I attended the American Dream Coalition Conference in Atlanta Georgia last week and it will no doubt generate an endless number of op-eds in the future. It was an extremely interesting and informative conference centered around transportation and housing issues, for the most part. There were a number of workshops and lectures that sought to explore and illuminate these subjects and help determine what is the best way to address these areas. Almost every city in the nation is facing these issues.

Atlanta is an incredible city. It has gained upwards of 1,000,000 residents in the last decade. The population and traffic problems are monumental. The seminar included a bus tour around the city that explored the latest in housing options that attempt to address the population and traffic congestion issues.

It is interesting to note that the city has a extensive rail service that seeks to address its traffic congestion problems. In spite of this, traffic congestion is one of the major problems the city faces and there is no way that they can build their way out of these problems with rail alone. As a result they are implementing a number of other alternatives in order to address these issues.

Ironically, the gradual diffusion of employment and jobs into the suburbs from the downtown part of the city is doing more to relieve traffic congestion than anything that city planners are doing. The solution to traffic congestion isn’t less sprawl, but more sprawl, of jobs as well as homes. There is plenty of room around Atlanta to grow.

When our plane took off from the airport on the way home I was fortunate enough to have a window seat. At 500 miles per hour it was a mere 30 seconds before we were entirely clear of the city. Looking down on the land it quickly became obvious that there was plenty of open space available for more building. In other words, the city was this tight little circle and surrounding it was acres upon acres of open land. Sprawl, even for a growing city like Atlanta, isn’t a problem.

I spent much of my trip with my face glued to the window, marveling at the huge amounts of open space, forest, farmland and rural landscape that makes up the major portion of this nation. As much as some like to complain about how little “natural” landscape remains the fact is that most of this nation is still empty. Cities only make up a tiny fraction of the countryside.

Cities are interesting as they pop upon on the landscape. A little clump of houses and buildings between large areas of farmland and nothing. The skyscrapers of a downtown seem so pitifully isolated in contrast to the surrounding landscape. We are a long way from filling up all of the land with sprawl.

Our plane got diverted to Los Angeles due to a mechanical problem but this proved to be a blessing for me. I had been looking forward to traversing San Jose, our original flight path, but we ended up going over North L.A. County. I grew up there so knew exactly what I was seeing as we flew over it.

I got to see to the Day Fire near lake Piru and flyover the San Fernando Valley where I grew up and went to high school. This is now considered the most dense area in the nation but as we flew over the Santa Monica Mountains there was nothing. The idea that every last inch of land is filled with sprawl is totally wrong. As dense as it is L.A. still has a number of areas that have no housing what-so-ever. There is still room to build more.

Coming into Honolulu after this experience was enlightening. The tiny little splashes of lights that make up Kapolei, Ewa Beach and Pearl City reveal just how meager our development truly is. The common wisdom, which is both too common and not very wise, is that we are out of land on this island to build more homes for residents. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It is only the bias of those who want no further development for their own reasons that promotes this view. The reality is there is plenty of room for more development if the state and the county will get out of the way and stop restricting development to only the manner that they desire, no matter how ill-advised and ineffective those restrictions may be.

Don Newman, senior policy analyst for the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii can be reached at: mailto:don@grassrootinstitute.org