Kotkin’s praise of the Sunbelt’s metropolises is based mostly on economic grounds.  Unlike their more glamorous coastal counterparts, metro areas like Houston and Phoenix have succeeded in providing homeownership opportunities on a massive scale for the middle class.  This economic integration is all the more noteworthy because it has occurred during a period of tremendous economic growth.  Kotkin believes this accomplishment is drowned out by excessive fawning over the façade of prosperity displayed by New York, San Francisco, Boston and other established urban areas.  In these fashionable cities, according to Kotkin, only the wealthy and childless creative classes have the means to enjoy the much-hyped amenities of downtown, while middle class families are forced to flee to the suburban edge in search of affordable homes and quality education.  Although I disagree with Kotkin’s conclusions regarding the strengths and weaknesses of different cities and the underlying causes of affordability issues, I recognize that our most renown cities have been too quick to pat themselves on the back for a renaissance that has touched only a portion of city residents.

This discussion, however profound, does not pit city against suburb.  Kotkin’s critique is not so much against cities but against policies that aim to recreate the feel and accessibility of cities like New York or San Francisco.  In Kotkin’s opinion, our metropolitan areas are already evolving away from a traditional urban center, and since suburban-style growth has succeeded in accommodating the middle and working classes, especially our growing immigrant population, we should embrace our suburban future.  

Kotkin has a point: despite even the best efforts to increase the gravitational pull of central cities, the suburbs are not going away.  Instead of living in denial, we must manage growth in the suburbs as diligently as we do downtown.  Only we shouldn’t look to places like Phoenix and Houston as examples of how to manage suburban growth.  Sunbelt cities are notorious for a laissez faire approach that is most accurately described as the absence of planning.  As I and others have pointed out on numerous occasions, the land use patterns in these cities do not reflect the pure machinations of the market, but the heavy influence of our dominant car culture and historical land use policies favoring sprawl over high density development.  That communities victimized by unrestrained sprawl produce affordable housing is no surprise; when you treat land as a commodity and offload costs to surrounding communities, the cost of housing drops precipitously.  Increasing the supply of affordable housing is a worthy goal, but to say that Houston-style planning is the only alternative to potentially fruitless efforts to recreate the unique urban neighborhoods of New York or San Francisco is so lacking in imagination that it suggests Kotkin’s purpose is to provoke rather than to contribute to a constructive debate.

The irony is that fans of the city and Plotkin share a common enemy in sprawl.  Sprawl will have the same damaging impact on today’s suburbs as it did on yesterday’s cities.  The quaint Main Streets that suburban planners have cultivated so deliberately will be ghost towns once the next layer of fabricated communities is erected.   Yet reasoned defenders of suburbia continue to provide useful cover for sprawl apologists like Robert Bruegmann, a University of Illinois at Chicago professor who, unlike Kotkin, truly does sing the praises of sprawl.  Bruegmann debated Gloria Ohland of Reconnecting America a few weeks back in a L.A. Times debate on sprawl.  Ohland did her best to highlight how even suburban communities and small towns have recognized the fool’s gold of sprawl and are exploring higher density development that frees people from their cars.  The sooner more communities, whether urban or suburban, come to the same realization, the better.  As I am sure many in the suburbs would agree, the continued growth of our communities requires us to embrace new models of development that don’t needlessly exhaust finite supplies of land and oil.