GROWING SMARTER:

Fighting Sprawl and Restoring Community in America

An Address Presented at San Joaquin Valley Town Hall Fresno, California
November 20, 1996

by
Richard Moe
President, National Trust for Historic Preservation

(Reprinted with permission from the National Trust for Historic Preservation)

Drive down any highway leading into any town in the country, and what do you see? You see fast-food outlets and office parks and shopping malls rising out of vast barren plains of asphalt. You see residential subdivisions spreading like inkblots, obliterating forests and farms in their relentless march across the landscape. You see cars, thousands of them, moving sluggishly down the broad ribbons of pavement or halting in frustrated clumps at choked intersections or parked in glittering rows in front of every building. You see a lot of activity, but not much life. You see the graveyard of livability. You see communities drowning in a destructive, soulless, ugly mess called sprawl.

That's what you see. Or maybe not. Many of us seem to have developed a frightening form of selective blindness that allows us to pass by the appalling mess without really seeing it. Even if we do notice it, we may do so just long enough to say, "Boy, this place has really grown. I hardly recognize it anymore." We don't even acknowledge what a chilling phrase that is: "I hardly recognize it anymore."

I recently received a letter from a man who wrote, "I believe that the 'land that we love' is literally vanishing before our eyes. [If current trends continue] this country will eventually be unrecognizable [as] what we knew as the United States just one generation ago." That writer lives in Ohio, but he could be from Florida or Colorado--or the Central Valley of California.
How did we get to this state of affairs? How did we get from an age that sang about America's "alabaster cities" to an age that seems determined to destroy the American landscape and throw those cities away like so much garbage?

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It happened as a series of steps, each step apparently logical and innocuous enough. We've allowed our communities to be destroyed bit by bit--nicked to death, if you will, by the urban-planning equivalent of a million paper-cuts. The final result of this slow, gradual process, as Jane Jacobs pointed out in 1961 in her landmark book The Death and Life of Great American Cities , is that "every place becomes more like every other place, all adding up to Noplace."

Does anybody really like the kind of nationwide Noplace that sprawl has created? In surveys that ask people to pick out pictures of the sort of place where they'd like to live, most choose scenes of compact, human-scaled neighborhoods that are the very antithesis of sprawl.

And when people go on vacation, they generally seek out destinations that offer them the sense of being Someplace, not just Anyplace. Tour promoters would have a hard time selling most of us on the notion of visiting a community that has transformed itself into a sad hodge-podge of nondescript cookie-cutter housing tracts, cluttered commercial strips and a bleak downtown. Travel expert Arthur Frommer puts it more succinctly when he says, "Tourism simply doesn't go to a city that has lost its soul." If tourists don't want to visit it, why should we want to live in it?
If everybody hates sprawl, why do we keep building it? Too often it's because we think there's no alternative. That's wrong. Sprawl isn't inevitable, it's merely easy. Too many developers follow standard formulas, and we haven't demanded much better. And too many government entities, from the National Capitol all the way down to the smallest Town Hall, have adopted laws and policies that constitute powerful incentives for sprawl. I'm not sure who said it, but it seems to apply here: "We have only one person to blame, and that's each other."

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We can't seem to shake our attachment to yesterday's vision of tomorrow--the dream of an auto-centered utopia where skyscrapers soar above acres of parkland and great highways stretch toward the horizon. The fact that this vision completely disregards the way communiities really work hasn't stopped generations of planners from adopting it as the paradigm of The Way Things Ought to Be.

Tragically, The Way Things Actually Are is something else altogether. Instead of pastoral vistas enhanced by attractive buildings and awesomely efficient highways, we have sprawl that makes a mockery of urban vitality and turns countryside into clutter. Instead of comfortable cities that run like clockwork, we have cities that are scattered, clumsy, expensive, and increasingly hard to enjoy or even use. Instead of shining towers in a park, we have windowless discount stores in a parking lot.

The impact of sprawl extends far beyond aesthetics. Besides being ugly, it is extremely wasteful and fiscally irresponsible. Last year a hearings board in Washington State held that sprawl causes a number of major problems:

• it needlessly destroys the economic and environmental value of resource lands;
• it creates an inefficient land-use pattern that is very expensive to serve;
• it fuels competition, redundancy and conflict among local governments;
• it threatens economic viability by diffusing public infrastructure investments;
• it abandons established urban areas where substantial past investments, both public and private, have been made;
• it destroys the intrinsic visual character of the landscape; and
• it erodes a sense of community.

