SPEECH: Growing Wiser: Finding Alternatives to Sprawl
Posted August 5, 2009 | Contact pr@nthp.org or 202-588-6141
By Richard Moe | March 22, 1995
An Address by Richard Moe, President, National Trust for Historic Preservation, presented on March 22, 1995 at the Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C.
What does sprawl have to do with historic preservation?
If that question has occurred to you, then the American preservation movement is not what you think it is. We've moved beyond the meticulous restoration of a few landmarks and the creation of museums. We're still doing those things, but we're also now involved in trying to make America's communities more livable. We're concerned about sprawl because it devastates older cities and towns, where historic buildings and neighborhoods are concentrated. Sprawl has drained the life out of thousands of traditional downtowns and inner-city neighborhoods, and we've learned that we can't hope to revitalize these communities without doing something to control the sprawl that keeps pushing further and further out from the center.
But our concern goes beyond that, because preservation today is about more than bricks and mortar. We're convinced--and there's a growing body of grim evidence to support us--that sprawl is having a devastating effect on our quality of life, that it is corroding the very sense of community that helps bind us together as a people and as a nation. Preservation is in the business of saving special places and the quality of life they support, and sprawl destroys both.
The National Trust's involvement with sprawl dates back to the 1970s, when we developed our Main Street program to help bring life back to historic downtowns that were losing businesses to the malls and the bypasses. That effort has become the most successful downtown revitalization program in the country--we've seen commercial districts in more than 1,000 places come back to life--but we soon realized that it wasn't enough to clean up the mess left in sprawl's wake. We needed to deal more directly with the root of the problem.
This conviction led us in 1993 to place the entire state of Vermont on our annual list of "America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places" because sprawl was (and still is) testing that state's commitment to the preservation of its cohesive small towns and countryside. We intensified our efforts in last year's successful confrontation with the Walt Disney Company over plans for a huge development in Northern Virginia. As we kept reminding people at the time, the battle over Disney's America wasn't about how a theme park might interpret American history; it was about sprawl that threatened to overwhelm one of the most scenic and historic areas in America.
We've also published a citizens' handbook called How Superstore Sprawl Can Harm Communities, last December we held a conference on sprawl in Boston, we've responded to calls for help from hundreds of people on the frontline of the sprawl issue.
We're not here to claim that preservation is the only answer, but it is one of the real alternatives to sprawl that we advocate.
What is sprawl? I've always thought it is a bit like pornography: It's hard to define, but you know it when you see it. And you see it almost everywhere. It's the low-density development that spreads out from the edges of cities and towns. It is poorly planned, land-consumptive, automobile-oriented, designed without regard to its surroundings. It is usually ugly, and it is enormously destructive.
One form of sprawl – retail development that transforms roads into "sellscapes" – is frequently spurred on by discount retailers. The two giants in this industry, Wal-Mart and Kmart, are planning 500 new stores within the next few years, many of them superstores with more than 200,000 square feet of space. In many small towns, a single new superstore may have more retail space than the entire downtown business district. The retail center of gravity shifts away from Main Street. As business drops off, downtown stores and offices close or relocate. Facing a loss of rental income, property owners cut back on maintenance. Facing a loss of tax revenues, governments cut back on services. Downtown becomes ghost town, while the retail building binge continues across a landscape already littered with the equivalent of nearly 4000 abandoned shopping centers or "dead malls."
Sprawl's other most familiar form – spread-out residential subdivisions that "leapfrog" from the urban fringe into the countryside – is driven largely by the American dream of a detached home in the middle of a grassy lawn. The dream carries a hefty price tag – and you don't always get what you pay for.
Developers frequently claim they can build more "affordable" housing on the edge of town – but "affordable" for whom? The developer's own expenses may be less, and the homebuyer may find the prices attractive – but who picks up the extra costs of fire and police protection, new roads and new utility infrastructure in these outlying areas? We all do, in the form of higher taxes for needless duplication of services and infrastructure that already exist in older parts of our cities and towns. The sad fact is that sprawl is heavily subsidized by both federal and state dollars.
Over the years, every community has made an enormous investment of public funds in downtown streets, sidewalks, water and sewer lines and the like. When this investment – an asset that is already paid for – is abandoned or used at a fraction of its capacity, taxpayer dollars are wasted. Sprawl is not only outrageously expensive, it's fiscally irresponsible.
It's insatiable, too. Many of the bedroom communities that sprang up on our urban fringes after World War II are now beginning to fade, and older suburbs are being abandoned just as inner cities were abandoned in decades past. As the cycle of decline and abandonment keeps repeating itself, sprawl keeps pushing outward, wreaking havoc on town and country alike. We lose almost three million acres of productive farmland a year, and our cities are turning into doughnuts – with the hole in the center getting bigger and bigger.
