While no one appears to like sprawl, the general impression is that there is little that anyone can do about it. It seems like such a big problem and hardly manageable at the local level. However, while sprawl is a national problem, we cannot wait for a national solution. Where preserving community character has been successful, it has been the result of concerted local action. Stopping sprawl begins with caring about where you are and caring enough to act. It begins with saving your own place, your own community.
But what is it that we wish to save? What is the form of that idealized place or landscape that we wish to see preserved? How do we translate caring into something that is more substantial, that represents the enduring ideal that citizens would want for their community?
Any community that wishes to preserve its character must first create a vision of what it wants to become. This is the first law of planning but one that is frequently neglected. Most families wouldn’t think of taking a vacation trip without determining where they were going and how they were going to get there. Yet, communities rarely chart their destinations.
Ironically enough, every community does have a vision: its zoning map. Zoning maps assume that all of a community can (and, by implication, should) be fully developed and built out. A zoning map is like a sorcerer's apprentice that keeps on working until its task is done. The realization of the vision shown on the zoning map would startle most residents, since it would result in continuous development covering the whole town or region. Yet this has become the reality for many communities and it will become the reality for many more if they do nothing. A reliance on zoning alone to guide development will result in a community that no one expected and no one wanted.
Unfortunately, most communities do nothing or do too little. All too many think that they are insulated from change, that “it won’t happen here,” or are indifferent to development pressures until the 11th hour, when it is almost too late for effective action. Some communities encourage development and will go to great lengths to promote it, regardless of the consequences, until the full costs in reduced quality of life and high taxes begin to make themselves felt.
For the most part, however, most towns and regions muddle through; they implement incremental actions that always seem too little and too late. Most political leaders have no interest in long-range planning and therefore planning is rarely high on a community’s priority list. Politicians are by nature short-term oriented: their focus is to fix the problem that is currently of concern to the public. If an intersection is clogged with traffic, the political response will always be to fix the intersection rather than address the long-term issue of uncontrolled development that continues to worsen the congestion.
That is why it is a mistake to wait for political leaders to lead on the issue of sprawl. It will rarely happen. The demand for planning must come from citizens. That has always been the case, and it will continue to be so. Citizens must make sprawl a political issue and insist that it be placed on the political agenda.
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