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worth repeating |
Parris Glendening, former governor of Maryland and nationally recognized leader of the “smart growth” movement, delivered the Collins Distinguished Practitioner Lecture April 13 for the Vinson Institute of Government. Some excerpts: “When I speak about smart growth, part of the question always becomes, ‘how do you get the message across?’ . . . The message is: With regard to sprawl, the preservation of our existing communities, time is not on our side. We must have an immense sense of urgency about changing the process, about changing the way we live, the way we govern. . . . “When we talk about this, I ask people to think about the development patterns across America.…I recently have been in Buffalo, and an interesting statistic is that the Buffalo metropolitan area has the exact same population that it did in 1940, except that the metropolitan area is three and one-half, almost four times larger than it was back then, and yet you’ve got whole neighborhoods that are practically abandoned. . . . This is in fact what is occurring through much of the United States. . . .One reason that development has spread to every remote corner of our state is that the development field has been tilted in favor of sprawl. We support it, officially, by policy, and subsidize sprawl. . . . “Sprawl has been going on now for 60 years, because two of the major pieces of federal legislation that really started fueling sprawl was first the G.I. home loan program, and subsequent home guaranteed-mortgage programs, and the interstate highway system. Both cases—good programs, good intentions, helped a lot of people, but really fueled the sprawl and the exodus from the cities.” |
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| —Beth Roberts |
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