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One observer has described sprawl as "a degenerate urban form that is too congested to be efficient, too chaotic to be beautiful, and too dispersed to possess the diversity and vitality of a great city." Actually, that's a more charitable description than some I've read. But whatever you call it, you can't escape it. It's everywhere.

One form of sprawl--retail development that transforms roads into strip malls--is frequently spurred on by discount retailers, 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 ghost town, while the retail building binge continues across a landscape already littered with thousands of abandoned shopping centers or "dead malls." There is in America today the equivalent of 4,000 abandoned shopping malls.

Sprawl's other most familiar form--spread-out residential subdivisions 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. The dream carries a hefty price tag--and you don't always get what you pay for.

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 homebuyer 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 our cities and towns. The sad fact is that sprawl is heavily subsidized by both federal and state dollars. I'll have more to say about that in a few moments.

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Why is an organization like the National Trust for Historic Preservation so concerned about sprawl? If that question occurs to you, it could be that the preservation movement isn't what you think it is.

Of course we're concerned about sprawl because it devastates older cities and towns--and increasingly, older suburbs--where historic buildings and neighborhoods are concentrated. Sprawl has drained the life out of thousands of traditional downtowns and inner-city neighborhoods, and 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. We're convinced--and there's a growing body of grim evidence to support us--that sprawl is having a devastating effect on our quality of life, that it is corroding the very sense of community that helps bind us together as a people and as a nation. Preservation is in the business of saving special places and the quality of life they support, and sprawl destroys both.

And this destruction isn't something that only happens Elsewhere. It's happening right here.

A study issued earlier this year by the American Farmland Trust says that the Central Valley of California is "the single most important agricultural resource in the United States." Just 11 counties here in the Valley produce 250 different crops--ranging from almonds to zucchini--with a market value of $13.3 billion in 1994. That figure represents 8% of the agricultural sales of the whole United States.

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Fresno County now enjoys the distinction of being the top-producing agricultural county in the entire United States. Forty-five years ago, that title was held by Los Angeles County. In just 45 years, Los Angeles County has been transformed from agricultural wonderland to megalopolis. If current development trends continue, we'll be saying the same thing about Fresno County 45 years from now. Let me give you some statistics.

The Valley's current population of about 4 million is expected to triple by the year 2040. Already, residential and commercial sprawl is consuming an estimated 15,000 acres of Valley farmland every year, and this loss is expected to accelerate in the future. In 45 years, the study estimates that sprawl will consume or indirectly affect more than 3.6 million acres; this is more than half of the irrigated farmland in the 11 counties covered by the study. Fresno, Sacramento and Stanislaus counties can each expect to lose about 20% of their prime farmland.

Obviously, this loss of farmland has an economic impact. By the year 2040, sprawl could reduce the value of agricultural products grown in the Valley by about $2.1 billion annually. That's equivalent to wiping out virtually the entire agricultural production of Oregon. This decline in sales will lead to the loss of nearly 40,000 farm-related jobs by 2040.

Farmland consumed by sprawl doesn't just lie fallow, of course. It gets replaced by housing tracts and shopping malls and office parks--all of which require expensive infrastructure and public services. The study shows that by 2040, the cost of providing the current level of public service to sprawl will exceed the revenues of Central Valley cities by about $1 billion annually. This means that those cities--your home communities--will have to make a choice: either reduce services or increase taxes. Either way, you and your children lose.

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These dire predictions of sprawl's impact aren't limited to the Central Valley. Many of you have heard about a remarkable report issued here in California last year. The report states flatly that the "enormous social, environmental and economic costs, which until now have been hidden, ignored or quietly borne by society" have made sprawl a luxury that "California can no longer afford." It goes on to say that sprawl has "shifted from an engine of California's growth to a force that now threatens to inhibit growth and degrade the quality of our life."

Strong words--and they take on added weight from the fact that the initiative for producing this report came from the Bank of America. A leader of the mainstream business community that traditionally preaches the gospel of unlimited growth now says that sprawl is bad--not just for the environment but for business as well.

We can't go on this way. It's time to stop it.

It's time for all of us to rise up and call for a halt to this endless, mindless madness called sprawl.

How do we do that? We can begin by doing a couple of fairly simple things. First, we can reverse existing policies and practices that subsidize sprawl. And second, we can insist on the institution of sensible land-use planning.

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People who insist that sprawl is merely the natural product of marketplace forces at work--and there are some people who do say so--fail to recognize that the game isn't being played on a level field. The fact is that government at every level is riddled with policies that mandate, encourage or even subsidize sprawl.

