Stemming the Tide of Sprawl

Rampant growth is no longer seen as just an environmental issue

Grant makers and charities in growing numbers are joining forces to combat a problem that affects nearly every community in the country: the haphazard commercial and residential development that creates suburban sprawl.

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U.S. Cities Affected by Sprawl

A Sampler of Resources on Suburban Sprawl

Fueled by a potent combination of passionate grassroots activism and sober economic analysis, the issue has shot to the top of the public agenda. Last November, more than 200 proposals in 31 states aimed at curbing sprawl and preserving open space appeared on state and local ballots around the nation, and voters approved nearly three-quarters of them.

While many developers, real-estate agents, and financial lenders still champion untrammeled development as crucial to economic growth, some non-profit leaders see an opportunity to take advantage of growing public disenchantment to push for major structural changes in how Americans pattern their lives. The benefits, they say, would be healthier, more vibrant communities for everyone.

Non-profit agendas as varied as preserving farmland, protecting air and water quality, improving public schools, promoting better health, fighting drugs and crime, finding jobs for welfare recipients, securing low-cost housing, defending civil rights — even filling downtown theaters and art museums — are all greatly affected by the basic issue at the heart of the sprawl debate: where people choose to live, work, shop, and play.

“There is scarcely a single national problem that is not exacerbated by sprawl or that would not be alleviated if sprawl were better contained,” says Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Washington organization that sees its own mission of preserving America’s architectural heritage threatened by rampant development.

A handful of grant makers — including the James Irvine, David and Lucile Packard, Surdna, and Turner Foundations — have made curbing sprawl one of their top grant-making priorities. They are now leading a campaign to get more philanthropies of every size and stripe to take an active interest in the issue. The solution, they say, has as much to do with making cities and towns more attractive and vital places as it does with trying to cordon off remaining farms, fields, and forests.

Their effort got a big boost last month in Miami, where staff or board members from more than two dozen foundations gathered for the initial meeting of the Funders Network on Sprawl, Smart Growth, and Livable Communities. Those attending represented not only some of the country’s largest grant makers (including the Ford, W. K. Kellogg, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, Charles Stewart Mott, and Packard Foundations) but also small family funds (the Bauman, Frey, and Rauch Foundations) and community foundations (the East Bay and the Metropolitan Atlanta Community Foundations).

Says Peter Bahouth, executive director of the Turner Foundation, in Atlanta: “I haven’t been involved in an issue where such a widely diverse array of foundations has begun to respond to how land-use issues are affecting the things they care about most.”

Adds Mark D. Valentine, deputy director of Packard’s conservation programs: “The problems have grown acute enough, and enough people are now losers rather than winners, that the parameters of the debate are ripe to be reframed.”

Some anti-sprawl leaders, while welcoming foundation support for their efforts, point out that the issue is difficult for philanthropy to deal with. “This touches on all the tough ones for funders,” says Scott Bernstein, president of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, in Chicago. “It’s about policies and cross-cutting themes; it requires a willingness to step away from the guidelines, do things that take more than three years to do, and build coalitions between national and local players.”

Sprawl results from a complex mix of factors, but it reflects a simple trend: For decades, millions of Americans have forsaken the central cities — with their perceived problems of street crime, neighborhood blight, poor schools, and high costs — in favor of suburbia, with its cheaper land, newer housing, and green lawns.

The exodus of people and capital has left downtowns with fewer resources to serve remaining residents. In turn, the subsequent loss of jobs, services, and amenities has caused even more people to leave. The result: Forests shrink, wetlands are drained, and two acres of farmland are bulldozed every minute to make way for malls, office parks, and residential subdivisions that stretch ever farther out from a city’s central core.

As that happens, businesses, churches, and schools in many downtowns are boarded up. Freeway traffic slows to a crawl. And neighbors in many bedroom communities remain virtual strangers.

Foundations are tackling the sprawl issue in many ways, which tend to cut across customary program boundaries and leap across ideological divides. Many are working to conserve forest, farmland, or other open space — either through outright purchase or by buying development rights, imposing conservation easements that bar future development, or supporting the work of groups like the American Farmland Trust, Nature Conservancy, Trust for Public Land, or hundreds of smaller land trusts around the country.

The Packard Foundation, for example, has committed $175-million to the five-year Conserving California Landscapes program. Much of that money will be spent to buy environmentally sensitive parcels of land or the right to develop them. But some $25-million is reserved for urban planning and land-use policy work in the hope of magnifying the influence of the foundation’s other place-specific grants.

In December, grants from the Freeman and Richard King Mellon Foundations helped enable the Conservation Fund to spend $76-million to buy 296,000 acres of paper-company land in upstate New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire. A third of the land will be sold to state and federal governments for conservation and public recreation. The rest will be put up for sale to another paper company under conditions that make it accessible for recreational use and that bar future development.

But protecting specific plots of land from development is only part of the answer, say many non-profit officials. Governments, they say, must be persuaded to change the system of incentives that favors new construction of roads and buildings over the revitalization and redevelopment of existing neighborhoods.

Research by the American Farmland Trust shows that towns and counties rarely recover in tax revenue the costs they incur in extending roads, utilities, police and fire protection, and public schooling to sprawling neighborhoods of new single-family homes. The trust hopes that if local officials recognize the fiscal impact of proposed developments they will take stronger steps to redirect growth to more densely settled areas.

Some grant makers are interested in other aspects of governmental decision making. By making generous political campaign contributions, road builders and real-estate developers wield significant influence with elected officials. The Joyce Foundation, which supports an overhaul of the campaign-finance system, has helped pay for analyses and computer data bases that let people track such contributions and compare them with legislators’ votes on land-use issues.

“Many people still feel that sprawl is a good thing,” Mr. Bahouth points out. “Development is seen as linked to growth, prosperity, and a healthy economy.” And powerful interests like the National Association of Home Builders, the National Retail Federation, and others who develop land or finance new construction have a big stake in preserving the status quo.

Developers are not a monolith, however. Many of them now realize that so-called smart growth accommodates development that is sensitive to environmental and social factors. And some grant makers are encouraging the redevelopment of existing residential, commercial, or industrial properties as an alternative to sprawl.

In California, the Irvine Foundation has made about $5-million in grants in the past three years to groups that work on land-use issues — whether redeveloping properties in inner cities, improving urban design, or preserving open space. The foundation not only has supported existing organizations but also has helped create new ones where it felt they would be useful.

Irvine linked up with several other California foundations (including Packard and Hewlett) in 1994 to create a project called Californians and the Land, an effort to gather people from government, business, neighborhoods, and the non-profit world to discuss critical land-use issues around the state.

Initially, the project was expected to focus solely on conservation issues. But it soon became apparent that one cannot promote conservation, whether of wilderness, forest, pasture, or farmland, without also being concerned about the quality of life in inner cities.

“There’s no way to reduce pressures on greenspace without simultaneously increasing the attractiveness of our urban centers,” says Nick Bollman, senior program director at Irvine.

That analysis has produced some initial, halting conversations between environmental groups and community-development organizations, who see a common interest in revitalizing urban cores and stemming the flight to suburbia. But some tensions remain, as neither side wants to see its own interests subsumed by the other’s.

“We realize we have to talk across functional boundaries, because this is an issue that undercuts everything we’re trying to accomplish in our own programs,” says Roland Anglin, who directs the Ford Foundation’s community-development program.

Transportation issues in general are a critical element in sprawl, since road construction or improvement is often the first step in developing rural landscapes. Grant makers approach that subject from several directions. And the passage last year of a $217-billion federal transportation bill has many groups scurrying to influence how the money gets spent.

The Sierra Club is working to get local citizens to participate in those decisions, which will determine how much each state will spend on road construction and bridge repair versus bus lines and bicycle paths.

Just as the interstate highway system shaped America’s growth in the 1950s and ‘60s, “the decisions we make today will chart the course of development for the next 20 years,” says Larry Bohlen, co-chair of the club’s Challenge to Sprawl campaign. “There’s excitement in the air — a feeling that we can accomplish a lot.”

The Sierra Club last year made its anti-sprawl campaign one of its top priorities. The club hopes to galvanize activists in chapters around the country to persuade more cities and towns to establish urban growth boundaries and take other steps to control sprawl. Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington already require local officials to map precisely where they will encourage growth and where they will restrain it.

