The Sprawling of America

Keith Schneider,
Program Director, Michigan Land Use Institute, Benzonia, Michigan

Q: What I need you to do is just tell me your first name. Give me your title and your organization because I know you've got a new title.

A: Right, I have a new title. I'm Keith Schneider, Program Director of the Michigan Land Use Institute in Benzonia, Michigan and we are one of the 20 largest state-based environmental policy research organizations in the country now - staff of 15, membership of 2200 families and organizations, budget of a million dollars, five years old.

Q: And you're a former environmental writer?

A: I'm a former environmental correspondent, national correspondent with The New York Times for ten years and left The Times to found the institute and be its first executive director from 1995 to September of 2000.

Q: How do you define "sprawl"? What are its characteristics and why has it reached a sort of critical mass now that people are much more conscious of it?

A: Well, it's done two ways, first the technical sort of definition of sprawls - land consumptive, environmentally damaging, destructive to cities, damaging to the countryside, auto dependent, and expensive, inefficient economically, environmentally from an energy point of view. And why has it reached a kind of a critical mass politically? I think probably three or four reasons, one is that in our lifetime we're going to be a nation of 400 million people and with the rate of vehicle growth, vehicle population growth is increasing two times faster than human population growth in the state of Michigan, for instance, which is one of the slowest growing states in the country. In California it's even higher. California, for instance, which is now a state of 35 million people is going to go to 70 million people.

So just in terms of sheer demographics we are reaching mega population heights, standards and in vehicle population we're off the charts with any nation and those two issues are one of the driving - traffic congestion - the difficulty that families have in just navigating in this civilization from a pure, you know, moving kids from one place to another, being able to afford where they're living, being able to find jobs that are within affordable distance from their homes - it is much more difficult for the average family in America and clearly in this state to navigate this civilization than it's ever been. And I think that's the kind of recognition that it's tougher to be alive in America today despite all of today's economic boom.

The other piece of it, I think, is the sense of loss, the competition for land on the suburban fringe. That is that the people who are living there have been living there for a while feel an aesthetic, moral, heartrending loss when, you know, they turn around and the 400 acre field next to them is literally converted to some mega mall in a space of 90 days. When we marry capital money and the construction technologies in our modern societies we can literally build a 200 to 400 acre mall in 90 days, from the spade full to the first, you know, ten box roll of toilet paper coming out the door. In order to save two cents on toilet paper we're just, you know, paving over this landscape and that sense of loss is a big piece of this, the sense that people are being hemmed in by architecture in a civilizing pattern that they find demoralizing. Not everybody, but enough people today to ask a question on not, how do we grow, but how do we this better - how do we civilize ourselves in a way that's civilized? In this state we have major cities, Detroit, Flint, Saginaw, that were based on the auto industry and were destroyed by auto technology. The ever, outward movement of capital and new construction, the ever outward mobility of people has disfigured this landscape and disfigured the communities left behind and it's that recognition that something is dis-eased in our society. There's a dis-ease in our society that's producing behavior, road rage, you know, distance from community, schools that aren't functioning any more, societal institutions that people are very cynical about.

I think that sprawl is this third component which is that this sense of how we live, the kind of communities that we built are reflective of a disease in our society. You know, 100 years ago in this state when we had nothing, we were economically nowhere, we built great public institutions, schools, libraries, churches, homes, public buildings that were morally uplifting. When you looked at them you felt good about the society that you lived in. Today we are richer than ever, Michigan and the nation - no other nation has accumulated the kind of wealth that we accumulated. You go into the townships and the counties and the cities in this state and everywhere else and we're building pole buildings for our public buildings which are demoralizing. That's the best we can do.

Q: So where did we lose our way?

