Last Harvest: From Cornfield to New Town Read online

  It’s unsettling to live in a state of perpetual upheaval. That’s probably why sprawl has become a whipping boy for so many of the things we don’t like about modern life: traffic jams, overcrowding, instability, change itself.15 George Galster, an urban economist at Wayne State University, describes sprawl as “the metaphor of choice for the shortcomings of the suburbs and the frustration of central cities…a conflation of ideology, experience, and effects.”16 I have a friend who has lived in Chester County for the last fifty years. He originally had an old house on a piece of land large enough that he could shoot rabbits without disturbing his neighbors. Over the years, he has seen the surrounding horse farms gradually replaced by residential subdivisions. Naturally, he grumbles about the influx of newcomers, the increased traffic, the noise, the slow disappearance of his bucolic surroundings. More than a decade ago, he subdivided his fifteen acres into three lots, selling two and building himself a new house on the third. In other words, in a small way, he became a real estate developer. But if I were to call him that, he would be outraged — sprawl is always somebody else’s fault.

  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word sprawl first appeared in print in 1955, in an article in the London Times that contained a disapproving reference to “great sprawl” at the city’s periphery. Lewis Mumford referred to “sprawling suburbia” in his 1961 classic, The City in History.17 A 1965 article in Land Economics defined sprawl as “areas of essentially urban character at the urban fringe but which are scattered or strung-out, or surrounded by…underdeveloped sites or agricultural uses.”18 At that time, the more neutral term scatteration was also used to describe this phenomenon.19 Thanks to a famous 1974 study titled The Costs of Sprawl, which computed the direct costs and adverse environmental effects of low-density development, sprawl entered the planning lexicon.20 The methodology of the study was later called into question, but the term stuck.21 There is no better way to occupy the high ground in a debate than to define its language.

  The Costs of Sprawl study was prompted by the fact that in 1970, for the first time, more Americans lived in suburbs than in rural areas or cities. The authors of the study predicted that suburbanization between 1970 and 2000 would be almost as great as in the previous twenty years, which had been “the period of greatest suburban growth in the nation’s history.”22 They underestimated on two counts. Suburban growth was greater than expected, not 70 percent but 80 percent, and the overall population grew not by 46 million but by 76 million. As a result, the increase in the number of people living in the suburbs turned out to be almost twice as great as predicted. The United States had become, in the words of one commentator, a “nation of suburbs.”23

  When railroads and streetcars opened up the urban periphery in the nineteenth century, only the well-off could afford to commute, whether it was from Chestnut Hill to Center City Philadelphia, from Brookline to downtown Boston, from Lake Forest to Chicago’s Loop, or from Tuxedo Park to Manhattan. That might have remained the pattern — a select number of wealthy garden suburbs on the distant fringes of dense, blue-collar, industrial cities — but for Henry Ford. Inexpensive automobiles gave mobility to everyone.

  John Nolen, who was a student of Fredrick Law Olmsted, Jr., and one of the most prolific American planners of the early twentieth century, predicted the revolutionary impact that cars would have on urbanization. In 1927 he wrote: “If the movement away from the cities assumes the formidable aspect of a hegira (and the magnitude of recent modern developments like the automobile and the radio makes this appear quite likely), then it is immensely important that it be organized and directed accordingly.” He understood that technology was making suburban living convenient and attractive. “This sort of urban overflow is like that of a rising flood braking a dike at its weakest point and spreading uncontrolled over the adjacent country, greatly to its damage.”24

  Nolen’s solution to suburban growth was to channel the overflow into planned garden suburbs, among them his exquisitely planned model town of Mariemont, outside Cincinnati. He believed in design, but unlike most city planners today, he was not wedded to high-density development. He agreed with his friend Raymond Unwin, who once wrote a pamphlet titled “Nothing Gained by Overcrowding!” Nolen and Unwin decried the congested tenements and walk-ups of the old industrial cities. They wanted everyone — not just the rich — to have their own homes, their own gardens, and access to nearby parks and playgrounds. Garden suburbs delivered that promise. Nolen and Unwin’s suburban strategy still appears sound. As Gregg Easterbrook wrote in The New Republic in 1999: “If suburbs are where Americans choose to live — and that verdict is in, the suburban class now constituting the majority of Americans — then brainpower should be applied to making burbs as livable as possible.”25

  One of the planning ideas advanced as an antidote to scattered development is so-called smart growth, which originated in the nineteen nineties.26 Smart growth, like sprawl, is a slippery concept, not least because it is espoused by anti-growth environmentalists as well as pro-growth developers. According to Anthony Downs, advocates of smart growth do have some things in common. They are for walkable communities and mixed-use town centers, and generally favor preserving open space and redeveloping inner cities. However, depending on who is speaking, smart growth can also include controversial ideas such as subsidizing mass transit to reduce car dependency, creating regional governments, and establishing urban growth boundaries to restrict growth into rural areas. While environmentalists see smart growth as a way of placing limits on growth, developers would like to change zoning to permit higher densities, and land conservationists would like to restrict development to selected areas. Downs concludes that, as a national strategy, smart growth is simply too contradictory to be effective, and he argues for elements of smart growth to be applied selectively at the regional level. As he succinctly puts it, “What is ‘smart’ in New York City may be ‘dumb’ in Phoenix.”27

  So, what is smart in Londonderry? On the one hand, if sprawl is measured in consumption of land, New Daleville, with more lots on less space, appears to limit sprawl. Compared with the 86 houses that were originally planned for the Wrigley tract, New Daleville will have 125, which is an increase of almost 50 percent. However, since the lots at New Daleville will be smaller, it is likely that the houses will appeal to smaller families and empty-nesters. If the average family size in New Daleville is three rather than four, the total population will be 375 persons, versus 344. Still an increase, but nowhere near as dramatic.

