The following is by Peter Calthorpe, Congress for a New Urbanism

A well-organized and well-funded campaign is underway to harm the American quality of life. Americans in general agree that urban sprawl is a problem. But a collection of sprawl apologists is doing everything it can to convince people that sprawl is not just harmless, but good.

The apologists' arguments often make sense at first blush. They say sprawl is the American Dream, and that any problems with it are easy to fix. There's plenty of land left in America, they say, and congestion would go away if we would just build more roads. Most of all, they claim that sprawling development patterns are the result of the free market responding to people's true desires.

If only things were so simple.

Sprawl matters. In February, the Pew Center for Civic Journalism polled Americans from coast to coast, asking what national, state and local issues mattered most to them. Among local issues, urban sprawl was the most important issue in the country, especially in Northern California and Colorado.

This distress with urban sprawl arises from a range of factors, from loss of open space and teenage alienation to traffic congestion and economic segregation - from a lack of affordable housing to a lost sense of community.

Americans are driving more miles every year and spending more time in congestion, leading to a declining quality of life. According to Harvard University political scientist Robert Putnam, the longer people spend in traffic, the less likely they are to be involved in their community and family. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that sprawling suburbs, in which it is difficult to walk or bicycle from place to place, are a cause of much of the nation's epidemic of obesity.

Atlanta is the ultimate case study of these problems. In this fast-growing city of endless sprawl, people drive more miles per capita than any other city in the U.S. They also spend the most hours in traffic. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently polled local residents and found that almost half didn't know anyone on their street.

Land, Land Everywhere The sprawl advocates point out that land in America is plentiful. Urban development only represent 5 percent of our country. Even if we were to preserve environmentally sensitive areas, there would be more than enough space for us to sprawl as we like.

But the reality is that more than 50 percent of our population is crowding into the coasts, on just 17 percent of the country's land mass. Knowing there is lots of land in Nevada doesn't relieve most citizens. They wonder, "Do we want to lose the open space and farmland in our region?" They have answered at the polls. In the past four years, there have been hundreds of ballot initiatives across the country to preserve open space. More than 80 percent have passed.

Conserving land does not have to be draconian. A recent regional plan for the Salt Lake City area showed that by responding to the existing market demand for rental housing, redeveloping underutilized areas and reducing the average single-family lot size by less than 10 percent, the total land area needed to accommodate the next one million people would drop from 420 square miles to 167. This doesn't require that everyone move into apartment towers, and it doesn't take social engineering. It is a combination of simple land conservation and free-market economics, providing smaller lots for those who want them.

Don't Mess with the Market Supporters of sprawl contend that everyone wants a detached home in the suburbs and that any form of growth management will frustrate this "natural" market. But the claim that people have voted with their dollars for sprawl is simplistic. In fact, the reverse is often true.

Today, many local government regulations constrain the market. For example, many communities try to maintain high property values by allowing only large-lot homes to be built. This effectively excludes many types of households, including singles, single parents, some empty nesters and the elderly - along with lower-income people.

Property rights advocates rarely decry constraints on this segment of the market. Somehow, social engineering that rewards middle-class families with kids, while punishing all others, is acceptable in their eyes.

In a free market, it would be possible to build housing options for everyone. The favored middle class family with kids represents, today, only 25 percent of new-home buyers.

One size no longer fits all. The 1990 census showed that only 11 percent of U.S. households are families with children and one wage earner. Some of the other 89 percent may want single-family homes, but many may want more housing choices than current zoning allows. To provide the full range of housing choices, we need to reduce government interference in the market. The inertia of our zoning regulations and banking policies constrains the options we have. The range of choices offered by the market has yet to catch up with economic and demographic changes.

Where choices are available - bungalows in walkable villages, town homes in real towns, lofts in vital urban neighborhoods or affordable housing just about anywhere - the housing market responds enthusiastically. If more towns would allow the development of compact communities that offer urban amenities and street life, we might find that the market actually supports more density and housing diversity, not less.

People fundamentally like small towns more than sprawl, and in many cases are moving back to older urban neighborhoods and even central cities. And they can't get enough of New Urbanism. New Urbanism is a style of development that arose in the early 1990s. It creates compact, walkable neighborhoods where people can live, work, play and learn. Where towns allow New Urbanism to be built, it sells faster and for a premium, compared to nearby conventional suburbs.

