The Fast-Moving Fight To Stop Urban Sprawl

E: The Environmental Magazine, May, 2000 by Linda Baker

Sprawl happens.

Louden County, Virginia, the third-fastest-growing county in the country, could easily become the outward-most link in the Washington, D.C. "edge city" corridor. The commute to the nation's capitol is only an hour and a half, land is cheap, and 5,000-square-foot homes are invading the landscape with all the force of a flock of locusts, Over the next five years, 40,000 new houses are slated for development on county open space and farmland.

But last November, in an extraordinary mandate, Louden County activists decided it was time to call a halt to the congestion, pollution and destruction of greenspace threatening their way of life. A slate of eight anti-sprawl candidates challenged the incumbents on the County Board of Supervisors--and won.

"It was an astounding victory," says Joe Maio, director of Voters to Stop Sprawl, which endorsed all eight of the newly elected supervisors. "It was a complete repudiation of the way business is done around here."

Louden County's coup d'etat may be unique in the annals of local politics. But grassroots efforts to combat sprawl are anything but. In response to tremendous growth pressures, communities around the country are advocating for "smart growth": a controlled planning process that encourages sustainable development and preservation of open space and farmland. The results, as the Sierra Club's sprawl coordinator, Deron Lovaas, puts it, are "thrilling?

Consider, for example, that in 1999, voters passed more than 70 percent of 240 local ballot initiatives governing preservation of open space, creating more than $7.5 billion in funding for land conservation. A record 1,000 state land use reform bills were introduced in legislatures last year, and over 200 of those were enacted into law. And ever since Maryland joined 10 other states last year in adopting a much-publicized smart growth strategy,, several other states are considering comprehensive growth management plans or major land purchases to preserve open land. Colorado and Arizona are debating legislation requiring urban growth boundaries, as is Tennessee, the first state in the conservative south to pass a comprehensive growth management act.

Momentum is also building at the federal level. President Bill Clinton's 2000 budget includes a $1 billion Land Legacy Initiative, the largest one-year investment for land protection. The U.S. Senate Smart Growth Task Force is studying the role federal policies play in exacerbating sprawl; a similar task force has been organized in the House by Congressman Earl Blumenauer (D-OR). In January, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore launched their Livability Agenda, a series of initiatives to curb urban sprawl and promote quality of life.

"People are sick and tired of sprawl," says Lovaas. "The issue has become so hot so quickly that we are seeing solutions being considered and passed all over the country."

A Slow Awakening

The smart growth movement has become a force to contend with largely because it has enlisted the services of a broad coalition of supporters, from environmentalists to affordable housing advocates. Yet the obstacles they must overcome are equally formidable. For all the talk about urban growth boundaries, anti-growth measures and preservation of open space, the effort to get bills passed and enforced still confounds plenty of communities across the country. Urban planners wax poetic about downtown revitalization and high-density development, but proliferating "sprawl cities" show just how hard it will be to reverse dominant trends.

Consider, for example, the second chapter of the Louden County story. Virginia is one of the few remaining "Dillon states" in the country--local jurisdictions are subordinate to the powers of the state. Legislators in Richmond, Virginia's capitol, have yet to acknowledge municipal opposition to sprawl. Last year, five of the six smart growth bills never made it out of committee; the sixth was defeated on the floor.

Entrenched political attitudes at the state level have cast a shadow over the newly elected Louden County Board of Supervisors. Although county officials have issued policy statements and begun to revise the comprehensive plan, they cannot move forward without a directive from the state.

"Our next goal is to remove some of those people in Richmond from office" says Maio. "The governor keeps saying we have enough measures to control growth and the board of supervisors is going to test that"

Another kind of sprawl war is being fought over Newhall Ranch, the largest housing development ever approved by Los Angeles County. During the next 20 years, 21,600 units are to be built in an unincorporated area bordering Ventura County, a rural enclave that has generally been sympathetic to slow-growth measures. Explaining their support for the project, Los Angeles County Supervisors claimed single-family homes with private backyards were part of the American birthright in general and the culture of Los Angeles in particular.