Up Above: The Geography of Suburban Sprawl
in Southern California’s Antelope Valley

Matthew Jalbert

The Alternatives to Sprawl
TO SAY THAT THE ANTELOPE VALLEY’S RECENT DEVELOPMENT was misguided may be a truism, but it leads us to another question: how could it have been different? Given the context of growth in California in the 1980s—when six million people were added to the population, and a half-million more each year in the early 1990s—did the Antelope Valley have any choice but to accommodate its new residents? More important, what plausible forces needed to exist to bring about a different development pattern in the Antelope Valley, forces that are aligned with current sensibilities about the returns on investment, the limits of government planning, and the single-family home? In this section I would like to examine alternative scenarios to the Antelope Valley’s sprawl. Though unable to plumb the situation’s full intricacies, I hope that by a considered analysis I might raise possibilities for the application to future growth.

One might first be prone to ask if anything is wrong with sprawl at all. I hope that in the previous sections I have demonstrated that indeed it has considerable costs across a broad spectrum of evaluation. A February 1995 report issued by several diverse entities led by the Bank of America confirms my case study. Titled Beyond Sprawl: New Patterns of Growth to Fit the New California, this report may indicate a sea change in the corporate and public reaction to sprawl. With its economic rhetoric stressing externalized and social costs, the report, as modest as it is, does point out that the traditional patterns of suburban growth have had—and will continue to have—significant negative economic and environmental impact.

As I have stated, the boom in the Antelope Valley was developer-planned at the subdivision level. The cities of Lancaster and Palmdale merely reacted to their growth; they did not guide it. Indeed, under the contemporary local, state, and national policies, there are few ways in which the cities could have affected the boom. Any effort to moderate development must account for the role of investors; enlightened social objectives are not the forte of developers. Thus, if the Antelope Valley or other greenfield sites are to implement economically rational models for growth, those ideas must be framed in such a way that they are at least as attractive to investors as traditional patterns. Likewise, government’s ability to influence what investments are “attractive” should not be ignored. This notion has several sides: what is attractive to investors and developers is what will sell to consumers, and that is something shaped by a variety of economic, political, and social conditions.

In order to create the context for a different form of growth, better coordination must be achieved across all levels of government and economies. In the current climate of economic sluggishness and intense regional competition, solutions to the problems of sprawl cannot be local; indeed, one area’s slow-growth policy might well be the stimulus of even more insensible sprawl somewhere else. That kind of spillover undoubtedly had a part in developers’ decisions to build in the Antelope Valley, where local resistance to development was nil. Solving sprawl then becomes a regional or national policy; it must be seen in the interest of society as a whole to provide an alternative to traditional development patterns.

We might frame the solution in the form a social contract, one which considers the roles and interests of capital, the government, and consumers. In order to move toward alternatives to sprawl, the consumers of housing must see it in their best interest to reject the traditional single-family home; capital must be comfortable with providing a new pattern of development; and government policies must foster investment in both the building and purchasing of these new developments. New patterns of growth are available and ready for implementation; the obstacles are, of course, numerous. As long as it is affordable to commute long distances, to buy a large single-family home, and to irrigate a green grass lawn in the desert, people will do so. Developers will build it, and they will come. As long as cities and older suburban areas are considered dangerous and crowded and their schools inadequate, developments such as the Antelope Valley will be generated and continue to degrade the vitality of society and the Earth as a whole.

Thus, the leaders of change must be a coalition of diverse interests, perhaps initiated by concern for a sustainable future but made long-lived by economic and legal structures. In the following sections, I will sketch some facets of how these structures might be created. At their heart are economic realities, for there is no room for utopian visions in the calculated atmosphere of late twentieth century America. The following sections develop in consideration of the Antelope Valley in particular, but the ideas presented may find application in a range of geographic contexts.

NEXT | The Role of Government

© Matthew Jalbert 1995–2002