Here, just outside Atlanta’s I-285 beltway, is the front line of the great lifestyle struggle of the next century. It is taking the paradoxical form of a war not on poverty, but on affluence–or the way affluence is typically realized in America, in suburban enclaves that eat away at the countryside and promote the triple evils of sprawl: air pollution, traffic congestion and visual blight. Al Gore has made an anti-sprawl “livability agenda” the centerpiece of his presidential campaign, warning darkly of commuters who arrive home “too late to read a child a bedtime story.” Most of the $8.8 billion the administration was seeking for the next fiscal year–for projects such as mass transit, green-space acquisition and road improvements–has already been approved by Congress. New Jersey Gov. Christine Whitman, a moderate Republican, has ambitious plans to spend almost $1 billion to preserve undeveloped land in the most densely populated state in the union. Even builders here in Atlanta, those prodigious cultivators of affluence, are scrambling to meet an unexpected demand for “simplicity.”
But translating this shift of sentiment into lines on the map and trees on the ground is a daunting task. Anyone who has flown over it can see that there is no shortage of empty land in the United States, 95 percent of which is undeveloped. Activists like to cite figures for the overall loss of rural countryside that vary from about 400,000 to 1.4 million acres a year. Those on the other side often repeat a statistic from Steven Hayward of the conservative Pacific Research Institute, which puts the rate of land development for the United States, excluding Alaska, at an infinitesimal 0.0006 percent a year. Last week Hayward admitted he had made “a stupid math mistake” and that the real figure is .07 percent, more than 100 times greater. That’s still not a lot, although it means that over the lifetime of a child born today, the developed area of the nation will more than double.
But the problem is that this development is concentrated in a relatively few areas close to big cities–such as Atlanta, whose 10-county metropolitan area population has grown by roughly a quarter just since 1990, to about 3.1 million, as of a year ago. Reversing or even slowing this trend will require a whole new way of thinking by local planners, federal regulatory agencies, developers and homebuyers. Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, thinks that’s going to happen: “People are willing to pay [for mass transit and open space]; they are willing to accept regulations,” he says, “because this issue more than any other affects the quality of life in communities today.” On the other side of the issue, Samuel Staley, an economist with the Reason Public Policy Institute in Los Angeles, points out that “suburbanization by other people is what’s unpopular; people love living in the suburbs, they just don’t want anyone else out there with them.” He adds: “You can’t develop a public policy around stopping people from moving to the communities and homes they want to live in, at least not in the United States. Not yet.”
Atlanta will be a test of those competing views, and its citizens, business leaders and government officials provide a good window on how this struggle might be waged over the next few years. One who will be watching closely is Julie Haley, a 39-year-old mother of two who moved to a subdivision in Alpharetta back when the neighborhood was mostly horse farms and trees. That was in 1994. Today, she says, “people who visited us five years ago say, ‘I couldn’t find your house.’ The roads have all gotten wider, they’ve knocked down all the trees, there’s a million shopping centers.” On business trips, her husband, Michael, leaves the house at 5:30 for a 9 a.m. flight to beat the traffic to Atlanta’s Hartsfield airport. Her children, Kaitlin, 9, and Conor, 5, both suffer from asthma, which she attributes to sharing the air with cars whose drivers make the longest average round-trip commute in the country, 36.5 miles. “The kids cry when they see the bulldozers,” she says. “They say, ‘When I grow up, I’m gonna be president and I’m not going to let them cut down any more trees’.”
Of course, Haley, a nonpracticing lawyer, knows it’s more important to have the local zoning board on your side than the president. But that body, she has found, responds mostly to the well-connected developers. She has won a few battles, only to lose the wars. Fulton County officials recently declared a moratorium on new development in an area where the sewers were overflowing. But a day later the moratorium was lifted for developers who already had a “land disturbance permit.” It turned out there were hundreds of them, she says; “We’re in the middle of a moratorium, and there’s twice as much building as before.” She joined a boycott of a supermarket whose builders, she says, chopped down several oak trees of a protected species. The store went out of business, but that didn’t bring the trees back.
