12 Step Solution for Fighting Suburban Sprawl

12 Step Solution for Fighting Suburban Sprawl

By Todd Shallat, PhD, professor emeritus of history and urban studies and former director of the Center for Idaho History and Politics at Boise State University. He is the sole author of five books and the lead co-author of another eight about cities, technology, and the environment.


Blueprint Boise breaks an addiction to sprawl
The word "small" appears 85 times in the current edition of Blueprint Boise: Boise's Comprehensive Plan. The word "sprawl" appears only once, but its danger is omnipresent. Words like "blighted" and "disinvested" darken the Blueprint with dread for suburbs, sprawling and placeless. Words like "stewardship" and "transit-friendly" speak to a need to reclaim the older, greener, simpler, more chaste and walkable places. Blueprint, preaching small, speaks with nostalgia for the civic connections that sprawl squandered and suburbia lost.

Once, when sprawl was young, the word meant easy living. Sprawl in the era of the Boise streetcar meant a bungalow among the orchards in a bucolic subdivision like Warm Springs and Hyde Park. Sprawl for postwar dreamers of suburban dreams meant a split-level patio home with a Chevy sedan and a station wagon in a stucco two-car garage on the Bench near Vista Village. But gradually sprawl came to imply conformity and isolation. Nowhere to walk and nowhere to mingle. Bad air and asthma. Longer commutes and higher property taxes. Gated subdivisions and the demise of the family farm.