Vice President Al Gore thinks he's found his Big Issue for the 2000 campaign: suburban sprawl. Sprawl, according to the vice president, is a "threat" to our well-being. We have to stop sprawl, he told the Brookings Institution in September, so that "our kids will see horses, cows, and farms outside books and movies." He is proposing that the Environmental Protection Agency promote "smart growth" by doling out billions to communities that use planning to preserve open space and avoid traffic congestion, overcrowded schools, and functional but inelegant development forms such as strip malls. And the EPA has said it intends to use its existing authority under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act to strong-arm local governments into fighting sprawl.

Beyond these modest first steps lies a grab bag of visionary planning ideas that has attracted a diverse coalition of environmentalists, urban planners, and good-government reformers. The four hallmarks of smart growth are "urban-growth boundaries" that limit the amount of land available for development, higher-density residential development, more mass transit (particularly rail transit), and much more aggressive long-range urban planning.

On the left, it has become axiomatic that future development should be heavily regulated by enlightened planners. The usual gaggle of liberal foundations, including Turner, MacArthur, Joyce, and Charles Stewart Mott, have formed the Funders Network on Sprawl, Smart Growth, and Livable Communities, and have already shoveled millions to smart-growth advocacy groups. Behind the argument that we have to stop sprawl to preserve farmland and open space is a push to revive central-city urban renewal. People fleeing the city for the suburbs in search of better schools, lower crime, and quieter neighborhoods are blamed for sucking the life out of downtowns. Stopping the exodus to the suburbs, goes the argument, is key to saving central cities.

Gore is calculating that in a time of peace and prosperity, spending too much time in traffic is one of the few things that still exercise voters. The politics of sprawl follows the economic cycle, rising to a crescendo when housing starts reach their peak late in booms, and then disappearing during recessions. The last big controversy over urban growth peaked at the end of the '80s boom, when states like California, Florida, and Washington adopted growth-control measures. The economy slid into recession shortly thereafter, and the issue largely disappeared.

What's new today is that the controversy over the proliferation of suburbs has spread beyond the fast-growing regions of the west and east coasts to the heartland. Crusades against sprawl are in full swing in St. Louis, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and other older metropolitan areas that 20 years ago went begging for growth of any kind. The 1998 election saw over 200 growth-control measures, sponsored mostly by environmentalists and planners, on the ballot in 31 states. Voters approved three-quarters of them.

But the threat of sprawl is vastly overblown. Indeed, there is a strong Alice in Wonderland quality to the whole campaign. In Chapter 7 of Lewis Carroll's book, we read, "The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one corner of it. 'No room! No room!' they cried out, when they saw Alice coming. 'There's plenty of room!' said Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a large armchair at one end of the table." The anti-sprawl crusaders, too, are myopically focusing on small corners of the country.

Developed land accounts for less than 5 percent of the total land area in the continental United States. The amount of land developed each year, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, is 0.0006 percent. Since World War II, the amount of land set aside for wildlife, wilderness conservation, and national parks has grown twice as fast as urban areas. The land set aside for these purposes is now three times as large as urban areas. And for all the rhetoric about "vanishing farmland," the amount of farmland isn't declining significantly. The rate of farmland loss--which is driven more by falling commodity prices than by development pressures--is actually lower today than in the 1960s and '70s.

Yet these facts have little to do with the politics of sprawl. No one in a fast-growing area is likely to be moved by aggregate land-use statistics. If some of that .0006 percent of land development is taking place in your community, it's a big deal. And the favorite solutions of free-market policy wonks, such as charging drivers for using their cars during hours of high congestion, privatizing infrastructure like sewers, and zoning that respects property rights, are unlikely to appeal to voters. As between a candidate talking up "livability" and "quality of life" and one speaking about road pricing, there is no contest. In this respect, Gore's anti-sprawl crusade can be seen as adapting a kind of conservative nostalgia--for communities untouched by the changes that development inevitably brings--to advance liberal ends.

Indeed, a number of Republicans, and even some conservatives, have embraced much of this agenda. New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman tried to raise gas taxes to purchase open spaces and, when that failed, successfully sponsored a bond issue for the same purpose. Utah governor Mike Leavitt is a believer in smart growth, and Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge two years ago appointed a "21st Century Environment Commission" that has become obsessed with sprawl.

There is just enough truth in the "smart growth" critique of contemporary urban life to make a direct attack on the Gore agenda difficult. Many American cities and suburbs are a mess. This was foretold in Jane Jacobs's 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, an attack on the "urban renewal" being led by the planners of the day. Urban renewal in those days consisted of bulldozing entire neighborhoods so that they could be replaced with strictly separate land uses that were thought to be more "rational." The bigger the area "renewed," the bigger the disaster, the apotheosis being Brasilia in South America, which sprang full-blown from the minds of the best planners of the day and resulted in perhaps the ugliest and most dysfunctional city in the world.

