Why Don't Conservative Cities Walk?

 

By Will Oremus

 

| Posted Tuesday, April 17, 2012, at 12:44 PM ET

 

Reading Tom Vanderbilt’s series on the crisis in American walking, I noticed something about the cities with the highest “walk scores.” They’re all liberal. New York, San Francisco, and Boston, the top three major cities on Walkscore.com, are three of the most liberal cities in the country. In fact, the top 19 are all in states that voted for Obama in 2008. The lowest-scoring major cities, by comparison, tilt conservative: Three of the bottom four—Jacksonville, Oklahoma City, and Fort Worth—went for McCain. What explains the correlation? Don’t conservatives like to walk?

 

You might think it’s a simple matter of size: Big cities lean liberal and also tend to be more walkable. That’s generally true, but it doesn’t fully explain the phenomenon. Houston, Phoenix, and Dallas are among the nation’s ten largest cities, but they’re also among the country’s more conservative big cities, and none cracks the top 20 in walkability. All three trail smaller liberal cities such as Portland, Denver, and Long Beach. And if you expand the data beyond the 50 largest cities, the conservative/liberal polarity only grows. Small liberal cities such as Cambridge, Mass., Berkeley, Ca., and Paterson, N.J. make the top 10, while conservative cities of similar size such as Palm Bay, Fl. and Clarksville, Ten. rank at the bottom.

 

Substituting density for size gets us closer: Houston, Phoenix, and Dallas are notorious for sprawl, while New York, San Francisco, and Boston are tightly packed, partly because they are older cities whose downtown cores developed in the pre-car era. As they grew, their borders were constrained by those of the smaller cities and towns that surrounded them. That’s not the case with many Southern and Western cities. Jacksonville and Oklahoma City, for instance, are vast in terms of land area, encompassing suburban and even semi-rural neighborhoods as well as urban ones.

 

That still leaves the question of why urban density should go hand-in-hand with liberal politics, however. I see four possible categories of explanations. 1) Liberals build denser, more walkable cities (e.g., Portlanders supporting public transit and policies that limit sprawl). 2) Liberals are drawn to cities that are already dense and walkable (think college grads migrating to Minneapolis rather than San Antonio, or young families settling down in Lowell, Mass., with a walk score of 64.1, rather than Fort Wayne, Ind., with a walk score of 39. 3) Walkable cities make people more liberal (by forcing them to get along with diverse neighbors and to rely on highly visible city services such as parks and subways). 4) The same factors that make cities dense and walkable also make them liberal.

 

read the rest:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/04/17/_.html

Liberals value walking, conservatives don't.  Liberals value cities, conservatives don't.

^wow, nothing like painting with a broad brush.

 

 

Do you have a counter-explanation?  Generalities are an attempt to explain relationships between observable phenomena.  Doesn't have to be 100% true to still be a valid point.  In samples the size of modern cities and political camps, few things are going to be 100% true.

Let's keep it civil, kids.

 

In the end it appears age of the cities has the most to due with it. An most of the large new (auto-centric) growth has happened in the Bible Belt and Sun Belt cities which are conservative areas of the country. While a large portion the growth in the old industrial cities and cities along the coasts has come from infill into old parts of the city proper which were already set up for walking, and tended to already be liberal.

 

Interesting article. I did find this comment by the author kind of off-putting:

 

Walkable cities make people more liberal by forcing them to get along with diverse neighbors...

 

So, the author is suggesting conservatives don't get along with diverse neighbors, I suppose. Then again the use of ultra-dumbed down and overly simplistic categories like "liberal" and "conservative" always bothers me.

^ Agreed on the use of "liberal" and "Conservative".

 

I think that the author is suggesting that the "Conservatives" aren't getting a chance or choose not to get along with diverse neighbors. Not that they don't get along with diverse neighbors. Once again, though broad brush strokes.

It's the Slate. It's a liberal publication that makes no secret that it wants to be liberal and bashes the notion of conservatism or even moderation.

 

That said, conservative cities do walk, but past planning ideals could still provide repercussions on how people interact with their city. In my hometown, one of the wealthiest and most liberal of areas, Bellefonte, has no sidewalks and is just a collection of winding roads, expensive homes and landscaped with a dense tree cover. Ashland, which is a fairly large city for Kentucky, is more conservative but nearly every street has a sidewalk. The use of a payroll tax has also led to major infrastructure improvements, such as wider sidewalks, pocket parks throughout the city and a new streetscape in downtown to replace one that is 40 years old.

 

See? Just blew that article out of the water already.