Federal policy in many areas--housing and lending, for instance--is riddled with provisions that encourage sprawl, but transportation policy is perhaps the biggest offender. Transportation policy should be based on principles that reward rational planning and efficiency. Instead, it is rooted in principles that reward sprawl.

In the decades since the end of World War II, "transportation" has become practically synonymous with "car." Today's automobiles may be smaller and less chrome-laden than they were thirty or forty years ago, but what they've lost in bulk they've made up for in sheer numbers and in their insatiable demand for space. But the real villain is not the automobile--or not the automobile alone, at any rate. As Jessica Mathews wrote in the Washington Post , "Americans are not irrationally car-crazed. We seem wedded to the automobile because policy after government policy...encourages us to be." Since the 1950s, auto-centric transportation policies at every level--federal, state and local--have effectively destroyed transportation choices for Americans.

To cite one example, these policies have wiped out walkable older communities while preventing the creation of new ones. By mandating inordinate amounts of parking and unreasonable setback requirements and by prohibiting mixed uses, 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 for America's auto-dependence.

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In addition, most states have adopted road-design standards that systematically destroy the pedestrian-friendly layout of small-town Main Streets and big-city downtowns and neighborhoods. They frequently prohibit engineers from designing roads for slow speeds, even in quiet residential areas. By mandating excessively wide streets and roads, state highway agencies contribute to the sprawl that virtually guarantees continued auto-dependence.

The result is that 82% of all trips in the U.S. are taken by car. The average American household now allocates more than 18% 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.

What are we getting as return on our investment? A headache. The Federal Highway Administration expects congestion to grow fourfold on our freeways and twofold on other roads over the next 20 years.

And how do we propose to deal with this headache? By laying more pavement. Instead of recognizing that the phrase "if you build it, they will come" doesn't apply only to ballparks, highway engineers keep on trying to ease congestion by generating plans for new and wider highways further out in the countryside that will encourage the spread of sprawl and pave additional acres of productive farmland and scenic open space.

This destruction is bad enough in itself--but what makes it worse is the fact that the money that makes it possible comes out of our own pockets. A recent study indicates that drivers traveling alone to work pay only 25% of the actual cost of their commute. We all subsidize the rest of it, whether we like it or not.

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We often hear that Americans will never shed their attachment to cars, that Americans will never adjust to using other modes of transportation such as public transit or walking. I believe this is wrong. But it won't happen unless we take some firm steps to make it happen.

First, we should determine--to borrow a phrase from the medical profession--to do no more harm. Specifically, federal and state officials should halt plans for construction of new and unnecessary freeways that represent a 1960s solution to a 1990s problem.

There's an excellent example of such a freeway right here in California. For 30 years, CalTrans has been advocating the construction of a short extension of the 710 Freeway in the Los Angeles area. This project would cost $1.4 billion and take 23 years to complete. It would destroy more than 1,000 homes, 5,000 trees and parts of five historic districts and in the process displace more than 3,000 people. What's more, CalTrans' own figures indicate that the average speed on the freeway would be less than 1 mph faster than that on a much less destructive alternative. Highway projects such as this one--and sadly, there are others almost as bad--make no sense. CalTrans could make better use of a billion dollars by addressing California's more urgent transportation needs of seismic retrofit and repair and expanding mass transit system, rather than destroying stable communities.

Cities like Los Angeles or Houston or even Fresno can't be turned into outsized European villages where people walk everywhere. We can't eliminate the need for freeways, but we can take steps to help to reduce auto-dependence and the resulting congestion that inevitably leads to more freeway construction and more sprawl.

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We need a thorough rethinking of our approach to transportation. Public officials, transportation planners, civic leaders and private citizens can--and should--make it possible for us to live comfortably and work efficiently without driving an average of 12,000 miles per year as we now do. It's an effort that need not cost huge amounts of money. In fact, we should adopt the attitude of a British statesman who told his colleagues in the darkest days of World War II, "Gentlemen, we are out of money. Therefore we shall have to think."

Federal and state transportation departments should give higher R-&-D priority to concepts that reduce auto-dependence. Current research agendas are still heavily weighted in favor of auto travel and high-tech approaches. But low-tech initiatives should be looked at too: things like increased licensing of private bus and van lines, more infill construction to bring about the kind of density that makes public transit feasible, and increased emphasis on creating and preserving pedestrian-friendly environments. What's needed is research into urban planning policies that encourage sensibly dense environments and cut down on the amount of time we spend behind the wheel. What's needed is research into ways of making the automobile a servant instead of a master.