Recent studies by Market Perspectives and the Urban Land Institute that compared New Urbanist developments with standard subdivisions showed a minimum 15 percent premium for houses in New Urbanist communities. The projects were also selling faster than those in conventional subdivisions.

What if real mixed-use towns were available to live in or near? A study by American Lives showed that a "walkable town center" is second only to "open space" in new home buyer's desires. The market is changing but some marketing experts, constantly looking into their rear-view mirrors, don't recognize it.

Traffic: Are roads the answer? The apologists for sprawl contend that we could solve the traffic congestion problem by building more roads. But increasing numbers of people oppose this strategy, recognizing that it would only be a temporary fix. More roads lead inevitably to more auto-oriented development, which consumes more open space and leads to more congestion. A University of California, Berkeley, study showed that for every 10 percent increase in new freeway miles, a 9 percent increase in traffic would be generated within five years.

More importantly, we can no longer afford to keep building new freeways. It has been estimated that California needs to add approximately 720 new lane miles per year to keep up with its growing auto demands. The maximum ever built was 573 miles in 1967; current budgets only allow about 50 lane miles a year.

Roads are only one part of the cost. The Salt Lake study compared low-density development with more roads to a compact, transit-oriented regional future and found the former cost the new home buyer an average of $30,000 more for backbone infrastructure and services. The wealthy may be happy to pay these costs, but many may be priced out of living in the Salt Lake area if such a sprawl future materializes.

Why not let the users pay? Build toll lanes on existing highways, say the land-use libertarians (and, ironically, the Environmental Defense Fund). But this approach creates a very exclusive future; the next ring of sprawl will be accessible to the wealthy, who can speed down economically segregated highways while the working poor and young families without disposable income poke along in the slow lanes. Congestion solved for some, fewer choices for others.

The apologists for sprawl criticize transit as a solution to congestion. They argue that even doubling transit ridership (for example, from 2.5 percent of trips to 5 percent) is slight compensation for increased density. They're right: Transit alone will not solve the congestion problem. What they overlook is there are a range of alternatives that are interdependent with transit. In most of Europe, walking and biking are much more significant alternatives to auto use than transit. In Sweden, with a cold, wet climate, more than 50 percent of trips are made on foot or bike, with just 10 percent by transit and 37 percent by car. Increased transit use has a multiplier effect on walking, and vice versa.

Walking to the solution The key is building more walkable environments, which not only reduce the necessity of using cars for local trips but also support the use of transit for longer trips. Walkable neighborhoods coupled with good transit can have a large effect on Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT). In Portland, for example, there is a three-to-one variation in VMT per capita between its auto-oriented suburbs and walkable urban neighborhoods. In the Bay Area, it ranges from 8,000 VMT per household in San Francisco to 32,000 in Contra Costa County.

The real goal, of course, is improving people's mobility and access, not just reducing auto congestion. And this depends more on promoting different land-use patterns than building new roads. Pedestrian-oriented, mixed land-use patterns coupled with a range of transit alternatives (trains, buses, jitneys, car pools, etc.) can provide much-needed choices in environments now completely monopolized by cars. Simply put, locating everyday destinations closer to home or closer together may be a better strategy than building bigger roads to connect increasingly distant places.

The Cost of Containment The land-use reactionaries claim that regional open space preservation and urban growth boundaries (UGB) drive up home prices by limiting the supply of developable land. They claim that Portland's UGB has driven up home prices dramatically.

But the link between rising prices and the UGB is unclear. Portland's median home price is now $150,000, which is about average for major Western cities. And the doubling of housing costs that Portland experienced in the '90s was matched in Salt Lake and Denver - both regions without UGBs. Some would argue that the home price escalation in Portland is tied more to the region's phenomenal job growth than to a shortage of land.

Perhaps Portland's high-quality jobs, open space, walkable neighborhoods, convenient transit and successful downtown are making the region more desirable and, therefore, more expensive. Should we have a policy to ensure that a region maintains a low quality of life so home values do not rise? Isn't it a free market choice to pay a higher price for a single-family home in a region that provides a higher quality of life?

Property Rights - and Responsibilities Finally, property rights advocates argue against regional planning, or any planning for that matter. They say that people should have the right to develop their property as they please.

But what if one person's development decision adversely impacts another's property, or the neighborhood? What if certain choices require more public tax dollars (to pay for the infrastructure and services, for example) than others?

