If you're like many Sierra Club members, you'd probably like to live out in the country with a sparkling view of the mountains from the window of your spacious home, the peaceful gurgle of a creek to sing you to sleep at night and the sharp scent of a lush forest to greet you when you open the door. You want to live in concert with nature--at least until that first mountain lion sighting.
How could the Sierra Club not support such an idyllic vision?
Because to live out there, you'd need roads and cars, grocery stores and schools, drinking water and electricity. And the people who stock the shelves at the store and teach your children at school either have to live out there, too, or commute, most likely by car. And before you know it, the wide open spaces aren't so wide anymore, new subdivisions are crawling up the side of the mountains, traffic on the highway drowns out the sounds of the creek and the air smells of car exhaust.
That's sprawl--low-density, automobile-dependent development spread out over the landscape at the urban fringe and rural areas. It not only paves over farmland and wildlife habitat but contributes to disinvestment from the urban centers, which in turn drives people to the outskirts in an endless search for "a better quality of life."
Stopping sprawl is the Sierra Club's newest national campaign. Traditionally, our national campaigns have focused on pressuring the U.S. Congress to pass laws that protect our air and water, and preserve unspoiled wildlands and the species that inhabit them.
But nothing threatens our air, water and wild places more than sprawl. This new locally focused campaign is of concern to nearly every Sierra Club chapter and group and intersects with other current Club battles, such as the Endangered Species Act and wetlands protection campaigns.
As longtime biodiversity advocate John Hopkins, member of the Challenge to Sprawl campaign steering comittee, says, "The way we can help protect wildlife and habitat the most is by taking part in land use planning to stop sprawl."
Mostly it has to be fought locally because county commissioners, city council members and state legislators decide how land is used. The pattern is similar everywhere. What town or city doesn't have a strip with look-alike fast food and motel chains defining its periphery? How many rural and urban areas don't face pressures to develop the surrounding farmland? Where don't developers want to build more roads?
Hundreds of local "stop the whatever" efforts have already sprouted in response to local land use crises. There are also efforts to address the crumbling schools and roads, and the abandoned industrial sites and stagnant economies that plague our cities. The Club's new campaign aims to support those activities, establish links between them and channel them into a national effort that addresses the root causes of sprawl and creates positive goals for each community's future.
"We don't want to get caught up in just being anti-this and anti-that," says Challenge to Sprawl Campaign co-chair Tim Frank. "Rather than being against development, we are for community. We're for development--or redevelopment--of compact, vibrant, livable communities."
After all, how can we preserve open space and prevent flight to the suburbs without making the cities more livable? How can we stop new roads without improving public transit? How can we get people out of their carssss without making the streets safer and more attractive for pedestrians and bicyclists?
The specific objectives of the campaign are:
- To establish urban growth boundaries.
- To revitalize communities within growth boundaries.
- To protect lands outside growth boundaries (farmlands, parks and forests).
- To reform the government policies and subsidies that encourage sprawl and undermine our cities.
One challenge, of course, will be to avoid echoing sprawl in the campaign itself--with lots of uncoordinated efforts and no central organizing principle. Instead, the goal is a positive comprehensive development plan analogous to what we're demanding of sprawling towns and cities.
Turning Back New Roads
The campaign starts with what we're already doing in dozens of places--Stopping inappropriate roads and developments. Limiting sprawl is not as simple as stopping roads, but it's a crucial beginning.
In Texas, Drusha Mayhue, Marge Hanselman and other Houston Group members are fighting to protect the Katy Prairie, home to North America's largest concentration of wintering waterfowl. They are sponsoring birding trips and bicycle rides through the prairie, promoting better mass transit and selling organic rice grown on the prairie. But first they've got to stop a proposed new airport and 170-mile loop road around the city, which have already contributed, even before being built, to the expansion of the suburbs toward the prairie.
In Atlanta, Bryan Hager and other Georgia Chapter volunteers are advocating redevelopment of the urban center. They've already defeated a gas tax that would have funded construction of new roads. But they still have to stop a proposed 200-mile-plus outer perimeter highway. "We've managed to change the debate", says Hager, "from 'Where do we need to build a new road?' to 'Do we even need to build a new road?'"
But fighting individual roads, necessary as it is, is only a stopgap measure if underlying causes of development--cheap land, subsidies to roads and cars, politicians in the pockets of highway and subdivision builders--are not addressed.
