Free Republic

CHINO, Calif. (AP) - Watching his 18-month-old grandson waddle past a herd of cows on the family's 80-acre dairy farm, Sybrand "Syp" Vander Dussen feels certain about one thing. The boy, the youngest in a long line of dairymen, will one day follow in his footsteps. The question is where. For nearly 60 years, the Vander Dussens have milked cows. Suburban development edged them first from a farm near Los Angeles and is now squeezing them from land in once rural San Bernardino County. In a state where the lines between rural and urban are disappearing, homes and cars are...

Across the United States, an unprecedented acceleration in suburban sprawl is prompting concerns about the environment, traffic, health and damage to rural communities, but opponents appear powerless to stop the process because of the economic development and profits it generates. Sprawl, defined as the unplanned, uncontrolled expansion of urban areas beyond their fringes, has greatly accelerated over the past 25 years, spurred by low mortgage interest rates and aggressive developers. According to the National Resources Inventory, about 34 million acres -- an area the size of Illinois -- were converted to developed uses between 1982 and 2001. Development in the...

A well-made, raised-relief map is a beautiful thing. You know what I'm talking about, don't you? It's a map mode of molded plastic, so that mountains protrude into your personal space. This is handy when you are riding your bicycle across America. You can see where the tough climbs will be. Avoid Gunnison, Colo. My map of the 48 states is made by Kistler Graphics Inc. in Denver. Not only the texture but also the colors are delightful: a rich mix of tans, greens and blues. The artist uses one other color, yellow, to mark urban areas. I think about...

At first glance, Robert Bruegmann -- a childless academic whose modernist apartment building sits in a dense, upscale Chicago neighborhood -- seems like the kind of guy who'd hate the suburbs. His peers and predecessors have, for decades, decried the unplanned, low-density, auto-dependent growth of shopping malls and subdivisions. But his counterintuitive new book, "Sprawl: A Compact History," charts the spreading of cities as far back as first-century Rome -- and finds the process not just deeply natural but often beneficial for people, societies and even cities. "Sprawl has been as evident in Europe as in America," Bruegmann writes, "and...

Over the next 30 years, most of Harris County's remaining open space will succumb to subdivisions, office buildings and shopping centers where millions of new residents will live and work, projections by local planners show. The spread of development, particularly west and northwest of Houston, is among the more striking trends shown in preliminary population and job growth projections developed by the Houston-Gal- veston Area Council for the eight-county Houston region. The potential loss of open space alarms conservationists and others concerned about suburban sprawl. It is among the factors driving an effort by business and civic leaders to find...

Complaining about suburban sprawl is a national pastime. It's bad for the planet, the prevailing theory goes -- energy-consuming, highway-clogging, pollution-creating, farmland-gobbling -- and soulless and ugly to boot. But in his controversial and gleefully contrarian new book Sprawl: A Compact History (University of Chicago Press, $27.50), Chicago author Robert Bruegmann questions the assumptions behind each of those assertions. A professor of art history, architecture and urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he doesn't exactly defend sprawl, but he argues that it's no worse than other urban settings. "Dense central cities have some advantages, but they also...

We hate sprawl. It's responsible for everything that we don't like about modern American life: strip malls, McMansions, big-box stores, the loss of favorite countryside, the decline of downtowns, traffic congestion, SUVs, high gas consumption, dependence on foreign oil, the Iraq war. No doubt about it, sprawl is bad, American bad. Like expanding waistlines, it's touted around the world as yet another symptom of our profligacy and wastefulness as a nation. Or, as Robert Bruegmann puts it in his new book, "cities that sprawl and, by implication, the citizens living in them, are self indulgent and undisciplined." Or not. In...

TORONTO — Unchecked population growth and a badly flawed planning system are endangering Ontario’s wildlife, forests and water and posing a threat to living standards, the province’s environmental czar said Tuesday. In his annual report, Environmental Commissioner Gord Miller questioned the wisdom of what he considers Ontario’s unbridled expansion. “To what degree can certain regions in Ontario, especially southern Ontario, sustain and assimilate this relatively unchecked growth?” Miller said. The provincial Finance Ministry projects up to six million more people will call Ontario home over the next 25 years, most in the Toronto area. That’s a 50 per cent increase...

CHINA, Texas - "There used to be more rice fields, but they keep on urbanizin' and urbanizin,' " George adds, nodding at an unsightly McMansion that recently parked itself in an open pasture. There's an irony here, because for nearly all of recorded history, rice has been one of the world's most basic foodstuffs. Even today, it's the dietary mainstay of an estimated two-thirds of the earth's population. In Cambodia, for instance, the verb for to eat, translates literally as to rice. Across the globe, there are nearly 40,000 varieties grown. Rice has little or no fat, no cholesterol and...

PORTLAND (AP) - Oregon residents want urban sprawl controlled, but they also want to use their land as they see fit, according to the first major poll on land-use issues since voters approved Measure 37 last November. More than 65 percent of those surveyed said growth management makes Oregon a more desirable place to live. The respondents also favored public planning over market-based decisions and wanted to protect land for future needs instead of using it now. But those polled also valued protecting property rights more than farmland, the environment or wildlife habitat. And 60 percent chose individual rights over...

Southern families are hurt most in the United States by the record high prices for gasoline because of lower income levels and longer commutes, a recent private study shows. Working families with two full-time commuters spend more than 14 percent of their after-tax income on gasoline in Pensacola, Fla. the most in the country, said Bert Sperling, of Sperling's Best Places. The next biggest bites out of family budgets for gasoline come in Birmingham, Ala.; Orlando, Fla.; Nashville, Tenn.; and Louisville, Ky., Sperling's study showed. "The large cities in the South and Midwest landed in the top 10 due to...

The Hunters Brooke subdivision in Charles County, Maryland, is the postcard-perfect example of what is often meant by "the American dream of homeownership" - large houses (more than 300 are planned) going up against a backdrop of woods and fields, within extended commuting distance of the Baltimore-Washington job core. This dreamland for some is a waking nightmare for others, such as environmentalists concerned with what the runoff from the large development will do to a nearby bog. One night in early December of last year, several large homes under construction in Hunters Brooke went up in flames. No one was...

Critics fear higher costs and even more sprawl ___ The chatter buzzing in the halls of a half-dozen county government buildings is about growth management: If lot sizes become larger, fewer people can come. More exurban counties are considering -- and imposing -- requirements that would increase the lot size of a house, in some cases to 1 acre or more, as a way to slow growth. But planners say these minimum lot requirements can have the opposite effect. They create more sprawl by spreading out the development. "It's based on the misunderstanding of thinking that that's going to slow...

Larger housing projects squeeze into Charlotte's core ___At first glance, site work at a west Charlotte development called Lela Court might look like just another subdivision. But this is something different. This planned 147-home development is big infill. The 13-acre project, under way adjacent to the Wesley Heights Historic District, illustrates just how far one of the urban core's hottest trends has come in 30 years. In the early days, developers dabbled in small infill -- filling in gaps in established neighborhoods with new homes or condos generally on small vacant or underused lots. Small-scale infill is still occurring citywide,...

what is sprawl like were you live. is it big thing or small.

The nation's strongest laws against sprawl are beginning to buckle here in Oregon under pressure from an even stronger, voter-approved law that trumps growth restrictions with property rights. In a collision between two radically different visions of how cities should grow, claims under Oregon's new law are pitting neighbor against neighbor, rattling real estate values, unnerving bankers and spooking politicians. The property-rights law, which was approved overwhelmingly by voters last fall and is known as Measure 37, is on the brink of wrecking Oregon's best-in-the-nation record of reining in sprawl, according to state officials and national planning experts.

"Smart Growth" is here, a collection of proposals, guidelines, and goals that will ultimately make homebuying less feasible and commuting more difficult. And that's the good news. The essential idea behind various "Smart Growth" initiatives is to move zoning decisions from local communities to Washington. This is necessary, it's alleged, because we have too much traffic congestion, metro areas are getting too big, and we're losing too much farmland. To solve such problems, we must allow the federal government to spend $10.5 billion for programs and strategic planning. The "Smart Growth" concept is a wondrously curious idea precisely because it...

Fact or Fiction? Is gasoline more expensive than ever? Do you think urban sprawl is ruining America? You might not think so after watching John Stossel's "Myths, Lies and Nasty Behavior." [...] Coming Up on 2020 Coming Up on 20/20 * Tonight on "20/20" at 10 p.m.

Robert and Amy Hanneman are not real estate developers. He's a city firefighter, and she's a nurse. They live on the corner of Park and Livingston streets in Missoula. They're a young couple, and they'd like to have children soon. While the kids are little, Amy would like to stay home with them. Their financial ace in the hole is their house. It sits on two lots. Robert Hanneman bought the house two years ago with the idea of dividing the two lots, building another house on the second lot and selling it to another young family. The profit would...

SAN DIEGO - In the shadow of her new high-rise condominium building, Carol Rutkin paused in her morning stroll with her poodle to count her blessings as a Southern Californian without a car. "I'm completely independent - I can't think of anything I can't walk to," said Rutkin, a retiree who moved here from Florida a year ago after her husband died. "The bank is right around the corner. There's a grocery store. The library is close. The cleaners is right in my building. The train station is close. Even the cruise ships - last year, I took a cruise,...