A: This is a generational change and it's going to take generations to get out of it and what we're seeing now is a genesis of a new sense that we can go better as a civilization and we're not just talking about the Wal-Mart or the Kmart or the McDonald's or the suburb or the new subdivision. We're talking about how do we coordinate a cohesive vision of ourselves as a nation because we're fractured and that's what sprawl is about. It's a civilizing pattern that distances us from each other by design and as a result we, as a nation, have really become a nation of inward looking. We retreat to our gated communities, retreat to our halls, retreat to our great rooms. We retreat to our television. We're not reaching out, by and large, to our neighbors. We're living in subdivisions where you need a bullhorn to reach your neighbor. You may not even know your neighbor. You may never see your neighbor and that's outside of the mainstream tradition of the United States. That's something new where people don't know who are in their neighborhoods and don't care to know who are in their neighborhoods because, by and large, to some extent we're building communities that are designed where people can, you know, move into their pods, their homes, their cars, and live lives that are very concentrated and focused on a very small group of people, their families, maybe a few friends, but not on the stranger and the communities that we're building are not encouraging people to know the stranger. And as a result I think we're losing the richness of our American tradition and our culture.

So, there's a lot tied in to how we live. I mean look at a society that can only build, primarily, only build communities that are parking lots, eight lane freeways, and subdivisions where you can't move from one subdivision to another any other way but in a car. On an increasingly wider boulevard is a society that knows that there's something diseased in us.

Q: Talk a little bit about the historic roots of all this.

A: I mean I'm going to give you sort of a - I mean I'm a political activist at this point. I'm a paid professional political activist so I'm going to give you, you know, a point of view here that not everybody is going to agree upon. I think that for much of the American experience, the governing experience, we had a government that treated its responsibilities to the citizen and to the community at large as its priority number one and somewhere after the second World War our governing focus began to be that we, as a government, need to become partners to business, not as an independent regulator, not as somebody that has their eye on where business and the aggregate is going, but that we, as a government, see businesses as job number one, that we see business as government's number one responsibility to aid, abet and encourage business activity and as a result if you do that in your governing structure at the local level where business takes precedence over any other social value, any other social value, you get the kind of civilizing patter that we have which is uncivilized. You get major scale. The issue about sprawl is its scale. We're not building little stores. We're not building little subdivisions. We're not building - we're not linking street to street to street. We're building in pods. It's like a UFO dropped out of the sky and boom, 200 acres of Wal-Mart there, boom, a whole strip mall of every kind of fast food that you can imagine. And none of it is really community oriented.

If you look at the economics of that kind of development you're looking at national business strategies whose supply lines are national. Home Depot is not supplying - you know when you buy wallboard by the square mile you're not getting it supplied by your local supplier. You're getting it supplied out of Lexington, Kentucky or Indianapolis and your cash flow and your capital lines are also national. So, you're not building the community that you have when you have family owned businesses on Main Street that have been there 100 years and know the community and all that and in our region, Traverse City, you have this great disparity between Traverse City which has been there since the 1880's or 1890's where 90% of the businesses on Front Street, which by the way is 100% occupied at this point, is family owned by people who have been there and Garfield Township, which is the fast, suburbanizing township just south where more than 90% of the businesses are national and the economies are different. In Traverse City you have a professional class and the incomes are higher. The home values are higher. In Garfield Township you have $8.00 an hour jobs, $6.50 an hour jobs. Most of the economy is in the service economy. It's not serving the people who are working in there and those workers, thousands of them, have to go 30 miles out to manage the county, highly rural, you know, Springdale County, mostly forested counties where they can only afford to live in trailer parks where they're kind of economic refugees.

So how does that all work? And I'm saying, I put it to you that the change in our governing structure where we saw governments serving business as it's job number one and all of its social values coming secondary is the reason that we provide this civilizing pattern that I submit is uncivilized. And what we're seeing in the sprawl to be politically is a recognition that this is a myth and we need to reinsert those other values at least as equal in priority to economic development, that they are compatible goals and they ought not to be one superceding all the rest. That's the big political struggle in this and that's where the rub is.

Q: Let's talk about rural areas a little bit. I talked to you earlier about the environmental impact of sprawl. What is it that we're doing? Use Michigan as an example.

