Planning in The Age of Sprawl - Hamilton County, Ohio

PlanninginTheAge of Sprawl:
Conflicting Viewson Suburbanization
COMMUNITY COMPASS SPECIAL RESEARCH REPORT NO. 3-2
Hamilton County, Ohio
September 1999

ABSTRACT
Title:
Planning in the Age of Sprawl:
Conflicting Views on Suburbanization.
(Working Paper)
Community COMPASS
Research Report No. 99-001
Subject:
Conflicting views on
suburbanization and sprawl.
Date: September 1999
The Planning Partnership is the long-range
collaborative planning and coordinating committee of
the HCRPC. Its mission is to bring together public,
private and civic sector organizations engaged in
community planning in Hamilton County so that
mutual goals related to physical, economic and social
issues can be planned for comprehensively and
achieved collaboratively.
Community COMPASS is the Comprehensive
Master Plan and Strategies for Hamilton County,
Ohio. It is a major initiative of the Planning
Partnership.
RPC Staff
Ron Miller, AICP, Executive Director
Mark Abell
Karen Ambrosius
Caroline Andrews Statkus, AICP
Jim Bowen
Bob Eaton
Tim Horsley, Ph.D.
Steve Johns, AICP
Lorraine Jordan
Todd Kinskey, AICP
Catalina Landivar-Simon, AICP
Teresa Lawson
Christine Nolan
Lance Schultz, AICP
Steve Sievers, AICP
Paul Smiley
Jay Springer
Project Team
Ron Miller, AICP, Author
Paul Smiley & Jay Springer, Cover Art
Lorraine Jordan & Paul Smiley, GIS Maps
Source of
Copies:
Synopsis:
Notes:
Hamilton County
Regional Planning Commission
Room 807
County Administration Building
138 East Court Street
Cincinnati, OH 45202
513-946-4500 (Phone)
513-946-4475 (Fax)
info@rpc.hamilton-co.org
www.hamilton-co.org/hcrpc
This report presents a summary of
divergent views on suburbanization
and sprawl as well as a scan of the
range of opinions regarding what
should be done. The unique influence
of rugged topography on growth
patterns and sprawl are identified to
facilitate community discussion of
important local issues related to
obscured consequences of sprawl in
Hamilton County’s hillside
environment.
The report is part of a series of
research reports providing technical
information to support Community
COMPASS (Comprehensive Master
Plan and Strategies for Hamilton
County, Ohio).
The content of this paper does not
necessarily reflect the official views or
policies of the Hamilton County
Regional Planning Commission.
About the Cover:
The three Hamilton County maps
show the development pattern of
residential dwellings constructed on
or before 1930, 1960 and 1998
respectively.

PLANNING IN THE AGE OF SPRAWL
CONFLICTING VIEWS ON SUBURBANIZATION
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 1
ABOUT THIS REPORT 1
A RANGE OF DEFINITIONS 2
A RANGE OF SUBURBAN VIEWS 3
A RANGE OF CONSEQUENCES 6
A RANGE OF CAUSES 7
A RANGE OF ADVICE 9
HAMILTON COUNTY’S SPATIAL FRAMEWORK 11
Notes 13
Bibliography 14
“We are using land planning strategies which are
40 years old and no longer relevant or affordable
to today’s culture. We are still building World
War II suburbs as if families were large and had
only one breadwinner, as if jobs were all
downtown, as if land and energy were endless and
as if another lane on the freeway would end traffic
congestion. It is time to overhaul the American
dream… We must move...from segregated sprawl
to place more like traditional American towns.”—
Peter Calthorpe and Henry Richmond, Changing
America
“Sprawl has gotten a bad rap. It has become the
all-purpose catchword for the rape of the
environment by unscrupulous builders. But
Sprawl is also an expression of upward mobility.
An unprecedented 67 percent of Americans now
own their own homes. Sprawl is part of the price
we’re paying for creating the world’s first mass
upper-middle class.”—New Democrat

This report may be freely copied, duplicated or extracted with the appropriate
citations and acknowledgements as shown below, or in conformance with the
conventions of the MLA Style Manual.
Suggested Citation:
Miller, Ronald P., Planning in the Age of Sprawl – a Profusion of Perspectives,
Comprehensive Plan Research Report Number 99-001, Hamilton County Regional
Planning Commission, Cincinnati, Ohio, September, 1999.