At the regional scale, it is public dollars that enable development on private property. Without highways, roads, sewers, water systems and public services, development is not viable. It is conservative and defensible to seek out and implement the most cost-effective set of public investments to support growth. This is the basis of the Smart Growth legislation in Maryland, which will not pay for development in areas where investments for infrastructure and services is deemed inefficient.

Study after study finds that sprawl is more expensive to build and maintain than more compact walkable neighborhoods. Certainly, we all have property rights, but not the right to use public dollars to enhance our development potential or the right to degrade the environment for others.

Expanding the Horizon The apologists for sprawl always seem to resort to oversimplifications to make their case: "Developed land in America only represents 5 percent of the country - there's plenty of room," "The alternative to sprawl is high-rise living," "Cars are flexible and transit is not" or "Sprawl is the people's choice or it wouldn't exist."

Comments like these sidestep the challenge of finding new patterns of development that expand people's choices. What if we could conserve accessible open space and provide a full range of housing options? What if we could expand the flexibility of the car by adding the flexibility to walk, bike or use transit? What if we could define a new metropolitan form, one that was not black or white, car or train, high-density or low-, suburban or urban? What if we could move beyond rhetorical extremes and set to work designing complex, multifaceted communities that fit the post-industrial society we are becoming?

New Urbanism assumes that the future is not necessarily a linear extension of the past, that yesterday's market is not necessarily tomorrow's. The American Dream is changing. The issue is not density but design - the quality of place, its scale, mix and connections. The alternative to sprawl is not a forced march back to tenements but a range of unique places with various densities and in various locations - more choices for a diverse society.

- - - - -Peter Calthorpe is principal of Calthorpe Associates, which includes urban designers, planners and architects, in Berkeley, California. He is a founder of the Congress for a New Urbanism.

-- Common Sense (1@hotmail.com), September 27, 2000

Answers

Now this is a masterpiece which I will quote often, especially the fact about $150,000 median home price for "major" western cities.

Hoo boy!!

-- Doug (dgoar14@hotmail.com), September 28, 2000.

to Common Sense: I want to comment on some of what you posted. I have no objection to New Urbanists developing property as they see fit, and, I suppose different communities will vary in their zoning laws.

Your post includes the following: "Why not let the users pay? Build toll lanes on existing highways, say the land-use libertarians (and, ironically, the Environmental Defense Fund). But this approach creates a very exclusive future; the next ring of sprawl will be accessible to the wealthy, who can speed down economically segregated highways while the working poor and young families without disposable income poke along in the slow lanes. Congestion solved for some, fewer choices for others."

This is a blatant exaggeration. In fact, creating NEW road capacity and charging people a VOLUNTARY FEE to use it will give people MORE choices than they have now, not "fewer choices", as the author claims. Furthermore, the working poor will have more access to jobs and centers of learning, with merely having to pay a few dollars a day more in transit costs. Furthermore, the working poor will now have a financial incentive to carpool, since carpooling will speed (via the tolled highways) them to their final destination. So, the author is not credible, since he has no evidence to back up his claim. Let's try the concept out before we pass judgment.

You also post: "In most of Europe, walking and biking are much more significant alternatives to auto use than transit. In Sweden, with a cold, wet climate, more than 50 percent of trips are made on foot or bike, with just 10 percent by transit and 37 percent by car. Increased transit use has a multiplier effect on walking, and vice versa."

It's not fair to compare America with Europe. There, they have a much higher gasoline tax, so, of course, using a car is less desirable. Furthermore, European countries tax the hell out of purchases, so BUYING a car is incredibly daunting. Finally, America has a different social climate than Europe. Our fear of crime is probably much higher than in Sweden. Yeah, if people were pretty sure they would not be beaten and robbed while waiting for a bus, and, they had a high probability of sitting next to a Swedish bombshell, sure, they'd ride the bus more often. In fact, the bus stops would be mobbed by people, looking forward to sit next a "blonde-haired, blue-eyed goddess".

You also post: "The real goal, of course, is improving people's mobility and access, not just reducing auto congestion. And this depends more on promoting different land-use patterns than building new roads. Pedestrian-oriented, mixed land-use patterns coupled with a range of transit alternatives (trains, buses, jitneys, car pools, etc.) can provide much-needed choices in environments now completely monopolized by cars. Simply put, locating everyday destinations closer to home or closer together may be a better strategy than building bigger roads to connect increasingly distant places."