Also, Congress should direct the U.S. Department of Transportation to develop new road design standards for urban, historic and scenic areas. Standards now in use are systematically destroying the walkability--and livability--of small towns and urban areas alike, and are eroding the scenic character of historic parkways and byways.

Finally and perhaps most important, government should think of "transportation" as more than another word for "highways." A piece of legislation called the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, universally known as ISTEA, is a step in the right direction. It reduces the financial incentive for states to favor highway construction over all other transportation modes, opens up the transportation planning process to local communities and citizens, and provides funds for projects that will enhance communities and transportation facilities.

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But it's now under attack. Originally enacted in 1991, ISTEA is up for reauthorization next year--and various groups are already lining up to try to remove provisions that they don't like. Some opponents of the current law, for instance, feel that the federal government should simply make block grants to the states and allow them to use the funds as they please. Others are violently opposed to the diversion of any transportation funds for non-highway projects, and still others don't like the ISTEA provision that sets aside funds for enhancement projects.

Here in Fresno, I'm told there's been some interest in rehabilitating the old Santa Fe depot as a multi-modal transportation center. This is exactly the kind of enhancement project that has received funding from ISTEA in communities all over the country--and it's exactly the kind of project that may never have a chance to go forward if the ISTEA enhancements program isn't reauthorized in its present form. We need your help in making sure that this forward-looking legislation isn't gutted.

The fight over reauthorization of ISTEA makes it clear that changing old habits won't be easy. It took centuries of "throw-away" mentality to bring us to this point. Before we go any further, we owe it to ourselves and our children to decide whether we really like living in a society in which, to paraphrase Joan Didion, the only thing constant is the rate at which it disappears.

Do we really like the kind of cities that our transportation policy has created? I don't think so. If we liked them, we wouldn't be on the brink of abandoning them. According to the 1996 national home buyers' community preference survey, nearly 3/4 of all home buyers want to live in a community where they can walk or bicycle. So perhaps what's most needed is a fundamental change in America's willingness to demand the kind of communities it wants rather than merely accepting the kind of communities it gets.

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There's plenty to criticize about the federal government's role in encouraging sprawl. But not enough attention is paid to the role of state and local governments, which often function as major sources of sprawl subsidies. To state the matter most simply: Instead of finding ways to control or reduce sprawl, many state and local governments are pouring money into projects that encourage or reward it. These agencies are therefore unwitting--and sometimes not so unwitting--partners in the spread of sprawl.

State and local subsidies for sprawl fall into two general categories: the provision of financial incentives or outright financial assistance to sprawl-type projects, and the provision--at public expense--of the infrastructure that sprawl demands. Whether you call them incentives or inducements or subsidies, they crop up in astonishing--and costly--profusion:

• 1000 Friends of Oregon reports that the cost of providing public facilities and services for new residential subdivisions in that state can average $25,000 per home--but developers are typically asked to pay only a fraction--$2,000 to $6,000--of these costs.
  
• Similarly, a study in Tallahassee, Florida, shows that the cost of providing sewer hookups ranges from about $4,000 per house in inner-city neighborhoods to about $11,000 in outlying subdivisions. Despite this big difference in real cost, everyone is charged the same fee--about $6,000. This means that high-cost users in suburban areas are getting a subsidy financed by low-cost users in the inner city.
  
• In Darien, Georgia, the developer of an outlet mall was given a 13-year abatement on all property taxes. This means that the community, which had a population of less than 2,000 in 1990, is foregoing approximately $250,000 in tax revenues every year for 13 years.
  
• In Terrell, Texas, a developer told the town, "I don't care how you get the money, but this is what we need from you to make this a viable site." The town responded by providing nearly $3 million worth of incentives, including installation of all utilities and water and sewer lines to and through the site; construction of a mile-long 4-lane road through the project; installation of a traffic light; and provision of up to $125,000 annually for 7 years for marketing.
  
• Here in California, the redevelopment agency in one town spent almost half a million dollars to pave over a creek to make a development site viable, then asked the developer-- a huge discount retail chain--to repay only 83% of its costs. And the redevelopment agency in another town bought land for $10.7 million and sold it to a developer for the bargain price of $6.4 million.