INTRODUCTION
Planning in the Age of Sprawl
CONFLICTING VIEWS ON SUBURBANIZATION
Even before urban sprawl became a presidential campaign issue by Vice President Al Gore,
there was more written about it than anyone could possibly read. Now there’s more. In just
a few seconds my search on the web offered me 17,234 sites to read about “urban sprawl”!
In reviewing even a small part of the plethora of new literature on sprawl, one must conclude
that a healthy profusion of perspectives exists and that the literature is highly subjective.
The range of values related to sprawl or suburbanization, and the diversity of professional
opinion regarding suburban planning and related metropolitan impacts, is a central concern
to the Hamilton County Regional Planning Commission and to the greater Cincinnati
metropolitan region as we initiate studies to update the County’s comprehensive plan. This
plan will necessarily engage a continuing discussion on alternative views of the future
related to divergent economic orientations—long term versus short term and collective
versus individual. Myers and Kitsuse succinctly define the problem in The Debate Over
Future Density of Development: “Economic models that support the wisdom of sprawl are
inherently short-term frameworks which assume that efficient, short-run decisions made at
the level of the individual add up to a good long-range future.” 1
The planning dialogue related to Hamilton County’s comprehensive plan will basically focus
on how we want to live in the future--in the context of an ever increasing list of competing
objectives and priorities – employment, environment, housing, transportation, education,
aesthetics, social diversity, economic diversity, etc. How can we accommodate people
throughout their life cycles How can we accommodate new social trends affecting the
family unit and the work unit How much growth should be encouraged Where and when
should it occur What type of growth should be encouraged
ABOUT THIS REPORT
What follows is a somewhat perfunctory look at conflicting views on many of these issues as
they pertain to suburbanization and sprawl as well as a scan of the range of opinions
regarding what should be done. The unique influence of Hamilton County’s rugged
topography on growth patterns and sprawl are identified to facilitate community discussion
of important local issues related to obscured consequences of sprawl in our hillside
environment. The rich diversity of opinions identified below will hopefully generate needed
dialogue among local stakeholders and potential planning partners as we attempt to articulate
a collective vision for Hamilton County.
A RANGE OF DEFINITIONS
First, what is this phenomenon called sprawl Proponents of conventional suburban growth
often speak instead in terms of suburbanization, outward growth and economic development.
ugly chaos of “laissez faire urbanization”. Even the American Heritage Dictionary defines
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However, one person’s utopia is another’s sprawl. Opponents to sprawl describe it as the
ugly chaos of “laissez faire urbanization”. Even the American Heritage Dictionary defines
sprawl as “haphazard growth or extension outward, especially that resulting from new
housing”. Much of the literature talks about sprawl, urban sprawl and suburban sprawl
without ever defining it—as if a common definition exists. However, differing definitions of
sprawl abound:
• Sprawl is the continual use of more land than is necessary to accomplish a given
development goal.
• Sprawl is the consumption of resources and land in excess of what is needed to create a
comfortable, livable and functional city.
• Sprawl is “leapfrog” development patterns, containing commercial strips and large
expanses of separate land uses accessible only by car, and lacking functional open space.
• Sprawl is the rapid spread of fragmented, low-density, automobile-dependent
development on the fringes of cities.
• Sprawl is a pattern of strip development and spread-out low-density development in the
countryside that leads to a gradual decline in community life and values, and the erosion
of the economic base in cities and villages.
• Sprawl is discontiguous and low-density development patterns that gobble up farmland
and open space.
• Sprawl is low-density development beyond the edge of service and employment, which
separates where people live from where they shop, work, recreate, and educate - thus
requiring cars to move between zones.
• Sprawl is a fifty-year-long experiment in wretched excess that endorses the disposability
of the built environment—an insatiable consumption apparatus, draining life from cities,
devouring open space, siphoning precious time off to automobile travel, separating
people from one another, and leaving a trail of washed-up neighborhoods and shopping
centers in its wake. (adapted from remarks of Robert Davis, chairman of the Congress
for New Urbanism)
• Sprawl is low-density, auto-dependent development that rapidly spreads on the fringes of
existing communities, often consuming agricultural and environmentally sensitive lands.
• Sprawl is random development characterized by poor accessibility among related land
uses such as housing, jobs and services.
