For every suburban big box and urban freeway, there lies an empty main street and a crumbling neighborhood.  This is sprawl’s legacy.  But by seeing these old buildings, once-vibrant neighborhoods, underused strip centers and vacant parking lots for the valuable assets that they are, flagging economies can be revived.


Sprawl and the Preservation-Revitalization Connection
We lose more than beautiful buildings from sprawl. We also lose the community character that makes each place unique.  This character, made up of the architecture, people, and landscape of a particular place, offer regions some of the best opportunities for economic development.  Many of the most impressive examples of revitalization around the country, whether urban downtowns or rural Main Streets, have had the preservation of historic architecture and character at their core. 

Giant Sucking Sound
Sprawl drains resources away from existing communities.  Sprawl’s transformation of the American landscape has led to declining cities and inner suburbs, while imposing daunting new infrastructure and public service costs on suburban communities.  Many inner suburban communities are suffering from the same neglect and disinvestment as their urban neighbors.  Even suburban jurisdictions on the metropolitan fringe are not immune from sprawl’s pernicious effects on their economy.  Because rapid residential growth often fails to pay for itself, many local officials feel forced to accept any commercial development in whatever form it comes – typically, cookie cutter shopping centers and big-box stores. These patterns lead to the same problems – increasing traffic, marginal services, lack of open space and rising taxes – that many residents tried to leave behind.

Preservation-based Revitalization
While cities pay consultants thousands of dollars to come up with the Next Big Thing (usually with a huge government subsidy attached), some creative communities have realized that their best assets are what drew them to the place originally.  Historic architecture, diverse neighborhoods, and scenic vistas are just a few of the assets that can be built upon for successful and long-term economic revitalization.
 
Main Street Inc.
Few places are as hallowed in the American psyche as the classic Main Street.  With its human scale architecture of retail shops, offices and apartments above, and wide sidewalks, these places represent some of what is best about American town building.  With many suburban-style, generic malls falling out of favor with consumers and developers alike (which incidentally provide additional smart growth development opportunities, click here to learn more), the people are returning to Main Street for shopping, strolling or just to find a peaceful place to people-watch.

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Economic Benefits of Preservation
The state of Vermont’s economy has benefited greatly from two decades of preservation policy that has retained the state’s renowned natural beauty and agricultural economy.  Resisting the temptation of too many widened highways, billboards, and paved-over farms, Vermont has made preservation a key part of its economic development strategy. 

The anti-highway battles of the 1960’s and 70’s (and now) were largely a battle over preserving community character rather than transportation policy.  From the revitalized SoHo district in Manhattan to the Garden District in New Orleans to North Beach in San Fracicsco, these places chose preserving historic places over quicker suburban commutes.  The economic success of these neighborhoods proves this success. 

Preserving character and Economy by Stopping Superstore Sprawl
The following  is excerpted from an article by experts at  the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

People love what’s inside superstores. They hate what’s on the outside. It’s hard to argue with the popularity of Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot, Lowe’s, and their many imitators.

And yet, at any given moment, hundreds of grassroots organizations across the country are fighting tooth and nail to keep these retail behemoths out of their communities. “Is the worst of the suburbs the best we can hope for?” asks a flier distributed by citizens in New Orleans protesting a proposed 199,000 squarefoot Wal-Mart store in the historic Lower Garden District. “We’re not gaining a store; we’re losing our community,” laments a citizens’ group in Decorah, Iowa, in an ad placed in USA Today. Opponents of a proposed Home Depot in Mountain View, California, have opened their own office, stocked with lawn signs, literature, and petitions, to protest the giant store. A group called Mainstreet Defense Fund sued the city of Northfield, Minnesota, over its approval of a sprawling Target store on the outskirts of town.

What’s behind these battles? In the view of many, big-box stores impose hidden costs that don’t appear on the price tags of the products they sell: traffic congestion; loss of trees, open space and farmland; displaced small businesses; substitution of jobs that support families with low-paying jobs that don’t; air and water pollution; dying downtowns with vacant buildings; abandoned shopping centers; a degraded sense of community; and sprawl. The list of problems linked to big-box stores is long. Whether one loves or hates big-box stores, it is indisputable that their effects are long-term and significant.

Local public officials owe it to their constituents to consider these effects—and to become familiar with tools available for mitigating them—before approving bigbox stores. Such tools include impact assessments, design standards, planning moratoria, retail size limits, intergovernmental agreements, and the withdrawal of subsidies for retail sprawl.