by Ron McLinden, Chapter Urban Issues Chair
Back in December, the Brookings Institution of Washington, DC, released a report on growth in Missouri. Entitled “Growth in the Heartland: Challenges and Opportunities for Missouri,” the report had been commissioned by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City.
To summarize in one sentence, the report says that Missouri is growing at a satisfactory rate, but the way in which we are growing – our cities and towns are spreading out – results in unwanted and unnecessary costs that all of us pay, and that as a consequence we may be putting our state at a competitive disadvantage compared to other states and other parts of the world.
The report is couched in the most politically correct of language. The word “sprawl” is used sparingly – in most cases because the word occurs in the title or a key passage from another report from which the authors quote. Rather than illustrating the worst of sprawl and congestion and urban decline, the report includes images that might have come right out of an economic development promotional brochure. No billboards, no fast-food strips or shopping malls, not even traffic signals – much less poorly-kept housing or down-and-out citizens.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch made it a one-day story, but followed up a week later (December 16) with an editorial expressing strong support for greater attention to how we are growing. This is “precisely the right moment,” the paper wrote.
The Kansas City Star carried one story, but skipped the editorializing. That struck many people as odd since the Star had published an award-winning series, “Divided We Sprawl,” in 1995.
The Business Journals in St. Louis and Kansas City carried just a blurb, with the emphasis almost totally on the report’s reassuring opening that “Missouri is growing.”
The Springfield News-Leader gave it a lot more attention, focusing largely on water quality issues in the booming Southwest Missouri region. Likewise, the Columbia Daily Tribune gave it better coverage than did the big urban papers.
Since then there has been some grumbling about the report in the halls of the Capitol. Senator Chuck Gross of St. Charles wrote an op-ed rebuttal (Post-Dispatch, December 29) to the Post-Dispatch editorial. But in general, the report has taken a back seat to state budget battles.
A year and a half ago, Governor Holden was on the verge of appointing a task force on “growth and development” to take a look at the problem and consider the potential for “smart growth” policies to reduce some of the unwanted costs of sprawl. Unfortunately, suburban St. Louis area home-builders and public officials went ballistic, thereby derailing the effort, at least for a time.
While resistance to smart growth is not limited to any one county, the “epicenter of sprawl denial” appears to reside in St. Charles County. The fastest growing part of the state for a couple of decades, that county’s leaders have apparently come to believe that they embody the epitome of quality of life, that they are carrying the rest of the state on their backs, and that they deserve all of the state aid they can get to keep their boom going. (Remember the Page Avenue Extension?) If St. Louis City has declined, they would say, it’s because of corruption and ineptitude, not because of a half-century of federal and state policies that have favored suburbs over central cities.
In fact, it’s federal policies that have made suburbs grow at the expense of cities: the Interstate Highway Act; FHA and GI mortgage insurance programs whose implementing guidelines red-lined housing in older neighborhoods; and grants for water and sewer expansion.
Although opposition to the Governor’s “growth and development” task force was a setback, he quietly passed the issue along to an existing body, the Missouri Commission on Inter-Governmental Cooperation. That commission has been working away for well over a year, and issued a preliminary report, “Partnership for Prosperity: A Framework for Progress,” about the same time as the Brookings report.
Taking a cue from its own name, the commission has emphasized institutional problems resulting from rapid growth: challenges faced by local jurisdictions in counties that lack the power to prepare plans or implement them through zoning; increasing competition in the use (and abuse) of development incentives such as tax increment financing and transportation development districts; and development-related conflicts between local and county and state agencies. An overhaul of the state’s planning and zoning enabling legislation may be among the first efforts to be undertaken.
Meanwhile, there is a move afoot to promote greater awareness of the Brookings report and its implications. This spring the League of Women Voters sponsored a half-day forum in Kansas City on the report. Planned with active support from the Thomas Hart Benton Group of the Club, the forum attracted nearly 100 citizens. At its statewide convention the following month the Missouri League decided to take on getting word of the report out statewide as a major project, and it’s anticipated they will use the Kansas City model of local public forums to do so.
