Last Harvest: From Cornfield to New Town Read online

  “We know what’s in it for the developer,” someone says brusquely, “but what’s in it for us?” He doesn’t mean the people who are going to live in the new houses — they are not represented in this room — he means the people who currently live in the township. Benner points out that the developers will donate land for a future township building and that the open space on the site will be for everyone. There appears to be skepticism in the audience on this point. Is it really going to be public? “It’s up to you,” says Duckworth. “We could deed it to an agricultural trust that would keep it as farmland, or give it to the township for recreational uses, ball fields and so on.” This sounds too good to be true — a developer giving something away. “The proposed ordinance says that there may be up to twelve thousand five hundred square feet of retail or office space,” says a woman who has obviously taken the trouble to read the document. “I’d hate to see golden arches here.” “Or a Wal-Mart,” someone chimes in. Duckworth assures them that 12,500 square feet is very small, not a large building, something like a convenience store or a professional office.

  There are a number of questions about the houses that will be built in New Daleville. How big will they be? More important, how much will they cost? The latter is a key issue for the people who live in the nearby subdivisions. They own one-acre lots, whereas Arcadia is proposing something much smaller, and they are concerned that cheaper houses will bring down their property values. Duckworth says he expects the houses to be about two thousand square feet in size and to sell for about $200,000, which is comparable to current local house prices. He adds that, in other neotraditional developments, prices have generally risen over time. In that case, a woman asks, why does he need so many houses, why not a few less? “We’re hoping that the prices will rise,” says Duckworth, “but it’s still risky.” He explains that the larger number of houses is needed to cover the costs of curbs, sidewalks, lanes, and landscaping. He doesn’t say that it also covers the cost of the long approval process, drawn out by meetings such as this one.

  Despite Duckworth’s well-considered attempt to persuade the audience, the general mood remains one of mistrust and antagonism. It’s clear that if a floor vote were taken, a majority would vote against New Daleville. These people have not been impressed by neotraditional development. Walkability, the village concept, even the large amount of public open space, have not swayed opinion. As far as they are concerned, New Daleville could be as pretty as a Currier & Ives print but it’s still a new development, that is, it’s new houses on what was previously farmland. New houses mean extra cars, extra traffic at rush hour, more kids in the schools, and in the long run, higher taxes. Above all, new houses mean more people. The residents of Londonderry live here because they like the remoteness and the open countryside. They put up with driving some distance to work and to shop. Their isolation will be diminished by any development, whether on big lots or on small. Arcadia has a long way to go to convince them that New Daleville is a good idea.

  The discussion lasts an hour. Citing a full agenda, Benner thanks the Arcadia team and calls for a brief recess. Jason and Della Porta, who have not spoken during the meeting, collect the presentation boards and go out to the parking lot. Nearby, the lights of Mindy Acres gleam prettily in the darkness. It’s quiet, except for the low hum of occasional traffic on the highway, several miles away. The vast dome of the sky sparkles with stars. It’s easy to see what attracts people to live here, and why they are reluctant to accept change.

  Jason, who was hoping for a vote tonight, looks glum. “I thought that went well,” Della Porta says to cheer him up. “These meetings can be much worse, with shouting and insults. Tonight was pretty mild.” Comitta is not so sure. He’s surprised both by the large turnout and by the hostile atmosphere. “The previous meetings of the planning commission rarely had more than three or four people in attendance. I’ve never heard so much negative comment about this project.” He has to go back inside, since the preliminary plan of Honeycroft Village is slated for a vote. He doesn’t expect any serious opposition. “Honeycroft is up in the northwest corner of the township, and it has few neighbors, so it’s not in anyone’s backyard,” he explains. “In addition, the developer promised that the town houses would be mainly for retired and older home buyers without children, so schooling is not a big issue.” He’s right; the Honeycroft preliminary plan is speedily approved.

  “In thirty years I’ve never been asked by the county to defend a proposed township ordinance,” says Comitta, who will represent Londonderry before Chester County. He thinks the planning commission may be concerned that the county master plan designates Daleville as rural, whereas the new ordinance proposes a village. In fact, when Duckworth got involved in the Wrigley tract, he verified that the county was not opposed to a zoning change. Duckworth believes that the unusual request for a formal presentation is caused by the fact that he himself is a member of the Chester County planning commission, and currently serves as chairman. “The commission staff are just being very careful,” he says. “They want to make sure that there is no perception of favoritism or conflict of interest.”

  The county offices are located on the outskirts of West Chester, in a large, modern building that Comitta, when he gave me directions, described as resembling “a really big Circuit City.” The meeting is in a spacious room on the first floor. There are five commissioners, three young women — a township supervisor, the president of a local resources council, and a foundation president — a young man who is a lawyer, and an older man who is a borough councilman. They sit at a U-shaped table. Comitta comes early with a stack of presentation boards, followed by Jason and Della Porta. Comitta will do most of the talking, but they are here in case there are any questions he can’t answer. Joe Duckworth is the last to come in, very businesslike in a dark blue suit. He excuses himself for being late, explaining that he has been meeting with the county commissioners.

