[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 32 (Tuesday, March 2, 1999)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E318-E319]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                        THE SPRAWLING OF AMERICA

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. EARL BLUMENAUER

                               of oregon

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, March 2, 1999

  Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Speaker, people from across the nation are 
talking about ways they can make their communities more livable. 
Improving livability means better schools, safer neighborhoods, 
affordable housing and more choices in transportation. Improving 
livability also means preserving what makes each community unique, be 
it the farmlands in Oregon or the desert in Arizona. It is my pleasure 
to share with my colleagues the comments of Richard Moe, the president 
of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, on this important and 
timely topic.

The Sprawling of America: Federal Policy Is Part of the Problem; Can It 
                        Be Part of the Solution?

  (An address by Richard Moe, president, National Trust for Historic 
 Preservation at the National Press Club in Washington, DC on January 
                               22, 1999)

       America today is engaged in a great national debate. It's a 
     debate about sprawl. The central question in the debate is 
     this: Will we continue to allow haphazard growth to consume 
     more countryside in ways that drain the vitality out of our 
     cities while eroding the quality of life virtually 
     everywhere? Or will we choose instead to use our land more 
     sensibly and to revitalize our older neighborhoods and 
     downtowns, thereby enhancing the quality of life for 
     everyone?
       The debate touches every aspect of our lives--the quality 
     of the natural and built environments, how we feel about the 
     places where we live and work and play, how much time we have 
     for our family and civil life, how rooted we are in our 
     communities. I believe that this debate will frame one of the 
     most important political issues of the first decade of the 
     21st century. Ultimately, its outcome will determine whether 
     the American dream will become a reality for future 
     generations.
       The National Trust for Historic Preservation, which I am 
     privileged to serve, works to revitalize America's 
     communities by preserving our heritage--the buildings, 
     neighborhoods, downtowns and landscapes that link us with our 
     past and define us as Americans. Our mission is summed up in 
     a short phrase: ``Protecting the Irreplaceable.'' Sprawl 
     destroys the irreplaceable, which is why the National Trust 
     is concerned about sprawl--and why I want to address the 
     subject today.
       Preservation is in the business of saving special places 
     and the quality of life they support, and sprawl destroys 
     both. It devours historic landscapes. It makes the strip 
     malls and subdivisions on the edge of Washington look like 
     those on the edge of Albuquerque or Birmingham or any other 
     American city. It drains the life out of older communities, 
     stops their economic pulse and often puts them in intensive 
     care--or sometimes even the morgue.
       Sprawl reminds me of Justice Stewart's remark about 
     pornography: It's hard to define, but you know it when you 
     see it. In simple terms, sprawl is the poorly planned, low-
     density, auto-oriented development that spreads out from the 
     edges of communities. But it is best defined by the way it 
     affects us in our daily lives.
       Winston Churchill said, ``We shape our buildings, and then 
     our buildings shape us.'' The same holds true for 
     communities: The way we shape them has a huge impact on the 
     way we feel, the way we interact with one another, the way we 
     live. By harming our communities, sprawl touches us all--and 
     one way or another, we all pay for it.
       We pay in open space and farmland lost. Since 1950, the 
     State of Pennsylvania has lost more than 4 million acres of 
     farmland; that's an area larger than Connecticut and Rhode 
     Island combined. Metropolitan Phoenix now covers an area the 
     size of Delaware. It's estimated that over the next 45 years, 
     sprawl in the Central Valley of California will affect more 
     than 3.6 million acres of America's most productive farmland.
       We pay in time lost. A study last year reported that each 
     of us here in Washington spends about 59 hours a year--the 
     equivalent of a week and a half of work--stuck in traffic. 
     The price tag for time and fuel wasted is roughly $860 
     annually for every man, woman and child in the Washington 
     area. In Los Angeles, the average speed on the freeway is 
     expected to drop to 11 miles per hour by 2010. A new term 
     ``road rage'' has been coined to describe drivers' 
     frustration over traffic.
       We pay in higher taxes. Over the decades, we've handed over 
     our tax dollars to pay for infrastructure and services--
     things like police and fire protection, water and sewer 
     lines, schools and streetlights--in our communities. Now 
     we're being asked to pay higher taxes to duplicate those 
     services in sprawling new developments, while the 
     infrastructure we've already paid for lies abandoned or 
     underused in our older city center and suburbs. Even worse, 
     local governments use our tax dollars to offer incentives and 
     write-offs to sprawl developers--in effect, rewarding them 
     for consuming our landscape and weakening our older 
     communities.
