For years developers and urban planners struggling to meet the demand for residential expansion have clashed with environmentalists who style themselves defenders of natural beauty and natural resources.

Suburban residential developments and strip malls, linked together by newly-constructed highways and beltways dot the countryside. And there's no dispute that traffic congestion in outlying areas of growth cities like Spokane, Wash.; Houston, Atlanta and Las Vegas, among many others, had gotten worse.

Just last month, Vice President Al Gore slammed what is called "urban sprawl," which is simply low-density development beyond the edge of urban service and employment, which separates where people live from where they shop, work, recreate, and educate -- thus requiring cars to move between zones. In other words, the growth of Suburbia.

Gore portrayed this current cycle of growth -- the best year in terms of housing starts and sales in two decades -- as unplanned, at one point describing communities, "as mere plots of bull-dozed land and mere networks of roads and soulless buildings."

Kent Colton, executive vice president of the National Association of Home Builders, called that characterization untrue.

"Right now, the United States is enjoying a strong economy, low interest rates, and a high rate of new household formations that are contributing to a healthy demand for housing construction around the country," Colton said.

To meet this underlying demand for shelter, the nation's home builders will have to construct between 1.3 and 1.5 million new housing units per year for the foreseeable future. A good portion of that growth will be located in major urban markets where most employment opportunities are located, Colton noted.

Environmentalist and some planners say the residual fall-out of urban sprawl can be devastating to the social and economic health of a metropolitan region. They point to Detroit or the District of Columbia as examples of the driving forces of urban sprawl -- decaying urban cores, urban flight and the general loss of a "sense of place" can slowly change a vibrant and thriving city into an urban wasteland.

But even among environmentalists, there is dispute. Wayne Lemmon, a Maryland real estate economist, takes the controversial position that the much-maligned trend of urban sprawl may actually be beneficial to America.

Low density and dispersed development, Lemmon argues, are actually better for the environment than pollution-intensive, high-density urban plots.

"Dispersed development patterns can reduce congestion; thus untying of urban expressway knots may do more to reduce pollution than the transit modifications proposed by anti-sprawl activists," he says. Lemmon also argues that a more spread-out development pattern gives people in rural areas easier access to educational, cultural and health-care buildings.

There is no question that extra-urban growth has helped fuel the current economic boom, and that it has enabled millions to realize the enduring dream of home ownership.

But it is clear that sprawl has created some costs and problems. Ironically, unchecked sprawl can degrade the quality of life, at least as some people measure it. Urban job centers have decentralized to the suburbs. New housing tracts have moved even deeper into agricultural and undeveloped areas.

This acceleration of sprawl has created enormous social, environmental and economic costs, environmentalists say, which have been hidden, ignored or quietly borne by society.

The Sierra Club, a environmental activist group based in San Francisco, says the impact of urban sprawl can be felt in increased traffic congestion, longer commutes, increased air and water pollution, loss of farmland, open fields, forests and wetlands, increased flooding, and increased taxes to pay for additional fire, police, schools, roads, water and sewer services.

The Sierra Club says sprawl also hurts cities, by eroding the local tax base, as people flock to the suburbs, forcing cities to raise taxes on remaining taxpayers to pay for city services. They also say sprawl destroys downtown commerce by pulling shoppers from once-thriving locally owned stores and restaurants to large, regional malls.

"Since World War II, the American dream has been a house in the suburbs," declared Carl Pope, Sierra Club's executive director. "But that dream is turning into a nightmare of traffic, air pollution, lost open space, and higher taxes. The story is the same all across America.

"For decades, local, state and federal governments have encouraged people to move farther and farther out. Now, the costs of sprawling, runaway growth are clear and increasing. All across our country, cities and towns large and small are rethinking the costs of poorly managed growth."

The Sierra Club ranked Atlanta, St. Louis, Washington D.C., Cincinnati, Kansas City, Denver, Seattle, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., and Chicago, respectively as the 10 worst sprawl cities with a population of 1 million or more. Orlando, Austin, Las Vegas, West Palm Beach, Fla., and Akron, Ohio, ranked as the top five worst with populations of 500,000 to 1 million.

While many of the complaints by environmentalists are objective, some tend criticisms of development have a more subjective, aesthetic tone. The Sierra Club and other anti-sprawl groups describe such outmigration from the cities in harsh terms -- a "scattering of structures across the landscape (that) devastates rural areas"; it "homogenizes" the countryside, "destroys" the agricultural heritage; "upsets" small-town life.

"This is a public outcry," said Daniel Silverman, a press secretary with the Sierra Club. "It's missing the point to say Americans want to live where they want to live -- they say in poll after poll they don't want to have to drive an hour and a half to work, they want more undeveloped land and clean water and air near where they live."

But if that is so, they way people vote in polls and how they vote with their wallets are two very different things. The U.S. Department of Agriculture notes that the migration of people from rural areas of the country to the big cities has sharply reversed. Between 1970 and 1990, almost 20 million acres of rural land were developed nationwide. A total of 400,000 acres a year are developed to build residential and commercial centers.

Environmentalists and anti-sprawl planners generally push local and state-level legislation to achieve their goals of limiting development and building. These range from cities drawing urban growth boundaries, which separate an urban area from its surrounding greenbelt of open lands, to channeling state funds to existing urban areas.

Builders and business owners think the Sierra Club and their allies, however, are making a mountain out of a mole hill.