  On the other hand, if sprawl means building over farmland, then New Daleville will contribute to sprawl. Since Londonderry has no real master plan, merely zoning districts, the development, however well-designed, will remain an isolated residential island, just like Mindy Acres across the road. Although Bob Heuser has designed a walkable community, there is not really anywhere to walk to, since there is no real village center, nor is there likely to be. Since the density of Londonderry will always be too low for mass transit, the future inhabitants of New Daleville will be heavily dependent on their cars. Their comings and goings will add to the traffic and congestion of the back roads of Chester County — according to most estimates, New Daleville will generate more than a hundred peak-hour car trips daily. Thus, for hard-core, transit-first, rebuild-the-center-city, regional planning advocates of smart growth, New Daleville is merely more of the same, what they don’t want.

  Yet New Daleville’s compact layout will likely foster a greater sense of community than if the houses were spread out. Children will play in the parks — and probably in the lanes. People will more easily meet their neighbors. They may even organize public events on the common green. With its compact plan, New Daleville will be a nice place to walk — for exercise and for pleasure. The narrower streets and denser layout will reduce the amount of asphalt, hence there will be less polluted runoff; more rainfall will be absorbed into the ground naturally. Half of the site will be left unbuilt in perpetuity — no small
accomplishment. Kids will be able to walk or bicycle to the playing fields. Above all, New Daleville, unlike subdivisions in the area, will include shared, public spaces: sidewalks, walking trails, play lots, village greens, parks. These will be small reminders to the people living there that they are not only private homeowners but also members of a community. That will be smarter growth indeed.

  10

  More Meetings

  After upzoning here and downzoning there, the township passes an ordinance.

  The Londonderry supervisors don’t meet again for a month. Meanwhile, the plan of New Daleville continues to evolve. The Wrigley homestead, surrounded by five acres, divides the site into two major parts. The planner, Bob Heuser, has located the park and the village center on one side, and most of the homes on the other. “I’ve organized the plan around two main axes,” he says. “The boulevard runs north-south, and the street that links that neighborhood to the village center goes east-west.” The general location of the village center is dictated by Joe Duckworth’s demand that it be visible from the main road. The center has sites for a church, commercial building, and a village green. Most of the house lots are about one-eighth of an acre. Two dozen larger lots at the edge of the site — Duckworth’s ocean view lots — have driveways; the rest of the houses are served by rear lanes, a standard neotraditional arrangement.

  Like all developers, Duckworth keeps an eye on what his competitors are doing. He learned this while he was working at the home builder Toll Brothers. At that time, he was in charge of a project in a part of Bucks County where a small developer was having great success with a Mediterranean-style model that seemed to appeal to Hispanic buyers. The house was stuccoed, with Spanish Colonial features. “Bob Toll said that we had to build some of those,” remembers Duckworth. So one night he sent a foreman to the competitor’s development to measure one of the houses. “You see, we didn’t know exactly what it was that appealed to people, so we simply copied the whole thing.”

  Duckworth has recently seen an interesting new type of house group in Denver, at Stapleton, a large neotraditional development on the site of an old airport. The houses are clustered around common courts, set at a right angle to the street. The intimate green courts make safe and secure play areas for children, similar to cul-de-sacs but without the cars and the asphalt. Housing courts are not new — groups of houses around common greens were built in Chestnut Hill in the nineteen twenties — but what catches Duckworth’s attention in Denver is the fact that, even though you can’t park your car at your front door, the houses in these courts are actually selling more quickly than conventional street-facing houses. He describes the courts to Heuser and tells him to include some in New Daleville.

  The village center gives Heuser the most trouble. Since there are so few public buildings, it isn’t easy to create the villagelike atmosphere Duckworth wants. Early on it is apparent that the township is not interested in a site for a church. Instead, it wants land set aside for some sort of civic building, perhaps a firehouse or a new township hall. To show goodwill, Duckworth donates the required land to the township.

  The entire Arcadia crew — Joe and Jason Duckworth, Dave Della Porta, and Bob Heuser — show up for the supervisors’ October meeting, when they are due to vote on the New Daleville ordinance. Tom Comitta knows that some of the supervisors have been rattled by the county’s questions about spot zoning but hopes this issue has been laid to rest. “The one thing about this whole science of zoning and planning is that it doesn’t necessarily follow rules, as you might expect,” he tells me. “It follows state legislation, and it somewhat follows logic, but zoning boards can be very arbitrary. Often the decisions are unusually subjective. One board will vote one way, another board, on the same question, will vote another way.”

  The room is overflowing; more people have come than even the previous time. They are here not for New Daleville, however, but for the first item on the agenda, a sweeping proposal to rezone large parts of the entire township. Tim Cassidy has explained to me that the rezoning was initiated by the large estate owners. With the help of the Brandywine Conservancy, they approached the Londonderry supervisors with a proposal to create what is called an “agricultural preservation zone.” The chief characteristic of this zone will be that all new residential lots must be at least twenty-five acres. This will stop conventional real estate development in its tracks. The conservancy has prepared a study of soils, slopes, and wetlands to bolster its case, and has also submitted a petition signed by fully 80 percent of the landowners. The proposed preservation zone affects two-thirds of Londonderry — almost five thousand acres. The supervisors have agreed to consider the change. Since Honeycroft Village and New Daleville will increase the density in some parts of the township, they feel that the density of other residential districts can safely be decreased. As Cassidy succinctly puts it: “If we upzone here, we can downzone there.”*

  Howard Benner announces that the supervisors will vote on the proposed downzoning later that evening and opens the meeting to public discussion. A man in the front jumps up. He isn’t happy with the proposed change. He says that he owns sixty acres immediately north of the New Daleville tract. He bought this land fifteen years ago and is currently negotiating with a builder. His land is in the downzoned district, so now only lots of two acres will be allowed, not one acre, as before. In other words, his land will lose half its development value if the change goes through. After reading his prepared statement, he asks, “If the change is approved, can I still develop my land according to the previous zoning?” Bob Harsch, the township engineer, answers that no, once the zoning is changed, the new rules will apply to everyone. The landowner, previously calm, grows angry. He says that he is being unfairly targeted, since three-quarters of the land that will be downzoned belongs to him. Having vented his anger on the supervisors, he turns to the audience. “Your property values have just gone down by fifty percent,” he says. “How can you stand for it?” He quotes a passage from Deuteronomy about the sanctity of ownership. He says that downzoning is un-American. It is nothing short of terrorism, he says. He seems to be speaking in sound bites, but there are no media to hear him, only a roomful of embarrassed neighbors. Finally, he runs out of steam. “It’s just not right,” he says lamely and sits down.

  The next question is from a teenage boy who has come in late with a group of friends, all carrying skateboards. “Why do we have to have new houses here anyway?” he asks, somewhat belligerently. It’s a question that must be on a lot of people’s minds. Benner patiently explains that no doubt the majority of people in Londonderry would be happiest if there was no new development. “But we can’t just stop it,” he says. “The land has been zoned to allow housing.”

  A man in a suit stands. He is a lawyer representing another property owner whose land has been downzoned. He says that his client is asking not for a denser classification, only that the existing, one-acre zoning stay in place. After the Bible-quoting landowner, he sounds reasonable, and his argument is compelling. Moreover, it turns out that his client submitted a subdivision plan for approval just before the meeting, so it is likely that he will not be held to the new zoning. But the lawyer is making sure the supervisors understand the situation. “He’s throwing himself on the mercy of the board, plus he’s actually made a convincing case,” Duckworth whispers to me. “I would be surprised if the final rezoning doesn’t accommodate him.”

  There are no more questions about the rezoning, and Benner invites Comitta to present the New Daleville ordinance. Comitta describes what happened at the county planning commission meeting. He lists the changes recommended by the commission staff. They are all minor items, he says, but he goes through them somewhat pedantically, point by point. He makes it sound both routine and boring. He pins up a plan of New Daleville and reminds the audience that, while there are more houses, half the site will be open space and will belong to the township. He closes by saying that, since the state passed enabling legislatio
n for neo-traditional development two years earlier, about two dozen townships have adopted such ordinances. These types of developments are a known quantity, he says. He refers to them as “Ozzie and Harriet neighborhoods.”

  One of the boys with skateboards asks if the open space could include a skate park. “There’s a skate park in the area, but our parents work and it’s too far for us to go,” he says. Comitta answers that it is up to the township to decide what it wants. “You should give them your ideas,” he says. “Make sure you come to the next meeting.” This appears to satisfy the boys. Their business concluded, they pick up their skateboards and leave. There are no other questions.

  Benner calls a recess so the supervisors can meet with the township solicitor and the engineer. He doesn’t explain the reason for the private consultation. They go to the adjacent township office and close the door. (Pennsylvania Supreme Court case law allows for executive sessions in zoning and land-use matters.) The Arcadia people stand together around the watercooler in the back of the room. There has been no call for anyone to speak. Basically, things have gone well, but they still look nervous as they wait for the meeting to resume.

  Five minutes later, the supervisors file back in. Benner calls the meeting to order and asks for a motion on the text of the proposed townshipwide downzoning, which passes unanimously. He says that the supervisors have decided not to vote on the zoning map itself until after it has been advertised and more fully discussed in public. He announces that the planning commission will meet the following week to talk about the changes to the zoning map. Then he calls for a vote on the New Daleville ordinance. “All in favor say aye,” he instructs, and he, Clair Burkhart, and Fred Muller do. Londonderry has a new ordinance, and Arcadia has a project.