When I ponder what is taught these days at the University of Texas School of Architecture as regards rural, semi-rural and suburban development, I get a queasy feeling that there is a culture war going on that few of us are aware of.
The urban design paradigm being taught, at least at UT, is heavily weighted toward the concept of the “compact city” and follows the dictates of thinkers who favor a literal “culture of congestion” as the solution to our land use and energy consumption problems related to urban sprawl.
This might be a great idea for those who want to live in a city environment, but it rings hollow for people like me who have consciously fled the big city for a quieter, less-congested lifestyle in rural Hays County, Texas.
Urban designers and architects are busily concocting new ways for 300 million-plus Americans to live peacefully in this land of ours and Texas is growing so fast that we can barely keep up with the changes. Not everyone can or would want to live in these compact cities, but they do provide an excellent solution for many to the urban sprawl dilemma.
Making the cities more compact would take a lot of pressure off the land surrounding the cities and many people would benefit and enjoy living in these vibrant and culturally-rich city centers.
But not me.
Therein lies the rub, and that is people like me. And if you are reading this in a local Hill Country newspaper, maybe you, too. We just do not wish to live in the big city.
Either we never lived in the city or we left for good reason and our life goal does not include that lovely, impressive and most certainly comfortable and convenient high-rise down near Whole Foods with the great view of the Capitol from your bedroom and where you can watch the fireworks display at Auditorium Shores from your couch.
There has to be a way to retain our sanity, our water, our lifestyle, our open lands and still have a healthy economy and a healthy natural environment.
It is obvious that the land between cities cannot be turned into one vast suburban landscape, but there has to be a middle ground between either being a farmer and a city slicker.
The suburban marketing strategy, bolstered after the Second World War by government policies that made borrowing money from the FHA fairly simple, has proven to be an unsustainable land use and housing model when it became apparent that gasoline is not infinite.
Driving into the big city from the countryside or the ‘burbs to work has become a financial problem in terms of actual gas use, but also if you take into account the cost of roads and the detrimental effects on personal and environmental health caused by air pollution.
Most striking for me is the time it takes out of your day to make these commutes. Living far away from work and all our retail centers is not something we can do forever and maintain our quality of life.
Constantly converting farms, ranches and undeveloped open spaces into more subdivisions is no way to preserve local agriculture or replenish aquifers with rainfall. We need open land that has a filtered connection to the underground water sources to keep our aquifers healthy.
Without large expanses of native grasses, trees and permeable soil our rainfall is unlikely to find its way underground or if it does, it gets there too fast, still carrying contaminants from urban runoff.
There has to be a better way to enjoy the countryside without killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
One option is to encourage low-impact businesses to locate in our Hill Country communities, providing jobs and a tax base for our smaller towns and allowing people a shorter commute to work.
When local governments offer tax incentives to lure chain stores that offer only minimum wage jobs, they are not doing the local people or the local economy any favors. Our citizens need real, living-wage jobs where the money comes into our communities, not ones where the money generated is both inadequate to live on but also where most of the profits leave the community almost immediately.
Local shuttle bus systems could get people to and from work places and town centers, making the use of your car for short trips unnecessary.
The money saved on building new roads would be an obvious funding source for local public transportation systems, whether operated by public agencies or by private companies whose start-up costs might be subsidized by city councils and county officials who saw this as a benefit to all concerned and a way to save taxpayer money in the long run.
Many of our local economies could become essentially self-sustaining if we brought in jobs with real wages that produced something people outside our area might want to buy or use, promoted local agriculture, made sure that the money made here stayed here and made it possible to access most of our essential goods and services within a reasonable radius of our houses.
We could make it possible to go into Austin only on special occasions, save money on gas, save our hillsides from becoming highways and have more time to spend doing all the things we moved out here to do.
We need to make some changes in how we live and work, what and how much we drive and how and where we build our homes and businesses.
What is stopping us? Is it us?
Susan Cook
11 October 2009
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