Grant makers must deal with sprawl’s effects even in areas seemingly unrelated to land use. Welfare-to-work programs, for example, are often stymied because poor people in urban centers have no practical way to get to the suburbs, which increasingly is where new jobs are found. The MacArthur Foundation, which supports the redevelopment of commercial and industrial sites in Midwestern cities, has also financed a pilot project that finds jobs in the suburbs for city residents and provides them with transportation.

Because sprawl is so decentralized — the result of thousands of daily individual decisions about where to live and work — and because most land-use regulation occurs at the state and local levels, some grant makers believe that the battle will be won or lost virtually town by town. For that reason, some say, community foundations and family foundations that make grants in specific places have crucial roles to play.

“The momentum to promote policy changes will not develop at the state level if local officials and communities don’t lead the parade,” says Kimberly Krasevac-Szekely, program director at the Frey Foundation, in Grand Rapids, Mich. “A national organization isn’t more important than a local or state organization; it just has different expertise. The challenge is to combine that expertise to come up with the best solutions.”

Frey has committed about $1.5-million over the past five years to land-use issues, which it came to initially out of a concern for preserving farmland. But it now realizes that “sprawl has something to do with almost all our programs,” says Ms. Krasevac-Szekely, whether they involve improving the lives of children (who may get to spend little time with parents who commute long distances) or nurturing community arts groups (which may have difficulty attracting large audiences for evening performances).

“It’s a very tough issue that cuts very deep,” she says, “because it asks fundamental questions about what we value.”

In Cleveland, the George Gund Foundation has spent tens of millions of dollars in the past two decades in trying to improve the city’s public schools. “One reason why people leave the inner cities is that they have kids and want better schools,” says Jon Jensen, a senior program officer. “For a decade, we’ve been working to keep folks in the cities.”

For the past three years, Mr. Jensen adds, Gund has been dealing explicitly with the issue of sprawl. Because the metropolitan area is carved into so many political jurisdictions, he says, a major accomplishment has been just getting people from different areas to sit down together to discuss their mutual concerns. Several projects have emerged from those talks, including a $200,000 grant to help 100 congregations of all faiths confront the problem of sprawl, both in their own neighborhoods and across the area.

Other foundations that have dealt with facets of the sprawl issue for years are now grappling with how to broaden their approach to a problem that does not fit neatly into any single grant-making program, and that has multiple potential handles at the local, state, and federal levels. The Surdna Foundation, for example, since the early 1990s has supported groups trying to change federal transportation policy. But now it is considering additional measures.

One option is trying to identify successful strategies used in some cities and see if they can be reproduced elsewhere, says Hooper Brooks, who directs the foundation’s environment program.

Mr. Brooks is guardedly hopeful about the prospect for success in taming sprawl. “We might get this beast back into the cage, although it’s been out for a long time,” he says. “We all have this huge schizophrenia: We hate sprawl, but we also hate density. We want the freedom of the suburbs.”

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s board will soon consider a novel proposal to assemble a team from all of its grant-making program areas to craft an integrated approach to sprawl. “We’re looking at it as so much more than an environmental issue,” says Ali Webb, the foundation’s communications manager for rural development and food systems. “The impact of land-use decisions has huge ramifications for cities and suburbs as well as agricultural lands.”

Just what role the newly formed Funders Network will play is unclear. Some grant makers see it as little more than an information-exchange vehicle, aided by the work of the Sprawl Watch Clearinghouse, in Washington, which posts information from around the country on its Web site (http://www.sprawlwatch.org).

Others hope the network will take on more of an advocacy role, mobilizing support behind the kind of strenuous campaign some grant makers say is needed if sprawl is to be checked.

“There is something inevitable about funders getting involved in smart growth and land-use issues,” Mr. Bollman says, “because it is emergent, it is ubiquitous, it is urgent, and it is real.”

There are many approaches to dealing with unplanned development, he says, but immersion in the issue has convinced many grant makers of the need to involve as many players as possible in finding collaborative solutions.

“Our first inclination was to be against sprawl,” Mr. Bollman says, “but that’s just a baby step in the right direction. We now have to figure out how to make livable communities. That is the only alternative to sprawl.”