Sprawl is not inevitable. Certainly the free market system has been the primary culprit--as long as it costs less in the short-term to build out in the boonies than it does in the central city, it's going to happen--but the markets have been anything but free. Government subsidies, investments, services, zoning, regulations and building codes have encouraged, sometimes mandated, sprawl over the past 50 years, even if inadvertently. These policies can and must be changed in order to encourage smarter growth for the future.
This year, Congress will be considering the reauthorization of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (fondly called "ice tea"), which could address some of those concerns.
Originally passed in 1991, ISTEA authorized more than $100 billion for transportation programs, but it expires this year. From the Sierra Club perspective, this landmark law was too generous to highways, but it did allow gas tax revenues to be used for mass transit and other alternatives to highways, like shuttles for the elderly in Boulder, Colorado; port improvements in Columbus, Ohio; and bike lanes in Minneapolis and New York City.
In anticipation of ISTEA reauthorization, highway builders and state departments of transportation have initiated a campaign to eliminate this allocation flexibility and to limit local authority and public participation. The Club, meanwhile is pushing in the other direction, attempting to "brew a stronger ISTEA"--one that improves conditions for pedestrians and bicycles, better supports mass transit, eliminates highway expansion and funds a federal study of existing subsidies to motor vehicles.
It's not just roads that lead to sprawl. In Virginia, former Chapter Chair Tyla Matteson and other volunteers are working with the Mattaponi Tribe to stop construction of the proposed King William reservoir, which would provide drinking water for anticipated growth along the Newport News/Hampton peninsula. Less than a hundred miles north, the Maryland and Virginia chapters are fighting a proposed 15,000 person city at Chapman's landing on the Potomac, using techniques ranging from canvassing to staging canoe rallies along the riverfront. "Stopping sprawl from paving over Chapman's beautiful riverfront forest is critical to the Chesapeake Bay's continued recovery," says Joy Oakes, Appalachian regional staff director.
Drawing Urban Growth Boundaries
One of the ways that some urban areas, notably Portland, Oregon, contain sprawl is by drawing a circle around the metropolitan area and limiting development outside it.
"Urban growth boundaries in Oregon have not been used to stop development, but to redirect it within existing uban areas," says Scott Chapman, chair of the Columbia Group's land use and transportation committee. Legislating such boundaries is a daunting challenge, however, because most urban areas comprise dozens of cities and several counties that are sometimes competing for development dollars. Unless the state steps in, as it did in Oregon, growth limits can only be realized in a piecemeal fashion.
Without urban growth boundaries, farmers and other landowners on the periphery of developed areas are often under tremendous pressure to sell their land, which is worth much more as a potential subdivision than as a farm or natural area. One innovative way of adddressing this is for the community to buy the development rights from landowners, so that incentive to sell out to developers is no longer there.
Another obstacl to preserving farmland outside towns and cities is the pervasive myth that development along the periphery increases revenues for local governments. In reality, many communities see property taxes rise in response to the increased costs of roads, fire departments, sewers, schools and other critical government functions. This is especially true in fast-growing areas like Dane County, Wis., where the Sierra Club Midwest Office and John Muir Chapter (with the support of the Joyce Foundation) published a report titled "Sprawl Costs Us All"cataloging the costs of sprawl in Wisconsin and what local activists can do about it.
"Development in Wisconsin may cost state taxpayers $10,000 per home and over $4.4 billion over the next 15 years," says report author and Club Midwest Regional Representative Brett Hulsey. The Club is calling for a "property tax impact statement" akin to the environmental impact statements required for many developments.
The village of McFarland, Wis., compiled a property tax impact statement and found that for each $1 million spent on new homes, taxpayers would have to pay an additional $30 apiece in property taxes. The city of Franklin, south of milwaukee, estimated that each new home cost city taxpayers over $10,000 for schools and services in 1992 but that builders paid onlly $813 in impact fees in 1995, and the new homeowners paid less than $5,000 in property taxes.
We're just asking for truth in advertising," says Hulsey. "If taxpayers realize they're paying millions of dollars to subsidize sprawl, they're more likely to support cost-effective urban development."
The Maryland Chapter has adapted the Sprawl Costs Us All model for their state, giving an "Ostrich Aard" to 14 counties that do not track the costs of development to taxpayers. "These counties have their heads in the sand," says Janet Pelley, principal author of the report. "Sprawl development in Maryland costs more to service than it pays in revenues."