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Some developers have shown real innovation in getting government to pay for their projects. In Vicksburg, Mississippi, the developer of an outlying mall placed the main drive in the center of the project--then dedicated it back as a city street so that the city pays for maintaining it. The developer is now asking the state to construct a frontage-road connection to the center at a cost of $1.5 million.

Much of this information came from a magazine called Value Retail News: The Outlet Journal . As the title indicates, this is a trade publication for owners and developers of retail outlets. Obviously, these people know a good thing when they see it. The CEO of one development firm says, "Inducement packages are a significant part of the development of every one of our centers, averaging well into seven figures per project." This developer's portfolio includes 17 retail outlet centers across the country. He estimates that his company has received "a total of more than $50 million of inducements" from local, county and state governments.

I think it's worth reiterating the obvious: Whatever form they take, these subsidies allow developers to shift the costs of sprawl to other people. To state the matter more simply, these subsidies for sprawl come out of your pockets.

Governments offer incentives in exchange for the promise of future prosperity--and sometimes the projections are accurate. The mayor of San Marcos, Texas--the one who offered such generous incentives to the developer of an outlet mall--reports that the project has lived up to all expectations, creating new jobs and generating significant sales tax revenues. That's good for San Marcos. But what about the impact of the project on the next community down the road? Research indicates that shoppers and employees in a mall such as the one in San Marcos are drawn from a wide geographic area, and that new jobs and increased sales tax revenues in one community often come at the expense of fewer jobs and decreased sales in other communities nearby. Robbing Peter to pay Paul is a good thing if you're Paul--but Peter is likely to be much less enthusiastic about the transaction.

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Even when sprawl subsidies achieve the desired result, another vexing question remains: Are they really necessary? Shortly after the opening of the San Marcos outlet mall, another outlet developer entered the community. This second developer was offered no incentives by the local government, but he built his mall nonetheless. One has to wonder how many communities have offered expensive inducements to secure projects that would have been constructed anyway.

Concern that redevelopment agencies were giving away millions of tax dollars to huge corporations led the California legislature to pass the Community Development Act in 1993. Among other things, this legislation prohibits a local redevelopment agency from providing any form of direct assistance to retail projects located on more than 5 acres of land that has not been previously developed for urban uses. Nevertheless, in 1994 the Redevelopment Agency of Chula Vista approved a $1.9 million subsidy for a sprawl-type superstore development. Two city residents sued the agency and the city for violating the law, and they won their case in the Superior Court in San Diego at the end of last year. But the story isn't over yet. The retailer that received the subsidy is appealing the ruling, so concerned citizens all over California will have to wait a bit longer to learn whether this legislation sets up an effective barrier to inappropriate local subsidies for sprawl.

In every town in America that has been devastated by sprawl, I'm sure there were people who watched this monster suck the life out of the community--and simply shrugged it off as "the price of progress." They were wrong. Development that destroys communities and the places people care about isn't progress. It's chaos. And it isn't inevitable. It's avoidable--or, at the very least, controllable.

Communities, like individuals, have the ability to shape their own destinies. Our communities should be shaped by choice , not by chance.

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Our choices are clear. We can let the highway engineers and the big-box retailers do our planning for us, or we can take a more active role ourselves. As I said before, we can keep on accepting the kind of communities we get, or we can take steps to ensure that we get the kind of communities we want.

One of the simplest, most effective ways to reach this laudable goal is to insist on sensible land-use planning. For some reason we have an aversion to the very term "land-use planning," but it's a concept we have to come to terms with if we're to deal effectively with sprawl. Otherwise we're just nibbling at its edges, dealing with the symptoms of the problem rather than with its root cause. Besides, there's solid truth in the adage that land is a non-renewable resource. The land we have now will have to serve us forever, and decisions made now will have enormously important consequences down the road.

The first and most important step is to recognize that the way we zone and design our communities either opens up or forecloses alternatives to the automobile. We must get rid of provisions in our land-use policies that mandate auto-oriented sprawl and doom efforts to provide cost-effective public transit or to make communities more walkable. Municipalities should promote downtown housing and mixed-use zoning that reduces 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.

The city of Santa Monica has a proactive program that encourages the development of downtown housing--and this effort is paying off in some very satisfying and encouraging ways. With the approach of Christmas, many of us will be making the trek to Toys-R-Us to buy presents for children or grandchildren. In most communities, going to Toys-R-Us means getting into the car and driving out to some shopping center on some sprawl-wracked highway. But there's a big, new, attractive--and very successful--Toys-R-Us store right in the middle of downtown Santa Monica. Why? Because the availability of downtown housing means the presence of a downtown market for the things that stores like Toys-R-Us sells, and that means that such stores can locate downtown. Maybe the presence of a major national toy chain on a downtown street corner without a huge parking lot doesn't indicate a significant advance in modern-day civilization, but it's certainly a step in the right direction.