       Finally, we pay in the steady erosion of our quality of 
     life. Inner cities have become enclaves of poverty. Long, 
     frustrating commutes leave us less time with our families. 
     Tranquil neighborhoods are destroyed by road-widening. 
     Historic landmarks get demolished and carted off to the 
     landfill. Everyplace winds up looking more and more like 
     Noplace. These signs point to an inescapable fact: Sprawl and 
     its byproducts represent the number-one threat to community 
     livability in America today. And in a competitive global 
     marketplace, livability is the factor that will determine 
     which communities thrive and which ones wither. Nobel Prize-
     winning economist Robert Solow puts it this way: ``Livability 
     is not some middle-class luxury. It is an economic 
     imperative.''
       Sprawl is finally getting the attention it deserves. It was 
     the subject of major initiatives announced by the President 
     and the Vice President in recent back-to-back speeches. 
     Bipartisan caucuses focusing on smart growth and community 
     livability have been formed in both the House and Senate. 
     Governors across the political spectrum have announced 
     programs to control sprawl and encourage smart growth. The 
     Urban Land Institute, the American Institute of Architects, 
     the National Governors Association, and foundations and 
     nonprofit organizations of every stripe hold seminars and 
     workshops on sprawl. Last November, voters from Cape Cod to 
     California overwhelmingly approved some 200 ballot 
     initiatives related to growth management and urban 
     revitalization.
       All this attention is welcome. Sprawl is a national 
     problem, and it needs a national debate. But the debate 
     shouldn't focus on finding a national solution, because there 
     isn't one. There are two essential elements in any effective 
     program to combat sprawl: sensible land-use planning and the 
     revitalization of existing communities. These are issues 
     traditionally and best handled at the state and local 
     levels--and that, in the end, is where the fight against 
     sprawl will be won or lost. But--and here's the main point I 
     want to make today--the federal government also has a crucial 
     role to play in the process.
       There are obviously many factors such as crime, drugs and 
     bad schools and public services that have helped propel the 
     exodus of people and jobs from our central cities, but that 
     exodus has been greatly facilitated--even accelerated--by the 
     effects of federal policies. Sometimes these effects have 
     been intended and sometimes they have been inadvertent, but 
     in most cases they have been profound. Because the federal 
     government has contributed so heavily to the problem, it has 
     a clear duty to help find solutions.
       It can--and should--do so in four ways:
       First, it should correct policies that encourage or reward 
     sprawl.
       Sprawl-friendly policies and practices exist in almost 
     every federal agency. I'll mention only a few examples.
       Nearly 17 million people work directly or indirectly for 
     the federal government. With a workforce that size, decisions 
     about where the government locates its offices can have a 
     huge impact on a community's economic health. A 1996 
     Executive Order directs federal agencies to give first 
     consideration to locating their facilities in downtown 
     historic districts instead of out on the suburban fringe--but 
     two years after it was issued, compliance is spotty. Right 
     now, for example, in the small, economically-depressed town 
     of Glasgow, Montana, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is 
     putting its county office in a new building that will be 
     constructed in pastureland on the edge of town. A suitable 
     downtown building was available, but USDA rejected it because 
     the parking lot is a block away instead of right next door.
       Relocating post offices to suburban sites can also deal a 
     body blow to a small-town Main Street--and put historic 
     buildings at risk as well. Because post offices serve an 
     important role in the social and business life of many towns, 
     the U.S. Postal Service needs to give communities more say in 
     where these essential facilities are to be located.
       The federal tax code, in all its complexity, is heavily 
     tilted toward new development and the consumption of open 
     space. It needs to put at least as much emphasis on promoting 
     opportunities for revitalization and stabilization of older 
     communities. It needs to provide incentives--which are 
     currently lacking--for middle-class and moderate-income 
     households to become urban homeowners.
       Federal water and sewer grants were originally intended as 
     a means of providing clean water and safe waste-treatment 
     facilities in rural areas. In practice, however, the ready 
     availability of this funding virtually invites development 
     further and further into countryside.
       The list goes on and on, but the biggest offender of all is 
     federal transportation policy, which can be summed up in a 
     short phrase: ``feed the car, starve the alternative.'' As 
     Jessica Mathews wrote a while ago in the Washington Post, 
     ``Americans are not irrationally car-crazed. We seem wedded 
     to the automobile because policy after . . . policy . . . 
     encourages us to be.'' Transportation officials generally try 
     to ``solve'' problems by building more roads--an approach 
     which is often like trying to cure obesity by loosening your 
     belt.
       People need transportation choices and communities need 
     balanced transportation

