Past Imperfect

The bumper sticker reads: DON’T MOVE HERE. In California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, the person behind the wheel probably came to town right after college, planning to stay for just a season. She fell in love with the place. Ten or fifteen years have gone by, and now this is home. She’s part of a small community of skiers, writers, and artists - folks who don’t want to call themselves hippies - whose trail was blazed a half-generation earlier by people intent on getting “back to the land.” These people live in old ranch houses or miners’ bungalows, and their mostly amicable neighbors still do that kind of work - although these days, more and more of the neighbors drive to work at resorts and hotels. In the last few years, though, a new element has turned up: this crew has more money than the first or second wave, and, some might say, less taste, tact, and “sense of place.”

When newcomers’ money inflates a town’s housing market beyond the reach of the regular folks who live there, “Don’t Move Here” seems even more poignant. But the sticker is often too late. It is a sigh of longing, a reminder that the town’s best days are gone, and perhaps a taunt directed at those who missed them. The sticker represents a sentiment fixed firmly on the past, disguised as a claim about how the town ought to work now.

This conservative backwards gaze is endemic among recent writers who take otherwise progressive attitudes toward land use and growth. These writers deploy nostalgia to a variety of ends. Whichever method they use, though, they cheat by substituting misty reverence for reasoning, and thus undermine otherwise interesting thinking.

In her book, Americans and Their Land, Anne Mackin, a Massachusetts planner, similarly relies on a hollow, warm feeling about the past instead of delineating her critique of the present state of land use policy. The first half of the book (echoing, in part, Alexis De Tocqueville) lays the groundwork for an argument that from the sheer abundance of the continent, with its large tracts of seemingly underpopulated land, sprang the new nation’s high rates of land ownership, the possibility of a frontier, and waves of speculation. Even today, she argues, the U.S. is largely a nation of smallholders with their collective imagination committed to a vision of a rural society based on a certain distance between one family’s house and the next. There is little to recommend this made-up America as a way to house today’s 300 million people, while maintaining wild lands and a healthy environment. But Mackin, like many others, is devoted to it.

Ever a dutiful planner, Mackin deplores suburban sprawl by applauding zoning measures that ensure large lots, rather than semi-dense subdivisions, in newly developing areas. But she is simultaneously engrossed by the frontier ideal of a life surrounded by greenery, quoting a mournful line from Laura Ingalls Wilder: “Wild animals would not stay in a country where more people are arriving every day. Pa did not like to stay either.”

Mackin’s longing for the past becomes palpable in the first-person episodes interspersed with her history. Her visit to a Cape Cod town meeting is all slanting afternoon light and back roads. At the town meeting she describes - held to discuss plans about a high-minded New Urbanist development - the townspeople are unhappy with the proposal. They also seem unaware that the town code gives the developer the right to do pretty much as he likes. She obviously sympathizes with the residents (who wouldn’t?), but more than that, she seems to share their desire to simply keep things as they are, or were. Her nostalgia is tinged with guilt: “The suburbs,” Mackin writes, “are full of people like me who long for the country. And as more of us move there, we whittle it away.”

Roger Kennedy, a former chief of the National Park Service, in his book Wildfire and Americans: How to Save Lives, Property, and Your Tax Dollars, feels no such guilt. But he similarly summons the past - what he sees as an American heritage of urbanism - instead of actually arguing in support of his position.

The book begins with an explanation for the great suburban efflorescence after the Second World War, and a new reason for disliking it (as if we needed more). The move out of cities in the late ‘40s and ‘50s, he says, was driven not by the factors usually offered as explanations - racial hostility, the economics of cheap land, and subsidies for mortgages and freeways. Instead, like at least one previous historian (who is given no credit in the book), Kennedy proposes that a cold war policy of dispersing people to reduce potential damage from a nuclear strike on urban centers was primarily responsible.

Kennedy makes no connection between the need to “break up the nation’s concentration of attractive targets” and the national policies that drove the flight from cities. The cold war theory primarily serves to give him objects, such as the unpleasantly named “dispersion-industrial complex,” for his scolding when he turns to critique suburbanization itself. In this he focuses exclusively on the overwhelming danger that fire poses to exurbs in the West, moving across a truly tenuous bridge from the cold war to wildfire. A quick riff on man’s eternal fear of fire, a framing story about the 2000 fire in Los Alamos, birthplace of the bomb, and we’ve left behind dispersion altogether to enter what Kennedy calls the “flame zone” - an area whose vegetation is naturally inclined to burn.

This apprehension about fire is generally appropriate. Flame zones are frequently scenic, appealing places to live - think of the Colorado Front Range or Flagstaff, Arizona - and have been settled in the more recent waves of suburban development. Once there, people tend to build in a pattern that increases the danger by maximizing the length of the boundary between settlement and flammable open ground. That border zone, known as the wildland–urban interface, is where fire is most dangerous. Kennedy’s primary policy proposals - a mapping project and a fire-focused national service corps - are timorous programs that would do little more than nibble at the wildfire problem and would do nothing to curb the central problem: sprawl itself. The geometry of the situation makes it apparent that compact, dense development that minimizes the wildland–urban interface is the only real solution.

He does, however, hint at the real solution to his pet problem: living in cities. He does this, however, not by actually arguing that dense urban development is good protection against wildfire, but instead by positing an American tradition of city dwelling, stretching back, he claims, to before the Declaration of Independence. Bathed in the golden light of nostalgia, Kennedy’s view is seductive. An argument for density based on American values has irrefutable force. But to see colonial America as a nation of cities means ignoring the colonies south of Baltimore, and, more importantly, the slave–plantation economy and Jeffersonian yeoman farmer culture that developed there. These systems themselves may be contradictory, but they share an opposition to urbanism. And they are at least as important to the American foundation as the cities of the Northeast.

If Kennedy really sees urban development in the nation’s genes, then history has moved past him. The move to the suburbs, whatever the government policies that facilitated it, could not have happened in its staggering magnitude unless people actually wanted to live on half-acre lots along cul de sacs. Americans have, in huge numbers, rejected the traditions that previously led them to build houses close to one another. Lecturing them about how their grandparents lived seems unlikely to reverse their choices.

All this nostalgia would not be so irritating if the daydreamers were wrong. But they are for the most part dead on: Mackin offers interesting, if incomplete, statistics on the significant benefits for adults and school kids exposed to “nature”: reduced stress and increased health. And Kennedy’s apprehension about fire is well founded. But when a reverence for the past - whether those golden years were pastoral or urban - replaces fact and argument rooted in the present, even people with good ideas do nothing to advance their vision. More devastatingly, these problems require new thinking, but the people best positioned to make that leap are standing facing yesterday, with their backs squarely turned against the future.