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We should demand land-use planning that exhibits a strong bias in favor of existing communities. After all, in fighting against sprawl, what are we fighting for ? It makes no sense to spend enormous amounts of time and energy just stopping sprawl for its own sake--but it makes perfect sense for us to fight as hard as we can to refocus attention on our older city centers, to redirect investment to existing urban and suburban areas.

In his book The Geography of Nowhere , James Howard Kunstler has some compelling things to say about the importance of community. He writes that people are happiest in "physical surroundings worth caring about." And what makes surroundings worth caring about? He attributes it to charm, which he says "is dependent on connectedness, on continuities, on the relation of one thing to another...."

"Sprawl" and "charm" are words that don't go easily together. It's difficult to use the words "sprawl" and "connectedness" in the same sentence, too. One of the major complaints about sprawl is that it isn't related to anything except the highway. Mega-stores and power centers stand aloof, literally and symbolically cut off from the community by their location on the edge of town and by the vast asphalt moats of their parking lots.

If there is no sense of community in a strip mall, that suggests that we should do everything we can to hold on to those places where a sense of community can be found--in the traditional downtowns and older residential neighborhoods that we've neglected so callously in recent decades. Fortunately, there is a growing number of places where the effects of those decades of neglect are being swept away. Places like Lowertown in St. Paul, the Manchester neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Lower Downtown in Denver and dozens of others are being literally reborn--transformed from shabby urban backwaters to lively, attractive, desirable places to live and work.

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The success of efforts like these offers a lesson for all of us in the real meaning of wise stewardship. We've become conscientious about recycling everything from newspapers to aluminum, but we're not very good at recycling communities. We'd better learn how. We don't have an infinite amount of land in this country to build upon, and many places here in the West may run out of water before they run out of land. Even if the natural resources were available, we don't have the money to build the new roads, schools and other infrastructure that sprawl demands.

Being anti-sprawl is not being anti-growth. The question is not whether our communities will grow, but how they will grow. It's a question that we should examine in the clear light of its impact on our pocketbooks.

Earlier I quoted some alarming statistics and projections from the American Farmland Trust's study of the impact of sprawl here in the Central Valley. It's important to note that this study does not recommend a no-growth policy for the Valley. Instead, it offers alternatives to sprawl that will allow the Valley to grow smarter. And it presents these alternatives in terms that speak to your own self-interest. It says, for instance, that enforcing more compact development patterns would cut farmland loss in half and save $67 billion in farm production and farm support business by the year 2040. And it says that better-managed growth would save $5 billion in taxpayer dollars--your dollars--by 2040 because compact development is more efficient to service than sprawl.

Similar data came out of a Rutgers University study of the costs of sprawl in New Jersey. The study showed that implementation of a growth-management plan--again, not a no-growth plan--would not hurt business and job creation and would, over a period of 20 years, preserve 36,500 acres of "frail" natural areas and 108,000 acres of productive farmland--while saving the state $1.3 billion in capital infrastructure costs, $400 million in operating costs for public school districts and municipalities, $740 million in road construction costs and $440 million in water and sewer construction costs.

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Our communities can--and will, and should--grow. But to make sure that they grow wisely, we need clear-headed, far-sighted planning and better development models to replace the random collision of economic forces that has turned much of our landscape into what Peter Blake calls "God's own junkyard."

Those are grim words--and perhaps you think I've offered a pretty gloomy assessment of the state of America's communities in the past few minutes. That's practically unavoidable in any speech about sprawl. After all, when you paint a picture of a starry night, you have to use a lot of black paint. But it isn't all black: There are--to use a phrase that was popular in Washington a few years ago--some points of light. There are some states and communities that are recognizing that sprawl represents a real threat to livability. They're recognizing, too, that livability isn't just some warm-and-fuzzy, Hallmark-card sentiment. In an increasingly competitive global marketplace, livability is the factor that will determine which communities thrive and which ones wither. Robert Solow, Nobel Prize-winning economist from MIT, puts it this way: "Livability is not some middle-class luxury. It is an economic imperative."

