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NOWHERE_POLICY

                                           October 30, 2001

"The Geography of Nowhere" (1993)               NOWHERE_MAN
by James Howard Kunstler                         
discusses suburbia as                            
the result of government
intervention, rather than
the will of "the market"
or "the people":


    "There _is_ a direct connection between
    suburban sprawl and the spiraling cost 
    of government, and most Americans don't
    see it yet, including many in
    government."
                       p. 246


    "The deeper truth, as Randall Arendt [of
    University of Massachusetts in Amherst]
    realized, was that typical zoning laws
    not only failed to protect the
    landscape, they virtually _mandated_
    sprawl.  To reproduce anything
    resembling a traditional New England
    village had become illegal, a violation
    of all codes, acreage requirements,
    setbacks, street widths, and laws
    insisting on the separation of uses."
    
    [...]
    
    "All you could build in present day New
    England was Los Angeles."
                             
                     p. 264

   "Randal Arendt: 'The law is the major
   problem with the development pattern.
   Developers don't fight it, they go with the
   flow.'"
                     p 263.


   "As sprawl spilled over the countryside,
   alarmed town officials passed laws      
   designed to mitigate it, which had the  
   unforeseen consequence of making it     
   worse.  Once common response was to increase
   the minimum lot size in the mistaken    
   belief that spreading houses farther    
   apart would preserve the open character 
   of the landscape.  In fact, it had the  
   opposite effect: it ruined rural        
   landscape in larger chunks."

                   p. 264 

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