[[Page E319]]

     systems. Federal policy hasn't done a good job of offering 
     them--but that may be changing. The Transportation Equity Act 
     for the 21st Century, or TEA-21, enacted last year, 
     encourages planning that looks beyond irrelevant political 
     boundaries and allows for greater citizen and local 
     government participation in making transportation investment 
     decisions. That's welcome news, certainly, but TEA-21 is a 
     promissory note that will be redeemed only through hard work 
     at the state and local levels. It offers a great opportunity 
     for the federal Department of Transportation to take a 
     leadership role in urging the states to take full advantage 
     of this landmark legislation.
       Within the next few months, the General Accounting Office 
     will release its study on the extent to which federal 
     policies encourage sprawl, and I hope the report will prompt 
     a serious examination of these policies.
       Second, the federal government should reward states and 
     communities that promote smart growth and help revitalize 
     existing communities.
       Being anti-sprawl is not being anti-growth. The question is 
     not whether our communities should grow, but rather how they 
     will grow. More and more people--private citizens and public 
     officials alike--are realizing that the answer to that 
     question lies in sensible land-use planning.
       Three states have recently launched different efforts to 
     manage sprawl. Last May, Tennessee passed a law that requires 
     counties and municipalities to adopt ``growth plans'' which, 
     among other things, set firm boundaries for new development 
     and public services. Closer to home, Governor Glendening's 
     Smart Growth initiative in Maryland is one of the most 
     innovative--and potentially one of the most significant--in 
     the country. Under Governor Whitman's leadership, residents 
     of New Jersey have approved up to $98 million in tax revenue 
     annually for conservation and historic preservation; over 10 
     years this measure will protect a million acres of land--a 
     marvelous gift to future generations.
       We should encourage efforts like these in other states. I 
     suggest that we design a federal ``smart growth scorecard''--
     a system that favors sensible, sustainable growth and 
     evaluates the effectiveness with which states and communities 
     meet that test. States that amend their building codes to 
     make them more ``rehab-friendly'' or that remove their 
     constitutional ban against the use of state gas tax revenues 
     for mass transit projects, for example, are taking positive 
     steps to fight sprawl and restore communities. They ought to 
     be rewarded. The federal scorecard would give states credit 
     for initiatives such as these and would give smart-growth 
     projects an edge in the competition for federal funds.
       Third, the federal government should promote regional 
     cooperation as a key to effective control of sprawl.
       Metropolitan areas now contain close to 80% of the total 
     U.S. population. Half the people in this country now live in 
     just 39 metropolitan areas. But governmental structures in no 
     way reflect this reality.
       Urban decline and sprawl are practically guaranteed 
     wherever there is a balkanized system of local jurisdictions. 
     There's a perfect example right here in Washington, where our 
     metropolitan area is a patchwork quilt comprising two states, 
     the District of Columbia, a dozen counties and a score of 
     municipalities--each with its own budget, each following its 
     own agenda.
       When it comes to sprawl, city limits and county lines are 
     often meaningless marks on a map. Limited jurisdiction makes 
     it hard for local government to deal with an issue of this 
     magnitude, and efforts to control sprawl in a limited area 
     often just shift the problem from one community to another. 
     It's like trying to stop a flood with a picket fence.
       States need to encourage local governments in the same 
     region to better coordinate their land-use and transportation 
     plans, and the federal government can help a great deal by 
     simply providing basic information that regions need. Much of 
     this information--dealing with things such as the geographic 
     mismatch between workers and jobs and the extent of 
     outmigration from cities to suburbs--already exists, but it 
     is difficult and expensive for localities to obtain. That's a 
     fairly easy problem to fix, and the federal government ought 
     to do it.
       While regionalism by itself does not curb sprawl, it can 
     moderate one of the engines of sprawl: the costly bidding 
     wars between neighboring jurisdictions for sprawl-type 
     development that holds out the hope for new tax revenues. 
     Admittedly, the performance of some regional governments has 
     been lackluster, but in other areas--Portland, Oregon, for 
     examples--regionalism is making a difference in addressing 
     the problems of sprawl and poorly managed growth. Encouraging 
