Environmental Information
April 1975
Russell E. Train, Administrator of the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency, recently told a national meeting of urban
planners that congestion in our metropolitan areas "is not
too many people in too small a space but rather too many
people spread out all over creation." As a result, Train
said, "To far too qreat a degree, central cities are organized
for the care and convenience of cars, not people."
If we are to make the best of our cities and urban areas,
Train said, "we are qoing to have to develop, as rapidly as
possible, effective and democratic institutions at the State,
local and regional levels to direct and regulate growth" in
this country.
Train made his remarks before the National Conference
on the Urban Environment meeting in New York City on April 1.
A copy of his soeech is attached for your information and use.
Office of Public Affairs
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REMARKS BY THE HONORABLE RUSSELL E. TRAIN
ADMINISTRATOR, ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY
PREPARED FOR DELIVERY BEFORE THE
NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
TUESDAY, APRIL 1, 1975
MAKING THE BEST OF OUR CITIES
I am delighted to take part In this conference on the urban
environment -- for that is the environment in which the vast majority
of Americans lives and, not always without difficulty, breathes.
I am tempted to address you as "fellow elitists" -- for it has been
suggested, by one of our more recent philosophers of the absurd, that
people who care about the environment, and people who care about cities,
have one thing in common: they are all elitists.
We can take comfort In the fact that we are in good and ample
company. A Harris poll released earlier this month showed that the
American people rank water and air pollution as the nation's third
and fourth greatest problems respectively, above the energy shortage
and second only to inflation and unemployment.
Moreover, the poll reveals, three out of four Americans are un-
convinced that a temporary slow-down of water and air pollution control
programs will "help ease the energy shortage," "get the economy moving
again" or "ease unemployment." They believe, instead, that we can
deal with our economic and energy difficulties while at the same time
maintaining our progress toward pollution control.
By roughly the same proportion — three out of four — most
Americans live in metropolitan areas. Whether they do so by choice
or by necessity is not a simple matter to decide, and I will not
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attempt to do so here.
Americans have, in fact, almost always displayed an ambivalent
attitude towards the city. Nor is that surprising. For unlike the cities
of Europe which grew slowly — I might even say aged, like good wine ~
over many centuries, ours have often been transformed from trading post
to giant metropolitan complex in little more than a single century. "The
strength of ancient metropolises/1 historian Daniel Boorstin has written,
"came from the inability, the unwillingness or the reticence of people
to leave, but New World cities depended on new-formed loyalties
and enthusiasms, shallow-rooted, easily transplanted." Europe,
after all, was what Americans came to escape. And if Europe was
characterized by those close and corrupt accretions of the past called
cities, America was characterized by Us openness, Its limitless horizons
and frontiers. John Steinbeck said it well, and said It all, when he wrote
upon his arrival in New York City: "I was going to live in New York but
I was going to avoid it. I planted a lawn In the tiny soot-covered garden,
bought huge pots and planted tomatoes, pollinating the blossoms with a
water-color brush."
We have rarely, and only reluctantly, regarded cities In this
country as places where we expected to stay, to raise our children,
and to watch them raise theirs. They were, for the most part, places
where we came only to earn or acquire enough to enable us to get out.
Europeans may not have looked at their cities with greater affection
than we have. But they have generally known, or assumed, that they
would have to live out their lives in their cities, and they have general-
ly tried to make the best of them -- tn both senses of that phrase. They
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built cJtJes to last. And because land was scarce and areas ware small.
they built them in compact form.
Unlike the cities of Europe , ours have not generally grown up or
grown in — they have grown out. In part, our spread patterns of urban
settlement and development are the legacy of our old Illusion that we
had endless acres of Jand to build on and unlimited energy to burn. In
part, they are the result of the fact that we have regarded our cities as
places to leave rather than Live, as places to "process" immigrants and
laborers, as places ta make enough in order to be able to afford to move
put, And so our cities have become what one authority has called
"accidental cities" which put a "premium on moving" because they
"offer so Little In the way of living-" The fact that the automobile
is responsible for so much of our air pollution, and the fact that our
dependence on Arab oil can be completely accounted for by our dependence
upon the automobile, suggest how dearly we have purchased that "premium
on moving,"
The simpla fact is that our energy'and environmental problems are,
in no small degree, the result of the haphazard, helter-skelter patterns
in which so much of our urban growth has occurred, Wa cannot expect to
make much progress toward conserving energy or clearing our air unless
we change those patterns.
