By Rob Gurwitt

Looking over the election results, you might decide that the public is losing its taste for dramatic approaches to reducing sprawl. It’s an understandable conclusion. It’s also a bit hasty.

True, the state results are pretty suggestive. The big news was in Arizona and Colorado, where initiatives to require cities to impose growth boundaries went down under heavy fire — not to mention millions of dollars in campaign spending — from pro-development forces. Less noticed, but definitely more far-reaching, the voters of Oregon blasted a hole in the efficacy of the state’s land-use and environmental laws by agreeing that landowners should be paid for any loss in the value of their property caused by state or local regulations.

On the other hand, where the question involved government spending, rather than regulation, voters were much happier to give it their backing. Floridians decided they want to go ahead with high-speed public transit lines between their five largest urban areas. And voters in Ohio and Rhode Island enthusiastically backed open-space and farmland preservation initiatives.

So does this mean that people hate land-use controls but like land conservation? Maybe. But here’s another possibility: We’re looking in the wrong place to figure it out.

Turn for a moment to the results in California. Of the 54 local ballot measures either limiting or promoting growth around the state, slow-growth advocates won 35 of them. And there were some significant victories. In Alameda County — which is rapidly developing out in its eastern half — voters opted decisively for urban growth boundaries, requiring voter approval for any changes to them and explicitly prohibiting a 12,500-home development planned for one community. Voters in four cities, including San Jose, also opted for growth boundaries. In some cities, voters decided they were tired of holding referendums on pro-growth city council decisions and simply made growth decisions subject to popular vote. And in the Los Angeles suburbs, slow-growth advocates — including lawyer Ed Masry, made famous by the film Erin Brockovich — won council seats in several cities.

The point here is not that anti-sprawl sentiment was unstoppable in California. In fact, the Alameda growth-boundary bill was the only one of three such countywide measures that passed; two small cities also rejected them. But it does suggest that the real battleground over sprawl and how to deal with it is at the local level, and that the issue has lost none of its grip on the electorate.

Politically, of course, this makes sense. The bigger the jurisdiction, the harder it is to sway enough voters by knocking on doors or holding neighborhood coffees; in big counties, and certainly in states, money counts. And development interests tend to have a lot more of it to spend on elections than growth-control advocates. It’s hardly a surprise that the most far-reaching statewide growth-control measures have come not at the ballot box, but from elected officials: Governor Parris Glendening in Maryland, say, or the state legislature in Tennessee.

The fact is, sprawl and development are at heart local issues. It may make the most sense, in policy terms, to address them regionally or statewide, but they’re felt where people live — in a popular farm that suddenly gets plowed under, in a daily commute that gets more frustrating by the month, in a block of small shops that’s dug up to make way for a big-box retailer. As long as sprawl and the pace of development continue as they have, the place to look on Election Day for how people feel about it is right there, in the town or city where they live.

Rob Gurwitt is a staff correspondent for Governing.

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