THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, January 1, 1997 TAG: 9701010005
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A17 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: GLENN ALLEN SCOTT
LENGTH: 80 lines
Live in an old city like Norfolk or Portsmouth, you pay a higher property tax than you would in a young city, such as Virginia Beach, Chesapeake or Suffolk.
Public schools are not crowded in the old cities, as they are in the young ones, but they are burdened with the daunting task of transforming the children of the poor into literate, numerate and tolerably well-behaved youngsters with a shot at becoming productive adults and good citizens.
Live in the young cities, you reap the benefits of open space, affordable housing on large lots and low property taxes. But school construction never quite catches up to the demand for more and more classrooms, so many of the young are taught in trailers.
Roadbuilding lags, too, so main roads and feeder roads alike clog at rush hour, penning many commuters in their driveways. There never seem to be enough lanes to comfortably accommodate the peak-traffic loads.
Crime rates are significantly higher in the old cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth than in the young ones of Virginia Beach, Chesapeake and Suffolk. The higher crime rates correlate with high population density, high rates of poverty and few jobs for unskilled and semi-skilled workers that pay enough to support families. Young cities' crime rates ease upward as more and more low-income families move from old cities.
These realities are obvious.
Not so obvious, apparently, is the reality that residents of young cities can no more have their cake and eat it too than anyone else.
Chesapeake, for example, with a population around 190,000, is among the fastest-growing U.S. cities. Increasing numbers of people have been settling in Chesapeake because of its pleasing, green environment. But the more who do, the more muddled the scene, the less pleasant the life.
The alarmed Chesapeake home owners who have set out to block higher-density residential and commercial development approved by City Council for 127 acres between Kempsville and Butts Station roads accurately foresee thickening road traffic and further strain on their city's schools, public-safety and other services and utilities. They hope to force City Council to reverse its rezoning vote.
Perhaps their protest will succeed. Perhaps it will balloon into a stronger controlled-growth movement than already exists in the city.
But the odds are slim. Few localities in the United States rigidly control growth. Portland, Ore., and Petaluma, Calif., are two. People must have places to live at prices they can afford to pay. If that means living a long way from the workplace, that's how it will be. The automobile confers mobility on whoever has access to one and enough money to keep it on the road. Rein in development? Why that's - un-American.
Phoenix now stretches across more land than Los Angeles, although the Arizona city contains but a third of the Southern California city's population. Suburban sprawl is the norm - much to the dismay of people who champion economical land use.
People such as Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, who said in a recent speech:
``Drive down any highway leading into any town in the country, and what do you see? Fast-food outlets, office parks and shopping malls rising out of vast barren plains of asphalt. Residential subdivisions spreading like inkblots, obliterating forests and farms in their relentless march across the landscape. Cars moving sluggishly down the broad ribbons of pavement or halting in frustrated clumps at chocked intersections or parked in glittering rows in front of every building.''
Moe correctly blames much of this phenomenon on misguided public policies. ``Government at every level,'' Moe said, ``is riddled with policies that mandate or encourage sprawl. Federal transportation policy is perhaps the biggest offender.''
On the local level: ``By prohibiting mixed uses and mandating inordinate amounts of parking and unreasonable setback requirements,'' said Moe, ``most current zoning laws make it impossible - even illegal - to create the sort of compact walkable environment that attracts us to older neighborhoods and historic commuinities all over the world. These codes are a major reason why 82 percent of all trips in the U.S. are taken by car.''
Do most us want it any other way? Not so as you could tell, even after a thousand days of crawl-crash-and-stop commutes. The protestors in Chesapeake buck a ceaseless headwind. MEMO: Mr. Scott is associate editor of the editorial page of The
Virginian-Pilot.