 

Or what about Newport, Kentucky across the river from Cincinnati? It's more conservative than Lexington and Louisville, yet the basin features a well connected city with corner markets and ice cream parlors and there are sidewalks on every street. Their downtown is also cohesive and contains amenities for the citizens (meat market, coffee shop, bike shop, so forth).

 

Or what about liberal Lexington, Kentucky? Outside of downtown and the neighborhoods surrounding it, the city is completely suburban. Even though the streets have sidewalks, nothing is within walking distance once you go past New Circle Road. And the Hamburg Farms development is just one of the worst examples of sprawl in the United States - according to the Sierra Club, who gave it a sharp thumbs down for its unpedestrian-friendly environment.

 

To further that generalization, my parents are conservative, but love to walk around the city park and all over their neighborhood. They don't walk to any businesses since they live on a ridge and live 2.5 miles from a grocery store. They also love to bike on the bike paths and on quiet side streets. See? Blew out that generalization.

 

That said, this article is just trash. It just paints broad strokes of dick-waving to appease its reader base and only furthers the divide between liberals and conservatives.

Agreed that Slate itself is liberal. 

 

But I'm not sure that isolated counter-examples add up to a counter-explanation, or that they disprove the basic point that highly conservative areas tend to be less walkable.  Or that highly conservative areas tend to be less diverse.  These are facts.  Tendencies are facts.  The extent or meaning of a tendency can be very much debatable even when the existence of that tendency is clear.  No one is going around slapping a "LAZY" badge on random conservative individuals.  The question is how to explain an observed correlation between the walkability scores (which are somewhat arbitrary to begin with) and the political leanings of various areas.   

It's the Slate. It's a liberal publication that makes no secret that it wants to be liberal and bashes the notion of conservatism or even moderation.

 

That said, conservative cities do walk, but past planning ideals could still provide repercussions on how people interact with their city. In my hometown, one of the wealthiest and most liberal of areas, Bellefonte, has no sidewalks and is just a collection of winding roads, expensive homes and landscaped with a dense tree cover. Ashland, which is a fairly large city for Kentucky, is more conservative but nearly every street has a sidewalk. The use of a payroll tax has also led to major infrastructure improvements, such as wider sidewalks, pocket parks throughout the city and a new streetscape in downtown to replace one that is 40 years old.

 

See? Just blew that article out of the water already.

 

Or what about Newport, Kentucky across the river from Cincinnati? It's more conservative than Lexington and Louisville, yet the basin features a well connected city with corner markets and ice cream parlors and there are sidewalks on every street. Their downtown is also cohesive and contains amenities for the citizens (meat market, coffee shop, bike shop, so forth).

 

Or what about liberal Lexington, Kentucky? Outside of downtown and the neighborhoods surrounding it, the city is completely suburban. Even though the streets have sidewalks, nothing is within walking distance once you go past New Circle Road. And the Hamburg Farms development is just one of the worst examples of sprawl in the United States - according to the Sierra Club, who gave it a sharp thumbs down for its unpedestrian-friendly environment.

 

To further that generalization, my parents are conservative, but love to walk around the city park and all over their neighborhood. They don't walk to any businesses since they live on a ridge and live 2.5 miles from a grocery store. They also love to bike on the bike paths and on quiet side streets. See? Blew out that generalization.

 

That said, this article is just trash. It just paints broad strokes of dick-waving to appease its reader base and only furthers the divide between liberals and conservatives.

 

Understanding your points, Sherman, did you actually read all the way through the article?  He comes out basically on historical factors--older cities, especially developed near ports (whether ocean or river) tend to be more walkable because they were older with more industrial economies, as opposed to cities in the south, which tend to be more recent and have grown up in an area where, for many decades/centuries, the focus was more agrarian (which obviously leads to less density).  I think that makes sense. 

My normal reaction would be to just ignore a somewhat superficial article like that...  But the bizarre tea party obsession over Agenda 21 and the recent RNC resolution about Agenda 21 suggests that there is some direct partisan action here. 

@jdm00: It was a response in part to the lazy comments early on in this thread that correlated conservatives with laziness.

Just shut this thread down before it gets crazy. Please! :D

Or you could just, you know,  ignore this thread. I'm finding it interesting and relevant to a number of other UO threads.

Or you could just, you know,  ignore this thread. I'm finding it interesting and relevant to a number of other UO threads.

 

Then why lock any thread? They do it all the time. Things get out of hand if they dont.

When I read this, I immediately thought of the movie, WALL-E. How people "move around" is the conservative utopia.

 

 

 

 

 

The only city that never voted for FDR, Cincinnati, gets the same walk score as Cleveland--58