This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America

By Anthony Flint

The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006, 312 pp., hardcover $24.95.

At CNU’s conference in Providence in June there was a lot of talk about whether New Urbanism has reached the “tipping point” — the stage at which the country will see a rapid, widespread shift toward the kinds of communities that new urbanists and smart growth advocates want. Anthony Flint is sympathetic to this goal. He makes his home in South Boston, where urbanism is a way of life; he covered development and planning as a reporter for The Boston Globe; and most recently he served as “smart growth education director” for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

But this book is not principally about what Flint would like to see happen. It is mainly about what the nation is doing — both good and bad — on the development front. Though he recognizes that New Urbanism and smart growth have won attention and significant support, the fact that dominates his attention is that “most Americans are doing exactly the opposite of what the movement recommends.” He points out that “even during the years when smart growth picked up steam, we became more of a suburban nation” — a land of spread-out subdivisions, big-box stores, and thoroughfares too fearsome to cross on foot.

For This Land, Flint traveled widely and listened to leading figures and ordinary folks on all sides of America’s development and planning battles. The result is a vivid account of how smart growth made rapid progress several years ago but then began suffering setbacks. The experiences of Maryland, Oregon, and New Jersey — three states that not long ago were leaders in growth management — demonstrates, according to Flint, that “in any state where a new development policy was pushed, there has been blowback.”

The blowback may to some extent be a grassroots reaction, but if so, it’s a reaction stirred up by powerful economic interests. “Lobbyists for conventional homebuilders, strip mall and office park developers, and roadbuilders have had an obvious hand in getting growth management bills killed,” Flint reports. “Sprawl is bread and butter for these business interests.” A vocal contingent of commentators and researchers, often supported by foundations and think tanks, has emerged to do battle against smart growth proponents. Some of them make extreme charges. Wendell Cox, for example, once “wrote an article for the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank, arguing that the Communist Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was ‘the father of smart growth,’” Flint recounts. What Flint finds even more troubling than the flagrant redbaiting is that many such critics receive financial support — at arm’s length — from businesses and individuals that have powerful vested interests in conventional development, yet those financial ties are rarely if ever acknowledged in the critics’ opinion pieces and press interviews.

Sprawl Inc.
Flint labels the anti-smart-growth phalanx “Sprawl Inc.” He reveals that Heartland, for instance, “has received funding from the BP Amoco Foundation, General Motors Foundation, ExxonMobil Foundation, Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, American Highway Users Alliance, American Petroleum Institute, Chevron Corporation, and CITGO Petroleum Corporation.” If conventional development patterns appeal to corporations, the consequences are generally not so good for local governments. “For town hall, sprawl is a budget-buster,” Flint says, noting that low-density, dispersed development requires that roads, water lines, sewer pipes, firefighters, police, and school bus drivers extend across more territory, largely at public expense.

The book’s coverage of New Urbanism is uneven. Flint repeats the now-obsolete charge that New Urbanism mostly uses greenfield sites. (New Urban News has consistently found  during the past few years that there are as many projects on previously developed land or in infill locations as on virgin soil.) He caricatures traditionalists’ arguments against Modernism by suggesting that “the movement has blamed the decline of community in the United States on flat roofs and horizontal windows.” (Modernism’s frequent lack of human scale and its poor record in creating public spaces are surely much more important than whether roofs and windows are horizontal.) He says CNU filed “an unusual friend-of-the-court brief” in favor of property-rights advocates in Kelo v. New London. (Actually, John Norquist, the head of CNU, filed as an individual, not on behalf of the organization.)

Flint also engages in an annoying practice that’s common among journalists: that of tossing old criticisms into the latest article or book, regardless of whether the criticisms are true or false. He says, for example, that libertarians have worried about “how all those connected streets and sidewalks [in new urban developments] could give criminals easier access.” Certainly he must know that this particular libertarian critique is wrongheaded; new urbanist street and sidewalk networks, in conjunction with other elements such as porches and well-defined private outdoor spaces, have reduced crime, not aggravated it, as can be confirmed in many HOPE VI public housing redevelopments. Yet the book does not explore whether these charges hold water — nor are the readers given the information to judge for themselves.

Such flaws notwithstanding, This Land provides a panoramic and extraordinarily up-to-date account of the struggle over how America builds. Read it for a greater understanding of the obstacles the nation needs to overcome. There are moments of humor as well. Flint says San Francisco architect Dan Solomon remarked three years ago that CNU “reminded him of the Spruce Goose, the big transport plane that did manage to get airborne, but just barely and only briefly.” Fortunately it’s still flying, despite all the flak from naysayers paid for by Sprawl Inc.