Blueprint America

Marc Shaffer, producer

430 million people will be living in the U.S. by 2050.

It hit me like a brick when Earl Blumenauer, the congressman from Portland, said that during our interview.
Wow, that’s a lot of people.

Where are we all going to live? How are we going to get around? What about air pollution and global warming? Can we all get along?

Producer Marc Shaffer, center, interviewing Mayor Sam Adams of Portland, left

Infrastructure. Sounds about as exciting as, say, paint. Or steel. Or rubber. But you put paint, steel and rubber together just so, you have a car – maybe even a Maserati. The blood moves a little faster when you think of it that way.

And, when you put roads and bridges, cars and trains, sewer systems and phone lines together just so, you create a community – the way we live. And, when you think of infrastructure as a force shaping how we live, this seemingly lifeless, bureaucratic term suddenly gets the blood moving a little faster, too.

Watching a good documentary is to go through an arc of discovery – full of surprises along the way that make you question your assumptions about the world. For the filmmaker, making a documentary is also an act of discovery full of surprises. In making this film, the coming tsunami of humanity was one of those surprises, but not the only one.

Another surprise came when I learned that the great American era of suburbanization that followed World War II was as much a product of public policy as it was personal choice.

Jayson and Gina Luber, the young couple we feature in the film, present their decision to live in the Denver suburb of Highlands Ranch as one of personal choice. Gina tells us they “got more house for the money” and they “like the mountain views.” Really, it’s just a nice place to raise a family.

But, to get around the region from their remote home, the Lubers use their cars and rely on roads – both of which are heavily subsidized. American drivers pay roughly half the real cost of roads, while European vehicle users – on average – are charged three times the amount of direct highway costs. Gas in Europe is twice as expensive as in the U.S., and gas-taxes there are six to seven times what they are here.

I wonder if the Lubers would find Highlands Ranch such a great place to live – or if land speculators would find it such a great place to build – were it not so heavily subsidized by taxpayers.

We didn’t set out to pick on the Denver region. But, to explore how we got here and where we’re going, we needed to examine, as our correspondent Miles O’Brien so colorfully puts it, sprawl-burbia up close. We just happened upon Denver, but we could have closed our eyes and pointed at a map of the U.S. and the story would have been likely the same – whether we landed in Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Washington, D.C., or nearly any other metro region in the nation.

We could have chosen the San Francisco Bay Area, for instance. That’s where I’m from and live today. As a kid growing up in Berkeley in the 1960s and 70s, I watched as suburbs sprouted up to my east. Over time, they crept ever outward, right alongside the major interstate highways, track homes and big box malls, swallowing up farmland as the population surged. The early inner suburbs were homogeneous places – everyone seemed upper-middle class or above, white, and surprisingly conservative in the politically liberal Bay Area. Now, the newer suburbs are farther out, the houses cheaper, the population more diverse.

Columbia Professor Owen Gutfreund calls suburbanization a separation of the American people, a way to introduce physical space through the design of communities into an America already deeply divided by race and class, ethnicity and religion. Lily-white suburbia was at once fueled by – and also fed – the divisions that have plagued our country from the start.

Which brings me back to that number: 430 million people.

According to Congressman Blumenauer, and many others we spoke to, we can’t absorb all those people with more sprawl. The only answer, they argue, is to live more densely, to discard the car as the sole means of getting around, and begin using multiple modes of transportation. To do that will require an infrastructure plan and courageous political leadership. Just like in Portland and New York.

But, can we put Humpty-Dumpty back together again? Can the sprawling, splintered suburban landscape be replaced with a more tightly knit American fabric? If suburbs have been a product of government policy, which itself was a reflection of social attitudes and values, then a return to more dense, heterogeneous living will require not only a change in government policy, but also a shift in the social attitudes and values that drove past policies. As the South Bronx activist Alicia Torres-Fleming puts it, “we have no more green-spaces in this country. We’re being forced back in. We are going to have to learn how to live together as a people.”

Stay tuned – that infrastructure story is coming to a block near you.

“It’s a wonderful time in the history of our country to figure this out,” Torres-Fleming says.

Amen.