Time to Face Sprawl Politics and the Sprawl Lobby
In the war on sprawl, the smart growth movement cannot directly compete with the powerful and well-funded sprawl lobby. But it is folly to ignore the sprawl lobby and its commitment to sustain the sprawl status quo.
The
New York Times used the right word "war" when it headlined a
story on October 20, 2003 "War on Sprawl in New Jersey Hits a Wall."
Courageous Governor James E. McGreevey had lost the war he declared in his January
2003 state-of-the-state address. No other governor had ever used the strong
language that he had -- as in "It is time to draw the line and say
'no more' to mindless sprawl. There is no single greater threat to our way of
life in New Jersey than the unrestrained, uncontrolled development that has
jeopardized our water supplies, made our schools more crowded, our roads congested,
and our open space disappear."
From the very start, New Jersey home builders took the lead in opposing the governor's anti-sprawl program. Their fierce opposition was quite visible. Less visible was the tactic used all over the nation by the sprawl industry to maintain sprawl and suppress smart growth. The sprawl lobby's ammunition in the war is money. Money beats words. Vast sums are spent supporting campaigns of local and state officials to ensure that current planning and zoning rules continue to favor sprawl land development over smart growth. No surprise then that the Times story offered this quote from a New Jersey state official: "I don’t think anyone was under any illusion that the Legislature was not and is not under the thrall of the builders' lobby to a large extent." I had to look up thrall in a dictionary, which made it clear that the official was referring to the enslavement, servitude or submission of legislators to the sprawl industry.
The New Jersey situation is just the latest and most visible example of sprawl politics. In writing a book, I have been collecting evidence of the powerful sprawl lobby. While headquarters of several groups in Washington, D.C. put out reports and statements supporting smart growth, local groups representing home builders, real estate agents, and developers use their money and their political clout to keep the sprawl machine running smoothly. Others around the country have come to the same conclusion about the sprawl lobby. Here are several examples:
Listen to Alex Steffen, author of "Fashioning smart growth from mindless sprawl" in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1999: "Sprawl, unlike crime, pays. Powerful interests -- big developers, land speculators, construction corporations --get rich off sprawl. The sprawl lobby is strong and ruthless. We need to demand that our leaders find the courage to stare down the sprawl lobby and get to work on a statewide 'Smart Growth' initiative.”
Listen to Dottie Coplon in North Carolina writing a comment in 2003 on an article in The Charlotte Observer titled "Why sprawl lobby has clout:” “We thought City Council and the county commissioners actually has some say in rezonings. Our naiveté didn’t allow us to recognize the source of influence on public officials."
In early 2003, a case of Lake County, Florida commissioners supporting sprawl was revealed. The Orlando Sentinel talked about three commissioners who "never met a subdivision they didn’t like. They talk 'smart growth.' …Then they vote with developers -- the same ones that pour thousands into their campaigns." They had voted to build a sewage treatment plant that would cause an explosion of sprawl by attracting 10,000 new homes in an area where every elementary school was already overcrowded.
Consider an outstanding political analysis by Merrill Goozner, then chief economics correspondent for the Chicago Tribune's Washington bureau, published in Salon.com in July 1999. Here is Goozner’s wise observation: "Unfortunately, the Clinton administration's anti-sprawl program….doesn’t pose a serious challenge to the sprawl lobby. …Like most of the [state] smart growth initiatives around the country, the Clinton plan is doomed to fail because it doesn’t reckon with the powerful development interests that have a stake in sprawl -- most notably the home builders and road construction lobbies, which dominate every state capital and are already mobilizing to oppose smart growth plans."
The smart growth movement can never compete with the sprawl lobby, at least in terms of money and its influence on local and state officials. But it is folly to ignore the sprawl lobby and its commitment to sustain the sprawl status quo. If you cannot fight money with words, then you need votes. It is necessary to get millions of Americans to vote their commitment to smart growth to protect their own quality of life. Enough votes can stop the sprawl lobby. There is still a chance that the war on sprawl will be more successful than the war on poverty and the war on drugs.
Joel S. Hirschhorn was formerly with the National Governors Association and now is a free-lance consultant, writer and editor, and author of the forthcoming book "Sprawl Kills -- Better Living in Healthy Places."
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Sprawl
Sprawl is market driven. While there is a sprawl lobby out there, that lobby exists because there is a market for their product.
Let's set aside lifestyle issues for a moment of suburban living versus urban living and focus on hard economic forces.
Transportation is under priced, land is overpriced in the central cities and property taxes in the central cities are too high.
The total cost of driving in terms of percentage of income is only about 40 percent of what it was 40 years ago. As examples, the actual price of gasoline has increased by roughly 400% and the price of low end new cars by 500%. In addition, the average car lasts longer as well. Individual wages have increased by 500 percent and there are substantially more two income households.
Meanwhile, the price of a starter home in the central regions of major metropolitan areas has increased by over 1000%. This is due in a large part to land prices. Lot prices in the last 30 years in the inner parts of metroploitan areas have increased by at least 1500%.
I live in the suburbs of Minneapolis.
In looking to the future, the Minneapolis - St. Paul metro area is projected to add an estimated 200,000 new households in the next 20 years.
Our Metropolitan Council proudly stated, after a study by Calethorpe; "If smart growth practices are followed, ifrastructure cost savings of 3 billion dollars will be realized."
