New Urban Development: Looking Back to See Forward

7. Suburbanization and Sprawl

Charges and Verdicts against Sprawl: An Old Charge Redirected With the Ramapo court victory under his belt, Robert Freilich went on to become a leading hero in the battle against sprawl. He wrote in his book, From Sprawl to Smart Growth: “The techniques upheld in Ramapo were quickly utilized in other jurisdictions (cities, counties, metropolitan areas, and states) over the next twenty-seven years to expand the role of planning, managing, and channeling growth not in suburban cities and counties on the development fringe and metropolitan areas.”1 Two universally laudable goals—maintaining the fiscal health of the communities where development takes place and encouraging the intensive use of land for residential development rather than spreading out residences on more land—were always high on the list of Freilich and the other activists in the battle against sprawl. But the techniques they used went much further and often encouraged neither of these goals. Ironically, it was and is possible to further these two goals by simply mandating as a condition of approval that added development pay for the additional public infrastructure and the service demands the added infrastructure would induce, and by implementing zoning to discourage low-density housing development. Instead, a broad set of techniques for planning, management, and growth were incorporated into the planning maps and ordinances of communities to disallow development in a wide swath of territories that bordered existing urban development. The leaders of these efforts added a long list of other bad things about the sprawl they were stopping. As time went on, their speeches and writings created a new and popular mythology in which antigrowth activists are folk heroes and developers despoil the land by building too much and in the wrong places. This was the stuff of what made it so easy, on a cultural level, for the popular author 146 7 Suburbanization and Sprawl Robert Caro to characterize Robert Moses, the powerful New York public works director, as a super villain. By the time that Caro’s biography of Moses came out, the ideology that builders were bad and development was at best a sometimes necessary evil was already in place. However, it is important to understand the roots of this mythology, and that much of it revolves around money, taxes, and the possibility of personal financial gain by shutting down development. In the early days of the movement to restrict residential development, the reason given for turning down attempts to build housing was that to allow development would cost the public more to serve the additional housing than the housing would contribute to the public treasury. That is, the fiscal argument that residential development did not “pay its own way” was often the weapon used to stop developers in their tracks. Then, as the environmental movement became more powerful, other charges against residential growth would be added by urban activists who gathered supporters under “stop growth” and “prevent sprawl” banners. But the charge of public fiscal imprudence would continue to be an effective, explicit antigrowth weapon, just as it had worked in the 1930s to rally supporters to the cause of slum clearance. Introduction of the No-Build Alternative The Case of the Palo Alto Foothills Lawrence Livingston Jr., a widely respected MIT-trained city planning consultant , was one of the first to use the fiscal weapon against residential growth. Among the many plans his firm completed for California jurisdictions between 1953 and 1980 was a project to determine the fate of 7,500 acres of undeveloped land in the foothills of Palo Alto, California. In 1959, ten years before the City of Palo Alto asked Livingston to conduct a planning study, Palo Alto had annexed the land from the County of Santa Clara with the clear and stated intent of allowing the land to be developed, primarily for housing. To facilitate the development, Palo Alto built water mains and sewers on more than half the land and purchased 2,500 acres on which to build a park. In 1969, before Livingston’s firm began work on the study for Palo Alto, a part of the development containing single-family homes, townhouses, apartments, and a shopping center had been proposed for 500 acres of land near Atascadero Road. Palo Alto put that proposed project on hold pending the Livingston study. Because every phase of the work would be followed by lengthy and often heated debate, “The Palo Alto Foothills Study” that Livingston led was not completed for nine years, in 1978...