For years, the experts warned America about sprawl
to no avail. In the 1940s they predicted a new federal
system of highways would drain life from cities and
disfigure the countryside if suburban development was
left unmanaged. Policymakers ignored the warnings
and watched indifferently as sprawl took off. In the
1970s "The Costs of Sprawl" report issued by the federal
government tallied up the damages. Yet even with the
oil embargo fresh in their minds, Americans kept on
guzzling gasoline. Only now are the voters taking notice.
And the most vociferous opponents of sprawl are
no longer land-use planners or environmentalists, but
the people in suburbia stuck in sprawl every day.
From coast to coast, sprawl is being undermined by
its own constituency.
To understand the frustration you have to understand
the three "Ts" behind the rebellion: traffic, taxes, and
topography.
As suburban job growth increases the number of suburb-
to-suburb commutes, traffic grows larger than the
capacity of suburban road systems. Workers escape the
madness by commuting farther from the center. Home-builders
cater to them and employers follow them, subsidized
by government funding of new roads and other
services. Local officials then raise taxes to pay for crowded
roads and schools. Facing budget deficits from residential
sprawl that does not pay its own way, officials
lure commercial development to the greenfields that attracted
new residents, who watch helplessly as the
topography is degraded by ever more sprawl. The frustrated
ones pull up their stakes, move farther out once
again, and the vicious circle continues, trapping more
and more voters in an ever widening gyre of sprawl.
Americans have accepted this pattern as sustainable and
inevitable. Until now. Sprawl became the sleeper political
issue of 1998, when voters from California to Cape
Cod overwhelmingly approved some 200 ballot initiatives
related to growth management.
Listen carefully at the state and local levels and hear
the voices of responsive politicians. Glendening in Maryland.
Whitman in New Jersey. Ridge in Pennsylvania.
Add to this roster Vice President Al Gore. Outlining a national
sprawl agenda last fall, Gore said, "[This issue in]
our cities, suburbs, and rural areas is made up of so
many different pieces that until recently it has been a
problem that lacked a name." The topic has risen so
quickly up the political ladder that The New York Times reporter
Todd Purdum notes the word "sprawl" is not even
listed in the index of Gore's 1992 environmental manifesto,
Earth in the Balance.
Now, environmental groups from the Sierra Club to
the American Farmland Trust label sprawl the wasteful,
uncivil Public Enemy No. 1, making it clear that they
value habitats for civilized life just as highly as habitats
for wildlife. Joining environmentalists and disgruntled
suburbanites in this growing coalition are rural interests
squeezed by sprawl at the urban edge and urban interests
left behind in the abandoned cores.
The antisprawl movement has picked up new members
as calls for "Smart Growth" have replaced reactionary
calls for "slow growth." Smart Growth has given
Americans a third way out of old stalemates between "no
growth" on the one hand and "no growth-management"
on the other. It allows Americans to say "No" to sprawl
while saying "Yes" to other forms of development.
Smart Growth's appeal is an outgrowth of several movements.
The first is the kind of public choices made in
Portland, Ore., where voters and elected leaders have
protected open space at the urban edge while encouraging
"in-fill" development in the core. Over 25 years,
Portland doubled the number of jobs downtown without
adding a single parking space. Every year, this
healthy city surrounded by stunning scenery lures
50,000 new workers fleeing sprawl in other regions.
Second, over the last two decades more than 1,400
small towns and mid-size cities primarily in rural America
have waged the fight of their lives against sprawl by
joining the Main Street program of the National Trust for
Historic Preservation, which helps them compete against
strip malls beyond their borders. The many local campaigns
to preserve downtown post offices and challenge
the cookie cutter formulas of "big box" retail stores are
the most publicized manifestations of a Smart Growth
ethic spreading across the heartland, from the bottom up.
Finally, within the last decade a highly articulate
movement for "New Urbanism" has emerged among architects
and urban designers promoting alternatives to
residential sprawl. They call for a new pattern of devel-
opment, inspired by the kind of neighborhoods and suburbs
Americans built in the first two decades of the century,
before traffic flow and isolated privacy overtook
sidewalks and scenery as the goals.
