Sprawl has gotten a bum rap -- sort of. It has become an all-purpose political catchword for the rape of the land by unscrupulous builders who would pave over the Everglades given half a chance. Sure, there's some truth in that caricature. And yes, the preservation of open space should be a high priority. But sprawl is also an expression of the upward mobility and growth in home-ownership generated by our past half-century of economic success.

America's wealth and freedom have yielded smaller families with larger incomes living in bigger homes on bigger lots spread out across the landscape. Low unemployment, low interest rates, and rising incomes have produced -- in the words of a veteran real estate agent -- "the strongest market for new homes in 52 years." In 1990 amid a recession, there were 1.1 million housing starts in the United States. In 1998 amid an expansion, there were roughly 1.7 million starts, and if we count manufactured homes, the figure rises to 2 million.

The benefits of economic expansion have allowed a record number of Americans to buy homes for the first time. An unprecedented 67 percent of Americans now own their own homes. Black home-ownership has been increasing at more than three times the rate for whites, and today a record 45 percent of African-Americans are now homeowners.

Sprawl is part of the price we're paying for creating something new on the face of the earth: the first mass upper-middle class. Net U.S. household worth has been rising an unparalleled 10 percent each year since 1994. In 1970 only 3.2 percent of households had an annual income of $100,000 (as measured in 1996 dollars); by 1996 the figure had risen to 8.2 percent. This prosperity is reflected in the ever-increasing size of new homes -- many of whose owners, no doubt, decry the arrival of yet more "McMansions" and their occupants who clog local roads and schools. In the 1980s homebuilders didn't even have a statistical category for mass-produced houses larger than 3,000 square feet; by 1996 one out of every seven such homes built was larger than that.

The Old Tenement Trail

Sprawl isn't just a manifestation of already well-to-do whites getting even wealthier. It's also a reflection of upward mobility among the lower-middle class.

In 1952 Samuel Lubell, one of the first giants of public-opinion research, dedicated his book The Future of American Politics to the memory of his mother "who pioneered on the urban frontier." Lubell's family and others, like those who settled the West generations earlier, traveled on "The Old Tenement Trail" in search of a better life. In New York, they abandoned the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side for better housing in the South Bronx. From there, wrote Lubell, they went to the West Bronx, "crossing that Great Social Divide -- the Grand Concourse -- beyond which rolled true middle-class country where janitors were called superintendents." Every step of the way, some of these families' homes in the old neighborhoods were filled with new arrivals moving up the social ladder, and the process began again.

Much-maligned sprawl is one of the reasons why the immigrant tide of the 1990s -- the largest since the first decade of this century -- has produced only a fraction of the overcrowding we once associated with a new wave of immigrants. Thanks to plentiful, affordable housing in the suburbs, the once-teeming streets of the Lower East Side are now populated at a fraction of their past density, despite massive immigration.

Nightmares and Reveries

Nancy Gonzalez is traveling along a modern version of the Old Tenement Trail in southern Florida. An immigrant single parent, she scrimped and saved to escape from the overcrowded city and bought a small $82,000 house just beyond the city limits. Within a few years, she was earning and saving more and traded up to a nicer home in Kendall, a sprawling area 20 miles southwest of downtown. If you asked her, Gonzalez wouldn't hesitate to tell you how much better life in the suburbs is compared with what she left behind in the both the Old Country and Miami.

Kendall is every environmentalist's nightmare. An eyesore that encroaches on the Everglades, it is mile after mile of strip malls and auto dealerships adorned with grotesquely large U.S. flags. It isn't pretty, but as Chuck Lane of The New Republic recently put it, Kendall is "the Queens of the late 20th century," a place where immigrants like Gonzalez are buying into America. Carved out of the palmetto wilderness, its population boomed from roughly 20,000 in 1970 to 300,000 today. Farmland in the 1960s and a hip place for young whites in the 1970s, Kendall increasingly became home to Cubans, Nicaraguans, Costa Ricans, and others who arrived in the United States with very little, looking for a place to work their way up. Today, it is a remarkable example of integration. In most of Kendall, notes University of Miami geographer Peter Muller, "you can't point to a white or Latino block because the populations are so intermixed."

The Limits of Regionalism

Virginia Postrel, editor of the libertarian magazine Reason, argues that the slow-growth movement is animated by urban liberals who disdain the suburbs. (A joke making the rounds: What's the difference between an environmentalist and a developer? The environmentalist already has his house in the mountains.) But slow- growth sentiment has been growing in suburbs such as Kendall as development turns into over-development and traffic congestion into gridlock.

Regional governance, an idea with a strong logical underpinning, is often promoted as a solution to sprawl. Its backers argue that sprawl is the outcome of uncoordinated choices made by individuals and townships seeking to maximize their own advantage. But combined together, those choices can produce outcomes no one wanted. Coordinate the choices, backers of regionalism say, and you'll get better outcomes.

Regionalism sounds good in theory but works less well in practice. Southern Florida suffers under the governance of the country's oldest experiment in regionalism. Metro-Dade, the joint Miami-Dade County government created in 1957, is wracked by corruption and secession movements. In what The Orlando Sentinel has dubbed "the battle to bring government closer to home," places like Kendall are "lining up to bid the county goodbye."

Metro-Dade has squelched local self-determination without delivering efficiency, equity, or effective planning. Here, sprawl and unresponsive government go hand-in-hand and anti-sprawl and anti-consolidation movements merge. Despite county-imposed growth boundaries, Metro-Dade residents complain bitterly about unchecked development. The county commission -- many of whose members have been tarred by corruption charges -- has been highly receptive to developers, who are among the commissioners' most generous campaign contributors.

Learning to Live With Sprawl

The slow-growth movement is problematic for Republicans and Democrats alike. Some Republicans try to duck the issue while others insist on mounting a vigorous defense of property rights. Either tack is sure to anger suburban "Range Rover" Republicans, who are less concerned about principle on this score than they are about sprawl's immediate impact on their quality of life.

So far, Democrats have soft-pedaled plans to foster cooperation among different levels of government and discourage sprawl. But just beneath the surface, many Democrats continue to cling to the old party faith of government planning and economic redistribution.

There is no silver bullet solution to problems produced by sprawl. It is an unavoidable part of our future. The challenge for Democrats is to learn how to curb sprawl's worst effects without reducing the wealth and freedom that helped give us sprawl in the first place.

Fred Siegel is a New York-based senior fellow with the Progressive Policy Institute and the author of The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America's Big Cities (The Free Press, 1997).