Anti-Sprawl Activists and Changing Patterns of Suburban Expansion: an Exploratory Analysis

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With growth in the size and wealth of North America's human population after World War II, massive landscape transformations occurred, most notably outside of cities where loose coalitions of farmers, builders, and bankers converted farms and forests into subdivisions of single family homes. Alarmed by the accompanying environmental destruction, other citizens, organized into counter coalitions, have begun to oppose real estate development. The anti-sprawl activists try to prevent or slow development through open space preservation and down-zoning (an increase in minimum lot areas for houses). We know little about counter coalitions and their effects. Through case studies of anti-sprawl activists in four representative communities and a linked regional analysis of remotely sensed and census data, the principal investigators will address two key questions about the causes and effects of anti-sprawl activism. (1) What sorts of socio-economic and ecological circumstances give rise to counter coalitions and (2) what effects do their efforts to preserve rural landscapes have on the local quality of life? The expectations are that the research will confirm the existence of a new, lower density, more economically exclusionary sprawl in which open space preservation and down-zoning work in tandem to reduce the amount of new housing but not the amount of recently developed land. This interaction between open space preservation and down-zoning will be more evident in less developed, more affluent communities than in more developed communities and in small scale rather than large scale preservation efforts. More generally, this research responds to the contention by Duncan and Duncan (2001) and Teaford (1997) that environmental rhetoric and action in rural-urban fringe communities often masks and makes more acceptable the pursuit of an exclusionary social agenda. In this respect the Highlands project addresses several important questions about environmentalists as agents of change in the American landscape.