A: Well, I mean sprawl is land consumptive. So on the suburban/rural fringe we're just tearing up a lot of natural land and a lot of farmland and biodiversity declines. So there's less forest, less fields, less water, clean water. So in terms of biodiversity and species issues it's probably the number one issue in the country, certainly in Michigan. I think the big environmental issue that's effecting sprawl nationally and certainly in the Midwest is the fact that there's so much more pavement, so many more hard spots, so much more absorbent landscape that we're seeing changes in the hydrology, changes in how the water drains in the land. So here in the Detroit metropolitan region, which hasn't grown at all, there's still 4 million people here, there were 4 million people here 30 or 40 years ago which is now four or five times larger in terms of its landscape, it's urbanized landscape.

The rivers here are now hydrologically higher than they used to be historically. It's shown in gauges that have been on these rivers for decades and the reason that's happening is because when it rains the water is coming down and moving off the landscape at a more rapid rate at higher volumes directly into these streams and the result is, in this region, our sewage treatment systems are being regularly inundated and overflowing and we have serious e-coliform bacteria problems on all of our beaches and our fresh water. So Metro Beach, which is the major metropolitan beach, and Lake St. Clair north of Detroit is regularly closed and has been since 1994 because the rains inundate the sewage treatment plants upstream.

Now, you know, this is a technically solvable problem, two ways. One, we preserve our wetlands, our forests, our open space and begin to absorb more water. We take out some of these parking lots of, we design our parking lots in a way that are more absorbent and two, we invest some money in sewage treatment which is what the United States used to do in the 1960's, 1970's, and the early 1980's and which was taken out as a public investment. But the problem is that we're doing neither. And the result is we're literally swimming in our own crap. That's what we're doing in Michigan and all over the country and we have some of the most polluted beaches in the nation, on the continent right here in our state and we're surrounded by fresh water.

Our state government is fond of saying, here in Michigan, as are other state governments that the environment is cleaner than it's ever been. A, that's not true and B, our near coastal water quality is declining because of this problem with fecal coliform and we're treating it as some sort of nuisance. It's not a nuisance. It's a major public health hazard. I mean, it's something that we, as a nation, should not tolerate and we, as a nation, especially now, have the investment capacity to solve, but we don't have the political will to solve it. This has become a major political issue in the Detroit region and it's becoming a major political issue in places like Traverse City which shouldn't be dealing with this, but does regularly because the same trend of paving, of water, of water rolling off the landscape inundating these streams and overflowing the sewage treatment plants is becoming endemic in Michigan. It's becoming endemic nationwide. So that's another very important public policy issue/environmental issue.

And I think the third piece of this is energy and air pollution. I mean the United States, people in the United States get really exercised when their gasoline prices move up five cents a gallon. Well, we're seeing gasoline prices starting to inch ever closer to two dollars a gallon. We had two dollars a gallon plus gasoline in the state of Michigan earlier this year and we are tremendously vulnerable to economic dislocation because of that. That's an air pollution problem. It's an energy problem. We're going to fight war so we can lower our energy prices or we going to redesign our communities so people can use less vehicles or other ways of moving around that are less expensive? But we are significantly vulnerable to that because we only have one way of getting around in Michigan. You know, Detroit is the largest metropolitan region in the country that doesn't have a light rail surface rail. There's no other alternative. I mean you can use bus lines that don't work too well or you get in a car. So, Detroit, which hasn't grown at all in population, now has the sixth worse traffic congestion in the country and the reason that is is because families are running fleets of vehicles.

When I was growing up in White Plains, New York, you only had one car. We had four children and one car. My dad got on the bus. He went to the train. He took the train into the city. He commuted, right? That ain't happening and in lots and lots of places we're dismantled that system. In so many places people have one choice and you know, where I live now every time a teenager gets to be driving age another vehicle gets in the family and families are running fleets of vehicles and that costs an average of four or five thousand dollars per car to run and that's as fuel prices go up. We are facing a very big economic dislocation, never mind the energy. I mean, are we going to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge so that we don't have to pay two dollars a gallon? These are major costs that are associated with sprawl and public policy, weak public policy decisions that have been made to solve it and deal with it in any way.

