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Antisprawl raises PR issues for industry

By Edmund Mander

Shopping centers are frequently a lightning rod for suburban sprawl critics.

Just think how often the terms "strip center" and "mall" show up in the increasingly ubiquitous media stories on the subject; even the term "suburban sprawl" itself is sometimes summed up as "the strip-malling of America."

Consequently, to some people, being on the side of more development "is like saying you're procancer or antipuppy," as one ICSC staffer put it.

But such stigmas are unwarranted, according to ICSC and other real estate development organizations, and they are taking steps to prevent them taking root. After all, with several states considering antigrowth legislation, there is much more at stake than merely a nasty public relations black eye.

"I think retail goes where the people are, and we should not be unfairly criticized for delivering retail services at convenient locations where people reside," said Charles Grizzle, owner of Washington-based The Grizzle Co., a consulting and lobbying firm hired by ICSC to address the issue with legislators.

During a six-month period last year, ICSC counted more than 1,000 news media stories dealing with sprawl, and the subject provoked a media frenzy as November's state elections approached. Growth control was the subject of more than 200 state and local referenda across the country, noted Tracy Self, communications and state relations coordinator for ICSC's Government Relations Office.

On the national level, Vice President Al Gore has made suburban sprawl a central part of his "livability agenda" dealing with control of growth and preservation of the environment.

All of this has the potential to cause quite a headache for staff in ICSC's public relations and government relations departments.

Out-of-town malls have been charged with the double murder of natural virgin environments and downtowns, a theme that is familiar to Mark J. Schoifet who, until his appointment as ICSC's editorial director in 1997, served as the organization's spokesman, during a period when inner-city decay was a favorite media topic.

"Not guilty," Schoifet would repeatedly tell his media inquisitors, explaining that the shopping center followed, but did not provoke, the U.S.' postwar exodus to the suburbs.

"The first malls that were built in the country were built by the department stores," he would say, stressing that these retailers were responding to a trend, rather than engaging in some bizarre conspiracy to destroy their own downtown locations.

Of course the shopping center industry is not the only whipping boy for sprawl; housing developers get their share of heat, too, notes Lynn Rykowski, a spokeswoman for the National Association of Homebuilders (NAHB), in Washington, D.C.

To ensure the voices of both organizations are not lost amid the clamor against sprawl, ICSC and NAHB are pooling their resources, publishing a joint paper on growth restrictions, among various initiatives. And, with the help of the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization of 3,000 state legislators dedicated to free-market principles and limited government, they also are drafting legislative proposals that, for example, might require legislatures to hold economic impact studies before enacting growth restriction bills.

Such legislation could temper the unfettered enthusiasm in some quarters for growth restrictions, ICSC's staff say.

"When this issue comes up in state legislatures, they can have our position and intellectually evaluate the legislation that is coming before them," Self said.

At press time ICSC was forming a task force under the chairmanship of Susan Murphy, the planning director at Rudnick & Wolfe, a Chicago-based law firm that specializes in real estate and planning issues. It also has offices in Washington, Tampa, and Dallas.

ICSC members need to share their experience with antigrowth legislation and provide a coordinated response, both at the state and federal levels, Murphy said. She expressed fears that initiatives like those proposed by Gore could result in sweeping legislation at the federal level that is inappropriate and unworkable locally.

"They have no idea what the impact of various procedures is going to be on local land use. It's going to be too global," Murphy said. "Land use is something best left to the people who are living there."

Residential developers are as blameless as the retail industry for sprawl, according to NAHB's Rykowski. When her industry does build outside of city limits, it is only supplying what the public is demanding, she says, echoing her counterparts at ICSC.

"We'd like the public and the Vice President to understand that most people still want to live in a single-family home in the suburbs where there are new schools and there are new shopping centers, and they have a little more open space and they have a nice backyard," she said. "The population is growing, the economy is growing; people will continue to need homes."

Developers are not setting the agenda, and they certainly don't decide where development takes place, Rykowski said, stressing it is local and regional planning authorities who determine what goes where.

"Most people don't realize that subdivisions, developments and master-planned communities go through rigorous planning processes," she said.

Neither does NAHB condone sprawl, she added. On the contrary, the organization promotes sensible planning, she said, and to get this message across, the association has formed its Smart Growth Working Group to blunt some of the criticism directed against the industry. The Group's members comprise a cross-section of the organization's membership, including developers, designers and lawyers.

Some of the group's efforts were unveiled at a press conference attended by Gore in February, when NAHB launched a so-called "infill housing initiative" that will put housing in areas that are already developed.

"We're working with HUD and the U.S. Conference of Mayors to build an additional 100,000 homes in the inner cities and inner-ring suburbs each year over the next 10 years," Rykowski said.

Not that this represents any radical departure in NAHB's policy, she stressed.

"We've always been interested in infill; we've always been interested in more compact development," Rykowski said.

But, on the local level at least, developers' initiatives to limit sprawl are not always welcomed. For instance, builders' plans to cluster their homes in an effort to minimize sprawl have all too often been shot down, Rykowski said.

"The towns would have nothing to do with it, the citizens would have nothing to do with it," she said. "The citizens want a family home on a half-acre lot."

However, retail and residential developers are not fighting an entirely lonely battle. Several independent studies question some of the assumptions about sprawl. Self cites a recent report by the Reason Foundation's Public Policy Institute questioning the wisdom of growth restrictions, and even challenging the assertion that America has a problem with sprawl. The Los Angeles-based organization, which traditionally champions free-market solutions over government intervention, argues that only 5% of the nation's land is developed, and three quarters of the population lives on just 3.5% of its land area.

The Sierra Club paints a far grimmer picture on sprawl. In a recent report, it claims that between 1970 and 1990, more than 19 million acres of rural land were developed, and that 70% of the country's prime farmland "is now in the path of rapid development."

Whatever the issue's true proportions, the shopping center industry is sensitive to concerns about the destruction of virgin land, says ICSC spokesman Malachy Kavanagh, when reporters bring up the subject of sprawl and the environment. For instance, many of today's projects are built on so-called brownfields (see story, page 5), and others are going up in cities.

"Shopping centers have gone into what have been considered contaminated areas and cleaned them up," he said.

Furthermore, as the shopping center market has become more saturated, developers are spending more time these days renovating and expanding existing projects rather than building new ones, according to Kavanagh. There were 577 new centers built in 1998, but 673 others underwent renovation or expansion. Renovations have outpaced new projects for the past three years, he said.

In addition, some developers are making increased use of recycled materials in the construction of centers, and are adopting innovative waste disposal programs once the projects are up and running. Mall of America, for instance, sends surplus food from its food court to a pig farm, Kavanagh notes.

Using such information, ICSC and other real estate development organizations are striving to ensure that developers are associated with the solutions to environmental problems and suburban sprawl, rather than the problems.