Suburban sprawl, long seen as a local zoning matter, has emerged as a politically charged issue. The Sierra Club has mounted a major anti-sprawl drive hoping to create a grassroots movement that will catch the attention of politicians. Vice President Gore has expanded his environmental rhetoric to include "smart growth, " signaling that growth management is likely to be a major theme in his campaign for the presidency. But exactly what can be done to prevent further metropolitan dispersal is unclear.

Twenty years ago, a landmark report, "The Cost of Sprawl," first alerted the general public to the consequences of urban sprawl. During the intervening two decades the trends documented in that report by the Council on Environmental Quality have continued unchecked: housing tracts have pushed outward, moving ever deeper into agricultural areas; urban jobs have migrated in growing numbers to the suburbs, dependence on the automobile has become ever more pronounced, while the use of transit has continued to erode. Now, once again the alarm is being sounded about the dangers of continued metropolitan sprawl. Will the pleas for more orderly growth find any greater resonance today than the warnings issued a generation ago?

A rhetoric resonates with the voters because it responds to the suburbanites' growing unhappiness with mounting traffic congestion, the monotony of the suburban landscape, the disappearance of open spaces and the loss of environmentally sensitive areas. More than 100 measures aimed at limiting growth were on state and local ballots nationwide last November, including major land preservation initiatives in Florida and New Jersey (see companion Brief, The November Election Results). But how much impact are these actions likely to have? Can they modify existing patterns of development or effectively contain future urban growth? Interviews conducted by Innovation Briefs with a number of planning officials and real estate analysts across the country disclose a large measure of pessimism. Metropolitan dispersal, these experts are saying, may be largely beyond the power of public policies to influence. A powerful combination of population pressures, rising housing demand, advances in communication technology, fragmented regional governance and personal housing preferences have made continued outward expansion of our cities seemingly inevitable.

The Demographics of Housing Demand

A strong economy, falling interest rates and new mortgage lending policies have made home ownership attainable to an ever- growing proportion of the population. Mortgage interest rates, though not as low as in the 1950s, when they averaged a little more than 5% percent, are now around 6.75% and haven't been above 9% in three years. These low rates have coaxed many moderate-income buyers into the housing market, helping push home ownership rates to a record 66.8% in the last quarter of 1998. Fueling the housing demand is a new practice of low down-payment mortgage lending. Lenders, with the support of the federal government, community groups and the country's biggest mortgage buyers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (which buy more than half of the nation's mortgage loans), have lowered the bar on down payments to open up opportunities for low-income families traditionally left out of the housing market. About a third of the new mortgage loans to be made in 1998 will be extended to borrowers with down payments of less than 10% - many with as little as 3% down, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association of America. Partly as a result, immigrants, minorities and low-income families are buying homes like never before. They represented 42 percent of the four million people who bought a home for the first time from 1994 to 1997, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

The booming market for affordable housing has fueled development on the outer edges of metropolitan areas where land is still comparatively cheap and mass production of dwellings in large scale subdivisions helps to keep construction costs down. "Politicians who advocate wider access to housing opportunities and in the same breath condemn suburban sprawl are either deceiving themselves or the public " remarked one urban analyst in obvious reference to Vice President Gore's rhetoric. Sprawl is largely a creature of our housing policies. Just as government mortgage policy under the GI Bill of Rights encouraged the first wave of suburban migration in the 1950s, our liberal mortgage policies to promote home ownership equity contribute importantly to the current wave of suburban expansion.

The Waning Influence of Transit on Urban Development

Even if the political will to constrain growth were present, cities may find themselves lacking the practical means of making compact development work. Higher development densities would permit reduced automobile travel and greater use of public transit-an approach favored by many urban planners. But this would require huge public investment in additional transit facilities and services. In 1995 about 87 percent of all travel in the United States was by automobile, and only two percent was by public transit; transit usage was even smaller among suburban residents. Shifting even a small fraction of auto commuters to public transit would require massive expansion of transit facilities -- something that is hardly a realistic strategy in the current fiscal climate. Besides, expanding mass transit is not likely to remedy the problem. Buses or rail systems can operate efficiently only if at least one end of most journeys is concentrated in a few points of destination. But when both homes and jobs are widely scattered, transit cannot function effectively, even if there is a viable downtown, because most of the trips no longer go there.

What is more, transit's influence on land use and urban development patterns is weakening according to Genevieve Giuliano, professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Southern California, who recently testified at a special seminar on urban growth organized for Maryland Governor Paris Glendening's Transportation Solutions Group. Giuliano contends that the transportation systems in most U.S. metropolitan areas are already highly developed, and therefore the relative impact of new transportation facilities in terms of added accessibility will be minor. Even a large investment, such as a new rail line, will have only a modest incremental effect on regional accessibility. Moreover, even in rapidly growing metropolitan areas, the vast proportion of housing that will exist 10 or 20 years from now is already built. Incremental additions to the housing stock can only have a marginal effect on the shape of a metropolis. Thus, the so-called "transit villages" or transit-oriented development (TOD) that many urban planners advocate as a means of replacing low-density suburban development are at best a "five percent solution" Concludes Giuliano: transportation is no longer an effective tool for guiding metropolitan development.

The Information/Communication Revolution

Transportation is also of declining importance in location decisions of firms, according to Giuliano. Information-based firms have no incentive to locate in high-density places and these firms make up an increasingly large share of total economic activity.

What is more, the forces fueling decentralization seem to be growing stronger rather than weaker. Rapidly advancing technology, allowing people to communicate and access information cheaply and rapidly, will free individuals and businesses from the constraints of space. Flexible work arrangements and telecommuting will make distance between home and workplaces less important. Already, some 3 million employees of U.S. companies perform all or part of their work away from their offices, and the numbers of telecommuters are increasing rapidly.

The Lure of Suburban Living

Most individuals also have no incentive to locate in high density places. As successive generations of suburbanites have demonstrated, when people are given a choice they opt overwhelmingly for life in the suburbs, "where children can still ride their bicycles in the streets." Giuliano cites surveys conducted in Orange County, California showing that residents value open spaces and enjoy living far from the metropolitan core. The ease of commuting is no longer a major determinant of residential location. People are willing to give up proximity to jobs in return for the safety, privacy, tranquillity and amenities of the suburban environment. In a 1997 Fannie Mae location preference survey, 23% of respondents said they would prefer to live in a "suburb near a large city," 23% in a "small town not near a city," 22% in a "medium-size-to-small city" and 22% in rural areas. Only 9% of the respondents expressed a preference for living in a large city.

In sum, the forces driving metropolitan expansion may be too powerful to be effectively reined in and controlled by government in a democratic society.

Innovation Briefs are published by URBAN MOBILITY CORPORATION, C. Kenneth Orski, Editor; 1634 I Street NW · Suite 500 · Washington, DC 20006-4003 Tel: 202/338.9550· Fax: 202/338-9556; http://www.itsonline.com/innobriefs/

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Last modified: January 26, 1999