Stories from around the country in the past few months indicate that sprawl has been elevated from one of several “miscellaneous” environmental issues to an issue of its own, featured in the front pages of newspapers and CNN specials. (See EW, June 1998, for an introduction to the sprawl beat.)
Journalists have defined it, analyzed its local causes, bashed states for ignoring it, offered solutions to reverse it, and heralded the EPA for devoting funds to stop it.
In defining sprawl, this biting description is offered by Richard Moe of the National Trust for Historic Preservation: “Low-density development on the edge of cities and towns, poorly planned, land-consumptive, auto-dependent, and designed without respect to its surroundings.”
The thrust of that description seems to be universally accepted. See page 2 for how the sprawl issue is playing.
- Arizona Republic: “Is the agitation against sprawl, bubbling up across 50 states today, becoming a turn-of-the-century equivalent of the civil rights movement?...
“Increasingly, business leaders are joining the call for smarter growth. Religious coalitions are starting to back growth management proposals in Missouri, Minnesota and elsewhere.
“Everywhere the message is the same: The open space loss, despoiled countryside, traffic nightmares, the injustice to older cities and inner suburbs have become intolerable....
“One has to ask: Is the sprawl revolt flourishing just among a minority of informed people? Certainly that’s where it has started. But if the civil rights precedent is any guide, increased debate, focused on injustices and harm to the whole society, will lead in time to millions of new converts.”
- Associated Press: “The Clinton administration is proposing dramatic increases in spending to preserve open spaces by expanding federal land purchases and giving millions of dollars to states for urban parks and land conservation.
“Vice President Al Gore unveiled the first installment of the plan Monday during a speech at the American Institute of Architect[s]....
“But officials said Gore’s anti-sprawl initiative is part of a much broader administration proposal aimed at pumping more money into programs that shelter farmland, forests and rangeland from development and aid in restoration or protection of coastal areas.
“Such efforts could benefit Gore in his bid for the presidency in 2000. In signs of public support for such programs, last November’s elections saw 200 state and local ballot measures aiming to preserve watersheds, parks, farmland and other open spaces.”
- Boston Globe: “Battling sprawl has suddenly crystallized as an important quest of the nation’s public life. But as is typical, almost all of the attention is focused on the easy half of the problem....
“But while ideas abound for stopping future sprawl through land protection, zoning, transit, and architectural innovations, planners and environmentalists are generally hard-pressed to figure out how to fix the vast swaths of sprawl that already plague the nation....
“Former Massachusetts environmental affairs secretary Trudy Coxe declared last year that ‘sprawl is the single most important environmental issue facing any of us in New England today.’...
“There are a handful of examples of efforts around the country that could guide a sorely needed national discussion of how to improve the environments that already dominate so many communities. Some approaches include:
“Manufacture a downtown...
“Use new transit to spawn a downtown...
“Inject housing...
“Blow things up...”
- CNN: “Fed up with grueling commutes, more and more people are moving from the suburbs back into downtown areas, fueling a residential rebirth in cities like Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas and Denver....
“In Atlanta, prices for downtown lofts have doubled in the last three years. Old buildings are being converted into new living spaces, and many loft buildings have a waiting list for those looking to buy.
“Atlanta’s downtown now has a population of about a thousand residents, up from about fifty a decade ago.”
- Denver Post: “It’s those Californians, [officials] hear, who have gobbled up Colorado’s open space, sprawling across its suburbs, covering its mountainsides with trophy homes, clogging its interstates with their Golden States license plates.
“Yet the addition of more than 100,000 Californians played only a secondary role in the suburban explosion of the 1990s that prompted Colorado residents to rank growth as the state’s No. 1 problem.
“The main cause of Colorado’s suburban sprawl, a Denver Post computer analysis found, has been Coloradans .... The IRS data also shows that newcomers from California and other states tended to settle in Colorado’s urban counties first. At the edges of Colorado’s metropolitan areas, the movement to newly built subdivisions was led by people from neighboring counties, not newcomers to the states ....
“Colorado’s growth concerns are mirrored in communities across the nation. In the 1998 elections, voters approved nearly 200 initiatives to curb suburban sprawl. The Sierra Club has elevated sprawl to the top of its agenda and ranked metro Denver among the 10 worst offenders. Vice President Al Gore is taking local anger about suburban sprawl to the national stage as a potential centerpiece of his 2000 presidential campaign.”
