I don't know if I agree that urban sprawl being bad is a myth. It has always existed, BUT, Firstly, much of it has happened because families have been driven out of liberal-dominated cities and their stagnant economies and soft-on-crime politics. If it weren't for liberals in the cities, there would be less sprawl.
Number 2, add in property-rights-destoying laws (that Stossel would definitely oppose on libertarian grounds), such as open space laws which prohibit development, and sprawl gets even worse.
Number 3, towns know that businesses bring in tax dollars but schools cost money. Given our lack of property rights, towns preferentially zone for businesses. This necessarily separates jobs from the residences, increasing sprawl. The old liberal bugaboo, the Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again: "free" public schools create sprawl.
Number 4, (and this is more controversial), rent-seeking homeowners. Minimum lot sizes, restrictions on multi-families etc... I think that the public schools also drive this. The quality of a school is largely determined by the quality of the other students (as opposed to funding or teachers), so neighborhoods use zoning laws to self-segregate based on socio-economic status.
Does any of this mean that we wouldn't still have sprawl? Of course not. But I'll bet it would be a lot less with universal school vouchers, stronger property rights, and conservatives running the cities.
Dream on.
Even on the rare occasions when Republicans get elected in the big cities, you see very little change in the way they're run.
Sprawl is good. Get used to the idea.
I think you can trace the decline of the cities directly to the day the Feds started forced busing. When I was a kid, all the stores within a few miles of a high school had window banners cheering on the high school team. They all went away the year after busing started. Neighborhoods ceased being neighborhoods. Your schoolmates weren't the kids in your neighborhood. The quality of education went down. The Feds came to the "rescue" with more aid. Quality dropped further. People fled the cities, to the suburbs, and began building new towns and schools, out of the grasp of the Federal busing requirements. A few judges tried ordering busing across district lines. One even tried ordering a father to take his children out of a private school, because he perceived it as an attempt to avoid his order to bus his children miles out of their neighborhood. These were apparently overturned, because the judges stopped making these kinds of orders, but they kept their territory on the cities. More people fled. The cities declined. The suburbs grew. Many modern cities are now monuments to Federal incompetence. The suburbs continue to grow.
Jibaholic,
Government schools are also responsible for the stratification of American society, by race, class, economics, and education. Parents in an effort to send their children to the safest and best government schools strive to move to the most expensive neighborhoods they can afford. It is any wonder then that neighborhoods and consequently government schools are segregated by economic and social class?
Only government could devise a scheme with such fiendish consequences. There is nothing so segregated and NON-diverse as a government schools. There is nothing in the private sector that even comes close in scale and scope.
If this had occurred all at once, the American people would have been outraged. But,,,,they are like frogs in slowly heating water.
Also if there were no big yellow government school buses offering "free" transport, perhaps parents would not have so readily chosen to live in suburbia. If government schools were not guaranteed to every child in every new development, again, perhaps there would have been fewer parents choosing to live in countryside.
Government schools are responsible for more permanent loss of wildlands, fauna, and habitat that all of America's wars combined.