The U.S. Census Bureau is out with a new release on the nation’s shifting demographics. If you’ve read much about demographics, you’ll not be surprised to learn that the top five growing cities during the time 2000-2002 were in Arizona and Nevada.
The Bureau also notes that Joliet, Ill., is the 10th-fastest growing incorporated area, growing at a clip of 11.4 percent. This provides the suburban Chicago-based Daily Heralda chance to trot out the bogeyman of “Sprawl” with this headline: “Suburb’s Sprawl Gaining Speed.”
While the Census Bureau says that the City of Chicago lost population during the last two years, “The fastest-growing areas of the state in 2002 were towns anywhere from 20 to 40 miles from downtown Chicago.” It notes that other cities near Joliet, including Romeoville (13.5 percent), Plainfield, and Oswego grew by double-digit figures in the time July 2001 to July 2002.
Why the growth in this areas, which involve over an hour’s commute to the Chicago Loop?
– Some people value the opportunity to get some “country living” far from the urban core.
– Cheaper land prices mean, as one house-shopper put it, “you can get something new out here for the price of what’s old where we live now” (in a closer-in suburb). A sales rep for a developer, quoted in the article, “barely had time to gasp between phone calls and visitors streaming in to see model homes that range from about $130,000 to $158,000.” In the closer-in suburb in which I lived during four years, that kind of money will buy a condo (and perhaps only a one-bedroom one at that), not a house.
Of course, an article about population growth can’t ignore the professional fretters. The “village planner” for Plainfield says “”We see growth generally as a good thing as long as it’s done as smart growth.” Ah smart growth! That nebulous term that is a rallying cry for a motley collection of big city mayors who hate to lose population (and power), anti-auto cranks, environmentalists who prefer to use land for birds rather than people, and romantics wishing to re-create the mythical “community” of early 20th-century living, complete with boulevards, street cars, and large front porches. (Oddly enough, this last group wishes to re-establish a pattern of living that was the “suburban sprawl” of its day.)
The village planner of Plainfield defines “smart growth” as “working with developers to make sure Plainfield, Will County’s oldest community, does not lose its identity to development.” Hmm. Who defines a “community’s identity”–a centralized planner, or the voluntary interactions of its residents? Apparently, the thinking goes, the top down approach is best.
The article also argues that another contributing factor to growth on the metro fringe is that “Interstate highways and suburban rail lines make it easy to commute to work.” That depends on what your definition of “easy commute” is. Since my wife wanted to live and work in the ‘burbs, not the city, I spent 2 hours and 40 minutes commuting each day. Granted, taking Metra (the regional rail line) was cheaper than driving and parking, and much less nerve-racking.
But as even the Daily Herald article notes, jobs, not just people, are moving to the suburbs. This means that as facilitators of “sprawl,” highways (and where they exist, commuter rail lines) are fairly small. The Buckeye Institute, based in Columbus, O (which has itself seen a fair amount of “sprawl”), demolishes the “highways cause sprawl” argument in this study. A brief commentary based on the study is here, and the press release is here.