My generation inherited communities that, for the most part, worked. Our children stand to inherit shoddily-built suburban sprawl and inner cities that are crumbling into ruin. You see fast-food outlets and office parks and shopping malls rising out of vast barren plains of asphalt. You see residential subdivisions spreading like inkblots, obliterating forests and farms in their relentless march across the landscape. You see the graveyard of livability.
Some people say that sprawl is merely the natural result of market forces at work.
That's a myth. Tax codes are riddled with bias toward new development and the consumption of open space. State and local governments offer incentives and subsidies for sprawl ranging from tax-increment financing to sales tax rebates. Policies such as these have turned our communities inside out, releasing industry, commerce and population from the core, leaving vacancy and ruin behind. Over the years, every community has made an enormous investment of public funds in downtown streets, sidewalks, water and sewer lines and the like.