It is no accident that, fifty years ago,, tt was Henry Ford who
declared that: "The city is dead" and that "wre shall solve the City
Problem by leaving the City."
It ts no accident that, fifty years later, a former Secretary of
Transportation went so far as to describe a city as, originally and
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essentially, "a way of making transportation unnecessary ... of
enabling more people to get more of [the things they need and want]
for the least amount of transportation."
It Is no accident that both the energy crisis and the clean air
effort have combined to encourage far more compact and conservative
kinds of growth that will permit us to break the strangle-hold — one
might even say the "death-grip" — that the private, single-passenger
automobile has exerted upon our cities.
It is no accident that, together, our energy and environmental
Imperatives should help give the cities of America a new lease on life.
For the city, at Its best, may well be the greatest conservation device
ever invented by man. The whole idea of a city is to give people access
to the broad range of opportunities and activities they need and want
without having to spend so much energy, time and money in order to
get them.
The days of sprawl may not yet be over, but I suspect they are
decidedly numbered. The costs, as we are starting to understand, are
becoming far too high.
i Early last year, the Regional Plan Association of New York,
together with Resources for the Future, released the results of a study
s howlng that for all its bright lights, traffic Jams and World Trade Centers,
New York City consumes only about half the energy per resident that the
rest of the nation does. More than that, the study showed that — per
dollar of income — "spread city" residents use up three times more
energy in their homes than people in high-density developments. More
recently, the "Costs of Sprawl" study -- Jointly sponsored by.EPA, the
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Council on Environmental Quality, and the Department of Housing
and Urban Development — shows that the environmental, economic
and energy costs of higher density planned developments are 40-50
percent less than those imposed by unplanned sprawl.
There are, as Edmund Faltermayer of Fortune has pointed out,
other forces besides our energy and environmental efforts which are
moving us toward more compact and concentrated patterns of urban
growth and settlement. Already, the rapid and apparently endless
rise In land prices has meant the construction of more townhouses
and apartments. Today, multi-family residences account for about
half the units butlt in the United States (excluding mobile homes);
in the late 1950's multi-family units comprised only one-fifth of the
units built. There Is, in addition, a sharp shift away from large,
child-oriented households toward smaller, adult-oriented households.
The Census Bureau says there will be at least 13 million more house-
holds in 1985 than In 1975. The 25- to 34-year-old group — the age
span in which people generally buy their first home — will grow by 9.6
million by 1980. That is four times the population increase in that age
group during the comparable period in the 1960's. This burgeoning number
of young households with fewer children and with less interest in the
suburban life style; the growth in the number of working wives; the
increased emphasis or leisure — these and other related demographic and
cultural changes are generating a growing demand for closer in, more
compact kinds of development.
All of these factors and forces add up to a very real opportunity
to reshape and restructure our urban environment in ways that will
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make it a far better place to live. If we are to take full advantage
of this opportunity, we are going to have to do at least two things.
The first is to rid ourselves of some rather serious misconceptions.
I think, in particular, of the thoroughly erroneous notion that
density is synomous with congestion on the one hand and high-
rise on the other.
We often hear it said that most of our urban ills are the result
of overcrowding and congestion. There are Just too many people,
we are told. Jammed together in much too small a space. We
hear it said that what's wrong with central cities is too many people
and too many cars. Well, the problem with central cities is too
few people and too many cars. To put it another way, the congestion
that we experience in our central cities — both in our streets and In
our lungs — is mainly the result of the fact that there are too many
cars driven by too many people who don't live there. To far too
great a degree, central cities are organized for the care and con-
venience of cars, not people.
And the problem with urban areas is not too many people in too
small a space but rather too many people spread out all over creation.
Despite all the talk about overcrowding in our metropolitan areas, the
fact is that density in this country — defined as the number of
people per given area of land — has been steadily declining since
early in this century. In our urbanized areas, population per
square mile has declined from 6,580 in 1920 to 4,230 in recent
years — and is expected to decline to 3,732 by the end of the
century. It has been estimated that, in the year 2000, urban regions
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in this country will occupy one and a half times as much land as they
did in 1960.
Nor is high density the same thing as high rise. With all due
respect, we do not need *otH6b%e ttetW^n'Lofe Ah^sles^d^Manhattan,
between being strangled by crabgrass or submerged in concrete. Paris
has 2 1/2 times the density of New York, but until recently the hordes
of American tourists drawn to the delights of Parisian street scenes
saw nothing remotely resembling the towers of mid-town Manhattan.
