New Mexico in Focus; 534; Subdivide and Conquer: A Modern Western

. .. .. Major funding for in focus is provided by the McCune Charitable Foundation, enriching the cultural life, health, education, environment and spiritual life of the citizens of New Mexico. Amber Waves of Green, Purple Mountains Majesty and subdivisions as far as the eye can see.

Is this the future for the American West? Communities throughout the West are now asking if there's a better way to manage the land. Club divide and conquer a modern western next one in focus. Hello and welcome to in focus, I'm RC Chapa, urban sprawl is nothing new. The great American exit to the suburbs began after World War II and has continued

unabated since then. Now sprawl has become an issue in rural areas as ranches and range lands are being subdivided for housing units while watersheds and natural habitats are being destroyed. Sprawl is present throughout the United States, but the problem is worse in the West. Tonight in focus presents a special broadcast of a new documentary, subdivide and conquer, which examines the consequences of sprawl and looks at what communities throughout the West are doing to manage their growth. After the documentary, I'll be talking to one of the filmmakers and a group of New Mexico community leaders who are dealing with the issues of sprawl and managed growth. But before that, we present subdividing conquer a modern western. For 200 years, the modern West has filled our imaginations.

Yeah, the smell of sage and red dust, the sound of the wind over the prairie. This is the home of the cowboy America's national hero. But the West is fast becoming a place that an old timer might not recognize. This whole area here has been developed in the last 20 years and I feel like Rip Van Winkle, I lay down and I woke up in another world. Nobody's making any more land. What was there a hundred years ago in this state is still here today.

We haven't made one more square inch of country, but we sure built a lot of homes. Today, the West is being conquered by highways, subdivisions and strip malls. It's called sprawl. From New York to California, it's spreading outward unchecked, erasing 50,000 square miles of open land and half a lifetime. This story is set in the Mountain West, but it's a tale for all Americans about the costs of sprawl and why it keeps rolling on. It's also a search for solutions, for people working on alternatives to sprawl. The question is, when we choose better ways to grow before we destroy the last best places. From Mount Meadow, Dolly, and Marshall, condos at that special touch, a hard cash for

mountain hair, especially where they go, of course they are, and restaurants and pony rides so come on down, let's up the ride, let's up the ride, oh give me a home to where the buffalo are on, where they're here and there. The Montana de Arizona, the Mountain West, is the fastest growing region in the country. Fleeing crime, pollution and urban hills, new homesteaders flock here looking for a fresh start, but more and more the West looks like the places they leave behind.

Half hour drive from Denver is one of the ranches of the new West. That's home to thousands of cattle, it's called Highlands Ranch. Jane Kirchner and her family came to Highlands Ranch from Michigan. Obviously we're really interested in getting the community that we thought would be good to have our kids in, but we also want to live, feel like we're living in the country or a little bit, you know, have some views, have some open space around us. One morning I woke up and looked out the back, there were bulldozers, grading, and I was devastated. Basically what's happened here is they've just kind of graded everything and built houses. Highlands Ranch, like suburbs everywhere, was designed for cars.

Adams workplaces shopping and entertainment centers are far apart, separated by a wilderness of roads and cul-de-sacs. There's just one way to get from place to place. Keep rolling, rolling, rolling, though the streams are swollen, keep them doggies rolling The small means of driving has become a way of life all over the West, together the people of Phoenix, Denver, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, drive 1 billion miles a week. That's like motoring to the sun back every day. As cities get bigger and bigger people have to drive farther and farther. More than an inconvenience. This is creating a public health problem. We've now seen more and more asthmatic analogy patients to the point of calling it an

epidemic. The question is are we getting to be a crisis situation? Well, this city we are, take a look at any one of these summer days and look out over what was a fairly pristine valley and now what you see is a gigantic thick brown, soupy cloud that covers the entire valley. You can smell it. You can see it. There's another cost to these sprawling metropolitan areas, a social cost. As developments gobble up cheap open land at the edges of cities, down towns and older suburbs are left behind. With fewer people in tax dollars to support them, inner cities fall apart. Well, there's a real tie between urban sprawl and poverty urban sprawling decay because what happens is you have jobs and people moving away from the core city. You have them moving out to the suburbs and moving out to these bedroom communities and

what happens is you end up with a big huge donut with everything occurring on the outside and nothing for those who are still living in the heart of the city or living in downtown areas or in the inner city. From 1980 to 1995 Denver suburbs gained 25 jobs for every one job gained in the city. As the good schools and the best jobs move out, it's harder and harder to reach them, especially if you don't drive. Today 80 million Americans are without a car. Some are young people, others are elderly or disabled. Our mobile suburbier, which once promised freedom and convenience, is now a lifestyle of isolation, pollution and stress. Sprawl no longer begins and ends in metropolitan areas.

