Other nations didn’t make the same decisions regarding city design and transportation as the US, and there’s evidence that the US model contributes significantly to poverty and homelessness. Yes, there is less poverty and homelessness in European cities. An article by Walter Jaegerhaus in Common Edge explores the question of what went wrong with American cities and concludes that, “The insistence on optimizing spaces for the automobile or not is the fork in the road that separates European and American cities.” In essence, by focusing on the automobile as the vehicle that maximizes individual freedom, the US has created an economic dystopia that ironically reduces freedom for most people (by siphoning away their time and money) and dramatically increases the probability that a person will fall on hard times.
Per Jaegerhaus, Europe and the US started out in the same position. It was right after World War I and everyone had decided that cities were “instruments of oppression and sources of widespread misery” and that cars were, conversely, instruments of liberation for working class people. This “modern” model of the city required individual, freestanding houses, which meant the suburbs Americans are so familiar with today, as well as freestanding towers, which translated to the characterless apartment buildings everyone hates to look at. Both of these structures reduce housing density dramatically compared to traditional city design.
By the 1980’s, Europeans saw how the modern model contributed to sprawl that ruined the open countryside, and created massive traffic congestion and a generally unpleasant habitat for human beings. However, the real thing that stopped the modern city model in Europe was that they simply did not have room for it. Meanwhile, in the US, space was available and the economics of sprawl were extremely beneficial to the real estate and banking industries. Moreover, Europe lacked the philosophy of promoting selfishness to the point where the individual is harmed. As a result of all this, Europe switched back to a traditional model of city design; the only return to traditional city design that occurred in the US was in terms of aesthetics.
U.S. cities, especially in the Southwest, seem to attract an ever-growing collection of random problems—congestion, homelessness, displacement, housing shortage, rent escalation, construction cost escalation, escalating carbon footprints per capita—each in desperate need of a solution. Residents, meanwhile, find themselves in a “city” few of them love, but they still object to change thanks to NIMBY fears that doing so will only make things worse.
We’ve certainly seen these problems in the Columbia, Missouri area with the city continually oozing further and further into Boone County. Construction quality is generally poor, and the city uses physical expansion as a scam to increase tax revenue, requiring that newly acquired areas be neglected in terms of city services until they can be funded by taxes from the next area that is conquered. When it can’t expand, the city cuts services, making a difficult living situation even worse (see, for example, the ridiculous trash situation). Even in the city center, new homes are separate, individual houses surrounded by just enough space to park a car or two are required to support a car for each apartment. Not surprisingly, developers appear to be the ones running city council, but the voters participate in the problem because they won’t let go of the “modern” model of city design that centers the automobile rather than human beings.
To be clear, returning to the traditional model of city design doesn’t mean giving up automobiles entirely; it does mean owning fewer of them and using them less often. San Marino, California is highly automobile dependent and has an ownership rate of about 1.26 cars per person, whereas Vienna, Austria has a rate of 0.37 cars per person, but that’s not the important part. The important detail is that you can live in Vienna without a car, but in San Marino, it simply is not possible; i.e., in Vienna you have the freedom to choose to own a car or not. While someone who lives in Vienna takes a walk or rides a bike to get to work, an American worker has to drive for an average of 27 minutes to get to work, essentially losing another hour in addition to the 9 hour (8 hours plus breaks) of the work day, and spending that time sitting on their ass (which contributes to Americans’ poor health).
There’s a rule of thumb in urban planning that says that cities are more efficient than suburbs or rural areas, but that’s only true if you are comparing efficiently designed cities to the suburbs and rural areas; the US model of city design is more accurately called sprawl and the city is functionally part of the suburban and rural areas that surround it. Not only is housing density not as high as in the traditional model, but everyone ends up driving everywhere anyway, eliminating the transportation efficiency of the city entirely. Not only must everyone have a car, but they have to have a place to put it, and when they go to work, there has to be yet another space for that automobile to sit while they work. Because of the economics of this model that benefit developers and bankers while harming everyone else, cities become impoverished and chaotic in their centers, which further encourages people to move away from the center, which makes the rot spread outward, encouraging people to move even further away and continually pumping up the cost of rent and mortgages. This is true even without the racism of “white flight” though I’m confident that plays a part.