• Sprawl is the massive oversupply of developmental infrastructure in restrictively zoned
communities creating social and economic polarization within the region as well as land
use patterns that are particularly low density, economically inefficient and
environmentally dangerous.
The last definition offers particular local relevance, since it alludes to development patterns
in this region during the last half century as well as the potentially harmful effects that are of
increasing concern within Hamilton County.
A RANGE OF SUBURBAN VIEWS
In the communities in Hamilton County as well as our region there is a great diversity of
opinion about the desirability of suburban (a.k.a. sprawl) development. Not that anyone
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admits to being pro-sprawl—it’s not a nice word! I once was told that sprawl is what a slob
with a big belly and a beer can is doing when he is draped across the sofa watching
wrestling--inferring that anything characterized as sprawling cannot be good. However,
residents of suburban neighborhoods--many oblivious to the fact that “Sprawl-R-Us”--are
great champions of suburban living. Indeed, the suburban neighborhood—with or without
the label of sprawl--is exactly what most suburban residents want. That’s why they live
there! And, that’s been made quite clear to me at many public meetings during discussions
about community values and goals. Many surveys support the claim that low density
settlement is the overwhelming choice for residential living.
Current land use and development practices are defended by many. Supporters of
conventional suburban development (i.e., the predominant suburban character built since
1950) deem the use of the term sprawl to be pejorative. They prefer terms describing
development such as suburban, dispersed, decentralized, discontinuous and multi-centered,
multi-nodal or polycentric. Proponents of the status-quo note that conventional patterns of
development are necessary to economic prosperity, that open space is meant to be enjoyed at
home--not after a long drive outside the growth boundary. They are proponents of an
abundance of privatized open space in the form of front and back yards. In their view, the
net effects of conventional development patterns are overwhelmingly positive, contributing
to economic growth and to the social objective of widespread homeownership—exactly as
envisioned by the 1939 World’s Fair where the most popular exhibition was General
Motor’s “World of Tomorrow”, featuring an enormous model of an auto-utopia called “City
of the Future”. Another social benefit often cited as a positive result of the current suburban
development strategy is “filtering down” or making inner city housing available to lowerincome
people as it is vacated by others moving up and out. Indeed, nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century reformers, who viewed the congestion of the city as a profound evil would
have looked at today’s decentralization or “suburban sprawl” (GM’s “World of Tomorrow”
that we live in today) as an improvement too good to be imagined. 1
The Wells Fargo Bank, in Preserving the American Dream, defends the current development
patterns saying that current suburbia is simply in the early stages of development. Over time
these suburbs will transform into higher density areas supporting developed commercial
economies as well as jobs—a process of dispersal followed by later infill. The theory
resembles the natural growth and evolution of forests (succession of weed, grass, and forest
communities) where early stages are essential but not as attractive or useful as a mature
forest. In their view, the utopic visions of the 1940’s and 1950’s have been achieved—Why
fix what isn’t broke They assert that the traffic consequences of suburban development are
benign since commutes shorten as jobs move to the suburbs to be closer to the labor force.
In their view, consumer preference for low-density, single family homes is so entrenched
that any alternative to the current suburban spatial order will never have anything wider than
a boutique appeal. 1
The Wells Fargo view is reiterated in Jack Nasar’s The Evaluative Image of the City. He
explains that design professionals don’t share the values of the public and don’t deliver those
values in designs and plan: “For more than 60 years, planners and designers have attacked
the suburban landscape. Yet the public around the world continues to evaluate it favorably
as the ideal.”
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On a similar note, in Designing the City, Towards a More Sustainable Urban Form,
Hildebrand Frey identifies that what we care to admire as a tourist (nostalgic and sometimes
quirky) is not necessarily what we would accept as a place to live. She writes that compact
development concepts contradict the profound fondness for suburban and semi-rural living.
She also explains that the smart growth and compact city initiatives are certainly influenced
by the fact that many historic towns and cities have densely developed cores which are seen
as ideal places to live and work (mostly by those coming to visit these places for a short
time, not necessarily by their inhabitants). Visual preference surveys often reveal similar
conclusions—that residents like to visit or look at quaint and historic places but generally
choose not to live there.
