Ask Anyone

"Suburban sprawl is fine because that's what people want."

This is an interesting argument. I live in sprawl. My entire city of Elk Grove is sprawl. Everyone who lives here, apparently, likes it because they wanted it. The truth is, the only reason I bought in suburban sprawl was because it was cheap. Cheap housal unit prices attracted me in 1997, and I bought based solely on price.

I did not base it, whatsoever, on the cost of energy needed to shuttle me to work, to the store, to recreate...because energy was so damn cheap to concern myself with. Gas at $1.57 a gallon and with a degreed salary the cost of energy was nothing. Nothing. It meant nothing to live 30 miles from work, 2 miles from the grocery, 120 miles from the coast or mountains which I visited regularly. I could easily afford it. I thought nothing of driving through South Sacramentan neighborhoods to do the things I I had to do -- get to the Home Depot, get to work, or cash a check. I incrementally decreased their quality of life by either commuting by their homes or clogging up collector roads near their homes. All the while, I'm living comfortably here in Elk Grove, here in my suburban bunker.

Today, I enjoy hearing about how Wilton fights to prevent the city of Elk Grove from encroaching on their "open space." I enjoy reading about how the city of Franklin wants to exclude itself from Elk Grove's expansion. I enjoy this because I know that the residents of these "communities" have never found the means to provide for themselves locally, and all of them require employment elsewheres to be able to live there. To hear a new acquaintance who lives in the town of Franklin decry his loss of "country living" while commuting to Sacramento to work...talk about hypocrisy. Why should I care about his "loss" of "community?" He commutes daily through neighborhoods and across freeways that enabled him to live in the country to begin with. He has fucked over, along with 174,000 others, all those "in-between" neighborhoods with his incessant motoring. Should his "neighborhood" be spared from the relentless march of sprawl when his own actions contributed to it? Should mine? Tough question.

We need to reset our thinking, our belief that all farmland here in Sacramento county is valued only as land available for suburban sprawl.

I often lament my earlier choice in my living arrangement. I have a picture from 1991 when my housal unit was first manufactured that shows the fields to the east as a vast open space. Buying my housal unit contributed to the loss of land for elderberry beetles, prairie grasses and burrowing owls. At the time, this meant nothing to me, and the "developers" gave even less consideration; they made a pile of money destroying this former open space.

I believe that if/as energy becomes more expensive relative to today, more Elk Grovians will view their living pattern in the same way as I do. More will see sprawl as a terrible allocation of national energies. I don't hold the view, as do most of my neighbors and friends, that energy will be less expensive in the future. Ask yourself, and ask anyone you know: do you believe that energy will be cheaper going forward? If not, then why do you suppose it's in anyone's long term interests to continue to allow the squandering of what energy we do have by building sprawl even farther away from everything?

Do you really think that technology will rescue us from our foreign-oil-dependent living arrangement? Do you really think that somehow our engineers and scientists over the past thirty years have overlooked some profound engineering/technological marvel that will allow us to live in a cheaper energy future? Do you?

I don't know anyone who thinks so. I don't. None of my electrial engineering co-workers do. None of my relatives or my friends think so. Not my mom. Not my sons.

So why the fuck do we continue building farther-away-from-everything suburban sprawl?