Q: Talk a little bit about what has worked in controlling this sprawl of development in Minneapolis.

A: We have a very select group of communities that have done a decent job in asking these questions and responding to them. Portland, which has been criticized by the right as some sort of antagonistic to the American dream, which is foolish, I mean Portland has a vibrant community and Portland is a vibrant, big community because they made choices about how they would grow. They put an urban growth boundary in. They stuck to it. An urban growth boundary is a line of demarcation inside of which you develop, outside of which you don't develop. Politically, Portland and the state of Oregon has made it stick. By and large they've been very careful about how much they enlarge it.

As population grows they've installed all kinds of housing choices and transportation choices to accommodate growth in that area. Instead of building a billion dollar highway in the 1970's and 1980s they've installed a billion dollar light rail line that opened in September of 1990, which is, by the way, operating at far above the capacity that was anticipated early in its operation in which they're now trying to expand those lines. They developed communities, not just parking lots around the station stops, but actually houses, shops, professional centers all walkable to each station stop so the people can have choices about how they get around.

You know, Washington, D.C. did the same thing with its metro - highly controversial when it was first proposed. It would disrupt communities - now loved. And those communities that chose not to have a metro stop like Georgetown are now ruing that - disappointed with their decision because those metro stops have become economic magnets and they're easy to get to and businesses want to be close to the metro stops because their workers can get to the metro stop and that can reduce the workers family cost because they might not have to get the vehicle which is going to cost them $5,000, $6000 or $7000 a year just to operate.

So, there are communities in the country that are doing it, not a whole lot and politically this is tough stuff. Politically it's tough stuff because our government, at every level, still is focused on helping, assisting, at any cost, business and economic development and so when citizens come forward and asked about these other social values, quality of life, environmental protection, you know, equity issues, how we live, whether we need to have 100 acres for that or ten acres for the same thing that is seen as antagonistic to this goal which is government economic growth at any cost and that economic growth at any cost is producing this kind of, you know, distortions in how we live and it's producing, I think, distortions in how we behave.

I mean, this is off kind of where you're going, but I think there's a clear connection between the communities, especially the new communities, most of which are new communities and the school killings we've seen in this country over the last couple of years. I mean if you go to Columbine and Oregon and Arkansas and Florida, you know, you look at those communities, most of those communities are upper income, mostly white, mostly new, new suburbs, new schools and that's where the kids are getting killed. Now, why is - those are not inner city schools. We're not having massacres in inner city schools. We're seeing most of them, not all of them, most of them in these new suburbs and I think there's a disconnect. I mean I think there's disease I'm talking about, this disconnect between continuity and community and cohesion and how people feel about their neighbors and who they know and this cynicism and anger that we're seeing in our kids. I just think that how we civilize ourselves has to have some effect in this really macabre behavior that we're seeing, dangerous behavior we're seeing in select communities. I've not seen any psychological/sociological study. I just noticed that that's where they're happening.

Q: There are urban planners that are talking about exactly that. I'll ask you a general question about the state of government in Michigan and an issue I know that is very near and dear to your heart, but on farms I wonder if you'd talk a little bit about why land is so available today and what I'm thinking of is this issue of the value of farmlands when it's in agriculture versus when development comes near. What is the pattern that happens with that? I mean, we know, but a lot of people watching this aren't going to understand why farmers are selling their farms.

A: Well, for one thing, farmers aren't making any money and our national agriculture policy is designed to produce cheap commodities, not to provide for the families who are growing the food, raising the food and this has been going on for most of the post World War II era. And as a result there's no future in it, really. Families, young people, that are in agricultural families see no future in it. They see their parents and their grandparents working themselves to the bone and not making any money and they have as their chief economic asset, their land. And many of the most productive farms in America have been closest to the cities.