  As chair of the commission, Duckworth sits at the head of the table and opens the meeting by calling for a minute of silence — it is September 11, a year after the attack on the World Trade Center. Approving the minutes of the last meeting, the commission launches into a flurry of motions, seconds, and votes on dozens of zoning ordinances and sewage facility plans. There is no debate, since the staff has already reviewed these cases, and the motions pass rapidly. Following a brief discussion of agricultural easements and land conservation, the agenda arrives at the Londonderry ordinance. Duckworth explains that, as the developer of New Daleville, he is recusing himself from the proceedings. He leaves the table and sits at the side of the room.

  The first to speak about the Londonderry ordinance is Bill Fulton, who is the executive director of the commission, in charge of the professional staff. He gives some of the background on the Londonderry ordinance, explaining that originally the county proposed that Fagg’s Manor should be the village center for the township. The supervisors felt this was an inappropriate location, so the village designation was removed from the county master plan. However, a village center is needed somewhere, and this now appears to be Daleville, he says. No problem there.

  Comitta gets up to speak on behalf of the township. He hands out copies of the current zoning map and a short description of the neotraditional concept. He places plans of New Daleville and of the original Dilsheimer proposal on an easel and outlines the differences. He says that the township wants to use the extra open area as a public playing field. One of the commissioners asks if there is any opposition to the proposed zoning change. Comitta says that there is overall support. He doesn’t mention the tied vote of the planning commission.

  After answering some general questions from the commissioners, Comitta sits down. A young man speaks on behalf of the county planning staff. He has some technical questions about water supply and the width of the streets. He says the staff is concerned that the proposed ordinance may be challenged as spot zoning. Spot zoning means that an ordinance is so narrowly applied
that it benefits the owner of a particular property to the detriment of his neighbors. Comitta tells me later that spot zoning is a murky concept which has no precise legal definition but is often cited by opponents of a particular zoning provision. In the case of New Daleville, the county appears to be uneasy that the new ordinance is being applied solely to the Wrigley tract. Although there are a few technicalities to be ironed out, this seems to be the main issue. The staff member concludes by recommending acceptance of the ordinance. Minor adjustments can be worked out with the township later, he says.

  The commissioners have few questions. Unlike during the previous township meeting, there are no serious objections to the zoning amendment. The truth is that Arcadia’s neotraditional project is just the sort of development the county has been encouraging. Jason, who has clearly done his homework, responds to some of the technical concerns, and Comitta embarks on a complicated rebuttal of the objection to spot zoning. He says that the township solicitor will review the ordinance and communicate with the county. I have the feeling that everyone is merely going through the motions. Duckworth was right, it is just the staff being careful. When the vote is taken, all five commissioners raise their hands in favor. New Daleville is still on track.

  *The practice of naming residential subdivisions originated in 1811 in England, with John Nash’s suburban Bristol development, Blaise Hamlet. Llewellyn Park, Riverside, and Wissahickon Heights are early American examples.

  9

  Scatteration

  Every year, year in and year out, the American home-building industry produces between 1 million and 2 million new homes, four out of five of which are single-family houses.

  When Tom Comitta spoke at the township meeting, he characterized traditional neighborhood development as an alternative to sprawl. Whatever their opinion of development, most people believe that sprawl is bad. Conservationists decry the loss of agricultural land; proponents of mass transit don’t like spending more money on highway construction; environmentalists oppose continued dependence on fossil fuels; sociologists claim that low-density suburbs undermine community; urban planners see suburban sprawl as consuming resources that would be better spent on revitalizing inner cities; architects object to sprawl on aesthetic grounds; and, of course, opponents of development see sprawl as their chief enemy.

  It is not so simple. For example, sprawl is often blamed for urban poverty, on the grounds that peripheral growth removes jobs from the inner city. Yet Anthony Downs, a Brookings Institution researcher and a longtime critic of sprawl, has found no significant relationship between sprawl and urban decline. “This was very surprising to me,” he wrote, “and went against my belief that sprawl had contributed to concentrated poverty and therefore to urban decline.”1

  What about sprawl using up land? Most people in Londonderry would tell you that sprawl threatens farmland, but there is no evidence that a shortage of agricultural land is a serious national problem; in fact, during the last three decades of rampant suburbanization, food prices have dropped, not risen.2 Environmentalists make sprawl sound like a voracious monster. Yet America is not running out of land. One researcher has calculated that to house the entire population of the United States at a low suburban density of one family per acre would require an area smaller than the state of Oregon.3 Only about 5 percent of the United States landmass is currently urbanized — that is, occupied by buildings, roads, and parking lots — compared with 20 percent devoted to farming, more than 30 percent covered by forest. The balance — almost half — is wilderness.4 Indeed, as unproductive farms are abandoned and rural people move to urban areas, wilderness has actually increased. “If preserving large ecosystems and wildlife habitat is your priority,” wrote John Tierney in The New York Times, “better to concentrate people in suburbs and exurbs rather than scatter them in the remote countryside.”5