This sounded good, but I am sorry to say that I did the math. If you divide the 200,000 new households into 3 billion dollars, the savings per new household is only 15,000 dollars. Higher central area land price differences alone will more than offset that possible savings. Add to that the higher property taxes of 2000 to 3000 dollars per househoild per year in the central cities versus suburbabn communities (that result from the undisciplined spending of the "progressive" governments of those cities and their school districts), one can then see that smart growth theory is fighting against smart personal spending reality.
What do we do? We need to raise the gasoline tax or go to congestion pricing. We need to make transportation costs more realistic.
We need to spread the cost of metropolitan type services provided by the central city governments over the entire metropolitan area. We need to reduce the reliance on property taxes as funding mechanisms. We need to equalize the costs of providing government services by equalizing staffing and pay levels for city employees.
In summary we need to reduce government cost as a deterrent and cheap transportation as an enabler to sprawl.
It is also interesting to note that home loan lenders never ask what the borrower's transportation costs are likely to be when they come in for financing of that home in the outer reaches of the suburbs.
By the way, I live inside of our beltway and I live 3 miles from where I work.
Sprawl O'Jack
Ok Jack, could it be that the "American home buyer" wants to live there because there are few other choices? If there were enough alternatives, I doubt your American home buyer would chose sprawl...
question/comment for Chris W.
Chris, thanks for that link. This seems to touch upon some of the things we have discussed recently. I am ok with the initiative process as I suppose it can coexist with representative democracy. However, one issue - if voters approve a certain comp plan, how do we know some of the disenfranchised voters will not show up at individual project meetings to sabotage projects that conform to the plan? Has this not happened elsewhere. And if city council gives in to their wishes in regards to the project level debate, do they not undermine what the voters have approved in the plan amendment?
Also, in looking at that website, it seems there is an objection to higher density development projects. If developers want to build higher density and voters want to stop them and force lower density, maybe some folks should reconsider who they are calling the "sprawl lobby".
Check out FL's Hometown Democracy initiative
http://www.floridahometowndemocracy.com/
A group or fed-up Florida residents it is trying to qualify an initiative requiring local voter approval for General Plan amendments. The sprawl lobby is attacting them as "undermining representative democracy" duh. exactly right because the so-called representatives vote for sprawl over the residents' objections.
Legal means
It can be said that a constitutional 'inequity' exists and should be righted. Too many laws favor road-based mode of transport, (taxation, municipal codes), though that mode of travel presents a severe impediment upon other modes: walking, bicycling and mass transit.
These other urban/suburban modes require not only particular infrastructure, but the variety, or 'choice' of development patterns, (New Urbanism and Smart Growth), that allow them to function.
I believe an 'infill' movement is inevitable, though we can only hope that most infill attains the diversity prescribed in New Urbanism; concepts almost beyond the capabilities of Rightwing leadership.
The most misused word in the Country
Sprawl is the most misused word in the English language. People mislabel any suburban development as sprawl. If someone builds a subdivision it is automatically sprawl, without even considering any other factors. If the city has run sewer and water out to an undeveloped area because they anticipated that it would soon be subdivided, that is Smart Growth...planning facilities in advance of anticipated development, not sprawl. The "anti-growth" lobby will have you believe that anything that is not a traditional neighborhood in the City is sprawl. Any shopping center with a large parking lot is sprawl. Anything that does not fit their plan for how everyone else should love is sprawl. This is the type of thinking that is polluting the planning field. Face it; there are people who want to live on a 5-acre lot in the middle of a former cornfield because that is their American Dream. Believe it or not, not everyone wants to live on a ¼-acre lot with sidewalks and 10 foot spacing between homes. I personally prefer the traditional neighborhood feel, but in no means believe that is how everyone should live.
sprawl
We live in Durango, Colorado, where developable land is scarce. We have an enlightened developer with an excellent track record that hired Peter Calthorpe to plan an TND at the edge of town that has for almost 50 years been in our Comprehensive Plan as the last place to build density north of town. Utilities and roads have been upgraded by the town over the years to accomodate this development. Now that it is before the City Council, neighbors/nimbys are calling it sprawl. The local Serria Club chapter has even called it sprawl. It is not sprawl. What do you do when smart growth is attacked by nimbys calling it sprawl? Who has a definition specifing what is and what is not sprawl?
Sprawl Lobby
The Sprawl Lobby is strong indeed! It's called the American home-buyer. Show me a suburban subdivision of quarter-acre lots and I'll show you a hundred of homeowners who really want to live there. The fact that none of these homeowners has time to get involved in politics makes it look like the only sprawl supporters are businessmen, but that's hardly the case.
Calling it like it is
It is refreshing to see Joel Hirschhorn hit the nail right on the head. Our cities' newspapers depend on the ad revenues from car dealers and subdivision developers and therefore can't report the truth of what is going on in our country. Thank you, Joel!
Sprawl
Calling this lobby "pro-sprawl" is the same as calling Smart Growth lobbists "anti-growth." This article is just another finger pointing rant with no evidence to back it up. Only when we get past the us vs them mentality in the sprawl debate, will any usefeul programs emerge. Have you ever considered working with the so-called "sprawl lobby" to work on compromises? Probably not, because it is far easier to sit at your computer and rant about the evil land developers. The term Smart Growth should not mean that everyone has to live in a traditional neighborhood on a 40 x 120 lot. Smart growth is in effect, planned and managed growth. It should not mean no growth.