     and assisting similar efforts all over the country should be 
     a cornerstone of federal policy.
       Happily, the current Administration is taking an important 
     step in that direction. The ``Livability Agenda'' recently 
     announced by Vice President Gore proposes a major initiative 
     to reduce barriers to regional governance and to fund local 
     partnerships that pursue smart-growth strategies across 
     jurisdictional lines. This will be the first flexible source 
     of funding provided by the federal government to promote 
     smarter metropolitan growth. It's a very welcome initiative.
       Controlling sprawl is only half the battle, which brings me 
     to the fourth thing the federal government should do: provide 
     incentives for reinvestment in existing communities.
       Discussions about the plight of the cities often overlook a 
     simple fact: When people leave the city it's not necessarily 
     because they love sprawl or hate urban life, but because 
     leaving is the rational thing to do. More than anything else, 
     urban flight is an indictment of bad schools, crime and poor 
     public services. As if this ``push'' weren't enough, people 
     are ``pulled'' out of the city by policies and practices that 
     make homes and infrastructure in the suburbs less expensive 
     and easier to build.
       In place of this ``push-pull'' combination, we need public 
     policy that favors existing communities. Fifty years ago the 
     government began to offer economic inducements to families 
     that wanted to flee to the suburbs; it's time to offer those 
     same kinds of inducements to entice middle-class residents to 
     return to, or stay in, the city.
       It all comes down to choosing where to make investments. If 
     the federal government chooses to pour funding into more 
     outer beltways and more suburban infrastructure, sprawl will 
     continue to spread like an epidemic. But if the government 
     makes a commitment to existing communities, it can have an 
     enormous, positive impact on the critical need to keep people 
     in urban neighborhoods and give others a reason to move back 
     to the city.
       This is the missing piece of the administration's 
     Livability Agenda, which includes a heavy focus on the 
     preservation of open space. There's no question that we need 
     to speed up our efforts to protect open space and farmland 
     through land trusts, easements, the purchase of development 
     rights and other means. Saving greenspace is a very good 
     thing, but it's not enough by itself. We could buy all the 
     open land in the country and still not solve the problem of 
     sprawl. We also need to focus energies and resources on 
     reclaiming the streets and neighborhoods where people live--
     the towns, inner cities and older suburbs that we've 
     neglected so badly for the past half-century. We must develop 
     housing policies and programs that advance the goal of 
     economic integration of our communities and lessen the 
     concentration of poor households in inner-city areas. We must 
     attract middle-income families back to the towns and cities, 
     and we must improve the quality of housing for lower-income 
     people.
       One way to do this is by enacting the Historic 
     Homeownership Assistance Act. This legislation, which has 
     broad bipartisan support in both houses of Congress, would 
     extend federal tax credits to homeowners who renovate their 
     historic homes, giving residents of older neighborhoods 
     incentives to stay and invest in their community's future, 
     and providing an incentive for others to move back into the 
     city. By offering a way to put deteriorated property back on 
     the tax rolls while making homeownership more affordable for 
     lower-income residents, this law could greatly benefit 
     communities all over the country. Obviously, this one act 
     won't solve America's urban problems--but it can help, and a 
     step in the right direction is better than standing still.
       In fighting sprawl, we're dealing with an issue that 
     undermines many of the national goals and values that we've 
     embraced over the years. The provision of affordable housing, 
     improved mobility, a clean environment, the transition from 
     welfare to work, the livability and economic health of our 
     communities--all of these are undermined by sprawl. In fact, 
     there is scarcely a single national problem that is not 
     exacerbated by sprawl or that would not be alleviated if 
     sprawl were better contained.
       We can continue turning much of our nation into a tragic 
     patchwork of ruined cities and spoiled countryside, or we can 
     insist on sensible federal policies that strengthen 
     communities instead of scattering them randomly across the 
     landscape.
       We can keep on accepting the kind of communities we get, or 
     we can summon the national will to demand the kind of 
     communities we want and need and deserve.
       The choice is ours, and the time to make that choice is 
     now.

     

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