Dream of the future, or nightmare of the Midwest? This development is the largest mall in the world, over 10 million retail square feet. It is about 10 times the size of most large malls like the Galleria Mall in Cheektowaga. Although it has a population larger than the 30,000 in Jamestown, NY, no one lives in this "edge city". To survive, this mall needs several tens of thousands of visitors a day all carrying credit cards. The mall's drawing radius must therefore be several hundred miles. Daily charter bus reservations can be made in Detroit and Canada.

by Juan Wilson

(C) 1998 The Gobbler

Suburban sprawl has recently become a hot social, environmental, economic and political issue. Several communities, including New York State (Assembly 10038, Senate 7256), have "smart growth" legislation in process. Many counties and incorporated towns have adopted new laws aimed at curbing problems associated with sprawl. Most of that legislation has utilized a handful of techniques to more efficiently use land and conserve special local features. These techniques have included:

• Master planning, zoning & land use restrictions
• Economic incentives for growth in established population centers
• Identifying historical or environmental conservation districts
• Encouraging mass transit and alternatives to automobile use

These traditional methods have had moderate success in some places like Portland, Oregon where a large population growth in recent years (50% in the 1990's) has been absorbed in a metropolitan area growth of only 5%. However, many environmentalists and anti-sprawl advocates argue that the new laws often simply enforce the status quo and become merely a new set of rules to deal with. For example, in some Colorado communities new land use restrictions have merely replaced the requirement for an environmental impact statement and have actually accelerated speculative building.

Obviously laws don't always accomplish their goals. Two obvious examples of federal legislation underscore this point. Federal deregulation of airlines two decades ago and the Telecommunication Act 1994. These laws were intended to boost competition, and, in the long run, improve service to the consumer. To a degree, both sets of laws backfired and have resulted in poorer local service and/or higher prices.

A similar fate may confront our county if we are not in agreement on our real goals when we start moving towards dealing with sprawl.

I recently attended a forum in Buffalo, NY, on October 7, titled "Regionalism: From Agenda to Action". The forum was sponsored by the Institute for Local Governance and Regional Growth (part of the University of Buffalo). This meeting was attended by about 300 people from around the Buffalo metropolitan area. It should be noted that this gathering was not held in a hotel in downtown Buffalo but at the Galleria, the largest regional shopping mall in western New York, in the heart of the beast, so to speak.

One thing was clear at this meeting. Although many agreed on the unfortunate downturn in the health of the region's economy and quality of life, there was no consensus on problem's causes or solutions. In fact there were many opposing and contradictory agendas being addressed.

Similarly, I'm sure that here in Jamestown, NY, many people with diametrically opposed political and economic agendas would agree that our city is imperiled. Unfortunately, they may be reaching for widely disparate solutions because they perceive different sources of the symptoms they suffer from.

Before deciding how to deal with sprawl, I think that the first order of business is to discuss and identify the problems associated with sprawl, and their sources. If those items can be agreed on there may be hope to do something effective.

Sprawl has been defined as low density disperse development extending away from existing population centers. This kind of development has contributed to the economic failure of our urban centers, and a suburban quality of life that has been described as "There's no there there"and "Everywhere is nowhere".

Although there are many aspects of American culture that contribute to the problem of sprawl, the source of the problem and the problem itself can be easily identified. There are two primary components:

• The widespread use of the automobile as a means of travel.
• The widespread use of television as a substitute for culture.

 The automobile business, through most of this century, has been the biggest industry in the developed world. General Motors and Standard Oil were the biggest corporations in America for decades.

The use of the private car exploded at the end of World War II in 1945. It has been the means of relocating of our population from the city to outlying suburban (and now exurban) areas where there was previously no transportation.

Of course the car itself could not do it alone. The car needed a road to drive on. After the war, during Eisenhower's first term, a proposal was made to build The National Defense Highway System. It was to help us fight Communism. It quickly evolved into the biggest public works project ever proposed. It was renamed the US Interstate System, and has been under construction ever since.

Since World War II television has grown as a contributing factor to the increasing irrelevance of the city and its culture. Why does anyone need to experience the city center and its cultural variety? It is possible to experience life as a voyeur watching TV in your living room, with occasional trips to a convenience store for beer, pizza seen in advertisements.

The synergy of the car, the road and television have created a new kind of business. The national franchise outlet on the suburban strip. Advertised on television, supplied by interstate tractor trailers and located within a few minutes of anywhere, these businesses have replaced almost every local independent business in America.

Concurrent to the development of the national franchise outlet on the suburban strip has been the consolidation of franchises in regional malls and shopping centers. These centers have replaced and displaced many urban functions that used to be public and non profit. These urban functions have been privatized and commercialized. Subsequently, the town square and free speech have been replaced by the mall concourse and approved behavior on private property.

In the particular case of Jamestown there has been another factor at work. The economic divergence of the rust belt and sunbelt. Much of the industrial and manufacturing loss that Jamestown has experienced has been to the sunbelt. Jamestown is situated amid a cluster of rust belt cities that once were the backbone of industrial America; Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, Erie, Buffalo, Rochester, and Binghamton. These cities were developed with heavy industry and railroads. Their large populations were clustered around centralized resources that were entrenched and expensive. Elaborate social and cultural systems were also in place, like labor unions and political organizations that made change difficult.

The synergy of automobile and television made an end run around the need for those resources and entrenched social structures of the city. The car and TV made it much easier to develop and relocate businesses and people. As long as you gave them air conditioning and cable TV it was easy to move people away from these rust belt cities and put them in the middle of the bug filled scrub pines of the South or the blistering desert of the West.

For our county, here in the middle of the rust belt and snowbelt, there has been little in the way of economic or population growth since the depression of the 1930's. That will change in the next century as the pressure of population growth and the need for undeveloped real estate increase. Unless we are prepared, sprawl will accelerate and the quality of life will suffer in Chautauqua County.

Now is the time for a new alliance in Chautauqua County. One that links the fate of the city to the fate of the country. This alliance will be most effective if it is established before there are more people in suburbs to deal with. This alliance would have a simple premise. What is good for suburbia is bad for both the city and country. Restated, what is good for the car is bad for people and bad for the environment.

Any strategy that the County successfully employs to counter sprawl will have to deal with reducing the dependency of residents on private automobiles. The ineffective planning strategies that the County has used in recent decades have actually emphasized increasing our dependency on sprawl as an economic engine. A key example are the plans to develop Route 60 as a commercial corridor linking north and south County.

Chautauqua County is still mostly rural in character. For this rural lifestyle to remain intact there must be a revitalization of its villages as well as its cities. Villages once provided people most of their daily needs; the grocery, post office, restaurant, doctor's office, gas station, etc. There are about twenty villages in our county. Most people not in a city still live within a couple of miles of a village center.

For a small city like Jamestown to be viable it needs new and refreshed economic reasons to exist. These new economies must swim against a tide moving from the city and counter to the city's interests. To motivate people to join a movement against this tide, these economic rationales must be simple ideas expressed in themes that are easily understood and widely shared. Obviously, historic and present social realities must be considered in relation to these themes. As a first pass I would propose two economic themes to counter sprawl here:

• Promote Jamestown as a resurgent center of quality furniture manufacturing
• Promote the county as a leader in alternate cultural and spiritual activity

The people of a community must begin with a shared understanding of their past history and present state of development. Then they can envision what kind of place they want to live in the future, and finally decide what needs to be done to make that vision a reality.