Jacobs's point was that truly livable cities evolve spontaneously, and that prescriptive planning stifles this process and upsets the urban order. She was especially critical of the proscriptions against mixed-use and high-density development that formed part of the conventional wisdom among planners at the time. Today's smart-growth advocates hold Jacobs up as their guru because of her praise of density and mixed-used development, but totally miss her main point about the limitations of planning and the spontaneous nature of city life. Here we have the beginnings of a possibly effective counterattack on "smart growth": Why should we let the government and the planners who failed so badly at urban renewal try their hand at suburban renewal?

The new plans work just as poorly as the old. People never fit the planners' mold. Light rail, for instance, which together with high-density development is supposed to reduce congestion, has been a flop. In his Brookings speech in September, Gore incredibly claimed that the light-rail system in Portland, Oregon (the Potemkin village of the smart-growth movement), was attracting 40 percent of daily commuters. The actual number is less than 4 percent on a good day; that Gore was completely credulous about this fantastic figure, and that no one challenged him on his blooper, is telling. There is no reason that we should be looking to a 19th-century technology to meet 21st-century mobility needs.

Nor does high-density development reduce congestion. The superficially appealing idea is that if we all live closer to where we work and shop, shorter car trips and mass transit will replace all those long car rides. But the real world doesn't work that way. Try this thought experiment: What happens at a cocktail party when a new wave of people shows up and the population density of the living room doubles? Is it harder or easier to get to the bar and the cheese tray? Is it harder or easier to carry on conversation and move around the room? As urban population density rises, auto-traffic congestion gets worse, not better, and commute times get longer, not shorter.

If density and proximity to transit cured congestion, then walkable, transit-rich New York City would have the best mobility and least congestion of any American city. In fact, while the average home-to-work commute in American cities is about 22 minutes, the average home-to-work commute for new Yorkers is 36 minutes, according to U.S. Census data, one-third longer than the average. No other city, not even Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, or Philadelphia, comes close. "Sprawling" low-density cities like Phoenix and Albuquerque, meanwhile, have commute times below the national average. So why would anyone want to embrace a "solution" that will make the problem of congestion worse?

The answer is readily apparent: to get us out of our cars. It is no exaggeration to say that for most smart-growth advocates, the car is a rolling cigarette, and General Motors is the moral equivalent of Philip Morris. In Earth in the Balance, of course, Gore wrote that the internal combustion engine "is posing a moral threat to the security of every nation that is more deadly than that of any military enemy we are ever likely to confront again." It is this animus toward the car that explains why the smart-growth crowd is fixated on high-density development.

The planners want to increase congestion deliberately, to force us out of our cars and onto light rail. National Public radio noted in a report that "Portland's planners are embracing congestion; they want to create more of it." Portland's 40-year plan restricts road-building and envisions congestion tripling. The smart-growth coalition in Utah has produced a 25-year plan that predicts a 10 percent increase in congestion over what would otherwise be expected.

Behind the contempt for the car is contempt for the communities and ways of life it makes possible. Elite distaste for suburban life is an old liberal theme. Herbert Gans wrote his famous book The Levittowners 30 years ago to defend suburbanites from the charge that they were "an uneducated, gullible, petty 'mass' which rejects the culture that would make it fully human, the 'good government' that would create the better community, and the proper planning that would do away with the landscape-despoiling little 'boxes' in which they live."

Those attitudes persist to this day. They are present in a recent report of the Pennsylvania commission appointed by Gov. Ridge. Identifying urban sprawl as the single most important environmental problem in the Keystone state, the report declared, "We must find ways to prompt individual Pennsylvanians to explore their personal lifestyle choices--where they choose to live and work, how and how much they travel each day, how much energy they consume or save, and consider changes in those patterns that will not only improve the long-term quality of their lives but also contribute to a better quality of life for all citizens of the Commonwealth."

In other words, commuting suburbanites are making unenlightened lifestyle choices because they lack the expert supervision that only their betters in government can provide. And this is the product of a Republican administration.

Gore can be expected to be a lot more careful with his rhetoric about suburban life as he gears up for 2000, and his remedies will be described in the most benign way. He knows that a direct attack on cars won't work and that the imposition of urban-growth boundaries making certain areas off limits to development can proceed only by stealth. (Watch for the new land-conservation program to establish de facto urban-growth boundaries by having localities lock up key parcels of land on the urban periphery to choke off growth, and for the EPA to start monitoring more closely local zoning-board decisions.) That's why smoking Gore out will require skill and finesse. Conservatives need to revive the populist language about centralized government and liberal elitism that worked so well in the past. The same government that brought you urban renewal, conservatives should say, is likely to make an even worse mess of suburban renewal.

Mr. Hayward is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research institute in San Francisco.

Reprinted with permission of National Review.