I used to live in a one-car, inner city household; we even managed to walk to work. We moved out to exurbia for the very reasons most people do — the decay, chaos, and hopelessness of the automobile-centered inner city environment — and now we have two cars and drive at least one every day. Part of the decision to move was based on the fact that I’d gotten a new job on the other side of the city and it required me to drive for the same amount of time that we do now; the transportation advantage of living in the city no longer applied to us. It is more common than not for an American to have to commute even if they live in a city; sprawl is the reason.
As I mentioned previously, it isn’t just the real estate and banking industries pushing bad city design — it is also the American fixation on absolute freedom at the cost of everything, even if it means self-destruction (a state that necessarily eliminates one’s freedom). If you like cars like I do, you might enjoy this documentary on YouTube about the Lambourghini Countach that appeared in the movie Cannonball Run. If not, I’ll pass along an interesting bit of wisdom I found tucked inside it. Brock Yates meant Cannonball Run to be a rebellion against Ralph Nader and the latter’s crusade to make US highways safe for everyone to use for transportation. An important element of Nader’s strategy was to standardize national highway speed limits to 55 miles per hour — a state of affairs that deeply offended self-centered thrill-seekers like Sammy Hagar.
The race involved driving from coast to coast. The route was not specified; you just had to get there in the same car you left in. This wasn’t something everyone was allowed to participate in, though; Yates personally approved each person who intended to race and rejected drivers if they lacked the skill or character to finish the race safely. Then, one day, a man asked to participate and showed Yates his new Lambourghini Countach; it was able to sustain nearly 200 miles per hour, which at the time was nightmarishly fast compared to everything else. Yates looked at the car and decided that there would never be another Cannonball Run — because someone would die. I hope you see the irony. Yates essentially agreed that speed kills and that he couldn’t change that fact — only work around it by controlling who participated.
On the open roads of America, a speed limit is necessary because everyone has to be able to drive to get to work, which means that a driver’s speed must be limited to what the average driver can handle — not a batch of hand-picked, exceptional drivers. Eventually, the “I can’t drive 55” libertarians won, and not only did the speed limit get raised to 70 miles per hour in most places (85 in Texas), but police routinely ignore violations of the speed limit if they’re less than 20 miles per hour over the limit. The overall effect has been more deaths on US roads (though, higher speed limits actually slightly reduce the number of collisions). Nader’s contribution to vehicle safety ironically made it safer to travel at these speeds. Regardless, it’s probably true that Brock Yates thought that he could drive a Countach across the country safely even if he didn’t think someone else could.
By the way, the Countach that killed the Cannonball Run ended up in the movie based on the real race and people continued trying to improve their Cannonball Run times even after Yates killed the official event. The best time of about 25 hours was produced during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, which was a reduction of about 6 hours compared to pre-lockdown records.
But here’s the situation: The automobile-centered design of US cities hurts Americans in a number of ways, including:
- More deaths
- Less money due to having to purchase and maintain a car, including fuel costs (nearly $2000 per year)
- Less money due to sprawl pushing up the cost of housing
- More pollution (including CO2)
- More energy resources used per capita
- Much more homelessness and poverty
- More time spent on work (because the commute is part of the work day), less free time
- More general misery
- Worse health
- More perceived freedom, but less actual freedom
What is there to do about this? Unfortunately, Americans are highly resistant to change or even new ideas; however:
There is a simplistic, but authentic answer: one could design and build new U.S. neighborhoods people would like to live in, and at rates they can afford. This is not hyperbole. Situations like this exist elsewhere in the world. There are current urban models being exhibited in several European cities, but they also occur in other countries.
Naturally, Americans will have numerous dumb excuses for why they can’t change. This is just self-centered laziness having no relationship to the facts; as with many other problems America faces, the only real obstacle is narcissistic cowards who just don’t feel like doing things differently. Jaegerhaus does a great job explaining what would be necessary in his article. In contrast, consider Columbia’s approach to homelessness has so far been a great example of what not to do (though there might be hope for the future): We can see that an automobile-centric city creates poverty and homelessness, and we of course realize that most homeless people are lacking a reliable car. So why would the City of Columbia keep trying to find places far from the city center to hide homeless services? What would make sense is for those services — including both a permanent camp and permanent shelters — to be located in the city center so people who need those services have access to more resources within walking distance (though, Columbia is an American city so resources are far apart even in the center). That would give them the opportunity that is a prerequisite for success.