The Brawl Over Sprawl

By Richard Lacayo

I hear the whistle of the locomotive in the woods... Whew! Whew! Whew! How is real estate here in the swamp and wilderness? --Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1842

Which brings us to greater Atlanta, 1999. Once a wilderness, it's now a 13-county eruption, one that has been called the fastest-spreading human settlement in history. Already more than 110 miles across, up from just 65 in 1990, it consumes an additional 500 acres of field and farmland every week. What it leaves behind is tract houses, access roads, strip malls, off ramps, industrial parks and billboards advertising more tract houses where the peach trees used to be. Car exhaust is such a problem that Washington is withholding new highway funding until the region complies with federal clean-air standards. On a bad traffic day--basically any weekday with a morning and evening in it--you can review whole years of your life in the time it takes to get from Blockbuster to Fuddruckers.

"We can't go on like this," says Georgia Governor Roy Barnes, a "smart growth" Democrat who was elected last year. Barnes has proposed a regional transportation authority that can block local plans for the new roads that encourage development. But dumb growth is not confined to Atlanta. Half a century after America loaded the car and fled to the suburbs, these boundless, slapdash places are making people want to flee once more. "All of a sudden, they're playing leapfrog with a bulldozer," says Al Gore, who wants to be the antisprawl candidate in 2000.

For Gore, turning an assortment of suburban complaints into a vote-getting issue is no sure thing. But the fact that he's trying shows that suburban overgrowth has become a national headache. Instead of just fleeing the sprawl (and thus creating more of it), people are groping for ways to fight it. Last November there were no fewer than 240 antisprawl ballot initiatives around the country. Most of them passed. Some stripped local authorities of the power to approve new subdivisions without voter assent. Others okayed tax money to buy open land before the developers get it. In the largest of those, New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman successfully pushed a referendum to use sales-tax money to buy half the state's undeveloped land--a million acres. "Americans are finally realizing that once you lose land, you can't get it back," she says.

Twelve states have already enacted growth-management laws. Tennessee just adopted one of the strictest, requiring many cities to impose growth boundaries around their perimeters. In Maryland, counties get state money for roads and schools only if they agree to confine growth to areas that the state has designated as suitable. But managed growth is not a win-win proposition. When laws make it harder to build in the countryside, new development is pressed into more expensive land closer to town. That can mean higher home prices, so the single mother who manages a doctor's office or the couple who make $38,000 a year must choose between a tiny apartment close to work and a 90-min. commute to housing they can afford.

Limiting growth also means dealing with a profound conflict between the good of the community and the rights of the individual. For a lot of people, the good life still means a big house on a big yard. Who's to say they shouldn't get it? Yet smart growth envisions a nation packaged into town houses and apartments, a country that rides trains and buses and leaves the car at home. Everybody hates the drive time, the scuffed and dented banality, of overextended suburbs. But are we ready for the confinement and compromise the solutions require? Maybe not, according to a recent TIME/CNN poll. It showed that most people like greenbelts but don't trust government planning.

Americans do believe in property rights--including the right to profit by selling. So the farmers and ranchers who feel squeezed out when tract housing plunks down next to their pasture often think about cashing in. "You get people waving millions," says Ben Wurtsmith, 67, a rancher in Colorado's Eagle County, not far from the exploding area around Vail. "Some days you just think about taking the money and taking off." One way to solve the problem, being used in parts of Colorado, is "development rights," which let builders put up houses more densely near town in exchange for payments to outlying farmers and ranchers to keep land open.

There's another option being explored in Ventura County, northwest of Los Angeles. At night, what used to be dark hillsides are strung with lights from new tract housing. Those twinkling lights worked on Steve Bennett, a soft-spoken high school history teacher, until he'd had enough. Three years ago he co-founded SOAR (Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources) to get antisprawl initiatives on the ballot. It took just nine weeks last year for Bennett and his allies to collect the 75,000 signatures they needed. In November, large majorities in four of Ventura's five largest cities adopted rules that forbid the county to rezone land for development without voter approval. A fifth city came on board in January.

"We've protected more than 600,000 acres of land," says Bennett. "But more than 60,000 homes can be built in areas already zoned for development. SOAR is an attempt to say some areas have to remain precious." Opposition came mainly from a local farmers' organization. Why? An appraisal by the city of Ventura concluded that 87 acres would be worth $1.6 million as farmland but $13 million if zoned for development. "The people of this county have taken away my property rights," says Howard Atkinson, 51, who inherited part of a 57-acre ranch.

If America's detonating metro regions were the result of population growth alone, sprawl would be a problem without a solution. But they are equally the result of political decisions and economic incentives that lure people ever farther from center cities. For decades, federal highway subsidies have paid for the roads to those far-flung malls and tract houses. Then there are local zoning rules that require large building lots, ensuring more sprawl. Many localities fiercely resist denser housing because it brings in more people but less property-tax revenue. Zoning rules commonly forbid any mix of homes and shops, which worsens traffic by guaranteeing that you burn a quart of gas to find a quart of milk. Even more important, localities routinely agree to extend roads, sewer lines and other utilities to new suburban developments built far from downtown, while existing schools and housing stock are left to decay. "Impact fees" on developers cover just a fraction of what services for newcomers actually cost.

These incentives to expand help create cities that widen much faster than their populations grow. Between 1990 and 1996, metro Kansas City spread 70%, while its population, now 1.9 million, increased just 5%. In that period greater Portland, Ore., spread just 13%, the same growth rate as its population, now 1.7 million. For a long time Portland has been the laboratory city for smart growth. In 1979, as part of its compliance with a groundbreaking statewide land-use law, Portland imposed a "growth boundary," a ring enclosing the city proper and 23 surrounding towns.

