Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 28, 1994 TAG: 9409010034
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JESSICA MATHEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The qualities that make the state special - compact, walkable cities and towns, unspoiled countryside and a near absence of suburbs and strip development - were in imminent danger, it said, from the newest engine of sprawl: the huge discount superstore and the regional outlet mall.
It's happening all over the country, the trust says in a new report whose pictures and text capture the best and worst of our democracy. Ugly, homogenizing development - Wal-Marts, Kmarts and the rest - that makes everyplace look like no place and derives a good part of its profits from shifting its costs to others (especially local governments) is galloping across America.
Misguided zoning and transportation policies are enabling these stores to do to small cities and towns what shopping centers did to the larger cities before them: to suck the life out of downtowns, destroy farm and rural land on the outskirts and clog the roads with the congestion that inevitably accompanies total auto dependence.
St. Albans, Vt., is a typical example. A 150,000-square-foot store has been proposed for this town of 11,000. It would be plunked down two miles out of town (much too far to walk), on what is now farmland. If built true to form, the store would be a cheap, windowless box set amid a vast, tabletop flat, treeless expanse of concrete. Its 44 acres would cover an area as large as St. Albans's present downtown.
If successful, the superstore would generate 9,000 automobile trips daily and new strip development. Needed economic growth, yes, but much of its sales would come at the expense of locally owned stores, many of which would close, while most of the superstore's profits would go to its corporate headquarters elsewhere.
One-, two- and five-acre zoning doesn't preserve open land as originally intended. Instead, it produces a chopped-up countryside of parcels that are ``too big to mow and too small to plow.''
Rules that forbid mixing residential and commercial uses mean no one can walk to buy a carton of milk, much less to work, and that the number and miles of automobile trips will climb inexorably. In the '80s, the number of vehicle miles traveled in the United States grew four times faster than population.
As congestion worsens, the local government tries to fix it. But state transportation agencies will only help pay for roads built according to their standards - very wide, no sidewalks, no trees, as straight as possible. The standards dictate roads that are great for cars but bad for people and devastating for neighborhoods.
Few states have land-use planning laws. Without them, residential developers can build pretty much where they like, which means on the cheapest land farthest from downtowns. These sprawling suburbs are the most expensive of all types of development to service with water, sewer, schools and transport, which means higher property taxes for the whole jurisdiction. Because they are auto-dependent (nothing else works at such low densities), congestion and air pollution follow. With more and more people living farther and farther from downtown, commercial development concentrates on the suburban strips, and the stores on Main Street begin to close.
No one ever planned it this way, but the result of all this, says the trust, is: ``It is against the law in much of America to build tightly knit communities that people love - places they feature on Christmas cards ... [and] visit by the millions.''
Citizens are starting to fight back with some success. Among photographs that are painful to look at, the trust's report also describes how communities that didn't want mall sprawl organized to stop it. A handful of determined ordinary citizens is usually the key. In one case, they commissioned an independent economic analysis which showed that a store's claimed gain of 177 jobs and $7 million in taxes dwindled to a net of eight jobs and $34,000 when the loss of existing businesses was counted.
Other communities chose to accept a superstore, but on their own terms. Some insisted on a smaller store, more appropriate to their town's scale. Others forced developers to recycle an existing building, or even to put the superstore downtown, where walkers and transit riders could use it.
The most successful weapon is a commitment to revitalize downtown. One town found financing to restore and refurbish existing buildings, put in benches, lights and plantings, and even installed a ``snowmelt'' system of buried water-pipes heated by waste heat from its local power plant, so shoppers could stroll on clear, dry sidewalks.
Superstore-driven development means that smaller cities and towns across the country are quickly becoming miniature versions of Los Angeles, where 70 percent of the land area is devoted to the use of cars, or of Houston, which boasts 30 parking spaces per resident.
Instead, they can recognize the iron link between zoning policies, patterns of development and transportation, and choose to make the automobile serve the needs of people and community rather than vice versa. Superstore-driven sprawl has a big head start, but its further spread, says the National Trust, is not a forgone conclusion.
Jessica Mathews is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C.
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