In explaining this profound fondness for suburban rather than urban living David Rusk, in
Cities Without Suburbs, says “Suburban sprawl is a bargain to suburban residents (and
therefore thriving and considered as the desired development pattern) due to cheap home
mortgages, dream houses, affordable private cars, federally subsidized highways and
sustained economic growth, the romance of the “the frontier” — The American Dream —
promoted to the middle class since 1950 by ‘Washington, Wall Street, Detroit, Hollywood,
and Madison Avenue’”.
Today Rusk might add Silicon Valley to his list of icons that influence middle class
preferences. Many suburban communities today are not just bedroom communities, but
what Jon Teaford of Purdue University calls “post-suburbia”: economically and culturally
self-sufficient areas that are near traditional core cities but largely insulated from them.
Many employers—especially high tech firms—look for the post-suburbia features: safe,
clean, easy to get around and new. These features spell economic competitiveness and
survival by acting as magnets to attract scarce highly skilled employees.
On the opposite side of the Wells Fargo ideology is Howard Kunstler. In “Home from
Nowhere”, he decries not only the social, environmental and economic cost of sprawl but
also condemns its very appearance. “We drive up and down the gruesome, tragic suburban
boulevards of commerce, and we’re overwhelmed at the fantastic, awesome, stupefying
ugliness of absolutely everything in sight...as though the whole thing had been designed by
some diabolical force bent on making human beings miserable.” Kunstler believes that a
variety of forces—both economic (gasoline shortages and prices, the high cost of
maintaining a vast highway infrastructure) and social (a growing feeling of loneliness and
lack of community) – will soon bring an end to what he calls “the automobile utopia.” But,
even Kunstler acknowledges that “right now it would seem that Americans do not want to
change their behavior”.
Of course, people cannot want something they are not even aware of. And they can’t be
expected to want to solve a problem that is not even recognized as a problem. “So little of
our historic landscape remains that it is difficult to appreciate our present aesthetic
deprivation, having few opportunities for comparison” argues John Miller in Egotopia,
Narcissism and the New American Landscape. He points out that the New American
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Landscape is no longer about public and communal values, but rather a place “dedicated to
uncompromising notions of utility”.
Others clarify that perhaps behavior change will not have to be forced—that a great latent
demand for an improved lifestyle in alternative living environments already exists. All that
is necessary is to provide the alternative living environments and people will choose such
environments. “Of course, the issue is not about forcing people … to give up their suburban
cul-de-sac or three cars. The issue is about giving others an alternative so this selfdestructive
national madness can be contained. Suburbs are not for everyone”, writes
Roberta Gratz in Cities, Back from the Edge. In discussing the oxymoron of the suburban
city she explains that “hybrid suburban urbanism” --striving for the best of two contradictory
worlds--is unachievable. Gratz points out that suburbs cannot replace cities and they cannot
shake their irrevocable dependency on cities – that the suburb is still a sub-urb, a dependent
offshoot of a more complex urban center.
Some writers see the old suburban dream as being increasingly out of sync with today’s
culture. Peter Calthorpe in The Next American Metropolis, Ecology, Community and the
American Dream, states that “we continue to build post-World War II suburbs as if families
were large and had only one breadwinner, as if the jobs were all downtown, as if land and
energy were endless, and as if another lane on the freeway would end traffic congestion.”
Historical circumstance has changed. The urban environment is no longer the slum and
coal-belching industrial environment that drove people from the city in the 19 th and early
20 th centuries. Nor are we preparing for pent-up housing demand as required in the post-
World War II years. Values have changed and we have now superceded the 1939 World’s
Fair vision. Calthorpe notes that post WWII development forces—the privatization of life
and specialization of place—results in both the city and suburb being locked in a mutually
negating evolution toward loss of community, human scale, and nature. These patterns of
growth have created congestion, pollution, isolation and urban disinvestments. He describes
a world doomed to be dominated by specialization, segregation, and lack of scale if trends
are not changed.
“While some have proposed a rigorous return to traditional city forms and an almost preindustrial
culture as a counterpoint, others have praised this placeless evolution of the
suburban megalopolis. They claim it is the inevitable and desirable expression of our new
technologies and hyper-individualized culture,” according to Calthorpe.
Many other counter-arguments support the absence of need for any change. Proponents of
conventional suburban development argue that suburban and exurban growth should be
accommodated rather than restricted, and directed with market-oriented measures rather than
regulation --The Sprawling of America: In Defense of the Dynamic City by Samuel Staley.
