Well, sprawl happened. We asked for safe neighbhorhoods with good schools, but did we truly bargain for streets that are treated like raceways and monster schools that look like big-box stores, with parking lots to match? How good are these places for our kids, really?

Our sprawling landscape is taking an increasing toll on children and families. Growing commute times for many two-worker families steals parental time from kids. The combination of unwalkable neighborhoods, sedentary lifestyle and drive-through diets has resulted in a doubling of child obesity rates in the past ten years; one in four of today’s kids will suffer from diabetes as an adult if trends continue. Auto-dependent sprawl is reversing gains in air quality at a time when asthma rates among children are soaring. In fast-developing areas on the metro fringe, the huge, anonymous new schools often are overcrowded when they open.

Can’t we do better?

Advocates of Smart Growth think we can.

Smart Growth is about ensuring that all neighborhoods have quality public schools so that families don’t have to consider the quality of the school when deciding where and how they want to live. It’s about providing families with transportation choices so that kids can bike or walk to school, parents can choose to avoid traffic by taking transit, biking or walking to work and have more time and energy to spend with their family, and the elderly and disabled can get around without being dependent on another for a ride. Smart Growth is about providing housing choices so that teachers and firefighters, and others who work in the community can afford to live there too. It’s about preserving our Main Streets and keeping our local economies strong. It’s about protecting our farmland and our community parks. And finally, Smart Growth is about using existing infrastructure more efficiently rather than subsidizing new development that will drain resources and investment out of existing towns, schools, and businesses.

The Role of Schools

In many places, schools act as an anchor in the community. They are a symbol of the neighborhood’s stability and attract families to the community. They bring neighbors together for PTA meetings, school plays, and soccer games. They offer their classrooms and libraries to residents and adult education classes, and offices for family counseling and youth employment services. The schools strengthen their communites. The reverse is true as well. Teachers, principals, and superintendents talk about the importance of having parents and community residents that are actively involved in their child’s education. Communities have an enormous impact on the education of children.

Unfortunately, in some communities, the opposite is true – the decisions schools make actually hurt the community. When a school board makes a decision to build a new school, the details of that decision can impact the overall well being of the community. If a school board decides to close an existing school and to build a new, larger school at the edge of town, this decision can be devastating to the community and without recognizing it, to the school and its students as well. For example, if the new school is built on the edge of town, a significant portion of the student population may no longer be able to walk or bike to school. This causes school transportation costs to increase substantially – not to mention the new costs for roads, water and sewer infrastructure -- and students’ ability to participate in extracurricular activities may decline because they are suddenly dependent on the school, their parents or older friends or siblings for transportation.

The same problem may arise for those who work or volunteer at the school. When the school was located in the heart of the community, local residents could easily volunteer to staff the youth employment office and parents could more easily attend PTA meetings or their children’s extracurricular activities. In fact, research has shown that participation in civic activities declines by 10 percent with every ten minutes spent in traffic. And for the neighborhood that has lost its school, property values tend to drop substantially as residents perceive disinvestment in their community. A 1999 study produced by Case Western Reserve University and Pricewaterhouse entitled, “How Much is a Neighborhood School Worth?” showed that disrupting neighborhood schools reduces property values by 9.9 percent.

A school’s size and design can also impact student achievement, mental and social well being. More and more, researchers are finding that students tend to feel more connected to and perform better in smaller schools that fit more easily into neighborhoods. This is particularly true for students of low-income families and students of color. (footnote)

While many school districts have been able to avoid the trend toward “school sprawl”, it is important to recognize that there are pressures on school districts that have led them to make decisions that may have had outcomes that they hadn’t anticipated. For example, many states have school construction funding formulas that favor new construction over renovation. Other states have acreage requirements for schools that force schools to choose between two undesirable choices: building a new school on the edge of town or demolishing neighboring residences to accommodate the acreage requirements. Many of these requirements come from the official Guidebook produced by the Council for Educational Facility Planners International (CEFPI). While not all states have adopted these guidelines as requirements, in many places they are perceived as such, and in other states consultants use them as the basis for their school facility recommendations. CEFPI has acknowledged that a number of the recommendations included in the Guidebook are arbitrary and they are in the process of rewriting it and incorporating information and a section on Smart Growth schools.

What you can do: There are numerous resources for school boards, principals, teachers, students and parents who want to ensure that their school is a smart school.

Ask to review a copy of you community’s school facility master plan.
This document will have information about plans for school closure, repair, expansion, modernization, renovation, and new construction.
Support the maintenance of your community’s school facilities.
Start a petition for a sidewalk, or work with your neighbors and school administrators to ensure that there are “Safe Routes to School” to enable students to safely walk or bike to school.
Make sure your school provides a bike rack for students to lock their bikes.
Get involved in your community’s school through adult education classes, school plays, or the youth employment office.

Health and Safety Children face health and safety threats from many sources, but we don’t tend to think that one of the threats can be the design of our communities. In some cities, neighborhoods have been bisected by high-speed freeways design to carry commuters in and out of the city without thought about how the design can impact those living in the neighborhood. Many suburbs, particularly modern subdivisions that ostensibly are designed to be safe for children to play turn out to be almost hostile. Most modern suburbs lack sidewalks and are so isolated from other activities – schools, libraries, shops, playing fields – that children are captives of the cul de sac without a parent and a car for every trip. Streets are designed with wide, sweeping corners to accommodate speeding automobiles, and speed is a critical factor impacting whether a pedestrian survives an automobile accident.

