has wrongly invested $ Billions in the development and expansion of suburbs. Suburbs consume too much energy. They encourage -- and require -- a lifestyle that is not sustainable.

Cities are indeed our future. And they're more interesting, vibrant, and full of economic opportunity, too, as many young people will be glad to tell you!

In the 21st century, we need to encourage an influx to the cities, just as we encouraged an exodus in the 20th century!

Cities are the answer

By Douglas Foy and Robert Healy
The Boston Globe | Wednesday, April 11, 2007

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts: Many of the world's most difficult environmental challenges can be addressed and solved by cities.

This may come as a surprise to those who think of environmental issues largely in the context of wild places and open spaces. Cities, often congested, dense, and enormous consumers of resources, would not be the place one might first turn for environmental solutions.

In fact, cities are inherently the "greenest" of all places. They are much more efficient in their use of energy, water and land than suburbs. They provide transportation services in a remarkably equitable and democratic fashion.

Cities help to save natural areas and open space by relieving growth pressures on the countryside. And cities will be the pivotal players in fashioning solutions to the growing problem of climate change.

New York City, for example, is the most energy efficient place in America. Yes, it houses 8.2 million citizens and uses an enormous amount of energy to do so. Its electrical load, more than 12,000 megawatts, is as large as all of Massachusetts. Yet because the buildings are dense and thus more efficiently heated and cooled, and because 85 percent of all trips in Manhattan are on foot, bike or transit, New York City uses dramatically less energy to serve each of its citizens than does a state like Massachusetts. Indeed, it uses less energy, on a per capita basis, than any state in America.

When one considers that another 750,000 commuters also enter New York every day to work and use large amounts of energy in their daily business there but don't even count in the per capita energy calculation, the city's efficiency performance is even more remarkable.

Carbon dioxide, the dominant greenhouse gas and the primary cause of global climate change, comes largely from the combustion of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, gasoline and natural gas. Nearly half of all the energy those fuels produce is used in buildings - heating, cooling and lighting our homes, factories and offices. Another third of all the energy is used for transportation, primarily fueling automobiles, trucks and transit fleets.

In order to address the challenge of climate change, it is imperative that we make both buildings and transportation vastly more energy efficient. And cities are the place to start. In a way, cities are the Saudi Arabia of energy efficiency - vast mines of potential energy savings that dwarf most of the supply options our country possesses.

It is with that efficiency goal in mind that the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Kendall Foundation have developed for Cambridge the most aggressive energy efficiency program ever deployed in a city in the United States.

The outlines of the program were announced on March 29. It will involve the investment of nearly $100 million, largely raised from private capital sources, in buildings of all types throughout the city.

We will invest in energy efficiency measures in homes, condos, apartments, offices, hotels, institutions, hospitals, factories and schools. We will measure and verify the savings and document the carbon dioxide reductions and other environmental gains. And all of this will be done with the energy savings paying for the cost of the program, without the need for any government subsidies.

By mining Cambridge's efficiency opportunities, the city will become more competitive, save money, add hundreds of quality jobs, help build an efficiency industry that can produce a model that can be replicated in cities all over the United States and add its weight to a solution for global climate change.

The old paradigm of the pollution-filled city as a blight on the landscape and the leafy-green suburbs as the ideal is outdated and does not lead us to a future of energy independence, clean air and a stable climate. Cities are the best hope to realize our need for a bright, sustainable, and promising future.

Douglas Foy, former secretary of the Office of Commonwealth Development, is president of DIF Enterprises. Robert Healy is city manager of Cambridge. This article first appeared in The Boston Globe.