Common Ground: Pro-Sprawl and Grow-It-Yourself Blocs 
By Martin Harris

Yet another public opinion poll has surfaced, showing that those Americans citizens who aren’t counted in the ranks of the "beautiful people" hold views and preferences different from those of their social and intellectual betters. This one comes from the Pew Research Center and, like previous studies on the same subject executed by other researchers, finds that most of us would rather live in a single-family house on as large a lot as we can afford, rather than in a minimal-footprint row-house or walk-up as most of our grand-parents did. Half of mine, for example, spent their working lives in a Clinton, Massachusetts three-decker convenient to the mill, and were able to escape for only a few brief retirement years. 

This Pew study won’t get much exposure, because it doesn’t match the approved received-wisdom template, but it did get some space in a construction-trade magazine, Professional Builder, whose editors opine, in an op-ed commentary, about being pushed to do more infill and more compact-development residential which most customers don’t want. The phrase the editors use is the pressure on the industry from smart-growthers "to overcome tepid demand".

"We all talk about the increase in infill construction and a back-to-the-city lifestyle, but recent research suggests people in the ‘burbs are happier", writes the Editor in the March ’09 issue.

You can, of course, find a study or two with any "finding" to match your pre-disposition or ideology, but more indicative, I’d argue, are those intended for in-house "expert" consumption only, such as the 2007 report entitled "Lot Size, Zoning and Household Preferences: Impediments to Smart Growth?"  published by the Environmental Protection Agency in co-operation with the University of Maryland. On page 2 it lists the potential obstacles to smart-growth as including new homebuyer preference for larger lots, and on page 16 the writers worry specifically that "the bigger issue [than minimum lot size] may be household preference for larger lots". In short, they complain, the average American is too dumb or stubborn to recognize what the experts know is better for him, housing-wise.

Or maybe not: the majority opinion so despised by self-appointed intellectuals lies in a tradition which goes back to the tiny farms and large-lot city plans of the colonies and the philosophizing of Thomas Jefferson, the "rural-urban" notions embodied in Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities (1902) writing and Frank Lloyd Wright’s similar Broadacre City proposal in his 1932 book, The Disappearing City. In 1935 author Maurice Kains published Five Acres and Independence, the first of a series (1948, 1973, 2008) which has never gone out of print. Even the USDA has gotten into the movement, publishing in 2008 Living On An Acre: A Practical Guide to the Self Reliant Life. These aren’t self-absorbed navel-gazings like the writings of play-farmer trust funders Thoreau in 19th century Massachusetts or the Nearings in 20th century Vermont and later in Maine, but they are efforts at practical manuals for, ironically, exactly what the new local-vore movement now admires: changing food from an industrial/supermarket/mass production/low-purchase-cost model to a grow-it-yourself- or buy-locally organic, locally variable, and yes, markedly higher price (but it and we are worth it, just like the shampoo ad) range of products which, although theoretically grow-able on apartment balconies, in practice require just the sort of larger-than-minimal house lot sought after by the great majority of homebuyers and despised by the advocates of "smart-growth". It’s turning out, in a delicious (pun intended) irony, that the grow-your-own and local-vore trends are best supported by pro-sprawl land-use-planning guidelines.

This principle was acted on by builder Mike Mallott in –surprise—New Jersey, back in 1983, when he started a residential development in Beckett, a crossroads suburb 17 miles from Philadelphia in Gloucester County. The lay-out called for 98 lots ranging in size from 1.6 to 18 acres, each, together with a standard Cape-style house, then selling for $75,000. He named his successful subdivision "Five Acres and Independence". 

The average lot size works out to roughly 10 acres, about the size of Vermont’s once-popular but now expertly-condemned 10-acre lot usually associated with Act 250 but actually the offspring of earlier Health Department on-site sewage disposal regulations. More next week.
 

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights