Sprawl: If You Can’t Beat It, Tame It

How to grow a city that would be better off without growth

Greg Blake Miller

Boulder City, as its city council made perfectly clear last week, does not want new development on its margins. It seems that, somewhere in the deep dark verbiage of a State Assembly bill (SA 487, to be precise), is a section clearing the way for a major land swap. The proposed swap—and this is what irritated the City Council enough for it to give the would-be developers a thorough chewing-out—would see the Eldorado Valley Development Company exchanging 640 acres it owns near Boulder City (and on which the city does not want development) for 1,500 acres elsewhere in the city. Boulder City, understandably, is no more enthusiastic about development on 1,500 acres than it is about development on 640 acres. The council called for the withdrawal of the land-swap amendment: The people of Boulder City would be perfectly happy, thank you, with no development at all.


This kind of resolve is typical for Boulder City, and refreshing for those of us who live in the growth-happy Valley. Henderson residents, for instance, have grown weary of blasting on Black Mountain. On the streets of Las Vegas proper, people are struggling to come to terms with their soon-to-be high-rise neighbors. For years, ranches in the northwest have been encircled and ultimately swallowed by suburban development. All across the Valley, people are looking into their back yards and feeling acutely ambivalent about what they see.


I say "ambivalent" rather than the more direct "hostile" because deep down, most of us feel that, annoyed as we may be with the region's constant, soul-shaking change, there may be nothing we can do to hold back the earth movers. The recent, citizen-led scuttling of plans to build on Blue Diamond Hill gives the lie to the idea that we're helpless—and yet still we feel helpless. What are citizens to do when private capital wants its way, and wants it now?


If outright victories in these cases are hard to come by, we can, at least, get creative about compromise. Developers, of course, would rather not be cast as community destroyers, so a community that can swing the public to its side gives itself a reasonable chance of making a difference—a chance, perhaps, to bring the developer to the table, where erstwhile rivals can create a plan that works (or at least works better). That may mean a swap that leaves the developer with land less precious to the city, or it may mean a deal—and here is where a bit of new thinking comes in—that lets the builder build, but extracts from him a binding promise to build responsibly, with respect for the land, the neighboring community, and the latest principles of environmental friendliness.


All too often, communities are so (justifiably) frightened of what any development might mean that they lose the opportunity to create models of worthwhile, sustainable development; they are playing so hard to win that they miss their chance to change the rules of the game. In "Home from Nowhere," his seminal 1996 Atlantic Monthly article on the dangers of suburban sprawl, James Howard Kunstler argues that the roots of NIMBYism—the rejectionist philosophy of Not In My Back Yard—lie in the fact that suburban sprawl-dwellers actually hate suburban sprawl, but can't envision any alternative except to prevent further growth altogether. (Kunstler also posits a particularly extremist viewpoint called BANANA—Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.)


Growth prevention certainly has its advantages—in the case of Blue Diamond Hill it was absolutely the right approach. But in many cases, on lands less obviously environmentally sensitive than Blue Diamond Hill, growth prevention has a tendency to be a losing battle. Once land has fallen into private hands, the landowners—mentally quoting John Locke ("Life, liberty, and property") even if they've never heard of John Locke—have a philosophical, and, more importantly, a legal ace up their sleeve. It's just really hard, in America, to tell the owner of a piece of land that he's got no right to do anything with his land.


Even in Santa Barbara County, one of the most successfully anti-growth areas in the West, environmentalists and open-space advocates recently were able to save only a portion of a gorgeous stretch of open headlands that had fallen into private hands. The point is, though, that through a lengthy process of give-and-take, they were at least able to secure some of the land—and protect it for good—while influencing the terms of development on the neighboring parcel.


Portland, Oregon, which, with its Urban Growth Boundary, is for many a model of successful BANANAism, is actually a model of something a bit different: a successful wielding of both carrot and stick, in which the price of the boundary (similar to the Ring Around the Valley Proposal put forward—alas, unsuccessfully—by Nevada State Sen. Dina Titus in 1997) is considerably denser development inside the boundary. Meanwhile, the Portland boundary is occasionally extended, irritating growth opponents while only temporarily quenching local land demand. And, to paraphrase Lincoln, if you irritate some of the people all of the time, chances are you're serving the interests of democracy (as long as you're irritating different people at different times).


Boulder City, of course, is our own little Portland, a town that has done it right by doing it differently: In a gaming metropolis, Boulder City allows no gaming; in a region drunk on growth, Boulder City has allowed precious little of it. On the margins of Boulder City proper lie 200 square miles of city land, and most of it has been kept blessedly, remarkably empty. There is, however, a 640-acre doughnut hole on that territory; it is unincorporated Clark County land, and it is on that land that the Eldorado Valley Development Company would like to build a master-planned community.


Opponents of the development point to Boulder City's current zoning laws, which call for low-density housing—a home every two acres—and make the case that a Henderson-type planned community is not legally possible. That's one potentially fruitful approach, but there is nothing new or innovative about this kind of zoning, which (as Kunstler points out) devours a lot of land and thus creates sprawl in the first place. If your aim is to spare as much land as possible, perhaps a worthy approach would be to negotiate with the developer to restrict his building to only a portion of the 640 acres, in exchange for the right to develop a considerably denser mixed-use, environmentally sensitive, culturally appropriate (good architecture, park lands, small shops, a school, etc.) neighborhood.


After all, the glory of Boulder City lies not in the ranch homes that fan out on the edges of town, but in the relatively dense historic core. If it were possible to dictate development, on a limited plot, of an area that echoes and honors that core, Boulder City might be able to make the most of a difficult dilemma. That is, pressing developers to build both innovatively and responsibly may not be better than having them build nothing at all. But having them build nothing at all may not, in the end, be an option.

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