For that matter, outside mid-town and lower Manhattan, New York's
predominant residential structure is the five- and six-story walkup.
Preference polls always show that Americans regard San Francisco
as far and away the most desirable of American cities. Yet some of
its most popular neighborhoods — such as those Ln the North Beach-
Telegraph Hill area — achieve densities of as much as 100 dwelling
units per acre without high rise.
With careful design and planning, we can build to far greater dens-
ities and a far greater mix of uses than we do now and enjoy, as a result,
far less congestion, far greater convenience, more open space and
recreation areas, greater access to a diversity of activities and
services. We can, at one and the same time, achieve a far greater
conservation of resources and quality of life with the careful design
and planning of higher density and mixed use developments than we
can through the endless proliferation of urban and suburban "monocultures"
that are the prevailing result of our present development patterns.
Long ago, Aristotle observed that "that which is common to the
greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it."
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Americans, more than most people, have failed to take good
care of the things that belong to all of us together: air, water, land,
c ities, regions, neighborhoods. Yet unless we start taking care of
these things that belong to nobody in particular and everybody in
general, we are going to find ourselves faced not only with a nar-
rower range of individual choices than before, but with individual
choices that are less worth making.
These common choices must be made through political processes
and institutions that are both democratic and effective, that are
large enough to encompass the problems and small enough to reflect
and respond to the needs and desires of the citizens concerned. Most
of rne.se common choices involve problems that simply cannot be con-
tained within any single local jurisdiction. Local governments are too
feeble and too fragmented to cope with an increasing range of problems
such as transportation, air and water quality, and, above all, the problems
of growth — of the patterns and pace of development, of the way in which
housing, jobs, schools, recreation, and similar activities are distributed
within a given area. Citizens within each separate jurisdiction are deeply
and directly affected by decisions made within other jurisdictions; yet
they have no say in those decisions. Each Jurisdiction pushes and pulls
against the other. And the citizens of each watch helplessly as their
region assumes shapes and directions that are determined by forces
they do not understand and cannot influence.
If the citizens of this country are going to have the chance to make
Intelligent, effective decisions about the patterns and problems of
growth, and if they are to exercise any real control over those patterns
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that so deeply affect and'influence their lives, then we are going to
have to develop, as rapidly as possible, effective and democratic
institutions at the state, local, and regional levels to direct and
regulate growth.
If we can develop these institutions and come to grips with these
problems, then we will begin to make the best of our cities and urban
areas. In so doing, we will not only extend our range of individual
choices, but discover that our choices are Increasingly worth making.
Environmentalists, as I have suggested at the beginning, are
sometimes suspected of concerning themselves only with expanding
and improving the choices of an affluent few, who already have more
and better choices than the majority of Americans — especially those
who live In our central cities. And environmentalists may, at times,
lay themselves open to that suspicion. In their very real concern
over industrial pollution and the environmental harm and hazards
that have occurred under past patterns of economic growth, they
may seem to forget that there are millions in this country who can't
find work and don't earn a decent Income, and that only during
periods of strong economic growth have blacks and other minorities
made significant economic gains. In their very real desire to draw
the line at further environmental damage as a result of rampant
and random suburban growth, they may appear to Ignore the fact
that there are millions of low- and moderate-income Americans who
cannot find, let alone afford, decent housing.
But once this is said, it must emphatically be added that
pollution. In all Its forms, continues to take a high and heavy toll
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upon our lives and landscape. The more we learn about the health
effects of pollutants, the worse things look. Researchers at the
National Cancer Institute are reported to have estimated, for example,
that 60 to 90 percent of all human cancers are caused by environmental
factors — from ultraviolet rays to plastics and pesticides. And it is
upon the central city, and its residents, that the burden of pollution
falls most heavily. It is they who must inhale the heaviest doses
of sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and the like. It is they who
must bear the brunt of such environmental ills and assaults as noise,
congestion, litter, decaying neighborhoods and deteriorating housing,
the absence of open space and recreational opportunities. It is they
who have the most to gain from environmental improvement.
It is they, moreover, who have most to gain from efforts to
encourage more compact and concentrated patterns of development
that draw people back into the city and bring our metropolitan
areas back together again. It is they who have the most to gain
from efforts to manage growth and development in ways that give
at least as much weight to environmental and social considerations
as to economic and commercial ones.
If we can, at long last, take charge of the forces that shape
the growth of our urban areas, then I think we can do a far better
job of building more human and humane communities and of breathing
new life into the old adage: "City air makes men free."
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