Envisioning Vibrant Cities
Limiting outward expansion can only work if towns and cities are attractive and affordable places to live. There are a variety of visions of "sustainable communities," but many share similar characteristics: denser development around transit stations, a mix of people of different ages and incomes, close-together housing, mixed-use planning with residences above businesses and close to shops, and green open spaces prominent throughout. In some communities, undesirable land uses, such as incinerators, abandoned industrial sites or delapidated housing, must be eliminated first.
A major obstacle that opponents of sprawl face, says John Holtzclaw, Club transportation committee chair, is the perception that densisty is bad, that cities are undesirable places to live. "We've been bamboozled into believing that we all want a single-family house with a yard to mow," he says, "but when people understand the true costs of the status quo and they are presented with attractive alternatives, they prefer denser developments." In 1993, the city of Portland commissioned a study in which 4,500 adults and children were asked to view and rank slides of different kinds of urban and suburban neighborhoods. Participants overwhelmingly chose compact communities, where grocery stores were within walking distance, buildings were close to the sidewalk and people interacted on the street.
Presenting a vision of sustainable communities and identifying and promoting the incremental steps to get there is a core component of the Club's work. For example, in New York City, Deling Wang, clean air and energy co-chair of the New York City Group, and fellow transit advocatess are lobbying Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the city council for more frequent bus service and bus stops that are well lighted and visually attractive. Making the city more livable, she sayss, can involve everything from making streets off-limit to cars to promoting bicycle travel to improving existing bus routes. "An increase in pedestrians and bicyclists means less pollution and more attractive and livable cities," says Wang. "It's a small but productive step in the right direction."
Creating livable cities is also an important focus of the Club's environmental justice campaign, which is promoting affordable housing and transportation and the cleanup of industrial waste.
Exposing Corrupt Politicians
If limiting sprawl saves money and resources and people prefer more compact development, why do we continue to expand into the countryside? Glen Besa, the Club's Appalachian regional representative in Flintstone, Md., suggests a look at public officials' campaign contribution records for the answer. "Local elected officials can make land speculators into millionaires just by changing the zoning on a single tract of land.
"All too often we fight sprawl in a piecemeal fashion," he says, "opposing a zoning change here and a special exception there. Even when we put substantial energy into comprehensive planning, often the plan draws dust on the shelf while developers convince local officials that sprawl means an expanded tax base. As they say, money is the mother's milk of politics and, we might add, of sprawl as well."
The solutions, says Besa, is a vigilant and active electorate. In Maryland, one way the Club has helped make elected officials accountable is with a "report card" showcasing their votes. "Bad land use decisions are a potent campaign issue and one on which environmentalists can run and win election to public office, says Besa.
Gearing Up the Campaign
Because so much of the fight against sprawl is necessarily local, the Club's Challenge to Sprawl campaign will focus on nurturing and supporting group and chapter programs.
Among the initial goals of the campaign are to inventory existing chapter and group programs, develop a library and clearinghouse of literature and ideas that have worked, create a network of experts in urban planning and local land use law, and provide training, model grant proposals and small grants.
There is also a need to educate the American people (and our own members) about how low-density, auto-dependent development leads to inner-city and economic decline, congestion, air pollution and the loss of farmland, forests and wildlife habitat.
It may seem like a no-brainer to those of us who pay attention to these issues, but for many, understanding the costs of sprawl, the factors that contribute to it and the ways individuals can have a voice in stopping it remains a mystery. At a recent press conference in Houston, where the Club is fighting a proposed highway and its attendant sprawl, one reporter asked, "Wouldn't it be better for air quality if people were more spread out?" (He now knows better.)
Campaign Co-chair Tim Frank says we have many reasons to be optimistic. "We've already seen what can be done with good state and local laws such as those in Oregon. The benefits of smart growth over sprawl are compelling and we have a broad range of logical allies--residents of declining inner-city neighborhoods, farmers who want to farm, people who can't drive, historic preservationists, taxpayers--the potential constituency is huge.
"The Sierra Club's unique strength over the past 104 years," says Frank, "has been the strength of our grassroots volunteers. Your local group or chapter either has a transportation and land use committee looking for your help, or it's looking for a volunteer to organize one. Give a call."