The book on sprawl

As the debate over suburban sprawl heats up nationwide, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Surface Transportation Policy Project have released a timely book. Once There Were Greenfields: How Urban Sprawl is Undermining America’s Environment, Economy and Social Fabric, is the most exhaustive compilation of research and analysis to date on the nation’s sprawl problem. Once There Were Greenfields provides definitive responses to arguments made by defenders of sprawl. One defender, writer Gregg Easterbrook, writes that sprawl is not such a big deal because it consumes only a tiny percentage of the US total land mass each year. But most people don’t live in the vast prairies, forests and deserts of the US. Sprawl covers most of the areas defined by the census bureau as “ metropolitan,” which is where eight of ten Americans live, according to Once There Were Greenfields authors Kaid Benfield, Matthew Raimi, and Donald Chen. For the majority of Americans, therefore, sprawl has a huge impact. It certainly looms large for residents of Atlanta, who have seen their metropolitan region grow to 110 miles, measured north to south, from about 65 miles in 1990. Residents of the Northeastern seaboard, Southern California, the San Francisco Bay area, Dallas-Fort Worth, Southeastern Florida, and many other highly populated places in the US are deeply familiar with the problems of sprawl. Driving people crazy Meanwhile, per capita automobile use has risen by 230 percent since 1960. “The average American driver spends 443 hours, the equivalent of 55 eight-hour workdays, per year behind the wheel,” the authors note. Mothers are particularly impacted by this automobile society. Surveys indicate that they now average 5.3 automobile trips daily, up from only 3.5 in 1983. Aesthetically, our communities have been ravaged. Once There Were Greenfields quotes author James Howard Kuntsler: “We drive up and down the gruesome, tragic suburban boulevards of commerce and we’re overwhelmed at the fantastic, awesome, stupefying ugliness of absolutely everything in sight — the fry pits, the big-box stores, the office units, the lube joints, the carpet warehouses, the parking lagoons, the jive-plastic townhouse clusters, the uproar of signs, the highway itself clogged with cars — as though the whole thing had been designed by some diabolical force bent on making human beings miserable.” Built heritage threatened The historic preservation movement has had some success in protecting our built heritage, the authors note. “But increasingly we are learning that our heritage embraces much more than just rare, isolated relics; we suffer as a society also when we lose our sense of place — our main streets, neighborhoods, and landscapes — to haphazard development or to neglect because of the movement of investment to ever-new, ever- outward places.” The authors make an impressive case that sprawl is costly to American families, who now allocate 19 percent of their total expenditures to transportation (by comparison, health care is only 5.2 percent). They cite a number of studies demonstrating that construction, operation, and maintenance of infrastructure and utilities is significantly more expensive in conventional suburbs than in compact forms of development. The solution? To plan and build compact, mixed-use neighborhoods on a pedestrian scale. Although the authors contend that revitalization of cities is important, they do not recommend that everyone be forced to live in high-density urban areas. Rather, they recommend a change in the pattern of new development, incorporating the form and densities of traditional American towns.