Harold Henderson, a staff writer for the Chicago Reader, regularly examines environmental concerns. He has written for Illinois Issues on endangered species protection, the genetic diversity of feed grains and the cultural and historical roots of regionalism.

'Good sprawl'?
This writer thinks the anti-sprawl movement is half mass confusion and half mass exclusion
Essay by Harold Henderson Illustration by Mike Cramer


Anti-Sprawl movement

I haven't heard of "good sprawl," and probably neither have you.

That's because "sprawl" is one of those words it's almost impossible to use dispassionately. The negative judgment comes built in, as with "pollution." Of course, those who use the s-word are referring to some aspect of decentralized development they want government to discourage, if not stop altogether.

What aspect don't they like? Well, that's hard to figure out.

Is the problem "uncontrolled" suburban development? As developers are the first to point out, their developments are carefully calculated — controlled, you might say — by what they think people will buy. Is it "unplanned" suburban development, then? Many define "sprawl" as development where there is nothing to walk to except other houses, and planning is what dictated this separation of residences and businesses. Perhaps the problem is the wrong kind of planning, and what we really need are "town centers" suburbanites can walk to, as the "new urbanist" architects want. Yet such a development on the edge of Chesterton, Ind., has been condemned as "sprawl" by the Hoosier Environmental Council, that state's leading environmental coalition. Is the problem development

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34 / June 1999 Illinois Issues

THINKING THROUGH 'SPRAWL'

Let's assume for the moment that, unlike most people who talk about sprawl, you have a clear idea of what the word means. Then you're in a position to avoid some common pitfalls.

Sprawl doesn't pay for itself.
Sounds reasonable when you think how far water and sewer pipes have to run to serve decentralized development. But many homes on the fringe rely on septic tanks and their own water wells, in which case the residents themselves are paying that cost.

More important, check out your property tax bill. If it's anything like mine, the big item is not water or sewer pipes or roads — it's schools. And school costs vary mainly according to how many kids live in the school district, not where they live. In fact, largely because of schools, few residential developments of any kind — sprawl homes or apartment houses — pay for themselves. If we regard education as a pay-as-you-go service rather than a community's investment in its own future, then that might be a reason to charge the developers of new homes an "impact fee." But this has little to do with sprawl.

Some anti-sprawl crusaders use these facts in dubious ways. The February 1996 pamphlet "Sprawl Costs Us All: How Uncontrolled Sprawl Increases Your Property Taxes and Threatens Your Quality of Life," published by the Sierra Club office in Madison, Wis., and supported by the Joyce Foundation, depicts the so-called "costs of sprawl" for the small city of Franklin, Wis., south of Milwaukee. Out of total costs of $10, 607 roughly $9, 000 were for schools. To call this a "cost of sprawl" is to render both nouns practically meaningless. As an organizing tool, this pamphlet makes a case, not against sprawl, but against any residential development, no matter where located or how designed, where kids (or people who might ever have kids) would live.

We're running out of farmland.
This is easy for urbanites and suburbanites to believe because they see mostly built-up areas. But repeated news reports about farmers going out of business because their crops and livestock don't bring high enough prices ought to make them wonder. If farmland were in genuinely short supply, food would be more expensive.

The highest reliable estimate of current farmland loss is around 1.5 million acres a year, and in 1996 the United States still had 968 million acres of farmland left. That works out to about 645 years' worth, which should give us time to think. (If the claim is that we're running out of prime farmland, that might justify strict sprawl controls around Chicago and Fresno, and none at all around Boston — a proposal I have yet to hear.)

Don't build any more highways; they just fill up with cars.
This makes sense only if you already hate cars. As the Urban Land Institute pointed out in its 1996 booklet Transportation and Growth: Myth and Fact, "The weakness of this argument becomes clear if it is applied, say, to new schools (they just fill up with students) or libraries (they only fill up with books). The fact that a new highway is well used demonstrates its success in offering a shorter or cheaper route for users."

Mass transit is the solution.
Buses and trains save energy and money if they're full of people. And they won't be full of people unless people live close to where they run. In other words, mass transit is the solution only if it serves high-density cities and towns. The planners' rule of thumb is that it takes a minimum of 4, 000 people per square mile to run buses at all efficiently — more if you want to be able to run them often enough to provide a reasonable alternative to driving, and still more if you want to run trains.

