The Sprawl Lobby   Suburban sprawl doesn’t happen because most people like it. It happens because construction- finance-real estate interests dominate state and local government.
	It would be difficult to find a state that has given more media coverage to suburban sprawl than Virginia has. Ed Risse’s regular column in Bacon’s Rebellion articulates the concern that many have with scattered, low-density land uses. What’s largely missing from the debate about sprawl is a critique of the greed and corruption that is destroying Virginia’s and America's quality of life, quality of place, and public health.   Attempts to get sprawl under control started in the 1950s relatively soon after the phenomenon exploded after World War II. All have failed. Unless sprawl haters understand the politics of sprawl and the power of the sprawl lobby, huge population increases by mid-century will render it impossible to save the public green spaces, clean air and water, rural lifestyles, farmland and social capital that Virginians so value.   Sprawl in Virginia is not propelled simply by market forces. The land-development and home-building business sectors would have us believe that they are simply responding to the public demand for housing in general and suburban homes in particular. They lie. The housing market is remarkable because supply influences demand much more than demand affects supply. Many Americans, not wanting to live in the un-places that are a by-product of suburban sprawl, find they have few choices in the housing and transportation markets.   The truth is, many people want to live in true communities that are walkable and accessible to parks and other green spaces. They want to live near where they work and shop, near schools their kids can walk to. They want to lead a physically active lifestyle, not spend their time stuck in stressful congestion. They reject the automobile apartheid that makes people on foot and bicycles and using public transit second class citizens. They want more urbanized places, though not necessarily inner cities, where there is street life and it’s easy to meet their neighbors.   Market research and surveys over recent years shows that well over one-third of home seekers want an alternative to suburban sprawl un-places. The odds of finding a home in a place built according to New Urbanism, smart growth, or traditional neighborhood design principles, however, is over 500 to 1 against them.     The sprawl industry consists of land developers, home and commercial builders, real estate agents, land use attorneys, banking and finance institutions, road builders, and planning professionals. Closely aligned because they benefit so much from the sprawl land-development paradigm, which includes ever rising levels of vehicle ownership and mileage as well as sedentary health problems and mental stress, are the fast food, automobile, petroleum, and pharmaceutical industries. In truth, too much of the American economy is now closely connected to continued sprawl development.    Attempts by local governments to obtain from the Legislature new powers to better manage growth have prompted the Home Builders Association of Virginia to threaten, “You would be giving local governments a weapon of mass destruction on the economy of the commonwealth.” What ridiculous rhetoric. The Virginia sprawl lobby paints smart growth as some communist conspiracy depriving Americans of their freedom or forcing them to live in inner cities. While such accusations are utterly false, the strategy often works. The more that the smart growth movement succeeds and the more that home buyers want true alternatives to sprawl, the uglier get the tactics of the sprawl industry to defend the status quo.    The fundamental changes in the housing and real estate markets that Ed Risse and others talk about will not happen as long as the sprawl industry maintains its grip on the housing market through its powerful lobby. In Virginia, constituencies of sprawl funnel enormous sums of money to politicians, local government officials and state legislators. Long ago, sprawl interests understood that they had to spend money to control local planning and zoning systems to keep sprawl land development’s primacy. In Loudoun County sprawl money turned a majority of the Board of Supervisors from a smart growth to a pro-development agenda.   By controlling local governments and the state legislature, the sprawl industry has made alternative patterns of development either illegal or extremely difficult and expensive to build. Sprawl developers routinely bitch about government regulation and bureaucrats, but sprawl remains ubiquitous. Sprawl projects face a few speed bumps as they roll downhill. Developers trying to create smart-growth, mixed-land use projects must bust through veritable police barricades as they go uphill on the slippery slope lubricated by the sprawl lobby.   The pursuit of happiness by the few profiting from sprawl land development is killing the future pursuit of happiness by the many.   -- January 19, 2003