Daily Star trumpets right-wing flak
Perhaps you noticed the opinion cover story in today’s Star on “an expert’s close analysis” showing that, contrary to decades of study to the contrary, suburban sprawl is good for us and should be encouraged.
Too bad Jim Kiser, who wrote this column, didn’t check out the background of his source: Robert Bruegmann, a professor of art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Bruegmann is in fact a staff member of the speakers’ bureau for the Heartland Institute, a far-right libertarian think-tank funded by corporate luminaries like General Motors, ExxonMobil, the Walton Family Foundation, and BPAmoco.
Heartland is in the forefront of the far-right’s attempts to debunk global warming and the health hazards of cigarettes as it promotes the elimination of all corporate regulations and public schools.
It is also the comfortable home of Wendell Cox, the auto- and oil-industry funded flak who has been twisting numbers for decades in an effort to destroy public transportation and urban planning. Cox has a solution for sprawling, traffic-choked Atlanta: double-deck freeways crisscrossing the entire urban area one mile apart in all directions. Another Heartland fellow, Peter Samuel, advocates solving earthquake-prone Los Angeles’ notorious traffic jams by building 24-lane double-deck freeways throughout the region.
In the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, a criminal collusion of General Motors, Firestone Tire, and Standard Oil destroyed our country’s streetcar system in an effort to increase demand for cars, tires, and gasoline. These days, the corporate right wing employs think tanks to seed the public debate with purportedly reasonable arguments to get its way. This is a classic example.
The facts are clear. We sprawl not because we like hour-long commutes, but because that’s where the homes are being built in the greatest numbers and that’s where the homes are cheapest. That sprawl creates demand for longer and wider roads, sewers, police and fire service, water, and utilities, busting our civic budgets. Congestion and pollution increases, desert wilderness is bladed and graded, and time formerly spent with our families is spent on the road. Personal transportation costs grab an increasing chunk of our budgets and lead many into crushing debt. This is no way to live, and we don’t care how many experts the oil, auto, and sprawl industry pay to tell us otherwise.
We need real policy alternatives involving urban infill, housing affordability, public transportation, and sustainable development. We don’t need to be convinced by corporate “experts” that everything we know is wrong.
And our newspapers shouldn’t help those folks do their jobs. Tell Jim Kiser and the Star that we want real reporting on real solutions, not paid propaganda.
December 20th, 2005 at 8:15 am
An interesting entry, and I don’t necessarily disagree with a great deal of it. But I think your “background checking” wasn’t as thorough as it should have been in light of the accusations you make about Bruegmann and his motives. It appears that Bruegmann did indeed give a single talk at the Heartland Institute several years ago. But according to his curriculum vitae, he’s also spoken at the Phoenix Public Library, Yale University School of Architecture, and the Wave Hill Public Garden and Cultural Center in the Bronx.
I suppose he probably received honorariums for all those speaking engagements, but I think implying that he’s “on staff” at any of those organizations is probably stretching the facts more tightly the actual truth warrants. Why dilute your arguments with unfounded ad hominem attacks–surely your viewpoint can be defended without resorting to such tactics.
December 20th, 2005 at 9:12 pm
Scott, I would not in any way characterize this as an ad-hominem attack, but rather as an ad-organization attack. The link I found on the Heartland site indicates that he is “staff and policy expert” for the Heartland Institute, and his arguments follow directly the arguments being made by other Heartland flaks. There’s nothing unfounded about this accusation at all.
The fact that Heartland receives beaucoup bucks from the home-mortgage, suburban builder, oil, and auto industry is directly related to his “surprising” findings that happen to be directly what those folks would like to see.
This is how the corporate right wing has seized the mainstream media over the past decades and it’s only fair to call them on their tactics when mainstream journalists abandon their sacred trust to investigate their sources–that should be their job, not ours.
December 20th, 2005 at 9:38 pm
In case you wanted to hear more from Mr Bruegmann and his brand of logic, here’s an excerpt from an interview in a recent Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:
No further comment necessary on this one. Sounds like a proud Heartland policy expert.
December 22nd, 2005 at 9:16 am
Thanks for posting a response to that article. I wonder if there is anyone out there who has looked at the underlying assumptions that the author makes. The list of city density given seemed to have interesting metro area boundaries. NY included NJ and Conn. but LA didn’t seem to include all of the sprawl counties that I think of when I think of LA. Maybe they just didn’t list them all in the paper, but it seems to me that LA would have to include everything out to San Bernardino, and that is just to the East.
December 22nd, 2005 at 9:38 am
Very good point. I didn’t mention it before, but those census figures which seeming place New York only in third place for pop density are derived directly from Wendell Cox’s Demographia website. Wendell, the leading anti-transit activist in the country, mentioned above, and funded by the same big-oil corporations as Heartland, is notorious for twisting numbers to his liking.
The LA densities are based on a gerrymandered boundary taking in only the densest parts of LA, and ignoring the sprawling parts. Note that the New York area figure of 5,309 per square mile includes New Jersey and Connecticut–not simply the five boroughs, where the year 1990 pop density is actually 23,705 per square mile. San Francisco is not the Demographia-cited 7,004 (which includes East Bay suburbs); the city proper is 15,502. See the Census Bureau 1990 figures for more facts.
Cox is notorious for his bad data, and since Bruegmann bases his data on Cox’s data, we have no reason to accept the basis for his arguments, either.
December 22nd, 2005 at 10:51 am
The “discrepencies” you mention in regard to the census figures can easily be cleared up with a little more exploration of how the United States Government tallies its information.
The census offers its urban statistics in three categories: city, metropolitan areas (defined by counties), and urbanized areas (which the U.S. census defines as contiguous areas around a city center with population densities above 1,000 per square mile). If you’re looking at urban density, the latter category is much more useful than the older and arbitrary political boundaries of cities or counties–especially when you’re discussing sprawl, which no one would argue is especially respectful of traditional boundaries. This is not a statistical trick–it’s simply a more useful way to analyze settlement patterns as they exist in reality, and one that is becoming the standard statistical concept for census bureaus around the world.
As for Cox’s site–the commentary is of course his own, but the statistics come straight from the United States Census site (as do Bruegmann’s)–although it does take a little familiarity with census-taking methods to realize it.
December 22nd, 2005 at 11:07 am
Scott, it’s interesting how these discrepancies always seem to work out in Cox’s or Bruegmann’s favor. Census data is raw information, and it can be used in any way the researcher likes. By your own argument, don’t you think it would be more useful to look at the entire Los Angeles metro area, including parts of San Bernardino, Ventura, Orange, and Riverside counties to really check the densities of LA as it relates to sprawl? That’s what Bruegmann does with NY, Chicago, and San Francisco. His use of only LA’s densest core becomes an apples-to-oranges comparison that happens to skew the facts in his favor.
And Cox has a history of doing this with non-census data to “prove” the failure of various light rail systems. In Portland, he proves its “failure” by moving his baseline beginning and end year to create an appearance of less ridership growth than a standard beginning and end date does. The examples of twisted data from Cox is endless, and is covered in detail in many other places on the web (such as the PDF here). Bruegmann’s data appears to be equally twisted to suit his arguments.