Within that circle, the Portland-area metro council, the only directly elected regional government in the U.S., controls all development. Inside, permits for new construction are granted readily, which helps account for the construction cranes all around a downtown that looked ready to die 20 years ago. Outside, where open land is strictly protected, there's mostly just the uninterrupted flight of greenery we call nature. Unspoiled stretches of the Willamette River Valley start 15 miles from city hall.

Orderly growth comes at a price. Smaller towns within the ring are submerged by crowding they might otherwise zone out. And within the dwindling buildable space of the ring, average lot size has shrunk almost in half over the past 20 years, from 13,000 sq. ft. to 6,700. Yet the median price of a single-family home has more than doubled in just 10 years, from $64,000 to $159,900. Once ranked by the National Association of Home Builders as among the most affordable U.S. cities for housing, Portland is now the third most expensive, just a bit cheaper than San Francisco. One reason is that the growth limits helped attract an influx of new residents, who bid up costs. But another is that developers can't build on cheaper acreage farther from town. And though the growth boundary has been widened, local builders complain that the added acreage falls well short of what a growing population needs.

For all that, the "great wall of Portland" is very popular with area voters. That's one reason Gore wants to make sprawl his issue in the next campaign. He knows that some of his signature environmental concerns, like global warming, can seem remote from the here and now. He's counting on sprawl to be an environmentalism that people get, especially the suburban women who drive those crowded roads and are important swing voters. "Let's build more new homes," Gore recently told TIME, "but build them in places that help make people's lives more enjoyable."

His message may still need work, but his plan has some merit. In January, Gore introduced the Administration's "livability agenda," a collection of new and recycled budget programs (see box). Republicans in Washington have no counterpart, partly because conservatives think government should stay out of the way of private development. But G.O.P. pragmatists are worried. In a recent issue of the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, Republican pollster Christine Matthews reported that Gore's "mainstreaming of his environmentalism" was "startlingly on track with voters."

Even if presidential candidates manage to nationalize the issue, Washington doesn't have much to do with the local zoning fights and roadway approvals that determine where development goes. "The battle is going to be won or lost at the state level," says Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. And the remedies take many forms. In Illinois, there's Prairie Crossing, a 667-acre subdivision 40 miles north of Chicago, where more than half the land is preserved as green space. Utopia isn't cheap: the median price of homes there is $331,000, about $100,000 above that for the immediate area, which doesn't satisfy the need for the lower-cost housing that's driving suburban expansion.

In Chicago's southwestern suburbs, residents have joined with environmentalists in a lawsuit to block a 12.5-mile extension of Interstate 355, one they fear will bring more traffic, more houses, more everything. Two months ago, Illinois transportation officials announced they would stop appealing a federal judge's decision that has stalled the project since early 1997. The ruling held that state officials had failed to take into account the new road's projected impact on population growth. Opponents are hopeful that alternatives to building the toll road will receive serious consideration. "Highways are billed as antidotes to congestion," says Mike Truppa, a policy specialist at the Environmental Law and Policy Center, which joined the suit. "But inevitably they create more."

Since development tends to pop up any place it finds a foothold, the battle to contain it never ends. In the rolling country of Shelburne, Vt., McCabe Brook meanders through the former Clark farm. A developer liked the place so much that he planned to build 26 houses on its 120 acres. But David Miskell, 50, a bushy-bearded organic-tomato farmer, and dairy farmer Robert Mack, 44, both of whom had been working to preserve other open spaces in the area, helped organize public gatherings to discuss the fact that the development would require taxpayers to finance firehouses and classrooms. "My tomatoes don't go to school," Miskell says. "I think that woke people up."

When Shelburne approved the development anyway, a neighboring town took Shelburne to court, arguing that it would suffer costs from the project. To dramatize how construction would change the area, Miskell constructed scaffolds on the endangered land that approximated the proposed height and footprint of a few of the houses. In December 1997, the embattled developer sold the property to the Preservation Trust of Vermont. "If you are not into controversy," says Miskell, "you are not doing anything."

Keeping land open is just half the battle. The other half is keeping downtowns livable and affordable so people stay happily bunched there. That way new construction tends to cluster within developed zones and use existing roads, schools and utility lines. But for the centerless "edge cities" that collect around major highways, the problem is to create a downtown in the first place. So in Tysons Corner, Va., just outside Washington, county officials have just approved an instant town center--an 18-acre collection of small office buildings that will also house shops and restaurants around a plaza. Albuquerque, N.M., is examining a proposal to refurbish a 12-block area, nearly one-fifth of the city's downtown, into an urban center with entertainment, retail and high-density housing. "It's a typical American problem, the abandoned center," says architect Stefanos Polyzoides, who designed the scheme. "It doesn't have to be like this."

Polyzoides is chairman of the Congress for the New Urbanism, a group of architects and city planners who believe sprawl can be remedied in part through better town design--a return to sidewalks, narrower streets that don't encourage fast driving, a mix of homes and shops. Endlessly elastic suburbia "is not a way we're going to be building in the future," he predicts. The revival of downtowns in places like San Diego and Denver--and, for that matter, Atlanta--and the reaction against sprawl among the suburbanites who spawned it may also be signs, as he says, that the problem can be fixed. But sprawl is mostly indelible ink. Once the roads and houses and strip malls set in, you can't just get them out. The best way to fight sprawl is to stop it before it starts.

--Reported by Wendy Cole/Chicago, Dan Cray/Ventura, Daniel S. Levy/Shelburne, Todd Murphy/Portland and Timothy Roche/Atlanta

With reporting by Wendy Cole/Chicago, Dan Cray/Ventura, Daniel S. Levy/Shelburne, Todd Murphy/Portland and Timothy Roche/Atlanta