Vice President Al Gore deplores it. Senators plan
hearings on it. Governors pledge to fight it. Voters
are opening up their wallets to contain it. It's years
of pent-up road rage unleashed on the political system.
It's a bird, it's a plane -- no, it's suburban sprawl.
Across the country, Democratic and Republican
politicians alike are struggling to respond to pressure
from suburbanites to do something -- anything -- to
ease traffic congestion and curb poorly planned local development.
Consider these examples:
New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman (R)
worked hard last year to secure a place on the November
ballot for a bond initiative designed to protect up to half
of the state's remaining undeveloped land. Voters approved
the measure, authorizing the state to raise $1 billion
to buy land over the next 10 years.
All told, in November 1998 American voters passed
roughly 170 of 240 state and local growth-related ballot
initiatives. By doing so, they earmarked more than $7
billion in tax, bond, and lottery money to preserve open
spaces and make suburban life more bearable.
Gore, meanwhile, kick-started his expected
run for the presidency in 2000 with a
December 1998 speech to the Democratic
Leadership Council in which he lamented
"the sprawl that breaks our hearts and separates
us from one another and our homes
from the environment." He later proposed
up to $700 million in federal tax credits to
support sales of new "Better America
Bonds." States and localities would issue
these bonds to raise money to buy open
space, protect water quality, and reclaim industrial
"brownfields" for redevelopment.
The Vice President believes the tax credits
may leverage up to $10 billion in new state
and local investment to fight sprawl and related
problems.
"You deserve livable communities, comfortable
suburbs, vibrant cities, and green
spaces all around and in between," Gore
told the DLC. "And you can have them."
Once upon a time, sprawl was a fairly neutral
term to describe cardependent, low-density
economic growth beyond the
bounds of older suburbs. Now it is used almost
exclusively to describe the dark side of
that growth: unbearable traffic, vanishing
open space, increasing levels of air and
water pollution, and higher taxes to perpetuate
the cycle of new schools, sewers, and
roads. And that's just what the residents of
older suburbs are feeling. Sprawl is even
less attractive to urban residents who are
left behind and involuntarily subsidize the
outward migration through their taxes.
The sprawl debate has opened social
fault lines across the nation. Developers and
environmentalists spar over sprawl in court.
Suburban leaders guard their bounty of
businesses and jobs while city leaders clamor for a share.
Inner-ring suburbanites hunker down to preserve their
American dream while outer-ring suburbanites demand
their slice of the good life.
But for better or worse, sprawling developments are
where many people aspire to live. Housing is often far
less expensive and public safety and education significantly
better in areas of rapid growth compared with the
urban core and older suburbs. Since 1990 more Americans
have been living in suburbs than in urban and
rural areas combined. There is no reason to believe that
this trend will reverse itself in the foreseeable future.
Progressives need to stop thinking in terms of waging
all-out war against sprawl and instead begin searching
for ways to ameliorate its worst effects.
The pressure to do so is clearly on. The growing influence
of voters in the suburbs-- the epicenter of sprawl -- guarantees that calls for action will not fade.
According to a May 1997 issue of Congressional Quarterly
Weekly Report, suburban congressional districts that year
outnumbered urban districts 2 to 1 and rural districts 3
to 1. Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck in the fall issue of
DLC's Blueprint noted that in 1996 40 percent of votes in
Illinois were cast in the suburbs, up from 26 percent in
1960.
So what, if anything, should federal, state, and local officials
do about sprawl? Here's the bind: Although
schools, roads, parks, and utility extensions are inherently
local matters, the federal and state governments have
enormous influence over such choices. For decades the
feds have subsidized suburban development through
massive highway, housing, and public-works projects
that non-suburbanites must support. For their part,
many states abet sprawl by requiring all utility customers
-- not just the residents of new communities --
to bear the costs of new electricity, cable, sewer, and
other hookups. Meanwhile, Washington's say in suburban
affairs has grown as local land-use decisions have
collided with the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air
Act, and other national environmental mandates.
In defense of property rights and free markets, some
conservative politicians declare sprawl to be the natural
order of things and yield to developers' demands for
more of it. This fixes nothing. Some liberals, meanwhile,
urge that we simply "just say no" to suburban development
and "say yes" to urban redevelopment. This won't
cut it, either. Most politicians recognize that trashing
where constituents choose to live is a non-starter.
In contrast to "anything goes" or "nothing goes," progressives
should seek a third way that begins with cutting
state and federal subsidies favoring sprawl. At a
bare minimum, we should force new development to
pay its own freight. It makes little sense for one part of
government to conserve open space -- as it should
while other parts continue to foster poorly planned de-velopment.
But even more importantly, there is no place in the
sprawl debate for old-fashioned warfare between environmental
activists and growth advocates. We should
adopt a different approach to managing sprawl, one
borrowed from elsewhere in the environmental arena
and with a proven track record. We need to enlist citizens
and stakeholders representing diverse points of
view and equip them with the tools they need to solve
sprawl-related problems by themselves in their own
communities and regions. It is a concept called civic
environmentalism.
Civic environmentalism's defining principles are collaboration,
flexibility, and accountability for environmental
and economic outcomes. Its key features are scientifically
sound and strictly enforced environmental standards;
a concerned, active, and open-minded citizenry; broad
public access to technical data and expertise; and new
market-oriented policies that give private property owners
compelling reasons to act in the public interest.
Civic environmentalism is a clear departure from the
first generation of national environmental policy, which
has tended to address problems in isolation from others
with top-down, highly prescriptive, one-size-fits-all solutions.
First-generation policies have worked well, albeit
with diminishing efficiency, when it comes to older
problems such as pollution from large industrial
sources. But today's environmental problems in particular
those caused by sprawl are more complex and
diffuse. The geography of sprawl rarely squares neatly
with political boundaries. Indeed, airsheds and water-sheds
and commerce in the New Economy render most
such boundaries irrelevant.
Civic environmentalism recognizes this. It employs
new tools of community engagement that cut across bureaucracies
and jurisdictions and harness rather than
fight market forces. And it does so without undermining
the solid foundation created by our landmark federal environmental
statutes. Civic environmentalism strikes a
new balance between national and state standards and
local solutions.
The Progressive Policy Institute recently released a report,
Civic Environmentalism in Action: A Field Guide to
Regional and Local Initiatives, describing a handful of civic
environmental success stories in detail:
