Article of Diverse Groups uniting to fight sprawl

Sat Jun 10 06:01:08 PDT 2000

Subdivide and Conquer:A Modern Western
Suburban Sprawl Impacts, Causes and Remedies
Film & Discussion with Producer Jeff Gersh

Thursday, June 22, 7pm Donation $3
Faulkner Gallery Santa Barbara Public Library
(Also, Little Theater Santa Ynez High School Wed. June 21/ 7:30pm by We Watch
688-1536)    

PLEASE LOOK AT GREAT ARTICLE ON GROUPS COMING TOGETHER TO PROTECT THEIR
COMMUNITIES FROM SPRAWL 

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 7, 2000 
                     Headlines

  USA

Latest foe of sprawl: minorities in city
core

  Black civic leaders are joining forces with farmers and
environmentalists to oppose development of 'exurbs.'

Craig Savoye 
Special to The Christian Science Monitor

                                        ST. LOUIS 

When a referendum was held here last fall on
a proposed bridge and highway extension
across wetlands and the Missouri River, the
usual suspects showed up to argue both
sides of the issue.

Developers and city officials held that the
extension would ease traffic congestion and
open up a new region for residential growth. Antisprawl forces -
environmentalists, farmers, and suburban community
organizations - responded that it would further diminish wildlife
habitat and crop lands in favor of unsightly strip malls.

But another, more surprising coalition also showed up to oppose
the referendum: black urban groups.

"We were very much opposed to the extension because it takes
away funds we think should be spent on the inner core," says
Pastor B.T. Rice of the New Horizons Seventh Day Christian
Church. "It keeps taking the boundary farther and farther out and
furthering racial polarization in the city. We should be looking
inward and redeveloping the inner city."

Until recently, sprawl has largely been a pet issue of white
environmentalists, suburbanites, and farmers. But consensus is
growing among black scholars and civic leaders that the quality
of life in the urban core is inextricably tied to what's happening
far away on the exurban fringe.

And as the antisprawl movement focuses more and more on
redeveloping city centers - since ringing metropolitan areas with
greenfields or otherwise bounding them means growth must go
somewhere else - black urban leaders are getting involved.

"For too long a lot of our organizations were focused just on
issues of housing, education, and transportation. If we are to
create a healthy and livable community, our groups must look at
this issue holistically," says Robert Bullard, director of the
Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark University in
Atlanta.

Trying to dovetail a black urban agenda with that of white
farmers and environmentalists has made for strange political
bedfellows, but Mr. Bullard believes the proliferation of freeways
and strip malls in suburbia - not-so-distant cousins of urban
blight - has tended to align interests.

"Sprawl has the potential of bringing groups together that
ordinarily would not be in the same room, and with parity - as
opposed to poor people from the city trying to negotiate with
rich folks in the suburbs," he says.

The issue has also been linked to the problem of racial
polarization in metropolitan areas.

Some academics argue that government policies of funding road
construction at the expense of mass transit and giving tax breaks
to suburban developers literally paved the way for white flight -
the departure of whites from cities to suburbs. This, in turn,
shrank the tax base of most cities and led to many of the ills
commonly associated with struggling inner cities.

"The effects of sprawl and fragmentation are huge," says John
Powell, executive director of the Institute on Race and Justice
and a law professor at the University of Minnesota. "Many of the
gains of the civil rights movement have been undermined by the
racialization of space in metropolitan areas. Sprawl is central to
that and so many other issues. I think it will be the civil rights
issue of this century."

'Regionalism' a problem

Still, some proposed solutions give black leaders pause. One
perception, for example, is that sprawl has been aided by
developers exploiting the separate political entities of individual
suburban communities, and that strong regional government is
needed to defeat sprawl.

But many black leaders fear "regionalism" could encroach on one
of the few secure voting blocs they have: large cities. On the
other hand, allowing previously disparate suburbs to coalesce
into regional government without them also poses the threat of
exclusion.

Worse, some antisprawl measures have already had unintended
consequences.

Portland, Ore., is generally viewed as a national model when it
comes to "smart growth." The establishment there of an urban
growth boundary, along with redevelopment tax incentives, led
to a renaissance in several depressed inner-city neighborhoods
as whites moved back in and restored dilapidated housing.

Yet even as such gentrification raised property values and the
assets of black homeowners, it also drove some black renters
out - to the city fringe and suburbs. Not only are there fewer
social and city services in such areas, but the dispersal has
tended to perpetuate the ills of sprawl, with relocated renters
hopping into cars to drive back into the city to jobs, churches,
and friends.

San Francisco model

One place where the minority community has not only inserted
itself in a regional development model but is leading the effort is
San Francisco. The Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable
Development is co-chaired by the Urban Habitat Program, the
Sierra Club, the Bay Area Council (which represents the 200
largest businesses in the region), and the Association of Bay
Area Governments. The alliance has reached agreement on a
draft compact with 10 major commitments.

"A number of factors are challenging the paradigm in which you
think of the business community and suburban communities being
lined up on one side and poor people of color in the inner city on
the other," says Carl Anthony, executive director of the Urban
Habitat Program.

"There's an alignment of interest now, a realization that there
needs to be much more regional cooperation if a metropolitan
area hopes to be competitive in a global sense," he says.

Support not universal

Still, antisprawl support in the black community is far from
monolithic. The charge is led mainly by black academics at the
national level and faith-based and civic leaders, such as Pastor
Rice, at the local level. Conspicuously absent are traditional civil
rights leaders. Some argue that regional antisprawl movements
divert attention from the national legislative agenda of civil rights
groups and otherwise challenges their power base.

Mr. Anthony, for one, is willing to accept the risk regionalism
carries with it. "I don't see that we have a choice given what is
happening on the global level, given the class split that exists
within the African-American community, given the environmental
issues. We're at a crossroads."

He compares current events with black migration out of the
South in the '40s and '50s and the civil rights movement of the
'60s. "The old way of doing things isn't working."

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   For further information:

     Sprawl Campaign Index - Sierra Club 
     Sprawl Watch Clearinghouse 
     Sprawl: The Growing Pains of Suburban America (Apr
     99), 
     Sprawl: A Growing Political Concern (Feb 2000)
     Policy.com 

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