Against Livability: A Polemic

By Jake Carlo

It’s so hard to go into the city
You want to say hello to everybody
It’s so hard to go into the city
You want to say hey, I love you to everybody
—Cat Power

Last fall, not long after their attorneys general returned home with the Big Tobacco peace agreement, the States fired the opening salvo in a new war on yet another great enemy of American health and prosperity: Sprawl. The new enemy, rather than threatening life itself, menaces an even more ephemeral state of being known as Livability.

On November third, voters across the country faced a mixed bag of state ballot initiatives and ...



... constitutional amendments, over two hundred of them at final count, aimed at somehow curbing the relentless expansion of the suburbs. A surprisingly large majority of these measures passed, often by comfortable margins, and within a week big-city dailies were declaring the birth of a national livability movement. Suddenly Al Gore, known for his inhuman enthusiasm for land-use, planning and other tedious “soft-green” issues, went from laborious wonk to political bellwether and was being quoted from coast to coast, possibly for the first time in his career. And while Gore busied himself formulating the administration’s new “Livability Agenda,” a host of pro-development politicians defeated at the city and county levels began clearing out their desks. Growth-control had been definitively proven capable of making or breaking political livelihoods. Livability was officially on the map.

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