Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from Richard Moe’s article “Mindless Madness Called Sprawl,” based on a speech he gave on November 30, 1996, in Fresno, California (©1996 by Richard Moe).

At the time he gave the speech, Moe was president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Drive down any highway leading into any town in the country, and what do you see? Fast-food outlets, office parks and shopping malls rising out of vast barren plains of asphalt. Residential subdivisions spreading like inkblots obliterating forests and farms in their relentless march across the landscape. Cars moving sluggishly down the broad ribbons of pavement or halting in frustrated clumps at choked intersections. You see communities drowning in a destructive, soulless , ugly mess called sprawl.

Many of us have developed a frightening form of selective blindness that allows us to pass by the appalling mess without really seeing it. We’ve allowed our communities to be destroyed bit by bit, and most of us have shrugged off this destruction as “the price of progress”.

Development that destroys communities isn’t progress. It’s chaos. And it isn’t inevitable, it’s merely easy. Too many developers follow standard formulas, and too many government entities have adopted laws and policies that constitute powerful incentives for sprawl.

Why is an organization like the National Trust for Historic Preservation so concerned about sprawl? We’ve concerned because sprawl devastates older communities, leaving historic buildings and neighborhoods underused, poorly maintained or abandoned. 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. There’s a growing body of grim evidence to support our belief that the destruction of traditional downtowns and older neighborhoods—places that people care about—is corroding the very sense of community that helps bind us together as a people and as a nation.

One form of sprawl—retail development that transforms roads into strip malls—is frequently spurred on by discount retails, many of whom are now concentrating on the construction of 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. When a store like that opens, the retail center of gravity shifts away from Main Street. Downtown becomes a ghost town.

Sprawl's other most familiar form—spread-out residential subdivision 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. 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 home buyer 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 out cities and towns.

People who say that sprawl is merely the natural produce of marketplace forces at work fail to recognize that the game isn’t being played on a level field. Government at every level is riddled with polices that mandate or encourage sprawl.

By prohibiting mixed uses and mandating inordinate amounts of parking and unreasonable setback requirements, most current zoning laws make it impossible —even illegal—to create the sort of compact walkable environment that attracts us to older neighborhoods and historic communities all over the world. These codes are a major reason why 82 percent of all trips in the United States are taken by car. The average American household now allocates more than 18 percent of its budget to transportation expenses, most of which are auto-related. That’s more than it spends for food and three times more than it spends for health care.

Our communities should be shaped by choice, not by chance. One of the most effective ways to reach this goal is to insist on sensible land-use planning. The way we zone and design our communities either opens up or foreclosed alternatives to the automobile. Municipalities should promote downtown housing and mixed-use zoning that reduce the distances people must travel between home and work. The goal should be an integrated system of planning decisions and regulations that knit communities together instead of tearing them apart. We should demand land-use planning that exhibits a strong bias in favor of existing communities.