Popularity of ‘traditional communities’ growing

By Alan Suderman
THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE

Texans are used to big cars, big roads, and big cities. You don’t have to go far in this state to find highway construction or to see a new crop of big box stores being put up on a city’s outskirts.

Major cities like Dallas and Houston are being stretched bigger every day, expanding their borders to accommodate the growing number of people moving there.

And there’s no end in sight to the growth. The U.S. population recently topped 300 million people. Government estimates say we’ll hit 400 million somewhere around 2040.

Critics complain that expanding cities is not the way to deal with the influx of people, and is costing us dearly. They estimate that the cost of sprawls—including the longer utility lines, new roads, and higher gas prices—is $84 million a day, or $31 billion annually.

‘New Urbanism’
But not everyone is resigned to the fact that more people equates to larger, wider cities with more highways and more cars. One website explained that the “New Urbanism” movement promotes “walkable neighborhood-based development as an alternative to sprawl.”

Or, in other words, New Urbanism is a return to traditional neighborhoods that have a town center, businesses, homes next to one another, and plenty of space for walking.

“There’s definitely a community-minded spirit behind [New Urbanism],” says Stephen Filmanowicz, communications director for the Congress for the New Urbanism.

Filmanowicz says the traditional town or neighborhood that New Urbanism advocates worked well for centuries, but was only recently discarded after World War II when suburbs began to thrive. Many cities changed their zoning laws to keep businesses and residential neighborhoods separate.