THE REPORT STATES THE OBVIOUS: there is a link between income and well-being. Further, there is a link between well-being and where you live. The Sunday newspaper coverage of the report, Inequality in South Australia: Key Determinants of Wellbeing, restates the obvious and elicits the obvious reactions from health and welfare authorities to the fact health and well-being is harmed by restricted access to housing, employment, shops and essential community services. Not so obvious to commentators is the culprit for much of this social inequity.

The Monday newspaper unwittingly provides the answer with its news item “4000 blocks boost housing dreams”. The southern council of Onkaparinga and northern sister Playford have between them authorised the release of 4000 new housing blocks – in the two main regions of Adelaide identified in the Wellbeing report as already epitomising the have-nots in terms of infrastructure, services and amenity. Such “housing dreams” perpetuate the ills of urban sprawl, the essentially post-World War II global phenomenon that in just 50 years has all but exhausted our resources and social capital.

In America, land of the freeway and world exemplar of uncontrolled sprawl, the Washington Post reported in August “... clearly the strongest evidence to date that there’s a link between the built environment and obesity”. It followed the American Journal of Preventive Medicine report of a study of 11,000 people in Atlanta, Georgia, that found outer neighborhoods make walking or other exercise more difficult because there are often no pedestrian routes, the road systems don’t encourage people to walk or cycle, and major shopping areas are only accessible by car.

This report was followed by the publication of Urban Sprawl and Public Health: Designing, Planning and Building for Healthy Communities, a book by three university researchers that found “... urban sprawl is taking a toll on Americans’ hearts, lungs, air, drinking water, sense of community, psychological well-being and physical safety”. Which followed a study of 448 local government areas across the US that found patterns of sprawl influence people’s activity levels and the nature of their heart disease risk profiles.
For the first time, decades of anecdotal evidence of the link between social disadvantage and sprawl is being reinforced by quantitative research. The first major Australian study examining the obesity link is being undertaken in Victoria by Deakin University. In Adelaide, former state planning minister Jay Weatherill conceded the cruel incongruity of sprawl in a speech to the Sustainable Property Council over a year ago:

“We drive low-income people out to the city’s extremities where services are the most stretched ... The paradox is that governments unwittingly subsidise this sprawl … A Perth study has found that the direct cost to government of providing infrastructure for a fringe block is more than three times the cost of an inner block … So we have a situation in which government is providing high subsidies for low-income people to live in fringe areas where services are low and where building communities is hardest.”

What Weatherill was saying is that affordable house and land packages are not affordable at all – neither for the community nor homebuyers. He is talking about the unsustainability of a residential development practice that is a proven failure fiscally, socially and environmentally. In this context, unsustainability is:

• An ageing state with smaller households and decreasing birth rates that builds ever-bigger houses and consumes land and resources at a rate that outstrips population growth and need.

• Smaller households running more cars than ever before in a state already so car-dominated that public transport has only a five per cent share of the transport market. According to the Weatherill speech, this escalation in car numbers will cause an expected 42 per cent increase in Adelaide vehicle greenhouse gas emissions by 2012.

• The energy consumption of households living off major transport routes in poorly designed and orientated project housing that is totally dependent on costly heating and cooling systems for environmental comfort.

• The negative impact on physical and mental health from the isolation and social dislocation intrinsic to heavily suburbanised societies, such as the US and Australia. In a 2002 US Public Health paper, Yale professor Phillip Langton said: “It is no coincidence that at the moment the US has become a predominantly suburban nation, the country has suffered a bitter harvest of individual trauma, family distress and civic decay.”

As unsustainable as it is, there are powerful cultural and commercial forces working against containing sprawl development. The populist “Australian Dream” of a detached single-storey dwelling on a separate block with a Hills Hoist is now set in concrete as an inalienable right in our psyche. No government has been brave enough to confront the electorate with the unpalatable truth that it is no more a right than it is desirable. Politicians are as vulnerable to the threat of first-home-buyer voters consigning them to political oblivion as they are to building industry scare tactics on the consequences of plucking even a single feather from the golden goose.

American author and former industry bureaucrat Joel Hirschhorn talks of the “sprawl industry” that bullies and bribes politicians and regulators at all levels of the US community to maintain the status quo.

“The sprawl industry consists of land developers, home and commercial builders, real estate agents, land-use attorneys, banking and finance organisation, road builders and planning professionals,” says Hirschhorn. “Closely aligned, because they benefit so much from the sprawl land development paradigm – which includes ever-rising levels of vehicle ownership and mileage, as well as sedentary health problems and mental stress – are the fast food, automobile, petroleum and pharmaceutical industries.” Hirschhorn is a polemic – his website is called sprawlkills.com – but his picture of a public-private sector marriage of convenience that is more to do with politics and money than responsible government is reflected in the social landscape of metropolitan Adelaide. As Weatherill told the Sustainable Property Council: “The paradigm of cheap land on the fringe of the city no longer exists and, in fact, has not for many years. The true cost of urban sprawl has been masked through cross-subsidisation of infrastructure by governments.”

For “many years”, read almost four decades. It was recognised by advanced thinkers and informed governments in the early 1960s that the “housing dream” was turning into a social nightmare; iconic American urbanist Jane Jacobs said it all in 1962, in her best-selling book The Death and Life of the Great American Cities. By then, suburbanisation was a runaway train that authorities weren’t prepared to flag down. Rhetoric aside, little has changed – apart from overwhelming evidence that change is imperative. Jacobs, now 88, has just published her latest book, Dark Age Ahead, in which she says the fight to free “America’s soul” from the grip of cars and “commodity housing” is still to be won.

It is not as if we don’t know what the broader community wants from where it lives: anecdotal and qualitative research provides a window to a safe, healthy environment that is close to work, play and public facilities and services. Places allowing for our changing household arrangements and numbers. Places that promote living and give pleasure, identity and meaning. Places that provide for the individual while addressing the greater good. Places that are greener and cheaper to run. Not places determined by the convenience of governments, local authorities and industry.

By legitimising sprawl as the “housing dream”, the state and its development partners have created an illusion that will take decades to destroy. Weatherill admitted as much in his speech when, referring to the twin problems of containing sprawl and getting people to use public transport, he said: “We have yet to get the community to understand the nature of the threat and the price that has to be paid.”
The Wellbeing report is a powerful indicator of the failure of government urban development and planning policy of the past 50 years. Another is 16,000 people from Adelaide’s north-eastern suburbs signing a petition demanding more police to counter violent crime in their area. A further indicator is that the communities of the outer north and south have asked for the same increased police presence as Golden Grove families are demanding for the north-east.

Yet Golden Grove was hyped by developer Delfin and its government partner LMC as the perfect suburb, an Adelaide destination for the Stepford Wives. And Delfin, along with the Hickinbotham Group, were among broadscale housing developers who made submissions to the just-completed Federal Parliament Sustainable Cities inquiry. Their input was highlighted in About the House, a publication of Parliament, under the oxymoronic heading “Making Urban Sprawl Work”, in which the developers brazenly bite the hand that feeds them by blaming government planning policy and constraints for the problems of urban sprawl. And, bless their machiavellian hearts, they’re right.

Developers are in business to make money. They don’t have to care about people or the greater good. That is the role of governments, which is why the government has to rewrite the rules of the development game so the greater good becomes a viable business and the sprawl industry is consigned to the recycle bin. This is what the Wellbeing report is telling the government – the obvious.