All of these movements have shown that development
can happen in better ways, that Americans can either settle
for the kind of development they get or demand the
kind of development they want. Having seen the alternatives
for themselves, Americans want more choices than
sprawl offers.
That's what prompted the Walt Disney Company to
abandon plans to build a major theme park in northern
Virginia in 1994. The threat of sprawl on the scale of
Orlando, Fla., forged a new coalition of interests: old
money landowners of Old Virginia, new money ex-urbanites,
middle-class suburbanites frustrated by traffic
and the loss of open space, plus advocates of the District
of Columbia, from downtown real estate tycoons to
human services providers who understand the difficulty
of welfare reform in regions where most entry-level jobs
are created by sprawl, in places unreachable by transit.
Urban advocates used to ignore sprawl. They saw
fights over sprawl as somebody else's penalty for fleeing
the city. Only recently have they seen curbing sprawl as
relevant to their future. Five years ago, Roman Catholic
Bishop Anthony Pilla of Cleveland singled out sprawl as
one of the most pressing moral issues of our time. While
downtown Cleveland was calling itself "The Comeback
City," the region's middle class was deserting Pilla's
struggling urban parishes and diocesan schools in decaying
first-ring suburbs for distant Ohio farmland. Like
Americans before, the ex-urbanites heard the moral exhortation
but kept on going.
You can't save a city on pity, says Milwaukee Mayor
John Norquist, one of the prominent advocates of New
Urbanism. And he's right. Cities are being energized
today not by "poverty programs" but by wealth creation
strategies, home ownership, and retail development and
amenities that improve urban quality of life.
Smart developers are catching on quicker than the politicians,
because families with children in the home account
for only one quarter of the nation's housing market,
down from 40 percent in 1970. Some middle-aged
"empty nesters" are giving up isolation in the subdivisions
for the convenience of loft condominiums, reviving
Aristotle's ancient declaration that people come together
in cities to live, but stay there to live the good life.
Such a claim was laughable after the urban riots a
generation ago, but go to Memphis today. A downtown
declared dead after the death of Martin Luther King Jr. in
1968 is returning to life at an encouraging pace. Historic
downtowns and urban waterfronts have a future as appealing
alternatives to sprawl. Look at the revival of
downtown Denver. Witness dramatic investments in
downtown Fort Worth by the Bass family, or in
Wilmington, Del., by the credit card giant MBNA. These
are Smart Growth efforts led by business interests responding
to market forces.
Builders with vision see a growing market in search of
a sense of place and a sense of community that America
has lost to sprawl. In an era of increasing mobility, regions
with vision will protect their identity and livability
to attract skilled workers searching for the best place to
settle down.
When it comes to sprawl as a political issue, there is
wider agreement on the culprit than the cure. Currently,
the coalition for smarter growth has less influence in
shaping how new environments get built than in protecting
the places we have already. That means complex
structures for regional governance will be harder to do
politically than undoing policies that already do the
most harm.
Getting government out of the sprawl business could
become a rallying cry, if only because the tactic brings
deficit hawks, tax cutters, and libertarians into the fold.
Building new government facilities in cities and towns
instead of open space will help curb sprawl and revitalize
faded locations that drain tax dollars already. Transportation
policy is the most obvious offender, because
growth follows transportation. So, expect Smart Growth
advocates to demand even more choices for how to
spend transportation funds. The ultimate target, however,
will be the tax code, which catalyzes sprawl and rewards
disinvestment in existing places. The General Accounting
Office will deliver a report on federal subsidies
of sprawl soon. If we end public subsidies of sprawl if
we get government out of the way and make developers
pay their own way -- sprawl builders will suddenly find
many of their projects too expensive to be marketable.
The homebuilders, highway pavers, and hamburger
vendors tell us that America loves sprawl. Yet they fear a
run at the public subsidies that have funded their success.
They hear rumbling in the distance from an expanding
constituency that says America needs to grow
in smarter ways. The experts have said as much for
years. The only difference now is, the voters don't have
to be told. They know it from experience.
