Young people fighting sprawl

Louisville Courier-Journal
Sunday, May 11, 2003

By Thomas Hylton

Kentucky´s efforts to save its cities, towns and countryside are moving into the classroom.

On Tuesday, 150 high school students from across the Commonwealth will participate in a Youth Summit at Midway College, sponsored by the Kentucky Environmental Education Council. The summit will focus on visual pollution - a polite term for the mishmash of garish signs, parking lots, cheap buildings, and utility poles that sprawling development has spawned along many Kentucky highways. Later summits will address other aspects of sprawl: air and groundwater pollution, transportation, the loss of farmland and open space.

Two years ago, when Gov. Patton created his Smart Growth Task Force, he suggested that curbing sprawl would be a long, slow process. As if to prove his point, two major bills promoting Smart Growth subsequently died in the 2002 General Assembly, including a Patton-sponsored package of modest incentives to encourage local planning.

Although government policies play a huge role in how Kentucky grows, public attitudes are even more important. Young people, who will inherit the traffic congestion, dreary landscapes, and high costs that sprawl creates, may be more open to alternatives than adults.

In its first 150 years, Kentucky - like the rest of America - comprised cities and towns surrounded by open countryside. These towns were designed on a human scale, placing houses for people of all incomes within walking distance of stores, schools, and workplaces. Because towns were compact, they preserved open space. Because they were self-contained, they promoted a sense of place and community.

A radically different pattern of development, one designed on a car scale, evolved following World War II. With the aid of massive roadbuilding programs, Americans began scattering new housing, shopping malls and office parks randomly across the landscape. This lifestyle offered people bigger housing tracts and effortless travel, but required a car for every trip, with parking lots taking up far more land than buildings.

In recent years, a growing number of business leaders, environmentalists, and government officials have questioned whether sprawl is sustainable. Not only has it emptied out our cities and towns, leaving behind deserted main streets and abandoned factory buildings, it has consumed enormous quantities of land - in Kentucky, about three million acres of farmland since the 1950s.

In my state of Pennsylvania, a commission appointed by Gov. Tom Ridge, a conservative Republican, concluded that sprawling development was the No. 1 threat to Pennsylvania´s environment - even more than things like abandoned mines - because of air and groundwater pollution, fragmentation of wildlife habitat, and the loss of open space.

Kentucky students will start with the most blatant aspect of sprawl - what it looks like. Prior to the summit, students have been asked to take photos of their home communities - the good, the bad, and the ugly - which they´ll show as part of presentations about the scenes they encounter in daily life. They´ll be asked to identify special places they hope to preserve.

"Americans have been carrying around with them as part of their mental baggage a deeply felt and despairing assumption that progress demands degraded surroundings," writes author Tony Hiss. By the end of the summit, students may conclude that´s not true. Although the Bluegrass State has plenty of dismal commercial arteries, it also boasts some of America´s finest small towns and rural scenery.

The new, four-lane Paris-Lexington Road, for example, has won national acclaim for a design that is sensitive to its surroundings. Rather create a straight, wide alignment that flattens everything in its path, the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet was persuaded to create separate two-lane roads fitted to the contour of the land. Trees were protected during construction, and the region´s distinct limestone walls were either protected or sensitively relocated.

The Bluegrass country itself has been protected for decades by the nation´s first growth boundary, adopted in 1958 by Lexington and Fayette County before the governments merged.

There´s no reason why these initiatives can´t be practiced widely rather than be the exception to the rule.

For my part, I hope to tout the benefits of human-scale communities. I´ve spent my entire 54 years in traditional towns where I could walk to school as a child and to work as an adult. I´ve saved myself thousands of hours behind the wheel and thousands of dollars for the excess cars I didn´t have to buy and maintain. I´ve always enjoyed feeling part of a real community.

No matter what they conclude, it´s important for young Kentuckians to examine, rather than take for granted, the way they live - while they still have time to control their destiny.