The pro-growth values are often supported by ample statistics indicating we have no
farmland crisis and no need for compact development. The “crisis” is simply fabricated by
farmland definitions, and therefore related statistics, being misinterpreted. They explain that
“farmland” often means that land could produce crops if farmed or perhaps that land is
zoned as agriculture. “Cropland”, by contrast, is agricultural land on which food is actually
produced. So, while anti-sprawl activists may accurately claim that Ohio is losing 10 acres
of farmland per hour, growth proponents accurately claim that the amount of land on which
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crops are grown is rising each year. Growth proponents cite that the rate of farmland loss is
actually much lower than it used to be – i.e., the national rate was four times greater during
the 1970’s according to urban economist Samuel Staley. Growth proponents also note that
over the last half-century, more open space has been turned into parks and rural wildlife
preserves than has been turned into suburbs. Also, farmers have become so efficient on the
remaining farmland that they’re growing twice as much food as in 1950, and could easily
grow much more if there were a market for it. So, compact growth or any other alternative
form of suburban development is simply not needed according to most supporters of the
status-quo.
The defense of suburban development continues in the Wells Fargo report, Preserving the
American Dream. It dismisses concern over loss of agricultural land by showing that the
entire population of the U.S. could be arranged in households of four people at typical
“suburban sprawl” densities and still only use 3 percent of the total land area of the
contiguous U.S. 1
A RANGE OF CONSEQUENCES
The Sierra Club’s The Dark Side of the American Dream: The Costs and Consequences of
Sprawl documents consequences of sprawl that reach way beyond the issue of farmland loss.
They also identify: traffic congestion; longer commutes that steal time from family and
work; worsening air and water pollution; loss of open fields, forests and wetlands; increased
flooding; erosion of the central city tax base; raised taxes to pay for services – police, fire,
schools, roads, water, and sewer; destruction of central city commerce; and concentration of
poverty in urban centers. The concentration and separation of poverty and wealth also
results in suburban employers being increasingly unable to fill lower paying jobs due to lack
of affordable transportation links between low skilled workers and job vacancies located in
wealthy suburban enclaves.
The Bank of America’s report, Beyond Sprawl, identifies another laundry list of negative
effects: higher costs of housing, increasing road congestion, excessive travel, dwindling
land availability, poorer public services, loss of agricultural land, poor air and water quality,
decline of central city neighborhoods and older suburbs, deteriorated quality of life,
excessive cost to maintain infrastructure, abandoned and underutilized investments in older
neighborhoods. 1
Richard Moe describes sprawl’s influence on migration and related negative impacts on
older areas. “The continually sprawling metropolis encourages outmigration from the
metropolitan core and first suburbs. Migrations, whether across oceans or municipal
boundaries, are the outcome of factors that push people away from one place and pull them
to another. Pushed out by dropping property values, declining schools, meaner streets, and
rising taxes residents of declining neighborhoods are pulled elsewhere by the opposite. It is
this migratory pattern, played out in neighborhood after neighborhood, that pushes a city
past the point of no return” -- Changing Places - Rebuilding Community in the Age of
Sprawl by Richard Moe.
Myron Orfield clearly reveals the creeping movement of sprawl’s effects in his book,
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Metropolitics. “Contrary to popular belief, socioeconomic instability does not stop neatly at
central-city borders. As it crosses into inner suburbs, especially into suburbs that were once
blue-collar and middle-class neighborhoods, it accelerates and intensifies. Central cities
have a fiscal, governmental, and social infrastructure to slow these powerful trends. Lacking
the central city's central business district tax base, welfare infrastructure and network of
organized political activity, inner suburbs often decline far more rapidly.” Older suburbs in
urban counties, also known as “first suburbs” and “grayfields” are mature, land-locked and
built-out. They can quickly spiral into decline due to erosion of population, housing stock,
jobs and tax base. The decline is often rooted in state policies that encourage “greenfields”
development (building on vacant undeveloped land) and do not provide equal opportunities
to established communities with “grayfield” redevelopment opportunities. Avoiding rapid
decline of older suburbs in urban counties requires partnerships that promote public policies
for maintaining the vitality of our established communities rather than creating disposable
communities. This partnership of “first suburbs” will be a critical element in any strategy to
reverse the decline of older communities in Hamilton County.
