Thirty miles outside Chicago the most fertile farmland on earth is yielding a crop of subdivisions.
New houses and townhouses and the foundations of still more sit on freshly turned ground that forms a prosperous technology corridor flanking the I-88 toll road in DuPage and Kane counties, west of Illinois' largest city. Much of the roadside glistens with new office parks: boxy, modernist temples of commerce interlaced with small manufactured creeks and big seas of parking lots.
The newly minted, three-bedroom, two-bathroom home runs from $165,000 to just over $200,000 here.
A generation ago, this was foreign territory to many Chicagoans. Farmland. Sticks. Boonies. But I-88 and its extensions brought people and jobs out of Chicago. DuPage County's population has grown to nearly 900,000, compared to about 660,000 in 1980. Kane County's population grew from about 280,000 to about 400,000 in the same 20 years.
And with this growth, the old farms and rural landscapes fell one by one. The new arrivals didn't leave the city as much as spread out, claiming farms and open country in the 20th century, as earlier settlers had urbanized Chicago in the 19th.
It took Chicago 70 years to evolve from a trading post surrounded by farmland to the 227-square-mile metropolis it was in 1900. Now, the urbanized landscape spreads much faster and farther -- and requires fewer people.
And not just around Chicago.
According to American Planning Association figures, Peoria's 12 percent population growth sparked an 89 percent increase in land use. In Champaign-Urbana, a 48 percent increase in population led to a 159 percent increase in land use. And it won't be long -- it's obvious -- before the area near Aurora, and other rural points within 100 miles of Chicago's city limits, meets a similar fate.
The current resurgence of such big cities as Chicago and New York is duly noted, but the house in the suburbs remains the ideal for many.
However, that suburban slice of the American dream exacts a price substantially higher than the listing sheet would let on. Many of the
people who moved to the remote locale to escape urbanization will, paradoxically, urbanize these once-rural areas. Each town will demand its own schools, sewers, wide roads and shopping malls -- its scattered population trading in the chief benefit of big cities: economy of service. They will demand these things and get them. History is on their side. And, as a result, irreplaceable open spaces and farmland will fall under the load of the cement mixer.
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The result: urban sprawl, which is essentially scattershot development, with subdivisions, commercial malls, roads and schools laid out in seemingly crazy-quilt fashion without an overall plan. Of course, one person's sprawl is another person's progress. While sprawled-out homes are physically disconnected from typical community amenities, the remoteness also gives the perception of safety. As tough as it may be to commute between suburb and city, it is often as difficult for the ills of the city to reach the suburb.
The downside of suburban sprawl has been argued for more than a quarter century, with most of the bitter prognostication of the 1970s coming true. Bad suburban planning has created disconnected, car-reliant suburbs, a proliferation of boxy land-gobbling shopping malls and look-alike domestic architecture.
All of this is what we get with sprawl. But what do we lose? Increasingly, attention is being paid to the grand vistas and land features that are potentially lost in the name of progress. Nobody should deny the economic and social realities that cause farmers to sell their land. But nowhere is it written that the land, once sold, is only suitable for a subdivision or office park. Many of the farms and much of the rural land can be kept as open, public spaces or turned to nature trails.
Government, the public's landscape designers, could carve dramatic, useable outdoor spaces out of farm-flattened acreage. And if redevelopment is the only possibility, those same officials could have a role in making sure quality, sizable public space is part of the project.
In fact, state government can be an immensely powerful tool in helping to solve some of the problems associated with sprawl. Maryland, New Jersey and Oregon are among states that have enacted laws or sponsored initiatives to curb sprawl and protect open land.
But what about Illinois?
"The state of Illinois is doing very little,'' says Scott Goldstein, senior vice president of the Metropolitan Planning Council, a planning and public policy advocacy group headquartered in Chicago.
"We're just getting started,'' says state Rep. Ricca Slone, a Democrat from Peoria Heights, who is past leader of the Illinois House Smart Growth Task Force. "We realize it's an important issue, but a knotty issue with a lot of aspects to it.''
Meanwhile, according to the American Farm Institute, the region of northeast Illinois and southeast Wisconsin nearly tops the list of areas that are losing the most high-quality farmland, surpassed only by central California and neighboring areas of Maryland and Delaware.
There are signs along I-88 on the drive west. Nearly 90 acres are for sale next to, ironically, the Farmers Insurance Building in Aurora. Another 12.5 acres are for sale a mile away. A few farms sport "Built to Suit" signs close to the tollway.
Some Illinois farms still appear prosperous -- on one late winter day, horses could be seen feeding on one spread about 65 miles outside Chicago -- while others, with their rotting silos and ramshackle out- buildings, have been abandoned.
Here is where the paradox of growth, fueled by the longing for a place in the country, is most evident. The desire to build a quiet place away from the city is, in part, causing the demise of the actual quiet place away from the city.
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Yet the need to move away from the pack -- typically a westward move -- is deeply ingrained in the American psyche. Here is a country whose settlement from east to west was romanticized in literature and lore. The escape from the big city to the little plot of land is a stanza in an American song.
Environmental historian William Cronon, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says this contradiction lies in a deep-seated and likely over-romanticized ideal. "The pastoral type of landscape É has been celebrated in European literature since Virgil in Rome,'' says Cronon, author of Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, the classic environmental history of the city.
