My first thought also when I read this article. I disagree with the author, sprawl is a problem.....perhaps if he made the commute from Granbury Tx. to Dallas every morning he would change his tune.
Move...
I'm with you. We live on the edge of a very large US city, and I've also lived in Germany and Canada. In the US, although I'd like to live closer to where I work (and I've lived in Philly, San Antonio, DC and Honolulu), now that I have a family I wouldn't dare. US inner cities are dangerous and the schools are terrible. When I lived in Canada and Germany the cities were livable because they have planned for co-existing commercial and residential purposes. As a kid I could go anywhere--other towns, museums, shows, etc. because there was a safe, efficient reasonable public transit system in place. I think lots of suburban families would choose to liver closer to where they work if they could be assured of a safe environment with decent schools. Who wants to spend 3 hours a day commuting to work? Believe me, it's much nicer to be able to get to work in 15 minutes and be so close to restaurants and shopping that you can walk, and even have a drink or two with dinner. Instead we are being stuck with this soul-less cookie cutter enviornment that is leaving us nothing to tie ourselves to, and look at what it's doing to the kids who are raised in these environments. I'm not sure that we really have much of a choice here. The big winners are the developers--the rest of us lose.
Well, then, the solution is for you to voluntarily move into the city and live in a high-rise condo or apartment. It is not for you to get the government to force me to do the same.
The urban sprawl movement is driven by the same soccer moms who elected clinton. They moved out to the suburbs 20 years ago and have a nice place with lots of open space around it. But they don't want anyone else to move near them and have a nice place.
Problem is--they don't own the open space. Someone else does. So they get the government to confiscate the value of the property of the owners of the open space (by prohibiting development) and give that value to the soccer moms. It's the "I've got mine. Now you stop getting yours" mentality.
The folks running the open-space movement, of course, have a different agenda. People are a lot easier to control and much more dependent on the government if you stack them up in boxes in the central city. So they manipulate the soccer moms, not telling them that the real goal of the movement is to get their kids living in high-rise boxes in the central city.