The Houston Chronicle
www.chron.com

Issue of sprawl lost on campaign trail

By NEAL PEIRCE

September 10, 2000

Sprawl vaults to the top of concern lists in local polls. Chock-full roads trigger frustration coast to coast. Demand for public transit expands.

But where are our presidential candidates on the growth issues of 2000?

So far, mostly silent.

Al Gore -- the senator who built much of his national reputation on environmental issues, the vice president who championed livability and "smart growth" way ahead of the political pack -- makes dutiful, periodic reference to growth problems. But rarely with any special emphasis.

George W. Bush is even less audible. He occasionally notes his support for "brownfields" cleanups and Superfund reform -- important for city revival. But mostly he attacks regulatory excesses and insists land-use decisions be left to localities.

Gore may actually be saying more about the environment soon because polls show it is a particularly salient issue in the hotly contested Great Lakes states.

Though strongly anti-sprawl, Gore cautiously distances the federal government from overriding local decisions. Where he's a country mile ahead of Bush is his commitment to "reduce traffic and smog and improve transportation by investing in cleaner and safer buses, light-rail and subway systems and high-speed trains."

Gore's opponents may call those expensive propositions. Yet they're the kinds of investments other advanced nations are finding necessary. Total auto and truck miles driven in the United States expanded at three times the rate of our population increase in the '90s. Americans sense the need for new strategies.

The question about Bush is why he seems so indifferent to America's growth quandaries. He constantly stresses local control. But the Austin American-Statesman reports that when the growth-deluged city of Austin moved to regulate development and water quality, Bush approved state legislation to negate all its efforts.

Not every conservative makes that kind of decision. GOP Govs. Christie Todd Whitman (N.J.), Mike Leavitt (Utah), Jane Hull (Ariz.) and Bill Owens (Colo.) espouse smart growth.

Free-lance journalist Thomas Hylton cites the case of Bush's close friend, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, a property-rights fundamentalist when he first ran for governor of Pennsylvania.

But on taking office, Ridge began to hear a chorus of outrage from Pennsylvanians concerned by the flow of population and wealth out of their cities and towns, even while low-density development was devouring vast quantities of farmland.

Last June, Ridge signed a "growing smarter" package of bills, first of its kind in Pennsylvania, encouraging towns to collaborate on regional land development and conservation.

Though the bills are just a first step, observes Hylton, "Gov. Ridge's conviction that sprawl is damaging what is best about his state, and that government has a significant role to play, signals a sea change in Republican political thinking."

On a parallel track, Michael Garber of the conservative Hudson Institute believes Republicans need to avoid being branded the "pro-sprawl" party. How? By advancing "a local-oriented, market-based alternative to Gore's big-government anti-sprawl

campaign."

And why? Because, says Garber, it wasn't just free-market forces, nor big federal programs like housing and interstate highways, that triggered sprawl. He fingers an even more serious present-day problem: "highly prescriptive, single-use zoning codes and traffic engineering standards." Apply those rules seriously, he notes, and one couldn't rebuild America's Main Streets -- they'd be illegal.

The point is intriguing. Couldn't the Republicans encourage states and localities to take an ax to laws that now force massively wide streets, big schools separated from towns and long distances from work to residences?

In one fell swoop, incentives for sprawl would shrink. Chances would increase for traditional neighborhood development -- pedestrian-friendly places, with parks and schools and shops within walking distance. Communities with civic value, Norman Rockwell-like places in 21st-century America. How conservative, how Republican!

Sadly, there's not a hint of that approach in the Bush rhetoric. Nor, sadly, is there any real challenge to Gore to explain how, beyond transit alternatives, he'd actually reduce wasteful sprawl

development.

Gentlemen, we're listening.