- New York Times: “The word ‘sprawl’ does not even appear in the index of ‘Earth in the Balance,’ Vice President Al Gore’s earnest 1992 treatise on the environment. But these days that word, and the set of creeping suburban problems it embraces, from traffic congestion to loss of open space, has emerged as one of the reigning buzzwords in the political lexicon ....
“Sprawl, in sum, is the new language of environmentalism, seen by political strategists as perhaps the best way to engage voters in debate that had become more abstract over the last two decade as regulation curbed many of the most egregious environmental abuses, from pesticides to pollution, that had animated suburbanites in the 1970s.
“The new debate is being driven by some of the same concern that inspired the original movement, but now the length of a commuter’s daily drive is increasingly seen as an environmental issue like chlorofluorocarbons or global warming. And political strategists say that the voters most concerned about these issues — suburban women — are the voting group that helps decide elections.”
- Sacramento Bee: “Quite suddenly, the sprawl issue is ‘in.’
“New Jersey’s Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, one of the 11 governors who made a point of land-use issues in their 1998 state of the state addresses, sums up this issue: ‘Suburban sprawl is eating up open space, creating mind-boggling traffic jams, bestowing on us endless strip malls and housing developments, and consuming an ever-increasing share of our resources.’ ...
“In reaction to such abuses, a group of seasoned sprawl fighters is proclaiming a political sea change .... Jim Sayer, executive director of the Greenbelt Alliance that’s spearheaded a recent wave of urban growth boundaries in the San Francisco Bay region, argues that ‘after a 50-year infatuation with low-density development, American is giving rise to a multifaceted anti-sprawl movement.’...
“But will all this really curb sprawl? Won’t development interests find ways to puncture, circumvent, and compromise restraints and growth boundaries — even if proponents succeed in passing them? Aren’t there enough housing and commercial units in the approval pipelines right now to keep the bulldozers roaring for many more years? Will legislatures really appropriate enough money to buy and protect threatened lands?”
- St. Louis Dispatch: “If bucking trends take courage, Missouri is among the bravest states when it comes to a nationwide drive to stem urban sprawl.
“Missouri leaders can look to states in any direction if they want pointers on controlling growth or generating money for conservation. Soon, they may be able to look to the federal government for billions in bonding authority.
“But so far, the Show-Me State has shown little interest ....
“The anti-sprawl movement sprouted on both coasts because of worries about the environment. The new wave of conservation and growth-management is fueled by other sentiments: decaying city cores; suburban congestion; and the expense to taxpayers of unbridled growth.
“In the new debates, the burden of providing new roads, schools, sewers and other works to support development is proving persuasive ....
“But in Missouri, not much is happening. The most recent sign of public sentiment was in November, when more than 60 percent of voters in St. Louis County approved the Page Avenue extension to St. Charles County ....
“So far, the regional solutions emerging in other metropolitan areas have eluded the St. Louis area.”
- Washington Post: “When their oldest child reached school age, Deb and Darin Adair decided to leave Prince George’s County....They wanted good schools, safe neighborhoods, green space.
“They found their heaven about 25 miles south in Dunkirk, a Calvert County town of about 6,000 .... Best of all, Dunkirk had no sewers.
“Along with thousands of others who have flooded into Calvert in recent years, the Adairs reasoned that the absence of sewers would naturally limit development. With septic tanks, developers must leave room for large drainfields, but public sewers allow building at higher density.
“In the vast open spaces of Washington’s outer suburbs, the approval of new sewer lines has paved the way for construction of town houses, super stores and multiplexes — growth that families such as the Adairs see as the worst manifestations of suburban sprawl.
“When word came last year that the county had approved a limited sewer system for Dunkirk’s small commercial center, the Adairs and other fought back...
“Over the ensuing months, they proved that an aroused citizenry is an effective weapon in the sprawl battles that are now playing out in parts of the Washington area and across the country. They not only stopped the sewer — they booted out the politicians who supported it.”
- Washington Post: “The Environmental Protection Agency budget proposes a $9.5 billion, five-year credit program to help communities combat urban sprawl.
“With EPA’s approval, states and local communities would issue ‘Better America Bonds’ to acquire land, set up parks and greenbelts, protect water and farmland, and attack traffic congestion. Bond purchasers would get tax credits totaling $700 million, enabling communities to issue the bonds at zero interest. The initiative has no impact on EPA’s budget because it would be financed through reduced federal tax revenue.”