So what we're seeing is this great competition for land. As we put our investment every farther from the city centers that are ever farther even now from the suburbs, the land that's being developed primarily in the state, primarily in the hot development zones is farmland. So, farmland in Traverse City and the Traverse City region is worth $2000 or $2500 an acre as farmland and its development land, depending on where it is, could be worth $20,000 an acre or $30,000 an acre. I mean, that's just an economic mismatch as any fool would take advantage of if they owned a lot of farmland. So, it's producing tremendous stress in the farm community, tremendous emotional stress because it's not like a farmer hates his land and wants to development his or her landscape. They feel forced to. They feel like they have no choice and our state government has done next to nothing to help them.

I mean, there are ways to solve this. There are tools out there, purchase of development rights, transfer of development rights where the public can provide investment to farmers to permanently take his ground out ofofor development, buy his development rights, in some places $5000 or $6000 an acre, provide fungible cash and enormous amounts of cash to that farmer and allow him equity in his landscape before he has to sell, but in this state we've chosen not to do much of that. We've basically ignored the issue. Other states, Pennsylvania, Maryland and California have done a much better job at that because they care about their agricultural landscape, but in our state right now it's development at any cost. It's a transfer of natural resources to a select group of private interest and we're just not interested.

I mean people, you know, they see this farmland, this beautiful farmland being developed for subdivisions or malls or whatever it's going to be, roads and they feel that tug at their heart, in their gut that boy, this is terrible, but you know, how can you possibly put any onus on a farmer who's been struggling out there, who works harder than anybody we know and can't make a living off his resources. What is that person supposed to do? So it's tough. I mean we struggle with this all the time and the other thing is, in my community, advocacy community, progressive advocacy community that prides itself on developing all kinds of new answers, don't have a good answer for this because this is an answer that has to come from a public investment. It's a governing issue. There's no possible way that private, on the aggregate, private sources can start paying farmers to set aside their land.

So, there's two issues here. One, we've got to work on national agriculture policy to raise commodity prices so that people can make a living and two, we have to convince our governing leaders and citizens that saving farmland for perpetuity is going to be a good public investment for the future because we're not making more farmland and we're probably not going to be growing our food out of the air. I think we're still going to need soil and sun and water to grow food, to raise crops efficiently. It's the most efficient way that's been discovered. We've been doing it for 10,000 years and as we grow to 400 million people and 400 million vehicles and larger, that land is going to become ever more important just to produce our food supply. So, there's value in it from an aesthetic point of view and there's value in it from a national security point of view that we need to deal with and we're not. I mean, like much of these important public policy issues we chose not to deal with them. We'd rather talk about, you know, what are we talking about - Oprah's weight. We'd rather talk about Oprah's weight.

Q:We still live in the Horace Greeley, "Go west, Young Man, it's a great land of opportunity, it's all out there, we'll never use it up, it's never ending" era. Considering this sense of unlimited possibility and openness, what has to be done to convince American people to think differently and how do you do that?

A: Well, I think we're already in that transition. I mean, you look at Californians who are exiting California during the recession of the early 1990's and landing in the Colorado front range for instance which has now turned into being a civic mess and they wonder, both the Coloradoans who saw them coming and now the Californians who are there are wondering, we moved and we brought all our values about how we grow with us and we now need to change our interstate from six lanes to 15 which is what they're talking about on the front range of Colorado. I mean we're seeing it in Michigan.

Northern Michigan in the lower peninsula is growing at a record pace - never seen this kind of growth. It's mostly a transition from Southern Michigan to Northern Michigan. People come there with ideas about the kinds of values that they'll be moving into small town values - forests, you know, it will be this nirvana - clean water and clean air. And they get there and they find they're getting hemmed in. Now we're talking about six lane/300 million dollar bypasses, new sewage treatment plants, you know Wal-Marts and sprawls and they're wondering - going to Home Depot - not to say there's anything wrong with Home Depot, but there's this gargantuan - you buy in gargantuan scale and you put your family business out.

Q: What are the consequences if we don't do something about it?

