Date: Fri 10-May-1996

Publication: Bee

Author: KAAREN

Quick Words:

Urban-sprawl-growth

Full Text:

GROWING PAINS

Preservationists Highlight

The Threat Of Urban Sprawl

B Y K AAREN V ALENTA

"Sprawl is like pornography - you know it when you see it," said Richard Moe,

president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, at a recent

meeting.

Laura Weir Clark, executive director of the organization's Connecticut

chapter, agreed but felt compelled to add, "You know it just as well when

you're not seeing it."

Speaking at the Connecticut Trust's workshop, "The Cost of Sprawl," held

recently in Fairfield, Ms Clark said the effects of sprawl have become so

pervasive and throughout the state's rural and urban landscapes, "that

nowadays we are more surprised and delighted when we encounter places

untouched by sprawl, places which have retained their distinctiveness, places

which have maintained their unique character."

Unfortunately, these special places are becoming rare, she said.

"We have witnessed the loss of open space and agricultural lands... We have

seen the contrasts between town and country blur... We have heard the heavy

equipment as more local roads are enlarged to carry still greater volumes of

congested traffic."

More problems than solutions were offered at the workshop, one of two planned

by the Connecticut Trust to address the cost of sprawl and the economics of

preservation. The second workshop will be held May 10 in Hartford.

But Nan Birdwhistell, first selectman of Woodbridge since 1991, said her

community recently overwhelmingly, "in a bi-partisan, inter-generational vote

at a town meeting," approved $1.5 million to be spent on open space as it

becomes available.

The money will be used to purchase land outright, buy development rights, and

buy easements for greenways.

"It's important to put the land into the control of a trust so that they town

can't change its mind later," she said.

Another speaker, Thomas Hylton, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for

editorials advocating the preservation of farmland and open space in

southwestern Pennsylvania, has just published a 10-state study of planning. He

said most states, including Connecticut, have not yet set goals for preserving

open space.

Mr Hylton used, as an example of sprawl, a 20-square mile "bedroom" community,

Cranberry Township, Penna., which has a population of 18,000 evenly spread out

over three- and four-acre residential lots. "That population could be

re-arranged into two towns - let's call them Swarthmore and Princeton - which

would take up only 15 percent of the land, leaving the rest for open space. If

the towns are anything like their namesakes, they would be wonderful, liveable

towns, too."

"Sprawl is like a click or two on the clock of history," he said. "Throughout

history man has lived in close, tightly knit urban areas."

It was, in fact, the automobile which changed the landscape of Connecticut,

Laura Weir Clark said.

"In 1907 the General Assembly approved a comprehensive trunk highway system,"

she said. "By 1950 Connecticut probably had the most extensive system in the

country: over 3,000 miles of paved highways in a state which covers only 5,000

square miles. Business and industry followed their customers and workers out

along the interstates, and by the mid-1970's, Connecticut was no longer just a

state with suburbs, but The Suburban State."

James Howard Kunstler, author of The Georgraphy of Nowhere, agreed.

"Now localities are being asked to bear the full cost of running an automobile

utopia," he said. "It is virtually against the law to build the kind of cities

we have historically had. The biggest impediment is zoning.

"Zoning was created to get industrial areas hidden," he explained. "Then after

World War II we decided to expand this to commercial development so we zoned

out `inhumane' conditions like living over stores. That is why shopping

centers are only one-story high" and why we aren't building communities in

which you can walk to work, walk to stores or walk to school."

According to the Regional Planning Association, Connecticut leads the nation

in shopping centers per capita and nearly trails the states in the nation in

the amount of open space per resident. RPA's studies also indicate that even

in the late 1980s and the early 1990s when Connecticut was losing jobs and

population, the state continued to develop in a deconcentrated or suburban

way.

"Once that happens, Home Depot replaces the local hardware store, said Yale

University professor Douglas Rae. "Brand identifications, like the McDonald's

Drive-Thru, are identical everywhere, wiping out the uniqueness of individual

communities."

The Connecticut Department of Agriculture has surveyed Connecticut and

declared that Connecticut land is still 60 percent "wooded."

"That's the good news," Laura Weir Clark said. "The bad news is that most of

those lands are owned in small parcels by people nearing retirement age. A lot

of prime rural land will go on the market in the next two decades as the

economy is rebuilding."

"If we don't have some clear and positive plans for the way we want to manage

growth, what will we have in 50 years? Nothing that will attract people to

Connecticut; nothing that will make our grandchildren want to stay."

Ms Clark pointed to the RPA's Third Regional Plan for the New York/New

Jersey/Connecticut metropolitan area called "A Region At Risk" which proposes

a three-pronged approach to making the region economically competitive in a

global economy. The RPA targets the economy, the environment and the lack of

equity within our diverse society. Those three E's - economy, environment and

equity - form the basis of the RPA's goal of improving the quality of life.

"The RPA economists, planners, political scientists and statisticians are

serious people and they are saying that improving the quality of life is at

the heart of our economic future," Ms Clark said. "We're not claiming that

quality of life is totally, 100 percent an issue of aesthetics, but if we

don't pay attention to the look and feel of our communities, to the scale, to

the noise, and to our enjoyment of our streets and downtowns and our public

spaces, we could lose what is at the heart of our financial future."