Chicago's suburbs do not come close to this figure. DuPage County, the most densely populated collar county, averages just 2, 338 people per square mile. Of course you can run buses as a public service under such circumstances, but few people will choose to ride them.

Harold Henderson

Illinois Issues June 1999 / 35

that causes traffic congestion? Congestion stems from density — a lot of people in little space. If that's the problem, we should start deconstructing Chicago's Loop too.

Perhaps sprawl is like hard-core pornography, which the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said 35 years ago he wasn't sure he could define, "but I know it when I see it." That would explain why it's so popular to be against sprawl these days. Everyone is seeing something different:

• The most recent newsletter of the activist Elmhurst-based Citizen Advocacy Center proclaims its opposition to sprawl, as well as its opposition to charging tolls on the state's toll roads. Yet it is anti-sprawl gospel that easier transportation encourages people to live farther out.

• In the same vein, a Chicago transportation official and a public radio talk show host recently expressed their joint amazement that Metra had been denied federal funding to add a second track to its North Central commuter rail line that runs from the Loop north to Antioch, near the Wisconsin state line. It was denied on grounds that more trains would contribute to sprawl. The radio people thought Metra would persevere and overcome this bureaucratic objection because, they averred, rail transit is supposed to combat "sprawl." Yet it is anti-sprawl gospel that easier transportation encourages people to live farther out.

• Voters in suburban Lake, Kane, and Will counties approved referenda in April to buy and preserve open space and natural lands. A total of 173 similar referenda passed in the November 1998 elections nationwide. These are said to be blows against sprawl, and in some sense perhaps they are, because in the past suburbanites have preferred their open space in the form of private yards rather than parks. But decentralized development can survive new nature preserves just as it survived the creation of the Cook County Forest Preserves — it just flows around them. These votes will relocate sprawl and push it farther out, not stop it. In all likelihood, development in these counties will be more spread out because of the greenways in between.

• In the northwest Indiana county where I live, a grass-roots farmland- preservation group is beating the drums against a proposed rural development of factory-built modular homes on 50-by-100-foot lots. But so far no one has spoken out against nearby subdivisions of larger homes built on that site, which take up far more former farmland per person. Is "sprawl" inversely proportional to the incomes of its residents?

These examples suggest that the anti-sprawl movement is half mass confusion and half mass exclusion. A dab of history suggests why.

There was no anti-sprawl movement back when ordinary working people couldn't afford detached single-family houses with yards. In 1902, the great socialist Eugene Debs proclaimed Chicago was too crowded. "Regeneration will only come with depopulation," he wrote in the Chicago Socialist, "when Socialism has relieved the congestion and released the people and they spread out over the country and live close to the grass." That was the common view of progressive-era urban reformers who saw firsthand how oppressive it was to be crowded into tenements.

The anti-sprawl movement got going only when Debs' vision (minus the socialism) began to be realized, and working class people started living in places like Levittown and Bolingbrook, places that didn't measure up to upper-middle-class good taste.

"Whilst the suburb served only a favored minority it neither spoiled the countryside nor threatened the city," wrote Lewis Mumford in 1961. "But now that the drift to the outer ring has become a mass movement, it tends to destroy the value of both environments without producing anything but a dreary substitute, devoid of form."

Most suburbanites believe their well-kept homes and lawns do possess a definite form. As a result, less obviously class-biased arguments have since become more popular. Sprawl is alleged to be inefficient or environmentally damaging. But planners and economists are still vigorously debating the efficiency issue, and the air has been getting steadily cleaner (thanks to federal environmental regulations) even as sprawl and driving increase. According to the federal Transportation Statistics Annual Report 1996, Chicago-area emissions of trafficrelated pollutants all declined from 1985 to 1994.

So is anti-sprawl snobbery any different today from when Mumford wrote, or has it just been dressed up in politically correct clothing? That would certainly explain the conspicuous failure of the anti-sprawl movement to define what it's against. It would also explain why 40 years and more of anti-sprawl agitation has accomplished so little. Whatever we may say in public, when we plan our own lives, most of us agree with Debs.

In an era when everyone feeds off the government table, it would be astonishing had this majority not written some freebies for themselves into the law. It was the desire to "live close to the grass" that spawned the home mortgage deduction and commuter expressways, not the other way around. Anti-sprawl activists repeatedly assert that if sprawl subsidies were abolished, sprawl would be too, but wishing will not make it so. Subsidies don't make people do things, they make it easier for them to do what they wanted to do anyhow. If this is true, then we can expect the current anti-sprawl flurry to generate sound, fury and ballot measures to make the suburbs even nicer — but no multitudes flocking back to live earless in densely packed urban apartments and row houses.