"Another source is the vision of what was special about America that Thomas Jefferson articulated,'' Cronon says. "He argued what would keep America democratic were people living on a plot of land É [that] this idea of the rural landscape was a quintessential American place.''
Yet, the trend that homes and not nature will eventually dominate landscapes like these is commonly seen as a sign of progress. Construction stitched together by a network of roads is served up as proof that a place has evolved, that it is no longer crawling but walking full stride.
"You look at the GM Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair, or at the plan for New York from the 1920s É or Burnham's Plan for Chicago in 1909, and there are elements of these various plans of the future that are not completely inconsistent with where we find ourselves today,'' Cronon says.
"But what looks like a utopia at one moment can be a dystopia in another. We have to realize these contradictions are in us. We are not making peace with that fact.''
The contradiction is visible in McLean County outside of Bloomington-Normal. More than 140,000 people live in McLean County, compared to 129,000 in 1990, with the population projected to be 165,000 by 2020, according to the Illinois Land Use Clearinghouse, a joint effort of the Illinois Farm Bureau, the Illinois Department of Agriculture and the American Farmland Trust.
New homes are sprouting up like dandelions just outside these communities' borders in the tillable soils of McLean County. Of a group of 395 homes for sale during a weeklong period last month, 335 were five years old or newer. Much of what is being built is typical of fast-growth architecture: old-fashioned gabled roofs and something of a front porch.
The McLean County subdivisions have been given such names as Old Farm Lakes and Pepper Ridge, as if to create a sense of the house as the ideal place in the country, as Cronon outlines. Yet the dominant feature on the face of many of these houses -- and similar homes built across the state -- is not the friendly front door, but a garage door, an unintended commentary on the automobile-dependent nature of these developments.
The homes are there for a reason, be
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they outside of Bloomington-Normal or in the northwest suburbs of Chicago: Demand. And supply. The allure of a new home can be strong, particularly if it's fueled by dreams of safer streets and better schools.
"They're willing to pay with an hour's commute each way,'' Cronon says. "That comes from buying a house in a small town that has lost its agricultural base and is now becoming a sleeper suburb.''
"Some of this is the best farmland on the planet,'' Rep. Slone says. "What does it do to the whole fabric of rural life when farmer A and B and C don't want to sell their land and farmer D does? A 500-acre beanfield becomes a 500-house subdivision, with kids who need to go to school and police and fire protection and people honking at farm equipment on the road. So it becomes increasingly difficult for three people to remain on the farm once the homes arrive.''
Illinois is not powerless in the battle against sprawl and the loss of rural land, although figuring out a way to wield that power is key.
At the state level, Gov. George Ryan last June launched a four-year Open Land Trust initiative, a $160 million fund that would be used to acquire open spaces. Any land acquired or improved under the fund can only be used for conservation or recreation.
"We are sending the message that the state is going to be a more active partner in the drive to preserve and save open space and reclaim land,'' Ryan said in a news conference announcing the initiative.
The Open Lands Trust, as well as smart-growth policies, was a campaign pledge. Ryan's first budget included an initial $40 million of the open land program, but he's yet to detail a smart-growth plan.
Without aggressive and decisive plans, one wonders if any of these efforts can withstand the gale forces of development.
The state's Open Land Trust is a start, but it provides no eminent domain powers. Land can only be purchased from a willing seller. If a developer offers more, or if the seller
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likes the developer better, the state is out of luck.
And while state government figures out how and where to spend $160 million, more than a few local governments are preparing to open wallets and draw battlelines. Last April, voters in the forest preserve districts of Will and Lake counties approved selling $70 million in bonds in each of those districts to fund the purchase of undeveloped land. During the same balloting, Lake County voters sought to add land to their forest preserves with a $55 million bond issue. And Will County's Homer Township approved an $8 million open space bond issue.
"To me it's not immediately logical if the [state] regulatory way is one that would work in Illinois." Slone says. "There is a lot of education and planning that needs to be done."
But state government can't leave the issue of open land protection solely in the hands of local governments. Poor rural counties that lack the economic muscle of northeast Illinois would be ill-equipped to outbid developers for prime land.
The power to mount a consistent statewide smart-growth effort lies in one place: Springfield.
Proposals to provide incentives to curb sprawl have been languishing in the legislature for the past year. One such measure, introduced in the House last spring, is similar to smart-growth laws in Oregon and Maryland. It would require municipalities to develop growth plans and give the state authority to approve those plans. The measure is designed to encourage high-density development and open spaces. But it and other smart-growth proposals have yet to get to the governor's desk.
As of mid-March, new measures were under consideration, including one that would provide financial incentives to encourage employees to live near work. That proposal was approved by the House and went to the Senate.
The state -- Gov. Ryan, in particular -- must work overtime to develop a wider-ranging set of initiatives and create public debate about the issue. "People are upset now," says Goldstein of the Metropolitan Planning Council. "They really want to have things happening."
Lee Bey, architecture critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, recently received the 2000 Studs Terkel Award for a series he wrote for the newspaper on the restoration of the Pullman Historic District.
This article on land use, and those that follow, are funded by a generous grant from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
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