Haley, though, may have a powerful ally in the statehouse. Gov. Roy Barnes, a moderate Democrat, was elected last fall after promising to do something about sprawl, and he promptly did, creating a new agency with unprecedented power over zoning, roads and transit in a 13-county area. Surprising even the governor, the law authorizing the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority rolled to a quick passage–despite some grumbling that the agency’s initials should stand for Give Roy Total Authority. (Barnes gets to appoint all 15 members of the board.) But the legislature had little choice, since the 13 counties were out of compliance with clean-air standards and about to lose federal highway funds. Now the new agency faces the task of extending Atlanta’s feeble mass-transit system to the suburban counties that have always resisted it, and deciding whether to proceed with the “northern arc” freeway connecting I-75 and I-85 25 miles beyond the existing beltway. The creation of GRTA was praised by Gore as a model environmental initiative, although Barnes is quick to disavow the idea that he acted out of concern for anything as intangible as the atmosphere. “I’m no tree-hugger,” he insists. “I’m a businessman who thinks you can’t let your prosperity slip through your fingers. The pitch I made to the business community is that this is about money for schools and cities, to grow this state.”
Almost everyone in the region has a stake in how GRTA does its job, especially the leaders of the city of Atlanta, which has been mostly a bystander in the great land rush of the ’90s. Until recently, Realtors helping families relocate would show off Atlanta’s parks, museums and stadium, says Mayor Bill Campbell, but then head to the suburbs to look at houses. “Now, when they take them out there, they’re getting stuck in traffic,” he says gleefully. “We’ve had more construction building permits issued in the last three years than any other time in our history.” Campbell tends to regard the suburbs as a giant Ponzi scheme, in which taxes are kept low for the first arrivals by deferring the cost of roads and schools. “Now they’re choking on their growth and they don’t have the infrastructure to provide for it,” he says–while the developers have moved on to the next interstate exit.
And there are powerful business interests lining up with Campbell, such as the developer John A. Williams. His company built thousands of suburban garden apartments up through 1987, but since then has worked almost exclusively inside the I-285 beltway, often on “brownfield” sites recycled from other uses. He has moved toward “live/work/walk” projects that mix housing with shops and offices, and housing for different economic classes. “I was sort of poor when I grew up,” says Williams, an Atlanta native and Georgia Tech grad, “but there were people poorer than me, and I didn’t think anything of it”–an attitude that, if it ever spreads, could subvert a major unspoken premise of suburban developments priced from the high $200s-500s.
Yet the businessman who may have the most impact on Atlanta’s development over the next few years isn’t a developer at all; he’s F. Duane Ackerman, CEO of BellSouth, the second largest local employer after Delta Airlines. At a cost of some $750 million, Ackerman has ordained the relocation of 13,000 employees from 75 suburban offices to three new complexes within the beltway, each walking distance from a transit stop. The company will build four giant parking lots at the suburban ends of the transit lines, equipped with small business centers so that employees can keep working on the train and send off their e-mails and faxes before driving home. Ackerman, a hard-driving businessman whose personal formula for avoiding traffic is to get up at 5 a.m. and work until 6:30 at night, insists he is only trying to get more productivity out of a work force that was in danger of disappearing into daylong traffic jams. “I’m not a member of the Sierra Club,” he assures interviewers. “But we are a company that’s aware of its environment.”
And there are others, of course, who are watching Barnes’s great plans with more skepticism, like builder John Wieland, the brusque, tough-minded developer of Vinings Estates and dozens of other suburban projects over the last 29 years. He says what many probably think: that it’s easy to be against “sprawl” in the abstract, until you’re asked to weigh the logical alternative, which can only be “density.” “I ask people, would they like to see sprawl controlled, and they answer, ‘That would be good’,” he says. “Then I ask, how would they like town homes next door? That wouldn’t be so good.” As for GRTA, he’s in less awe of its dictatorial power than you might think. “As soon as somebody tells a well-connected developer he can’t build where he wants to build,” he predicts, “the governor’s going to get a phone call.” And there are, of course, a few holdouts against the whole concept of state intervention in local planning. “The people in my neighborhood aren’t complaining about dirty air,” says Don Balfour, a Republican state senator who opposed Barnes’s plan. “They’re saying, ‘Man, it takes me an hour and a half to go 30 miles’.” The solution for that problem, he contends, is not more density–but more highways.
Which is just the attitude that drives Julie Haley nuts. “People keep saying we don’t want to be another Gwinnett County,” she says, referring to Balfour’s home district, “because they’ve seen how ugly and desolate a landscape can look, devoid of trees and full of strip malls.” Sometimes, she thinks of moving even farther out–say, to Athens, 55 miles from Atlanta–but she doubts she can outrun sprawl. “They’re starting on what we’ve already been through,” she muses. “I’m thinking, ‘I’ve battled around here for so long, why don’t I stick it out’”–and fight.