Donnella Meadows, who co-authored the alarmist Limits to Growth in 1972 and its unrepentantly alarmist 1992 sequel Beyond the Limits, is an enthusiastic anti - sprawler. (Unlike some, she wants to stop all growth, not just manage it

36 / June 1999 Illinois Issues

better.) In the March 11 edition of her column "The Global Citizen," she wrote, "There are some illegal reasons for wanting to [draw strict no-growth boundary lines around a city]: to protect special privilege; to keep out particular kinds of persons; to take private property for public purpose without fair compensation.

"There are also legal reasons: to protect watersheds or aquifers or farmland or open space; to force growth into places where public services can be efficiently delivered; to slow growth to a rate at which the community can absorb it; to stop growth before land, water, or other resources fail."

Meadows has been publicly waiting for resources to fail for more than a generation now, and that secular apocalypse still eludes her grasp. She must be frustrated, but I'm sure she would never advocate anything illegal. Her readers, on the other hand, may not be so scrupulous.

Fortunately, we can apply a simple test. A legitimate anti-sprawl movement will lobby for a state law doing away with exclusionary zoning. Such a measure would require all towns and cities — suburbs in particular — to zone a reasonable share of their land for apartment buildings or other high-density residential uses, preferably near train lines.

Such a measure would improve the prospects for higher-density development, mass transit and affordable housing. It wouldn't interfere with the housing market or force anyone to live where they don't want to. But it would make sure that today's suburbanites don't hide an exclusionary agenda behind anti-sprawl rhetoric, the way segregationists once hid behind talk about states' rights.

Why should they get to pull up the drawbridge and keep all the grass to themselves? 

For More Information
There is a lot more chaff than wheat in the sprawl literature. If you admire the anti-sprawl diatribes of writer James Howard Kunstler, you won't care for the selections below. I have tried to select writers who are devoted to thinking through the issues rather than piling on abuse.

BOOKS
* Once There Were Greenfields: How Urban Sprawl is Undermining America's Environment, Economy and Social Fabric, by F. Kaid Benfield, Matthew D. Raimi, and Donald D.T. Chen. Natural Resources Defense Council and Surface Transportation Policy Project, 1999. Heavily foot-noted. Unlike the vast majority of anti-sprawl works, this one takes into account dissenting scholarship. A model for honest advocacy.

* New Visions for Metropolitan America, by Anthony Downs. Brookings Institution and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 1994. Not up-to-the- minute (five years is a long time in this field) but deeply thought. "In the long run America must strengthen the bases for its continued unity as a society by placing much more emphasis on social solidarity and less on individualistic values."

ARTICLES
* "The American City: Urban Aberration or Glimpse of the Future?" by Robert Bruegmann in Preparing for the Urban Future: Global Pressures and Local Forces, edited by Michael A. Cohen, Blair A. Ruble, Joseph S. Tulchin and Allison M. Garland. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1996. The author teaches architectural history at the University of Illinois at Chicago and finds most anti-sprawl arguments unpersuasive.

* "The Debate Over Future Density of Development: An Interpretive Review," by Dowell Myers and Alicia Kitsuse, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Working Paper, 1999. Also available on the Web at http: //www.lincolninst.edu/workpap/workpapl.html. Slightly technical but fair. "The debate over density is at heart a normative problem which has wrongly been treated as mainly a factual investigation."

WEB SITES
* http: //www.sprawlwatch.org/. An up-to-date and comprehensive collection of resources, most but not all from an anti-sprawl perspective.

* http: //www.reason.com/bisprawl.html. A collection of links maintained by the libertarian journal Reason, which is predictably opposed to any kind of central planning. Nevertheless, it offers many fine sources of information and argument on all sides of the issue. :

E-MAIL LISTS
* The Sierra Club maintains two sprawl discussion lists. One (CONSSPST-SPRAWL-DEV) is moderated and the other (CONS-SPSTSPRAWL-DISC) is not. I have found the moderated list reasonable and informative. I have not subscribed to the unmoderated version; but in my experience unmoderated lists have an awfully low ratio of signal to noise. For information on these and other Sierra Club lists, visit http: //www.sierraclub.org/news/lists.html.

Harold Henderson

Illinois Issues June 1999 / 37 

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