Report Deals a Blow to Suburbs

Warning: Suburban living may be killing you.

So say top environmental health experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Suburbanites don’t burn the calories others do walking or biking places, the theory goes, because poor urban design forces them to sit in their cars to go anywhere.

There’s far from universal agreement on the study. Other analysts at the CDC have reported that there is no better place to live than the suburbs if you want to be healthy.

But the study’s conclusions have certainly struck a nerve.

“Calling this ‘junk science’ is too complimentary,” said Laer Pearce, a Laguna Hills-based spokesman for the Southern California Building Industry Assn. “It is just junk.”

Home builders are angrily denouncing the report, released in the fall. They note that it came on the heels of an earlier CDC study that concluded that those who dwell in their master-planned neighborhoods are pillars of good health.

Scientists are just beginning to turn their attention to sprawl as a public health issue. But they’re already advising that they will have plenty more to say as they look closer at the health effects of what they consider poor urban planning.

Richard Jackson, the CDC’s top environmental health expert, wrote the controversial report with colleague Chris Kochtitzky. The research was funded by Sprawlwatch, a Washington, D.C.-based slow-growth advocacy group.

It’s that alliance which has provoked much of the ire of home builders.

Jackson makes no apologies. Sprawlwatch offered to fund what he considered a long-overdue paper. He and Kochtitzky are now writing a book on the public health consequences of unmanaged growth, which he says Americans too often “ignore at our peril.”

Consider, he says, a study showing that the average person living in Washington, D.C., walks 10,000 steps a day. “You cannot do that living in a place like Orange County,” he said.

The report is filled with similar examples. One study cited suggests that students are four times more likely to be able to walk to schools that were built before 1983. The authors say newer schools are built on the fringes of developments and are often designed in ways that make them inaccessible to walkers and cyclists. Another study shows that children walked or biked for nearly 16% of all the trips they made in 1977. Twenty years later, it was down to 10%.

“This is not yet a smoking gun,” Jackson said. “It is a policy piece. We’re putting forward hypotheses and thinking about how these things contribute to the public health.

“Our goal is to make home builders realize they can have a tremendous impact,” he said.

Environmentalists have warned for years about the unintended health effects of low-density, auto-dependent communities. The American Lung Assn. has issued some reports about the dangers of sprawl-induced air pollution. But the move to link sprawl to deteriorating health turned a corner in November when slow-growth advocates announced that CDC experts were on board.

The findings are ironic. Americans initially flocked to the suburbs to get outdoors, breath fresh air and leave the pollution and lack of green space in the big cities behind. Now experts warn that the suburbs have become so auto-oriented that walking to the store is often near impossible, and open space preservation is not keeping pace with growth.

“People assume the suburban lifestyle is inherently more healthy, largely because of access to nature,” said William Fulton, a land-use expert and author of books about urban growth in California. “But the suburbs aren’t like that anymore. People have small yards and they are surrounded by traffic.

“There is a big difference between living in a bucolic suburb of the 1950s and living in Orange County today,” he said.

The impact of urban design on public health began to intrigue Jackson during his 20 years as a state epidemiologist and environmental health director in California.

“Talk to people on the street in Orange County about the environment and they will tell you there is nowhere nearby for their children to play, there is not enough green space in walking distance, they can’t get anywhere without getting in a car, and if they want to go downtown they have to sit in traffic for an hour and a half,” Jackson said.

Yes, people are getting out of shape because they just don’t exercise, the authors acknowledge. But they say the two main reasons people give for not exercising are lack of accessible places to exercise and concerns about safety in the places that do exist.

One section of the report discusses the increasing number of pedestrians and bicyclists being hit by cars. Most of these accidents occur in sprawling new developments with inadequate sidewalks and crosswalks, according to statistics.

The authors also contend that “many different types of urban design encourage sedentary living habits.”

They propose subbing in high-density developments with a mix of homes, stores and office space that allow for fully integrated, racially and economically diverse walkable communities. Cramped lawns get traded in for community parks and trails in close proximity to everyone.

“While older cities and towns were planned and built based on the practical idea that stores and services should be within walking distances of residences, the design of most new residential areas reflects the supposition that people will drive to most destinations,” the report says.

Home Builders: Study Follows Political Agenda

Home builders say such statements prove that the authors are pandering to the agenda of Sprawlwatch.

“This report is a ludicrous sham,” said Pearce, of the Southern California Building Industry Assn. “Why are CDC resources being used to move a political agenda?”

That view is echoed by builders nationally.

“The authors seem less inclined to debate the fundamental issues of growth than to try to regulate lifestyles,” said Bruce Smith, president of the National Assn. of Home Builders, in a written statement.

“We’ll all be better off if [the CDC] stick to what they do best--fighting physical diseases, not defending political ones,” Smith said, adding that surveys consistently show that homeowners do not want to live in dense, mixed-use neighborhoods.

The CDC’s own findings, according to the home builders association, undermine Jackson’s report. Smith points to an official CDC study released in September that says suburbanites are the healthiest people in the country, exercising more and living longer than residents of rural and urban areas.

“Will the real CDC please step forward?” Smith said.

Jackson says the earlier report is skewed by the many affluent people in the suburbs with access to top health insurance, gym memberships and homes near bike trail networks. He points out that opportunities to exercise without driving somewhere are falling out of reach for most low-income families as well as an increasingly large portion of the middle class and the elderly as green space disappears in the suburbs.

“We are designing environments that actually restrict people’s options,” he said. “We need to be offering people options to take charge of their health.”

While the home builders advise CDC officials to stick to matters of toxins and treatments, many urban planning experts say now is the time for the public health community to step into the sprawl debate.

“These are interesting discussions to have,” said Scott Bollens, chair of urban and regional planning at UC Irvine. “For years people talked about sprawl increasing travel time. This is an attempt to talk more specifically about what it does to human physical and psychological well-being. It is really trying to look at what urban development patterns do to the individual.”