12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Potent ammo against unchecked growth, April 22, 2006
This review is from: Sprawl Costs: Economic Impacts of Unchecked Development (Paperback)
As a rural resident trying to help my town control predatory developers and manage issues of growth and land use, this book is a potent tool, a fact that is clearly disturbing to some who stand to profit handsomely from sprawl, like the automobile and oil companies, the large-scale construction industries, millionaire developers, automobile manufacturers, and big-box national retailers.
It's interesting that Diane Bast has written a negative review without mentioning, either here or in her Amazon.com profile, that she holds the title of Vice President of Internal Affairs for the benign-sounding (and Richard Mellon Schiafe-funded) "Heartland Institute," whose work she cites here.
She also fails to mention that her husband Joseph L. Bast is also founder, president and CEO of the Institute, whose board of directors includes representatives from General Motors, Exxon-Mobil, and Philip Morris, along with various banks and insurance companies. The Institute has also over the years received substantial funding from the tobacco industry, among other large multinational companies. Of course, none of these board members mention these affiliations on Heartland's flowers-and-little-kids adorned official website, because that would be giving the real purpose of the organization away.
I doubt that such an organization would subsidize any research which would support public transportation or de-emphasize converting far-flung farmland or open space into cookie-cutter subdivisions, so Ms. Bast's citations are unsurprising given her unmentioned affiliation to that organization.
As for Mr. Cox, a quick check of his consultancy website reveals his purpose is to denigrate comprehensive planning efforts (because they supposedly put constraints on private ownership and the so-called "free market") and to promote gasoline-powered transportation over rail, public transportation and other environmentally- friendly alternatives. (In the 1920s and 30s, a consortium of carmakers and tire manufacturers bought up and dismantled existing electric trolley systems in major cities, and Mr. Cox and his colleagues are apparently dedicated to making sure that such systems stay dead.)
In fact, despite Ms. Bast's derision of "politics" as a factor in the costs of sprawl, the Heartland Institute has been more than willing to use politics to its own corporate ends, including coordinating the blast-faxing of legislators to oppose or overturn anti-smoking, pro-environmental and health-care regulatory legislation that could cut into the profits of its benefactor companies. Despite her sprinkling her review with references to the poor and minorities, her organization believes in unfettered corporate power, first and foremost. I believe the reader should take that into account when reading her comments.
The fact remains that sprawl enriches developers, car manufacturers, oil and real estate companies much, much more than individual homeowners, who find that as gas hits $3 - $4 a gallon and above, and their property taxes jump as overburdened small towns try to cope with the sudden need to build new schools and keep formerly little-used town roads in repair, that their "affordable" homes cost them more to own than they imagined -- and that the only part of the supposed wealth they generate is when they sell them, long after the strip-mall, big-box and cookie-cutter developers have pocketed their profits and gone elsewhere.
There is a biological analog to unfettered and out of control growth. It's called "cancer." Cancer eventually kills its host. Sprawl kills community life and saps a region's vitality. This book lays out the evidence in black and white.
For more information on the Heartland Institute, go to www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Heartland_Institute.
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sprawl on our wallets, November 15, 2005
This review is from: Sprawl Costs: Economic Impacts of Unchecked Development (Paperback)
I just heard one of the authors on talk radio out here and must say that I was blown away by the amount of money sprawl costs every year. Just making a list of the items that tap into our tax dollars is staggering: schools, highways, sewers, electricity, water. And if you watch a new housing development going into the desert, this fact is so obvious---much of the bill must be paid by all the rest of us, how else could they afford all those big costs. So I know the argument for sprawl is that if we didn't have it, housing prices would go through the roof. But one sensible point this author made is that with a very limited change in the way we live, would result in a massive savings to our government spending. So I hope people will listen to this message cause it seems to make sense to me. Looking forward to reading the book, and I hope government officials will as well.
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