  Perhaps one reason for the confusion about sprawl is that there is no widely agreed-upon definition.6 Some describe sprawl as a particular type of low-density growth, and others as a symptom of runaway development. And for some it is merely a temporary stage in the urbanization process. Late-nineteenth-century photographs of upper Manhattan show brownstones and apartment houses surrounded by open space — which looks like the sort of scattered development commonly associated with sprawl, yet in relatively short order, the empty spaces were filled in, and sprawl turned into city. Most people think they know sprawl when they see it. But do they? Los Angeles is popularly considered an example of sprawl, yet the population density of its built-up metropolitan area is actually greater than that of metropolitan New York.7 Likewise contrary to popular belief, Los Angeles is not a city of freeways; it has the fewest miles of freeway per capita of any American urbanized area (which is why its freeways are so congested).8 The least dense metropolitan areas in the United States are not around the new cities of the South and West but surrounding older cities such as Detroit, Philadelphia, and Boston. Between 1982 and 1997, the urbanized areas of all three increased more than five times as quickly as their populations.9 This reduction in population density is chiefly the result of home rule. All three cities are surrounded by small, independent municipalities which have enacted zoning that restricts growth by requiring large lots or by creating other obstacles to development. This, in turn, reduces density and pushes new construction farther and farther into previously rural areas.

  The media commonly fuel misperceptions about sprawl. A 1995 cover story in Newsweek titled “Bye, Bye, Suburban Dream” described the growth of Phoenix in alarming terms: between 1950 and 1994, the area within city limits increased twenty-six-fold although the population grew only tenfold.10 Obviously a case of sprawl — or is it? When a city expands by annexation, it acquires empty land, as well as unbuildable areas such as wetlands and mountain slopes. If one counts only the parts of metropolitan Phoenix that were actually urbanized in the fifteen years leading up to 1997, the area of metro Phoenix increased only half as quickly as its population; that is, metro Phoenix grew denser. Moreover, in 1997 the population density per urbanized square mile in Phoenix was greater than the metropolitan density of Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia.11

  Sprawl is often contrasted with dense downtowns, as if the choice were between living in a suburban rancher or an urban high-rise. However, according to the 1990 census, the densities of American suburbs and cities are not vastly different: the average gross population density of suburbs was 2,149 persons per square mile, that of cities was 2,813.12 The explanation for this similarity is the nature of the American housing stock. As one might expect, the majority of suburban dwellings — almost three-quarters — are one-and two-story buildings. However, considerably more than half of city dwellings are also one-and two-story buildings. In fact, only 5 percent of city dwellings nationwide are in buildings of seven stories or more.

  If American suburbs and cities are more similar than different, why does the specter of sprawl loom so large in the public’s imagination? One reason is that sprawl is often equated with suburbanization. Virtually all postwar metropolitan growth in the United States has been suburban, but not all suburban growth, as Los Angeles and Phoenix demonstrate, is sprawl. As Downs points out, “Sprawl is not any form of suburban growth, but a particular form of it.”13 (He lists low densities, leapfrog development, and extreme political decentralization as some of the traits.) Another reason that sprawl appears pervasive is that the effects of growth can be so visible. Since coming to Philadelphia, my wife and I sometimes drive through Bucks County to a large flea market near Lambertville, New Jersey. It’s as much a chance to get out in the country as to look at cracked teacups. Bucks County, roughly halfway between New York City and Philadelphia, used to be strictly a rural area, then a place for weekend retreats; now city people are moving here permanently, drawn by good schools and relatively inexpensive housing. Over the last ten years, the quiet country roads we take have become congested thoroughfares, and the picturesque fields have filled up with housing developmen
ts and discount malls. In fact, development in the county is generally concentrated, and large parts of the countryside remain open, but that is not the view we have from the road.

  A lot of the new houses in Bucks County are the work of K. Hovnanian Homes, which has built more than 150,000 homes across the United States since the company was founded in 1959. According to Ara K. Hovnanian, who is president and CEO, “The challenge for home builders is to try and figure out the type of housing that will be demanded by buyers, and where the demand will occur geographically. The good news is that, over the long term, the size of the actual demand for new homes is entirely predictable.”14 The predictability he describes is the result of three conditions. The first is population growth. Thanks largely to immigration, the U.S. population has been increasing every year by more than 2 million persons. These people need somewhere to live. The second is steadily increasing prosperity. As people are better off, they want newer, better-equipped, and larger homes. The third is mobility. New jobs don’t necessarily coincide with existing housing, and as people move — from cities to suburbs, from suburbs to rural areas, from one coast to the other — they, too, need places to live. As a result, every year, year in and year out, the American home-building industry produces between 1 million and 2 million new homes, four out of five of which are single-family houses. Add to this new workplaces, new shopping places, new entertainment places, new schools, new hospitals, and new roads tying them all together, and you have a Monopoly game in full play.