For instance, the complaint that the current building boom isn't planned is a canard, said Michael Shibley, an executive with NAHB.

"It's a fairly shallow set of claims that we have serious disagreements with," he said. "There are constant references to unplanned development. But it is planned according to what each community wants.

"It just may not be planned the way the Sierra Club likes it," Shibley said.

In reality, thousands of communities across the country have comprehensive plans that determine where residential, commercial and industrial development can be located, Colton added.

"Under these plans, the home building industry, one of the most highly regulated industries in the country, works in partnership with local communities to encourage compact development, infill where there is demand, preservation of open space, financing and construction of necessary infrastructure, and most importantly, a variety of housing choices that meet consumer demand," Colton said.

"(It) sounds as if we're in a period of overdevelopment," he said.

He added that less than 5% of the U.S. land mass is urbanized, according to the statistical abstract of the United States 1996, Department of Commerce.

"What we need is balanced and well-reasoned zoning and land-use policies that enhance the quality of life, make good use of the existing infrastructure, and are flexible enough to accommodate a market's underlying demand for new housing. Such policies should be worked out at the local level and should take into account the preferences of where Americans want to live," Colton said.

Regarding the downtown revitalization favored by community activists and environmentalists, Colton said where there is demand for urban infill development, builders are meeting that demand. About five to 10% of the underlying demand for housing can be satisfied by infill development where land and development costs are typically much higher than in outlying suburban markets.

In short -- poorer buyers wouldn't be able to afford a new home, if the environmentalists get their way. It all comes back to the three basics of all real estate.

"To accommodate demand for housing, particularly among young families with modest incomes, the vast majority of new housing will still have to be built in outlying areas where land is less expensive," Colton said.

Peter VanDoren, an economist and the assistant director of environmental studies at the Cato Institute, a Washington D.C.-based libertarian think-tank, offered a third view on sprawl.

To VanDoren, this is neither a case of oppressive government regulation sought by zealots nor selfish, myopic developers out to churn dirt for dollars. Sprawl, for VanDoren, is neither good nor bad.

But it is unnatural, in terms of free market forces.

"The main question for me is, is the price paid appropriate," VanDoren said. "Central planners favor confined urban development and greater reliance on public transit, which will lead to less energy consumption and emission of pollutants. Planners want less new highway construction (or even none at all), more funding for public transportation and more government restrictions on land use. In contrast, conservatives generally argue that most Americans prefer low-density living with bigger lots and other suburban amenities.

"Conservatives generally favor more government spending for highways in the name of 'economic development' and don't generally complain about urban sprawl or the economic decline of central cities," he said.

But this debate skips over an important point, he says. The vast majority of America's urban population prefers to live in the suburbs. Indeed, suburban development predates urban expressway construction; urban growth followed the paths of new trolley and interurban train lines.

"There's little reason for policymakers to be concerned about suburban sprawl or use government power to discourage it," he said.

Taxpayers, however, shouldn't have to pick up the tab for other people's preferences for suburban living, yet that has been the effect of the federal interstate highway program since the mid-1950s, he argues.

"The construction of free beltways and expressways has subsidized suburban development," he said. "The 'correct' or efficient amount of suburban development is the amount that consumers are willing to pay for so long as they bear the incremental costs of land acquisition and expressway construction.

"To be sure, user charges and gasoline taxes approximately equal the construction and maintenance costs of major highways, but the financing of urban beltways and radial expressways from the Federal Highway Trust Fund represents a subsidy to suburban sprawl -- because all highway users pay taxes in proportion to their gasoline usage, but urban beltways and expressways are the most expensive to build and maintain." VanDoren said.

VanDoren favors more private roads, which offer better growth management and a more realistic cost to the users.

"The evidence suggests that private highways offer better growth management than do their public counterparts and are more sensitive to local property owners," he said. "A private highway operator could buy land around an expressway interchange for later development. He could receive donations of right-of-way from real estate owners who would benefit from the highway or form joint ventures with land developers to finance highway projects.

"Such relationships would promote suburban development only when the cost to landowners in donated land was exceeded by the later increase in value of their remaining land," VanDoren said. "Costs would not exceed benefits. In addition, taking government out of the highway business would prevent the political manipulation of highway construction decisions, through which political donations lead to additions to highway capacity that are not cost-effective."

VanDoren said two prominent examples of private highways show their comparative ability to meet local values and control suburban sprawl. He cited the two in a recent editorial he wrote for the Cato Institute.

In California the state highway agency approved private development of the Mid-State Tollway on the eastern fringe of the San Francisco-Oakland area. Bay area residents, however, strongly opposed the tollway and favored of a Bay Area Rapid Transit line built nearby to serve the area, VanDoren wrote. As a result, the highway developer abandoned the northern leg of the project. Had a public agency been building the highway, it could have invoked eminent domain authority to build the road in spite of political opposition.

In contrast to California's experience with the Mid-State Tollway, environmentalists in Virginia endorsed the private development of the Dulles Greenway toll road, which opened in 1995, VanDoren explained. Local officials believe that the tollway is essential to focusing development in the Dulles-to-Leesburg corridor, thereby easing development in the rural, western part of Loudon County.

"Private business relationships offer better outcomes than do relationships between the government and the private sector," VanDoren said. "That is because private interests cannot alter other private owners' decisions without fully compensating them. In contrast, government can use its power to take property to force a public highway through an unwilling community without consent or full compensation."

Published: September 23, 1998

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