A RANGE OF CAUSES
The literature also contains various explanations regarding the causes of sprawl. Sprawl is
no doubt the outcome of two great American liberation movements: personal transportation
and a spread of your own—largely born in the 1950’s and going strong today. Both are
outgrowths of federal policies and the availability of money after World War II. The
National Defense Highway Act of 1956 created the interstate highway system for quick
inter-city and inter-coastal mobility and to deliberately disperse industry into the
countryside – theoretically making it less vulnerable to nuclear attack. The Federal Housing
Administration created the other suburbanization driver – the guaranteed mortgage. This
financial instrument built the American suburbs with low down-payment, long term, fixed
interest mortgages, essentially riskless to banks. These behemoth federal policies continue
to drive the suburban character and overpower local planning initiatives that may attempt to
change the conventional suburban development pattern. According to Roberta Gratz,
“Sprawl continuation makes sense only with recognition that to tame it, stop it, unravel it,
and dramatically alter a 50-year, entrenched national development pattern, an entire
interrelated network of rules must be fundamentally changed. Inertia is the enemy of
change”.
New levels of inertia are expected to emanate from technology. Digital electronics will
continually make it possible for cities to become more and more dispersed and polarized
since office work will travel rather than office workers. The irrelevance of geography will
drive the trend toward rural and decentralized workplaces -- High Technology and Low-
Income Communities: Prospects for the Positive Use of Advanced Information Technology,
edited by Donald Schon.
We are reminded of the importance of American values during the past two centuries by
Richard Moe in Changing Places: Rebuilding Community in the Age of Sprawl. He writes
that Americans desire newness and change at the expense of context and stability. “Escape
and start over” is a long-held American tenet. The 21 st Century will no doubt bring new
technological forces that will continue decentralization trends.
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Given such root causes of sprawl, its well established foundation, cultural forces, as well as
current state and federal growth policies, it should not be a surprise to anyone that the
problems associated with sprawl are not likely to be reversed simply by local or county
planning initiatives – especially in the strong home-rule environment of Ohio. Only a few
North American metropolitan areas (e.g., Portland, Vancouver and Toronto) have made any
substantial progress in sprawl wars. And then, only after decades of work and billions in
public investment required by the mandates of state and regional government. This is not
very Ohio-like!
In Better Not Bigger: How to take Control of Urban Growth and Improve Your Community,
Eben Fodor notes that any change toward more compact development patterns will take
time, if only because each year’s new housing construction nationally amounts to less than
one percent of what has already been built. In Hamilton County each year’s housing
construction amounts to only one-half of one percent of what has already been built.
Obviously, we will need to measure significant results in generations rather than years.
A RANGE OF ADVICE
Calthorpe offers a simple and timely alternative to sprawl: neighborhoods of housing, parks,
and schools placed within walking distance of shops, civic services, jobs, and transit – a
modern version of the traditional town. Applied at a regional scale, a network of such
mixed-use neighborhoods could create order in our balkanized metropolis. At the core of
this alternative, philosophically and practically, is the pedestrian. Pedestrians are the catalyst
that makes the essential qualities of communities meaningful. Without the pedestrian, a
community’s common ground – its parks, sidewalks, squares, and plazas – become useless
obstructions to the car. Without the pedestrian, an area’s focus can be easily lost.
Commerce and civic uses are easily decentralized into distant chain store destinations and
government centers. Homes and jobs are isolated in subdivisions and office parks.
Calthorpe notes that, although pedestrians will not displace the car (he calls for
accommodation and balance), their absence in our thinking and planning is a fundamental
source of failure in our new developments. “To plan as if there were pedestrians will turn
suburbs into towns, projects into neighborhoods, and networks into communities. The new
balance calls for integration of seemingly opposing forces. Community and privacy, auto
and pedestrian, large institution and small business, suburban and urban; these are the poles
that must be fused in a new pattern of growth.” Consequently, he calls for hybrid town
centers that combine the intimacy of Main Street with the accessibility of strip centers. From
the neighborhood side, the commercial center must be pedestrian-friendly, from the arterial it
must be auto convenient.
Calthorpe cautions, though, against nostalgically imitating the scale and diversity of older
towns. He identifies a fine but important difference between tradition and nostalgia.