A: Well, we'll continue to degrade our air and our water. We'll lose the gains that we've made since the 1970's and 1980's in environmental policy. And I think in a society that we will continue to be distanced from ourselves and the consequences from ourselves and the consequences of that are now becoming manifest. I think we're a very cynical society. Again, environmentally, we're going to backtrack from the gains that we've made as a nation - air, water, biodiversity, forest, open space. We've made tremendous gains. It's one of the really great social policy triumphs of the 20th century was what we did on the environment in the United States and worldwide. So, we're going to backtrack. In terms of our cities we'll continue to lose ground in our cities and we'll continue to erode our cities. Unless we invest inward instead of outward that trend is going to continue with all its manifest sociological problems of crime, education, inability to function in the city, rising costs, poverty and I think as a nation we're going to continue to be distanced from ourselves. We're a nation that really hates our own society. Why else would be put up gates around our communities? Why else would we have nimbiism(sic)? You know, not in my backyard. We're a nation that retreats from ourselves. We don't seek our neighbors out for the most part. We come home from work, come home from school and get on the computer. We get on the TV. We sit in our great rooms. We eat our fast food. We're not seeking to - we don't relish the human community in our nation as much as we used to and I think that's a function of how we civilize ourselves.

I think our business life suffers. We are increasingly dominated by major capital and I'm not Andy Corporate, but you know, large masses of capital that's designed to take from a community what it can, not add to a community. So we have businesses that are developing in our communities that aren't particularly interested in circulating their capital both economic and human and that's how family businesses operate in the community and how national corporations operate in a community are two completely different things because that national corporation doesn't suffer the emotional, moral, ethical, heartfelt, you know, pangs of human contact when they decide they're going to close that store or that plant or you know, they just pick up and move because it's all about business whereas a family who is going to own a business has a connection with that community that's going to be a whole lot different.

So, we'll continue to be what we are, what we've become, a sprawled nation, on the map. Intellectually, morally, we're a cynical society and I think that has to do with how we live. I mean, you know, we are what we live, but I see this issue as a very hopeful issue because it's all not just downside. I see this issue helping the United States citizens become much more mature and we're not a new nation any longer and we need to grapple with how we design our communities. Why should we be building schools ever farther out that nobody can ride their bike to, nobody can walk to, that it takes a logistical planner, a mother, the logistical planner, or a father to be able to navigate just to get their children to school and to pick them up from school. Why don't we build that school on the corner like we used to? I walked to school.

You know, I do meetings all over the country now and I always ask people when I get to the meeting, how many people in this room walked to school as a kid? And if they're my age 99% of them walked to school as a kid. Does that make a worse person? When you ask the little kids, how many of you guys walk to schoolonone of them because we've got this grand, regional school. Where's the data that shows that is improving our school, our educational performance?

So, I think as people kind of really look at what we're doing to ourselves and how we're performing they're going to see that there are values that we've left as a nation that we need to return to about how we design our communities, the choices we make and I'm not saying this is going to be nirvana, but I think it's going to be a lot better. I think we're going to be able to - the great communities are just not going to be the ones that we decide to vacation in. They're going to be the ones that we live in and when that occurs how we govern ourselves and the kind of values we bring to the governing process which are just not, you know, maximum, economic profit because when you're just driving from maximum economic profit you get the mess that we're in. We have to, as a nation, find a way to put other values in there and I'm not talking about family values. I'm talking about social equity, economic environmental community values back in the equation about how we design our communities and we're getting there very quickly, much more quickly than I ever anticipated.

You know, in 1995, we started the Michigan Land Use Institute and in 1998, Bill Clinton was talking about sprawl in the State of the Union. He talked about sprawl, the need to start grappling with this and we may be electing a new president for whom this is an issue, a real issue and for whom is going to act on it. And that's all it's going to take because what we've seen around the country in the last five or six years, those governors that choose to act on this issue really get a lot done and so a chief executive that chooses to look at his transportation, education, housing, policy in terms of this land, in terms of improving community just not maximum economic profit and ever outward development can do a lot and that's what we need and I think those people are going to be surprised by how many Americans, ordinary Americans, can key into this issue and say, these are a set of ideas that I support and am willing to work for.