The proliferation of cul de sacs makes the world beyond the subdivision entrance doubly dangerous. The lack of interconnected streets means every subdivision and shopping center empties onto the same overloaded arterial road, which inevitably is widened and reconfigured to accommodate a high volume of speeding vehicles. When teenagers reach the age of being allowed to drive, the danger increases. Car accidents account for more than a third of teenaged deaths -- by far the largest single cause. More than 40 percent of 16-year-olds have an accident bad enough to warrant a police report in their first year of driving, and the majority of people between 16 and 20 years of age will be involved in at least one serious accident (8). Most parents realize this, but feel they have little choice but to provide their kids with a car. After all, their children are right when they argue that their community is designed so that few activities are available without a car.

Air pollution At the same time as sprawling development is requiring more driving reversing gains in air quality, asthma rates among children are soaring: the number of children with asthma more than doubled, from 2.3 million to 5.5 million, from 1980 to 1995. (9) Although the role of air pollution in causing asthma is unclear, its ability to trigger asthma attacks is well documented.

Air pollution presents parents with a difficult dilemma: We know kids need to spend more time exercising, but for the 23 million children under 13 who live in places with poor air quality, parents are faced with weighing whether exercise on bad air quality days might be as harmful as failure to exercise. All of these issues are exacerbated for economically disadvantaged minorities, among whom rates for asthma and other respiratory ailments have been soaring in recent years.(11, 12)

Child Obesity Since weight-gain exploded in the US in the 1980s, the rate of overweight kids between 6 and 17 has more than doubled to well over 10 percent (14). About 60 percent of overweight 5 to 10-year-old children already have at least one risk factor for heart disease including elevated blood pressure or insulin levels. Today about 30 percent of newly diagnosed diabetic children have “adult-onset” diabetes, a disorder triggered by poor diet and sedentary lifestyle. Before 1990 it was rarely seen in people younger than 40. By the time today’s kids reach middle age, if current trends continue, one in four Americans will battle diabetes and the potential consequences of blindness and kidney failure. (16) Finally, more and more kids are being diagnosed with depression and other mood disorders that can be exacerbated by poor diet and lack of exercise.

No one is arguing that sprawl is the sole cause of these epidemics, but it is among the factors to be considered for its contribution to the trends, and it is worth exploring what can be done in the field of community design to reverse them.

What you can do:

When shopping for a home, look for a community that has sidewalks and activity centers such as schools, jobs, parks, transit and shops in close proximity.
When shopping for a home, look for a community that was designed on a street grid rather than cul-de- sacs
Walk or bike to school with your child

Community Design and Convenience

Smart Growth communities are places that have been pitched by many in the real estate industry as ideal places for young professionals. A return to development with a mix of housing and commercial uses – a pattern of development that was once the norm for centuries -- has recreated active and inviting streets and neighborhoods filled with sidewalk cafes, restaurants, shops and other activities that draw people out of their homes, on to Main Street, and into the community. But what the marketers of smart growth developments have not yet realized is that one of the key features that make these communities attractive to young professionals, also makes them extremely attractive to families – that factor is convenience.

The typical suburban development of the past 50 years demands a growing number of hours driving as the number and distance of car trips required for daily living has grown along with congestion. In 1995, American spent and average of 43 more hours in the car than they had in 1990, an increase of 11 percent. In the 1990s, American drove 88 percent farther than in 1969 to go shopping and 137 percent farther to accomplish family and personal errands. Mothers are bearing the brunt of this burden. In a 1999 report by the Surface Transportation Policy Project entitled, High Mileage Moms (21), the study found that, on average, the typical mother spends well over an hour driving each day (and that’s not counting the time at each stop on her route), traveling 29 miles and taking more than 5 trips, 20 percent more than either single women or men. Driving, particularly under stressful, ime-crunched conditions, is hardly quality time for parents and children. In many ways, middle and upper class kids are the lucky ones because their parents have the means to drive them to activities in out auto-dependent neighborhoods. Lower-income families, with one or fewer cars, are not able to haul children to sports, music or other activities. When walking, biking or transit are not viable options, kids just miss out.

Smart Growth communities – in urban, suburban and rural areas -- are designed in such a way as to provide families with more choices and more convenience. Smart Growth communities with a mix of housing, retail and other uses, particularly when they are near transit -- allow parents to conveniently pick up children from day care centers, birthday presents from a local toy store, or dry cleaning or milk from a corner market. Transportation choices give parents the option to drive, use transit, bicycle or walk, and when necessary, switch modes to avoid an accident, construction or other causes of congestion, which is particularly useful when you’re tight on time and on the way to pick a child up from school or soccer practice. Housing choices allow families to choose between a townhouse, apartment or single family home and offer a range of prices that enables teachers and firefighters to live in the same communities in which they work.

Smart Growth is a choice that all communities can make. Even if your community was built without these choices and conveniences in mind, all is not lost. In many communities that were built in the last 50 years, residents are working with their neighbors and their locally elected officials to retrofit their communities to make them more livable.

What you can do:

Work with your neighbors and town officials to retrofit your community to make it more livable

Support mixed-use, mixed-income development proposals in your town center and around transit stations

Support efforts to use transportation funds to build safe routes to school for kids