The social costs of sprawl are many, and may be the most devastating in the long term. To begin with, the increased auto dependency fostered by sprawl makes us less mobile than before: Many people – children and the elderly especially – who can't drive have no choice but to stay home. As traffic worsens, commuters leave home earlier and get back later, leaving them less time to spend with their families or participate in the life of the community. Inner-city residents are victimized by economic segregation, stagnant property values and declining public services. And as crime and gangs and drugs move into outlying areas, children raised in the suburbs – the children we once thought would grow up free from the supposed "evils" of the inner city – actually face many of the same problems as preceding generations, and are often characterized by a lack of faith in the future and a diminished sense of community as well. It's very hard to find a sense of community in a strip mall.
Whatever else you say about it, you have to give credit to sprawl for being an equal-opportunity destroyer.
It's important to recognize that sprawl isn't the same in all parts of the country. In some areas it's an unintentional by-product of mushrooming growth and laissez-faire policies. Elsewhere, it was wanted and eagerly sought out in the name of economic development. In the boom years of the 1970s and 80s, states such as Colorado launched aggressive marketing campaigns to attract business and industry, extolling the ready availability of land and frequently offering attractive development incentives. The strategy succeeded, bringing an onslaught of sprawl that most officials equated with "progress." But as the boom turned to bust, people began to realize that development that destroys communities – and asks residents to pay for the destruction – isn't progress, it's chaos.
In 1947, William Faulkner wrote an irate letter to his hometown paper, the Oxford Eagle. The historic courthouse in Oxford was threatened with demolition, and Faulkner was furious: "They call this progress," he wrote. "But they don't say where it's going; also there are some of us who would like the chance to say whether or not we want the ride."
More and more people are deciding they don't want the ride – or at least they're wondering whether the price of the ticket isn't much too high. As dramatic evidence of this change of heart, I call your attention to a remarkable report issued in California just last month. The report states flatly, "California can no longer afford the luxury of sprawl" because it has "shifted from an engine of California's growth to a force that now threatens to inhibit growth and degrade the quality of our life." Strong words – and they take on added weight from the fact that the initiative for producing the report came from the Bank of America. A leader of the mainstream business community that traditionally preaches the gospel of unlimited growth now says that sprawl is bad – not just for the environment but for business as well.
Do we really like the kind of places sprawl has created? In surveys that ask people to pick out pictures of the sort of place where they'd like to live, most choose scenes of compact, human-scaled neighborhoods that are the very antithesis of sprawl. If everybody hates it, why do we keep building it? Too often it's because we think there's no alternative. That's wrong. Sprawl isn't inevitable, it's merely easy. Too many developers follow standard formulas, and we haven't demanded much better. I'm not sure who said it, but it seems to apply here: "We have only one person to blame, and that's each other."
So what's to be done?
In these days of budget-tightening, we could take a lesson from the British statesman who told his colleagues during the darkest days of World War II, "Gentlemen, we are out of money. Therefore we shall have to think."
We must recognize that being anti-sprawl is not being anti-growth. The question is not whether our communities will grow, but how they will grow. To answer that question, we need clear-headed, far-sighted planning and better development models to replace the random collision of economic forces that has turned much of our landscape into what Peter Blake calls "God's own junkyard."
We also have to recognize that it's not enough just to oppose a Wal-Mart or a Disney. Opposing bad development proposals is critically important, but in a sense it's merely playing defense. If we're going to get ahead of the game, we also have to play offense.
Communities should be shaped by choice, not by chance. Our choices are clear. We can let the highway engineers and the Wal-Marts do our planning for us, or we can take a more active role ourselves. We can keep on accepting the kind of communities we get, or we can learn how to get the kind of communities we want.
While sprawl is a nationwide problem, there is no national solution. We certainly must seek changes to federal policies that encourage sprawl, but we should not look to the federal government for a quick-fix answer to the problem of sprawl.
Nor should we expect local government alone to produce an effective solution. Limited jurisdiction hampers the ability of local government to deal with an issue of this magnitude that doesn't respect political boundaries; efforts to control sprawl in a limited area often just shift the problem from one community to another.
The best hope for truly effective action against sprawl lies at the state and regional levels. Local governments must cooperate in developing strong regional strategies for using already-developed land more efficiently, making thoughtful choices about where new development should and should not go, and setting up regulatory mechanisms that are fair, clear, consistent, rational and farsighted.
I'd like to suggest some specific actions that can make a difference:
- First, at the federal level, government policies that mandate, encourage or reward sprawl should be revised. Transportation policy, which is perhaps the biggest offender, should be based on principles that reward rational planning and efficiency instead of on principles that reward sprawl. Plans to build new beltways and bypasses should remind us that the phrase "if you build it, they will come" doesn't apply only to ballparks; building more roads to ease sprawl-induced traffic problems is like drinking more whiskey to cure a hangover.
