The Dirt Gap

How the Parties Could Manipulate the Dirt Gap: A reader responds:

* Are you sure the Dirt Gap isn't an awkward proxy for population density? I realize the difficulty of teasing the "true" density based on inhabitable land from a reported density which may be calculated with, say, the area of lakes within MSA boundaries in the denominator. Could R's help themselves politically by encouraging the dispersal of urban populations? (For one thing, this line of thought suggests once again that R's should limit immigration, since most immigrants end up in high-density areas. It also suggests that R's should build roads.)

Density is part of it, but it's hard to measure in a meaningful way, as a link this reader sent later points out. For example, this same reader then sent me a link to government density statistics that show, well, that the government has a lot of work to do on density. For example, Los Angeles came out as the most densely populated standard metropolitan statistical area in the country, while Chicago was 20th. Even weirder, Oxnard, CA, an exurb of LA out in Ventura County came in #10, well ahead of Chicago, even though Oxnard still has some farms left. LA (and Oxnard) have almost no urbanized areas comparable to either Chicago's towering high-rise apartment lakefront or its vast stretches of three story six flats. Almost all of LA looks like a suburb, but a dense suburb with a lot of five houses to an acre tracts, whereas Chicago has lots of suburbs zoned to one house per acre.

Anyway, I don't think inner urban density is necessarily related to the Dirt Gap, but is more tied to when the city was built -- i.e., before or after automobiles. Both Cleveland and Cincinnati are very old cities with dense pre-automobile neighborhoods, but the latter's suburbs can expand in 360 degrees and it's more Republican than Lake Erie-limited Cleveland. My reader continues:

I think that Democrat politicians like to make their areas more Blue. They make their electoral districts more blue by gerrymandering. I suggest that they make their geographic areas more blue by zoning.

Water (mountains) aren't the only barriers to housing expansion in the modern political era. For example, I live in King County, Washington near the city of Seattle. Seattle is very much constrained by water, and there are various water and mountain areas in the County. But King County has much unbuilt area close to Seattle which is *politically* off-limits to housing development.

The Democrat politicians elected by high-density Seattle (and its satellites) have literally outlawed suburban- density development in the County, and to a large extent in the State as a whole. This benefits them by preventing the evolution of Republican-voting suburbs of the sort that used to be so powerful politically in California's Orange County. (Political constraints on road expansion are also important here.)

If Republicans wanted to foster populations likely to support them politically, perhaps they could support better compensation for "regulatory takings" (that is, make it harder for state/local governments to outlaw suburban development). They could accomplish that at the Federal level. At a State level, Republicans could support County-splitting (or things like the San Fernando Valley secession from LA) to help free potentially Red areas from the choking grip of slum- and bohemia-based Blue politicians. (Perhaps Republicans could also use Federal power to override local Blue opposition to road building, though that would require big changes in the "Interstate Highway" program.)

I'm mindful of your view of environmentalism in California (especially in the North). It seems to me that "environmentalist" Republicans powerful enough to keep their home areas at very low densities aren't much use to national Republicans, because at those low densities there aren't many votes in a given area. What I mean is, national Republicanss would probably prefer a suburb of quarter-acre homes with a mean of, say, 5 R-voters per acre to a virtual nature preserve like coastal Monterey County with maybe 0.1 R's/acre (which I calculate very roughly from voter registration in the coastal districts--all but district 3 on this map).

Perhaps Republicans could encourage suburban-density housing by manipulating Clean Air regulations. The air is typically much worse in densely populated areas. But current Clean Air rules don't really promote population dispersal because increasing population in a less polluted area makes it more polluted, and any pollution increase is a no-no. But suppose the Republicans made some ratio of population to pollution the Clean Air figure of merit... since the relationship between density and pollution is non-linear, Clean Air regulations could favor suburban-densities to minimize overall population exposure to air pollution. I realize this is a very complicated question, given the problems of geography and weather which factor into air pollution; so I offer it just as an example of the sort of political tactic Republicans could investigate for viability.