Outlook on Sustainable Enterprise 

Robert Steuteville and David Riggle 

Land Use: Sprawl Versus Communities

Suburban sprawl has dominated the U.S. landscape for the last 50 years, gobbling up farmland with cookie-cutter housing developments, shopping centers, malls and, lately, "big box" department stores. While national figures on sprawl are hard to come by, data has been gathered on a regional basis. In the Chicago region, developed land increased at least 40 percent between 1970 and 1990, while population increased only four percent, according to the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission. Moreover, growth patterns in northeastern Illinois show that the greatest increases were on the outskirts of the metropolitan region, while the city and inner suburbs lost residents or remained stable. These general trends hold true in metropolitan regions throughout the U.S. 

For most of the last half century, there has been no alternative to sprawl. But in the last decade, a counter movement has begun to take hold to build communities, rather than developments. This is taking two forms, called "new urbanism" and "eco-villages." Both include tightly clustered development, public open space, pedestrian oriented design, and mixed commercial and residential properties. "You need to have the mixture of business and residential in the same area so people don't have to drive as often," says Brian Drewes, with the Eco-Village in Ithaca, a development of 30 homes that is planned to begin construction in the summer of 1995 in New York State. Eco-villages, of which there are about a half dozen planned in the U.S., focus more directly on environmental technologies, i.e. alternative energy, and the concept of cohousing, a cooperative living philosophy which began in Denmark 20 years ago. 

The new urbanism (also called neotraditional or transit oriented development) is a larger phenomenon, with an estimated 125 projects nationwide, according to Peter Kale, author of The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community. Most are in the planning stages, but at least a dozen are under construction (it is still a fraction of one percent of the total construction industry). Nevertheless, it is fair to say that no embryonic development concept has received so much attention -- Newsweek recently published a major story on the subject, for example, and so has just about every major newspaper and news magazine in recent years. "On the one hand, you have continued sprawl and the tendency toward big box retail stores," Katz says. "But there is also tremendous interest in new types of development. What you have is two freight trains going in opposite directions, and only time will tell whether they are on a collision course." 

The trend toward designing for community, and more prudent use of land resources, is being driven by dissatisfaction with suburbia, Katz says. Nevertheless, there are significant challenges ahead for forward thinking developers, including regulatory barriers, demonstration of market viability and inertia in the housing industry. The first hurdle may be the largest: zoning codes adopted nation-wide in the last 50 years explicitly forbid dense, mixed-use, pedestrian oriented development. Although there are a handful of locations where it is permitted and even encouraged, in most municipalities new urbanism or eco-villages require zoning variances, which can take months or years for approval. Proving market viability and overcoming inertia are related issues. Banks and builders are reluctant to become involved with an unproven concept. "It's the chicken and egg syndrome," Katz says. "The problem is getting the market validation when the option is generally not available in the marketplace." If the developments that are coming on line prove to be financially successful, however, this equation may change.

Last updated: July 25, 2000

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