Traditions evolve with time and place while holding strong to certain formal, cultural, and
personal principles. Nostalgia – the coloring of suburbia with an old-time style--seeks the
security of past forms without the inherent principles. His practical approach recognizes that
the scale of modern development cannot be ignored, concealed, or denied.
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“We must eliminate the two principal causes of sprawl: artificially cheap land and artificially
cheap energy”, advises Douglas Kelbaugh in Common Place -- Toward Neighborhood and
Regional Design. “The two most far-reaching corrections would be to make gasoline and
rural land more expensive, so that their market prices more closely reflect their true cost.
The capital costs of sprawl are high: new highways, roads, sewers, utilities, water systems;
new schools and school bus fleets; new stores and jobs that require the private transit of
automobiles with the attendant air pollution, congestion and lost time. Yet, we continue to
develop the urban fringe despite the high costs of improvement. Why Because it's so
profitable. The capital cost of land is still cheap and the burden of infrastructure can often
still be shifted to the public sector. Subsidized energy (for transportation and housing)
masks the high operating costs of suburbia.” He reminds us that legislative lobbyists
certainly know their bread is buttered on the suburban more than the urban side.
The European experience provides greater clarification of the complexity of “smart
growth” (i.e., compact growth without sprawl) and its unlikely fit in our American culture.
Pietro Nivola, in Fit for Fat City: A “Lite” Menu of European Policies to Improve Our
Urban Form, identifies key policies that have profoundly slowed suburban spread in
European cities. He dispels the conventional wisdom that European land use laws and
central planning agencies are stronger than in the US. Instead, Nivola points to several key
policies that have contained European sprawl:
• Large agricultural subsidies make it less likely that farmers will sell their land to
developers.
• Heavy taxation of gasoline and high rates for electric power and furnace fuels make it
much more expensive to live an American-style suburban life, with a large home,
multiple vehicles, a long commute, and the gigantic refrigerator and freezers that make
occasional shopping possible.
• The tax systems of most European countries make cars much more expensive and don’t
subsidize home ownership.
• Small neighborhood shops are protected by multiple restrictions on the penetration and
pricing practices of large retailers.
• Post-war building and rebuilding focused on mixed-income apartments, while the U.S.
encouraged home building with Federal Housing Administration and Veterans
Administration mortgage guarantees.
• Transportation spending in the post-war period was roughly balanced between passenger
railroads and highways, while in the U.S. spending on highways dwarfed spending on
alternatives by almost 6 to 1 in the same period.
In contrast to the European experience, the American smart growth ideology seems
simplistic. The magnitude of the required cultural “paradigm shift” is enormous. In The
Ecology of Place: Planning for Environment, Economy and Community, Timothy Beatley
identifies the cult of individualism that has so eroded community values in the U.S. For
example, consider the following excerpt. “Material use, energy consumption and
environmental degradation in the industrial world will have to be reduced by 90% to achieve
global socioeconomic sustainability. Yet material and energy consumption is still increasing
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in the U.S.” Due to our cultural and political differences, Nivola’s recommendations for
solving American sprawl problems center on eliminating the US highway trust fund so that
transportation spending would have to compete with all of the other spending priorities for
the general fund.
Regional initiatives – regional revenue sharing and fair share housing policies -- are
proposed as important parts of the solution by David Rusk in Cities Without Suburbs. “The
real city is the total metropolitan area--city and suburb. Suburbs no longer simply serve as
bedroom communities for workers with city-based jobs. By 1990 a majority of jobs in metro
areas were located in suburbs as well…. Any attack on urban social and economic problems
must treat suburb and city as indivisible parts of a whole.”
In his 1999 book, Inside Game Outside Game, Rusk outlines a new battle plan for sprawl
and its effects on race, class and culture. According to Rusk, focusing on programs aimed at
improving inner-city neighborhoods –playing the “inside game’—is a losing strategy.
Achieving real improvement also requires a strong “outside game” of regional strategies.
The new strategies require regional revenue or tax base sharing, regional fair share housing
policies and regional land-use planning and growth management. Also, where regions are
highly fragmented by competing city, village and township governments, Rusk argues that
state government action is critical. With 49 local governments in Hamilton County and 347
independent political jurisdictions in our 13 county region, the outside game, including state
mandates related to planning and regionalism, is certainly critical in any 21 st Century plan
for Hamilton County.
