Land use and mental well-being

Society's long-term goals often conflict with the short-term, narrow, outlook of our political systems. As well, many of the most valuable things in life are often ignored by our economic and political systems, because they cannot readily be converted into monetary terms. Some contributors to air pollution, for instance, are still disregarded in most countries. The consequences to plant and animal life of loss of habitat are usually ignored too.

But I'll look today at mental health, and specifically the negative impact on it of certain forms of planning and land use. Society's mental health goals are difficult to quantify, but I think we can be reasonably sure that our recent patterns of development of the built environment and land use increase alienation, loneliness, anxiety and depression. A brief extract from a recent article on land use in the US:

[W]alkable communities and co-housing — sound exotic to American ears. Thanks to shifting baselines, most Americans only know single-family dwellings and auto-dependent [ie car-dependent] land use. They cannot even articulate what they are missing and often misidentify the solution as more or different private consumption. But I do not think we should just accept that when we marry and start families, we atomize, and our friendships, like our taste in music, freeze where they were when we were young and single. We shouldn't just accept a way of living that makes interactions with neighbors and friends a burden that requires special planning. How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult, David Roberts, 'Vox', 16 January

My own belief is that the evidence that US-style suburban patterns of settlement are injurious to mental health is compelling, though perhaps not proven nor provable. But my opinion isn't important. What is important are these points: 

• Few of us have any incentive to find out whether in fact our land use patterns do create or exacerbate psychological problems for large numbers of people, and 


• Even were we to find that suburban living does destroy communities, lead to alienation and atomisation, and so aggravate psychological problems, policymakers have no incentive or capacity to do anything about it.

Acute mental health problems - the sort whose consequences are tragically newsworthy - do get some passing attention. But long-term mental well-being counts for very little in our economic and political systems. Just as policymakers failed to consider most aspects of our physical environment for decades until the consequences of doing so became too difficult to ignore, so too are mental problems and their causes neglected today. And, as the excerpt above implies, if we don't even know what we're missing, there's very little chance of either the market or benign central planners doing anything to help.

Perhaps Social Policy Bonds targeting for improvement the mental well-being of all citizens could be a solution. They could function as a way of representing the interests of people as human beings, as distinct from economic units. Such bonds, in targeting mental health indicators, could act as a countervailing force to the weight given to financial indicators in the property sector. Quantifying mental health might appear difficult, but there is important work being done in this area: examples are here and here.

Mental health is a hugely important issue, but there are others equally important that are similarly ignored by policymakers. There are measures being taken to help avoid nuclear war, for instance, but they are laughably small in relation to the enormity of the problem. The few people charged with conflict reduction - hard working and well meaning though they undoubtedly are - are not paid for their success in doing so, nor do the aggregate funds on offer reflect the urgency and magnitude of the challenge. Which is why I believe we should back Social Policy Bonds that reward the achievement of sustained nuclear peace - an indispensable requirement for humanity and one that is routinely ignored by policymakers. Just like long-term mental health.