The Brawl Over Sprawl

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"We've protected more than 600,000 acres of land," says Bennett. "But more than 60,000 homes can be built in areas already zoned for development. SOAR is an attempt to say some areas have to remain precious." Opposition came mainly from a local farmers' organization. Why? An appraisal by the city of Ventura concluded that 87 acres would be worth $1.6 million as farmland but $13 million if zoned for development. "The people of this county have taken away my property rights," says Howard Atkinson, 51, who inherited part of a 57-acre ranch.

If America's detonating metro regions were the result of population growth alone, sprawl would be a problem without a solution. But they are equally the result of political decisions and economic incentives that lure people ever farther from center cities. For decades, federal highway subsidies have paid for the roads to those far-flung malls and tract houses. Then there are local zoning rules that require large building lots, ensuring more sprawl. Many localities fiercely resist denser housing because it brings in more people but less property-tax revenue. Zoning rules commonly forbid any mix of homes and shops, which worsens traffic by guaranteeing that you burn a quart of gas to find a quart of milk. Even more important, localities routinely agree to extend roads, sewer lines and other utilities to new suburban developments built far from downtown, while existing schools and housing stock are left to decay. "Impact fees" on developers cover just a fraction of what services for newcomers actually cost.

These incentives to expand help create cities that widen much faster than their populations grow. Between 1990 and 1996, metro Kansas City spread 70%, while its population, now 1.9 million, increased just 5%. In that period greater Portland, Ore., spread just 13%, the same growth rate as its population, now 1.7 million. For a long time Portland has been the laboratory city for smart growth. In 1979, as part of its compliance with a groundbreaking statewide land-use law, Portland imposed a "growth boundary," a ring enclosing the city proper and 23 surrounding towns.

Within that circle, the Portland-area metro council, the only directly elected regional government in the U.S., controls all development. Inside, permits for new construction are granted readily, which helps account for the construction cranes all around a downtown that looked ready to die 20 years ago. Outside, where open land is strictly protected, there's mostly just the uninterrupted flight of greenery we call nature. Unspoiled stretches of the Willamette River Valley start 15 miles from city hall.

Orderly growth comes at a price. Smaller towns within the ring are submerged by crowding they might otherwise zone out. And within the dwindling buildable space of the ring, average lot size has shrunk almost in half over the past 20 years, from 13,000 sq. ft. to 6,700. Yet the median price of a single-family home has more than doubled in just 10 years, from $64,000 to $159,900. Once ranked by the National Association of Home Builders as among the most affordable U.S. cities for housing, Portland is now the third most expensive, just a bit cheaper than San Francisco. One reason is that the growth limits helped attract an influx of new residents, who bid up costs. But another is that developers can't build on cheaper acreage farther from town. And though the growth boundary has been widened, local builders complain that the added acreage falls well short of what a growing population needs.

For all that, the "great wall of Portland" is very popular with area voters. That's one reason Gore wants to make sprawl his issue in the next campaign. He knows that some of his signature environmental concerns, like global warming, can seem remote from the here and now. He's counting on sprawl to be an environmentalism that people get, especially the suburban women who drive those crowded roads and are important swing voters. "Let's build more new homes," Gore recently told TIME, "but build them in places that help make people's lives more enjoyable."

His message may still need work, but his plan has some merit. In January, Gore introduced the Administration's "livability agenda," a collection of new and recycled budget programs (see box). Republicans in Washington have no counterpart, partly because conservatives think government should stay out of the way of private development. But G.O.P. pragmatists are worried. In a recent issue of the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, Republican pollster Christine Matthews reported that Gore's "mainstreaming of his environmentalism" was "startlingly on track with voters."

Even if presidential candidates manage to nationalize the issue, Washington doesn't have much to do with the local zoning fights and roadway approvals that determine where development goes. "The battle is going to be won or lost at the state level," says Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. And the remedies take many forms. In Illinois, there's Prairie Crossing, a 667-acre subdivision 40 miles north of Chicago, where more than half the land is preserved as green space. Utopia isn't cheap: the median price of homes there is $331,000, about $100,000 above that for the immediate area, which doesn't satisfy the need for the lower-cost housing that's driving suburban expansion.