Roberta Gratz places less emphasis on comprehensiveness and uniformity. Instead, she
advises us that “… deep trouble and serious problems still get fixed, piece by piece. Think
big, devise a broad strategy, but develop the foundation on small actions and small
components.” She also reminds us that the places that we live “should be as unpredictable,
diverse, idiosyncratic, shaped by the unexpected and colorful, as interesting as life itself.”
Clearly, one size should not fit all when it comes to planning and building communities.
HAMILTON COUNTY’S SPATIAL FRAMEWORK
The issue of sprawl in Hamilton County is somewhat enigmatic. Although the Sierra Club
recently rated the greater Cincinnati region as the fourth most sprawl threatened major
metropolitan area in the nation, sprawl in Hamilton County is to a large extent “hidden” by
our natural topographic resource. At the same time, the hillsides and long ridgetop fingers
generate a rather unusual spatial pattern of dispersed development (some characterize as
sprawl) within this urban county and even in the core city. This environmentally constrained
development pattern is depicted in the map entitled Hamilton County’s Spatial Framework.
In urban counties with flat topography the market is not sensitive to preservation of open
space. In Hamilton County we are blessed with—and need to recognize the importance of—
our natural constraints to market forces. Hamilton County’s hillsides enable our
communities to avoid the appearance of sprawl. Without the result of hillside patterns most
other metropolitan counties suffer unrelenting same-density development and an absence of
well-defined spaces. Our hillsides provide a coherent spatial frame of reference--a sense of
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spatial orientation and human scale. Our tree-canopied natural endowment colors and
softens the look of our communities, provides complexity and diversity as well as open
spaces that break up the monotony of the developed landscape. Our spatial patterns of
development are defined by clear natural edges creating a sense of community for towns as
well as subdivisions. As development continues, especially infill development, we need to
be cognizant of the important role of our remaining hillsides – a nonrenewable resource that
has been threatened and already battered by the decentralizing forces of sprawl and could be
further threatened by alternative development patterns advocating centralized and compact
form.
The capacity of our hillsides to hide or absorb sprawl’s physical assault is a mixed blessing.
The downside is that we can easily lose sight of the cumulative effects of incremental
changes – allowing us to be blindsided in the future by sprawl related crises. The hillsides
create a screen in Hamilton County communities -- a buffer that enhances the physical
effects of sprawl and permits us to overlook not only aesthetic and environmental
consequences but also evolving socioeconomic conditions such as increasing social and
economic polarization.
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The rich diversity of opinions on alternative spatial patterns of development certainly creates
a formidable challenge for planning in the age of sprawl. The abundance of authors on issues
of sprawl and spatial framework assures lots of alternative strategies for consideration.
However, any attempt to improve the options as to how people in Hamilton County live will
require a hard row against powerful currents of culture and history. We will need to develop
a long-term future orientation and realize that results must be measured in generations rather
than years—an uncommon time horizon in contemporary planning. The comprehensive
planning effort being initiated by the Hamilton County Regional Planning Commission will
help to identify the possibilities, opportunities and problems that exist on the horizon, from
which we can derive a clearly articulated and timeless vision. It will help us to invent ways
we can create growth patterns that are responsive to the needs and values of people at all
income levels, and also help maintain Hamilton County’s quality of life and economic
competitiveness. It will help us to integrate the opposing forces of community and privacy,
auto and pedestrian, large institution and small business, suburban and urban, pedestrianfriendly
and auto convenient. Proposed major improvements in the Hamilton County
Regional Planning Commission’s committee structure and new initiatives in comprehensive
countywide planning are intended to capture the values and perceptions of people from the
three sectors of our society--public, private and civic. We encourage your participation as
we launch this important dialogue.
Notes
1
Dowell Myers and Alicia Kitsuse, “The Debate Over Future Density of Development:
An Interpretive Review”. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 1999. This paper provides a
comprehensive assessment of the density debate in California as it is conducted in “Beyond
Sprawl: New Patterns of Growth to Fit the New California” and “Preserving the American
Dream: The Truth About Suburban Communities and Housing Choice”, rival reports
published in 1995 with the respective sponsorship of Bank of America and Wells Fargo
Bank.
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HamiltonCounty Regional
PlanningCommission
138E. CourtStreet, Rm807
Cincinnati, OH 45202
(513) 946-4500
www.communitycompass.org