I have no objection to this, as long as it is done in a non-coercive manner, or at least voter approval is sought. For now, as long as the high paying jobs are in King County, and the affordable housing is somewhere else, we need to COST-EFFECTIVELY INCREASE MOBILITY without raising COERCIVE fees or taxes. The only way to do that is to create uncongested, safe, reliable capacity and charge people a fee to use it. The fee should be commensurate with the cost of the capacity. If the fee does not cover the true cost, then COERCIVE fees and taxes are only acceptable if the people being FORCED to pay the taxes/fees actually approve of it via an election.

You also post: "But the link between rising prices and the UGB is unclear. Portland's median home price is now $150,000, which is about average for major Western cities. And the doubling of housing costs that Portland experienced in the '90s was matched in Salt Lake and Denver - both regions without UGBs. Some would argue that the home price escalation in Portland is tied more to the region's phenomenal job growth than to a shortage of land."

Prices are determined by supply and demand. If the supply is limited, then this is ONE factor in contributing to higher prices. But, in general, older neighborhoods have very little available land for new development, anyway. And, if the older neighborhoods are closer to the better jobs and better educational facilities, then the home values are going to increase, with or without Urban Growth Management. A strong economy will also significantly increase the demand for housing, and, because existing neighborhoods have less available land, the result will be higher home prices. Are you recommending that we screw up the economy, so home prices fall? So, comparing housing prices in one community to another is meaningless. There are too many factors, and the strong economy means higher home prices in regions (e.g., Pacific Northwest; Colorado, Salt Lake City) where people actually WANT to live.

I agree with the author's objectives of creating livable communities. But, the free market is capable of doing this. As we inexorably march on to more and more privatization of the transportation infrastructure, the market place will adapt to the needs and affordability of the people. Let freedom reign.

-- Matthew M. Warren (mattinsky@msn.com), September 28, 2000.

The New Urbanist movement is wrong headed and losing support even here in the Socialist Republic of Seattle. p oll results.

Its prime effect seems to be pushing the poor out of the cities through gentrification and raising of property values (and taxes). Portland is finding out the same thing. I'll trust to the market to appropriately value the suburbs compared to the downtown areas. You distort that valuation with Urban Growth Boundaries at your peril. Even Berkeley, Calthorpe's back yard, has recently given up on rent control and other interferences with the market. It only took them 35 years to realize that it did more harm than good. Hopefully, the public will force the elimination of urban growth boundaries sooner than that.

-- Mark Stilson (mark842@hotmail.com), October 01, 2000.

Whoops, will try that again without the typo:

p oll results.

-- (mark842@hotmail.com), October 01, 2000.

The poll only talks about growth management options, but not about growth management itself. Just because the presented options were not be acceptable by individuals who voted in the poll, does not mean that growth management itself is not desired by society.

Growth management is an expression of society's values for the environment in which we live. These social values may conflict with the values we may have as individuals. Any rule imposed to control growth limits potential land development and housing availability. This limitation coupled with a constant or increasing demand will naturally raise the cost of housing in all areas, both urban and rural.

We may not like growth management and its impact on us individually. As a society, we know that it is necessary.

-- Gene (Gene@gene.com), October 02, 2000.

YO WILL NEVER GET US TO RIDE A BUS OR TRAIN I WILL ALWAYS USE MY CAR AND I DON'T WANT TO CARPOOL EITHER. I WANT MY TAX DOLLARS TO GO TO ROADS WIDER AND MORE OF THEM

-- roy (nannoookcs@cs.com), October 02, 2000.

to Roy: You write:"I WANT MY TAX DOLLARS TO GO TO ROADS WIDER AND MORE OF THEM."

I'm surprised to hear you support the construction of HOV lanes. But, then, that's what I-745 is all about, isn't it? A vote for I-745 is a vote for ferries and HOV lanes. Pretty ironic, don't you think?

How about a better solution, whereby you pay no taxes? Let the government build a parallel network of roads and charge people a fee to use it. Then, people would have a choice - sit in traffic or; travel on uncongested roadways. Over time, as demand increases, the cost of using the uncongested roadway would increase. Hence, your taxes would decrease, as the revenues from the toll roads increase.

-- Matthew M. Warren (mattinsky@msn.com), October 03, 2000.