I own a home in Calvert County, Maryland, a fairly short distance southeast of Washington. It is the fastest growing county in the state, and its rapid growth now threatens to transform the county from a quietly prosperous agricultural area to a booming center of development with sizeable tracts of land blighted by sprawl. Alarmed by what was happening and recognizing that continued sprawl could mean the disappearance of the quality of life that drew many of them to the area in the first place, people decided to do something about it.

The county commissioners are now considering a comprehensive plan to manage--not stop, but manage--future growth and development. The proposed plan focuses on four key concepts:
First, it calls for channeling future development--both commercial and residential--into designated "town centers" instead of allowing development to spread unchecked across the landscape, devouring open space and draining the life out of established towns.

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Second, it emphasizes the importance--not to mention the common-sense wisdom--of mixed-use development. Sprawl is characterized by the rigid separation of different land uses--houses here, commercial development way over there, public buildings somewhere else--that requires that people drive everywhere. In contrast, mixed-use development allows for the intermingling of compatible uses and is much more conducive to a reduction in automobile dependency and the creation of pedestrian-friendly environments.

Third, the Calvert County plan calls for architectural and site design standards to help preserve the attractiveness of the local environment and to discourage the sort of cookie-cutter commercial development that makes much of Montana look like Mississippi, Missouri or Maine.
And finally, the plan proposes to limit the size of single retail stores to 30,000 square feet. This proposal will prevent the kind of economic displacement that occurs when a community is suddenly glutted with more retail space than the local economy can absorb.

It's all pretty simple. It's all based on common sense. And if a relatively small, out-of-the-way place like Calvert County, Maryland, can do this, so can other places. And they are.
A growing number of states have recognized the need for some form of statewide or regional land-use planning mechanism. States such as Vermont, Washington and Georgia have adopted varied approaches that could serve as useful models elsewhere. In other states, encouraging initiatives are just getting underway. In Colorado, for example, Governor Romer has led a courageous effort to manage the poorly planned growth which, according to a recent poll, is the number-one public concern among a sizable majority of Coloradans. And in other states like Maryland, Utah and Delaware, thoughtful governors have started a dialogue about how to control sprawl. These efforts are among the most exciting--and promising--new public policy initiatives anywhere in the country today.

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But perhaps the best, most innovative statewide land-use planning program in the country is working in California's neighbor to the north. In 1973 the state of Oregon adopted legislation that requires every community to calculate the amount of land it needs to accommodate growth during the next 20 years. Then it draws a circle--an urban growth boundary--around that land and concentrates development inside it. Other provisions of the law seek to prevent sprawl from paving over Oregon's farmland and forests and require that local transportation plans consider alternatives to the automobile and avoid reliance on any single mode of transportation. It's not surprising that farmers and timber growers are strong supporters of the law--but the fact is that many developers are pleased with it, too. In the 23 years since it was enacted, it has been endorsed by strong majorities of the voters in 3 elections, reaffirmed by 10 sessions of the state legislature and supported by governors from both political parties.

For a clear indication of how Oregon's legislation works you need only look at what's happening in Portland. The adoption of an urban growth boundary has allowed Portland to define the territory within which it can provide public services economically. Knowing that it will not be called on to build new roads and water lines and provide police and fire protection to newly-developed areas sprawling farther and farther out from the urban core, the city can focus its energies and its tax dollars on improving the quality of life for city residents.

A 1991 study showed that Portland's urban growth boundary had expanded by only 2% in the preceding 17 years--but had contained 95 % of the area's residential growth. Developers are now building single-family houses on smaller lots and constructing more of the multifamily housing that constitutes about half of the market demand. This concentration of development has made mass transit feasible: The city is currently building a $1 billion light-rail line to serve new and existing residential neighborhoods. Concentration of development has also stimulated reuse of existing buildings downtown. The Wall Street Journal recently noted that "the number of downtown jobs [in Portland] has doubled since 1975 without the city adding a single parking space, widening roads or building new ones." I don't know of another city that can make that kind of claim.
Do you wonder why so many people from other parts of the country--including large numbers of Californians--are moving to Portland? Because, thanks to visionary and effective statewide land-use laws, it's a city that works.

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Can it happen here? Or is it too late for California? Have inexorable forces of unchecked growth and sprawl already sealed the fate of the Central Valley and the rest of this marvelous state? The answer, of course, is "No ." Admittedly, strong, informed, effective efforts by citizens and elected officials to regain control of California's destiny should have happened 15 or 20 years ago, but it still isn't too late to make a start--and make a difference.