- Tax policy that favors new development over rehabilitation should be replaced with policies that encourage the reuse of existing housing stock and the revitalization of inner-city neighborhoods. We've become conscientious about recycling everything from newspapers to aluminum, but we're not very good at recycling communities. We'd better learn how. We don't have an infinite amount of land in this country to build upon, and many Western states may run out of water before they run out of land. Even if the natural resources were available, we don't have the money to build the new roads, schools and other infrastructure that sprawl demands.
- At the state level, many governments are seeking solutions to problems that can't be solved as long as sprawl continues to consume so much of the average state budget in the form of transportation-related costs. Some states have recognized the need for some form of statewide or regional land-use planning mechanism. Oregon's "urban growth boundary" legislation is both innovative and workable, and states such as Vermont, Rhode Island and Georgia have adopted varied approaches that could serve as useful models elsewhere.
- In other states, encouraging initiatives are just getting underway. In Colorado, for example, Governor Roy Romer is leading a courageous effort to manage the poorly planned growth which, according to a recent poll, is the number-one public concern among a sizable majority of Coloradans. I am convinced that Governor Romer's "smart growth" initiative is one of the most exciting – and promising – public policy initiatives anywhere in the country today.
- At the local level, communities should discard planning and zoning practices that encourage sprawl. Many zoning laws make it impossible – even illegal – to create the sort of compact, walkable, human-scaled environment that attracts us to older neighborhoods and historic communities all over the world. What's needed is a new urbanism based on old wisdom, and nothing encourages me more than the really creative work being done in this area by talented people such as Andres Duany, Peter Calthorpe and others.
How we plan to use land is at the very crux of this issue. Land-use planning is a term that puts many people to sleep and scares others, but it's a concept we have to come to terms with if we're to deal effectively with sprawl. Otherwise, we're just nibbling at its edges or, as Peter Calthorpe says, we're only dealing with the symptoms of the problem rather than with its root cause.
We can't hope to make substantive progress until we build a broad-based constituency for fighting sprawl and creating more livable communities. Businesses and government agencies must be part of this coalition, along with community groups and private citizens – including both urban and rural residents. Working together, they should insist on – and assist in – the development of an integrated system of decisions and regulations that knit communities together instead of tearing them apart.
Americans hold some deeply entrenched attitudes: the notion of boundless space, the concept of a throwaway culture, the conviction that newer is always better. We have to challenge those attitudes.
Americans want freedom, choices, and control over their own destiny, but in sprawl we're dealing with a phenomenon that clamps a ball-and-chain on every one of those cherished concepts.
Americans are wrestling with fundamental changes to policies that have guided us for decades. Our job is to focus attention on a public policy crisis of national proportions.
It's a big job. It won't be easy, but it isn't impossible.
During the 1950s and 60s, urban renewal was touted as the best hope for transforming American cities. Hundreds of viable older neighborhoods and thousands of historic buildings were bulldozed. Decades later, many American cities still show the scars – and still suffer from many of the problems that this policy was supposed to solve. Urban renewal transformed communities, all right, but it didn't renew them. It ruined them.
For a whole generation of preservationists, the fight against urban renewal was the crucible in which their theories and convictions were tested and refined. It was probably the major catalytic event in the growth of the preservation movement. In reflecting on the legacy of that time, it's worth recalling an extraordinary statement by John Kenneth Galbraith: "The preservation movement has one great curiosity. There is never retrospective controversy or regret. Preservationists are the only people in the world who are invariably confirmed in their wisdom after the fact."
Preservationists were right about urban renewal. And in the process of speaking out against it, they ultimately helped change government policy, helped change longstanding patterns of behavior, helped change the way Americans thought about our cities.
Now we face our own challenge in the fight against sprawl, which is to us what urban renewal was to an earlier generation. We are joined by thousands of people who never thought the label "preservationist" applied to them – people who merely want communities that work, that are safe, attractive and livable. Working together, we can do what our predecessors did. We can make a difference. We can change the face of America for the better.
Richard Moe is president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation is a non-profit membership organization bringing people together to protect, enhance and enjoy the places that matter to them. By saving the places where great moments from history – and the important moments of everyday life – took place, the National Trust for Historic Preservation helps revitalize neighborhoods and communities, spark economic development and promote environmental sustainability. With headquarters in Washington, DC, nine regional and field offices, 29 historic sites, and partner organizations in all 50 states, the National Trust for Historic Preservation provides leadership, education, advocacy and resources to a national network of people, organizations and local communities committed to saving places, connecting us to our history and collectively shaping the future of America’s stories. For more information visit www.PreservationNation.org.
