Speak Out
(Rants & raves on topics of interest)

Sprawl: Are the Suburbs Consuming the Country?
byBarbara McCuen

The good news is that more Americans own their home than ever before. The bad news, many argue, is that many of those homes are located in large new suburban developments - the result of sprawl. As people live farther and farther away from urban centers and older suburbs, environmentalists say more problems are created - previously undeveloped land is gobbled up by developers for housing tracts and shopping centers, and residents of these new suburbs must drive longer distances to both go to work and to run errands.

Sprawl is on politicians' minds. Vice President Al Gore has railed against "ill-thought-out sprawl hastily developed around our nation's cities (that) has turned what used to be friendly, easy suburbs into lonely cul-de-sacs, so distant from the city center that if a family wants to buy an affordable house they have to drive so far that a parent gets home too late to read a bedtime story." Sprawl is also a growing concern among voters. In a recent survey on residents' biggest concerns about their communities, sprawl and traffic edged out more traditions issues, like crime, as the primary concern.

Some communities are adopting "smart growth" policies, which regulate the development of open spaces to ensure land isn't completely consumed by housing tracts and strip malls and create land-use policies to preserve farmland. But critics of smart growth say it is unfair to restrict land use and that people have a right to build and develop land where they can afford to do it.

On One Hand...

The thirst for more houses farther and farther away from established urban centers poses a grave threat to the environment and our quality of life. Greedy developers consume acres upon acres of open space and jam in as many cookie-cutter houses or "big box" stores like Wal-Mart as possible. The result is less open space, including farmland, the destruction of older communities, and more traffic congestion. Large discount stores force smaller businesses to close up shop - the corner hardware store cannot compete with Home Depot's massive purchasing power and lower prices.

On the Other Hand...

Sprawl is about the right to choose where we want to live. And as home prices in major metropolitan areas such as Boston and San Francisco soar, living farther away from the city and older suburbs is the only choice for many families. People move to the suburbs to get more bang for their housing buck, send their kids to better schools, and to live in safer areas. It is unfair to characterize all developments as soulless tracts of house after house. Housing developments work hard to build a sense community and many succeed.

• Two-thirds of all urban Americans live in low-density suburbs.
• More than 80 percent of all urban travel in the United States is by car.
• The amount of land used for all urban and suburban purposes is less than 5 percent of the total land area in the continental United States
• According to figures from the U.S. Geological Survey, the amount of land in the continental U.S. developed each year is .0006 percent.

U.S. Geological Survey, Sierra Club, Sprawl Busters, National Center for Public Policy Research