In 1947, William Faulkner wrote an irate letter to his hometown paper, the Oxford Eagle . The historic courthouse in Oxford was threatened with demolition, and Faulkner was furious: "They call this progress," he wrote. "But they don't say where it's going; also there are some of us who would like the chance to say whether or not we want the ride."

More and more people here in California are deciding they don't want the ride--or at least they're wondering whether the price of the ticket isn't much too high. As dramatic evidence of this change of heart, I call your attention to the encouraging news that several California communities have decided to take action to control sprawl and protect their future prosperity and livability.

On election day earlier this month, voters in four communities in Sonoma County approved the creation of urban growth boundaries around their home towns, and a countywide vote also approved a measure to restrict development in unincorporated areas adjacent to the new boundaries. This marked the first time that California cities have adopted UGBs--but there are indications that other communities are set to follow suit. These include smaller communities such as Saratoga, Los Gatos and Cupertino--and the largest city in Northern California, San Jose.

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Right here in Fresno, a remarkable coalition of farmers, business leaders and home builders has endorsed the concept of "compact development" in the City of Fresno's new general plan. In a letter to the director of Fresno's development department, this group said that it was convinced that policies that encourage infill construction and increased density in all land-use sectors are desirable because they would reduce consumption of farmland, lower housing costs, increase the feasibility of regional transit systems, revitalize urban centers and create a stronger sense of community and improved quality of life.

I couldn't have put it better myself. The people and communities I've mentioned are to be commended for having taken a bold step to rein in sprawl. But piecemeal efforts aren't enough.

While sprawl is a nationwide problem, there is no national solution. We certainly must seek changes to federal policies that encourage sprawl, but we should not look to the federal government for a quick-fix answer to the problem of sprawl.

Nor should we expect local government alone to produce an effective solution. Limited jurisdiction hampers the ability of local government to deal with an issue of this magnitude, and efforts to control sprawl in a limited area often just shift the problem from one community to another. It's like trying to stop a flood with a picket fence.

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When you're dealing with a steamroller like sprawl, city limits and county lines are nothing more than irrelevant--and obsolete--marks on a map. The challenge of the next decade is to create regional and statewide planning mechanisms that can deal effectively with issues that transcend political boundaries that were established decades or even centuries ago for different purposes. Most local government initiatives up to now have been sadly ineffective. What's needed--what's essential , in fact--is action by the state government to develop growth-management legislation with teeth in it, legislation that requires local governments to develop rational strategies for using already-developed land more efficiently, to make thoughtful choices about where new development should and should not go, and to set up regulatory mechanisms that are fair, clear, consistent and farsighted.

California has tried a couple of times--without success--to enact a statewide growth-management law. Those efforts haven't succeeded yet, but that shouldn't keep you from trying again--and again and again, if necessary. This state has led the nation in so many ways. Now is the time for it to seize the opportunity to demonstrate leadership again in establishing a growth-management program that makes sense--and makes a real difference in the way Californians live in the present while growing wisely for the future.

We can't hope to make substantive progress until we build a broad-based constituency for fighting sprawl and creating more livable communities. Businesses and government agencies must be part of this coalition, along with community groups and private citizens--both urban and rural residents. Working together, they should insist on--and assist in--the development of an integrated system of decisions and regulations that create and preserve communities that are safe, attractive, supportive places to live and work.

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In the courthouse park here in Fresno there's a marker honoring one of your city's most famous native sons, William Saroyan. The marker has an inscription in Saroyan's own words: "...I came to see from the perspective of far-away cities, some of the charm and some of the depth, dimension, and potential of Fresno."

It was that potential--the promise of a good life in a pleasant environment--that drew Saroyan's ancestors to this valley in the first place and that shaped and nurtured the eternally optimistic spirit of one of America's best-loved writers.

Keeping that promise alive means developing a vision of how you want your community to look and to grow. It means expressing that vision in clear-headed plans and laws that lay a rational foundation for sustainable growth. It means staying informed and involved. Keeping that promise alive isn't an easy task--but it isn't impossible, either. Margaret Mead once said, "Never doubt that a few committed individuals can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

When we all commit ourselves to making this process work, everybody wins. Developers get a clear message about what's acceptable and what isn't. Citizens who care about their community get the assurance that it will grow in acceptable ways and that its heritage won't be carted off to the landfill in the process. And everyone--citizens and public officials alike--begins to recognize the power and responsibility they possess to help shape the environment in which they and their children will live.

Only when that happens will the potential of Fresno--and of thousands of other American communities--be truly realized.