Growing wiser: finding alternatives to sprawl.

• Author: Moe, Richard
• Position: Forum

The following is adapted from an address by Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, delivered at the Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., on March 22, 1995.

What does sprawl have to do with historic preservation?

The American preservation movement has moved beyond the meticulous restoration of a few landmarks and the creation of museums. We are still doing those things, but we also now are involved in trying to make America's communities more livable. We are concerned about sprawl because it devastates older cities and towns, where historic buildings and neighborhoods are concentrated. Sprawl has drained the life out of thousands of traditional downtowns and inner-city neighborhoods, and we have learned that we cannot hope to revitalize these communities without doing something to control the sprawl that keeps pushing, further and further out from the center.

But our concern goes beyond that, because preservation today is about more than bricks and mortar. We are convinced, and there is a growing body of grim evidence to support us, that sprawl is having a devastating effect on our quality of life, that it is corroding the very sense of community that helps bind us together as a people and as a nation. Preservation is in the business of saving special places and the quality of life they support, and sprawl destroys both.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation's involvement with sprawl dates back to the 1970s, when we developed our Main Street program to help bring life back to historic downtowns that were losing businesses to the malls and the bypasses. That effort has become the most successful downtown revitalization program in the country--we have seen commercial districts in more than 1,000 places come back to life--but we soon realized that it was not enough to clean up the mess left in sprawl's wake. We needed to deal more directly with the root of the problem.

This conviction led us in 1993 to place the entire state of Vermont on our annual list of "America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places" because sprawl was (and still is) testing that state's commitment to the preservation of its cohesive small towns and countryside. We intensified our efforts in last year's successful confrontation with the Walt Disney Company over plans for a huge development in Northern Virginia. As we kept reminding people at the time, the battle over Disney's America was not about how a theme park might interpret American history; it was about sprawl that threatened to overwhelm one of the most scenic and historic areas in America.

We also have published a citizens' handbook called How Superstore Sprawl Can Harm Communities, last December we held a conference on sprawl in Boston, we have responded to calls for help from hundreds of people on the frontline of the sprawl issue.

We are not here to claim that preservation is the only answer, but it is one of the real alternatives to sprawl that we advocate.

What is sprawl? I have always thought it is a bit like pornography: It is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. And you see it almost everywhere. It is the low-density development that spreads out from the edges-of cities and towns. It is poorly planned, land-consumptive, automobile-oriented, designed without regard to its surroundings. It is usually ugly, and it is enormously destructive.

One form of sprawl--retail development that transforms roads into "sellscapes"--is frequently spurred on by discount retailers. The two giants in this industry are planning 500 new stores within the next few years, many of them superstores with more than 200,000 square feet of space. In many small towns, a single new superstore may have more retail space than the entire downtown business district. The retail center of gravity shifts away from Main Street. As business drops off, downtown stores and offices close or relocate. Facing a loss of rental income, property owners cut back on maintenance. Facing a loss of tax revenues, governments cut back on services. Downtown becomes ghost town, while the retail...