"A house and yard not a greedy thing"
A Boston Herald editorial
Monday, February 8, 1999

The regional office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has a new cause: fighting sprawl. This cause is better left to others.

If EPA's $3 million antisprawl initiative just means things like helping communities draw up master plans (it's assigning two staffers to "ride circuit" in New England in such a role) it's a probably harmless but unjustified assumption of a local task by a federal agency whose policy entrepreneurs are responding to polls.

What we worry about is the agency lining up with the "growth control" movements that in other areas of the country have started down the slippery slope of life-style coercion.

As for planning, we simply fail to see the need for federal involvement, whether through EPA, the Department of Housing and Urban Development or other agencies. The states can do the job. Somehow the nation handled the huge upheavals that progress brings - such as the introduction of the electric streetcar in 1888, the subway in 1897, the Model T Ford in 1908 and the federally financed Interstate Highway System in 1956 - without federal planning help. The Cape Cod open space initiative approved last year shows that communities can develop their own solutions to what they think their problems are.

As for the slippery slope, consider the EPA-sponsored conference in Boston on Feb 1.

Some participants, according to the AP reporter there, urged efforts to "get people to give up those three-acre lawns for row houses on 40- by 100-foot plots and trade in their Ford Explorers for running shoes. Do it by hiking suburban taxes through the roof, if necessary, and slicing the rates in cities."

Now EPA is not responsible for the far-out views of a few zealots, to be sure. But the zealots include the vice president of the United States, another official beating the drums of sprawl concern. He wrote not long before his nomination that "the environmental crisis is now so serious that I believe our civilization must be considered in some basic way dysfunctional" and advocated "completely eliminating the internal combustion engine" in about 25 years.

Zealots have been more active in the West, where they have won "growth controls" in many places. The sure effect of such measures is to raise the cost of housing, something that Massachusetts should never want to do. The most comprehensive of such efforts, the "urban growth ring" around Portland, Ore., has stimulated development - sprawl, if you will - beyond the no-growth boundary and filled in much of what open space there was in the urban core - surely counterproductive.

Much concern about "sprawl" comes from new suburbanities whose bucolic view from the front window is spoiled by the house of an even newer suburbanite. It was ever thus.

If developers see money to be made in "new urbanism communities" of close-together housing units with spacious green common areas near shopping, then communities should let them try. But let's not make a religion out of density like Somerville's, 28 citizens on every acre. The desire to live in a spacious house with a yard, in a safe community with good schools, is not a sign of a dysfunctional civilization, but a prosperous - and free - society.