There is also growing interest in establishing a broad-based citizen constituency for action. About a dozen other states have “ThousandFriends” organizations that work for reform in laws and policies and practices related to growth, and there is active talk of forming such an organization in Missouri. Actually, it might take at least two organizations: one a grassroots organization of ordinary citizens like you and me, and the other a less-formal coalition of “civic leader” types. While the former might follow a strong advocacy course of action, the latter are likely to prefer an un-apologetic pro-growth agenda – let’s grow, but just do it in a more cost-effective manner. (We've heard the name “Grow Missouri” floated for such a group.)
Meanwhile, Missouri may be on the verge of acknowledging that racial prejudice is a factor in sprawl. Over 300 people attended a half-day “Summit on Racism and Metropolitan Dynamics” in Kansas City to build awareness within minority and faith-based communities of the effects of continued socio-economic segregation that is institutionalized in the political and economic decision-making of fast-growing suburban areas of our major cities. This awareness evolved in St. Louis nearly a decade ago through MCU, Metropolitan Congregations United for St. Louis. Formation of a counterpart organization in Kansas City could raise the profile of issues related to growth – not the least of which is “access to opportunities”– throughout the state.
How Missouri responds to the challenges that accompany growth will somehow get worked out over the coming months and years. Setting aside a very legitimate environmental and philosophical question –“Should Missouri grow at all?”– it’s essential that whatever growth does occur in Missouri take place in ways that have the least direct and indirect consequences for the environment and natural systems. It’s important that we look beyond an “aesthetic environmentalism” that seems interested mostly in protecting unique species or landscapes or ecosystems, and that we work toward an “holistic environmentalism” that strives to reduce human impacts on nature everywhere.
How we answer these questions – not just in Missouri, but throughout the developed world – will determine the quality of our lives and, indeed, the very life expectancy of our species and our civilization on this planet.
(Sidebar )
Where to find the reports
A Kauffman Foundation news release about “Growth in the Heartland” can be
found at: http://www.emkf.org/pages/331.cfm
The full report can be found at:
http://www.brookings.org/es/urban/missouri/abstract.htm
”Partnership for Prosperity: A Framework for Progress,” the first report of
the Missouri Commission on Intergovernmental Cooperation, can be found at:
http://www.oa.state.mo.us/comofc/ir/MCIC_Final.pdf
(Sidebar)
More Sprawl – or “Smart Growth”?
What you can do to promote smart growth – for livable communities, a more efficient economy, lower taxes, and a more sustainable environment.
Become informed:
- Learn about smart growth principles. Know that the “where” of development is perhaps even more important than what it looks like.
- Recognize features consistent with smart growth principles: located near
existing development, walkable streets, availability of public transit, a mixture of land uses nearby, neighborhoods where porches greet the street instead of garage doors, re-use of vacant land in older areas instead of bulldozed meadows.
Speak out:
- Attend public meetings (city council, planning commissions, etc) and speak out for smart growth and against proposed developments out in “nowhereland.”
- Visit a new display home and ask the agent if there’s anyplace you can get to from there without driving.
- Write letters to your local newspaper in support of smart growth and against more suburban sprawl.
- Speak out against tax breaks and other subsidies for developments that don’t follow smart growth principles.
- Question whether it makes sense to keep expanding freeways so people can enjoy longer, faster commutes.
- Question why regional plans are based on the assumption that past growth trends will continue, without first considering the benefits of changing the pattern of future growth.
Write to public officials:
- Ask your governor, state representative, and state senator what your state is doing to make sure its policies and programs don’t subsidize sprawl.
- Ask your mayor or city council person what they are doing to see that local development policies promote smart growth principles.
Vote with your dollars:
- Even if you already live in “sprawl-land” and can’t move right away, you can still vote against sprawl by choosing where you spend your time and money.
- Spend in places that exemplify smart growth principles – a downtown or town square or neighborhood shopping district, for example.
- Avoid spending money at businesses that don’t offer a safe way to walk from nearby neighborhoods to their front door.
- Be a deliberate pedestrian at least part of every day. Walk on some trips where you would otherwise drive.
- Next time you move to a different place of residence, choose a neighborhood that embodies smart growth principles.
Useful web sites about sprawl:www.sierraclub.org/sprawl/, www.smartgrowth.org, www.sprawlwatch.org