It has leapt to the mountains and is spreading across some of America's most spectacular landscapes. There's very much rural sprawl, which looks like urban sprawl, which means that people tend to use up a lot of land and resources. Many people move in and they're only here part time. They're not here full time to live in a place and have it the place. They're here to enjoy the recreational amenities, but tomorrow they might be somewhere else. Second, third and fourth homes. The new rural economy runs on tourism, retirement and recreation. Visitors looking for their own piece of the West are turning into home buyers and telecommuters who want stunning mountain backdrops for their backyards. But this prime real estate is critical habitat for wildlife. In the last 15 years, we've lost 25-26% of agricultural land to subdivisions, to people

moving in here and bringing suburban expectations to a rural area. Efforts to subdivide break up the open spaces. It means that the wild animals cannot move through here freely. The elk, the deer that people come here to enjoy, those animals are largely driven out by subdivisions. Peace by peace, the wild lands are whittled away, sold, pence and tamed. From mountains to metro areas, it seems there's just one way to grow. The reason sprawl happens is that it has huge momentum behind it. Banks are accustomed to financing it. Home builders know how to build it.

Local officials have already required it in their codes when they require certain number of parking spaces or they require large minimum lot sizes. And it's something that's become ingrained in the way people think. People has become an institution, a sprawl machine. It's not driven by the market. Instead, it's propelled by a collection of government policies, regulations and hidden subsidies favoring the automobile in the single family home. Sprawl follows infrastructure, water, sewer, roads and power lines. Everyone's paid for most of this with taxes and utility bills. Denver is a classic example of the kind of metropolitan growth we're seeing throughout the West. It currently has an area of about 550 square miles. Given the projections that another 850,000 people are going to be attracted to this community,

this area, we're looking at a choice that Denver metropolitan region has. Whether it can stay more compact or it could sprawl to 1,000 square miles, almost doubling the current size of the region. A more compact Denver would save hundreds of square miles of open land and millions of hours in commuting time. It would also save taxpayers $3 billion in new infrastructure and billions more in maintenance. There's no doubt that growth is a factor that we're going to have to contend with in the West for the foreseeable future. So the question is, can you grow and not sprawl? Can you grow in a more comprehensible, more land sensitive, more community building way than just sprawling out? I think you can. Some call it smart growth, changing the way communities are designed, introducing more choices for where people live and how they get around, saving the magnificent open spaces

that give the West its unique character. More and more people are looking for these kinds of alternatives to sprawl. From cities to suburbs, better design can make any community more livable. Tony Nellis and help citizens all over the country take a fresh look at where they live. Typically, what we like to do is we start with a community itself, the photograph in that community first, to look at this range of what are your streets like, what currently got built in your town, where is your shopping, where do you guys shop? Then what we'll do, in some cases, is we will use computer technology to enhance those photographs. With a wizardry of digital imaging, Nellis and can transform the present into a set of alternative futures.

The computer technology is so good, we can look into the future before it's ever actually built. He's a tracing paper and put that on top of that plant. He calls his work designed by democracy. Things gathered to decide what their community should look like. They vote on a menu of options for everything from the style of buildings to the location of parking spaces. We put all that stuff together and say, here are your top choices, and if we put this into a big computer, guess what happens? You wind up with a 1930s community. They wind up with communities the way they were built before the era of sprawl. Places that are more than a collection of houses and driveways, they're called neighborhoods. A neighborhood is the building block of community.

It's a place with its own identity, where single-family homes share the block with bungalows or apartment buildings. Having entertainment in public spaces are close by, so walking is a convenient option. It's a place to feel safe, connected. There aren't enough neighborhoods for all the people who want them, but a group of architects calling themselves new urbanists are starting to change that. New urbanists have rediscovered traditional designs at work. Those who start with front porches, garages have returned to the alley and back. Sidewalks and tree-lined streets make neighborhoods walkable in appealing. These features encourage people to meet face-to-face rather than bumper to bumper. Developers can build more livable communities from scratch, but it's also important to repair

and revitalize places that already exist. That's even starting to happen in one of the most sprawling metropolitan areas in the country. Phoenix, Arizona. I'm a true believer that every city needs a heart and a soul. In a downtown, a concentrated downtown, if you have housing, a lot of people living there because of the vibrant atmosphere that exists. In a lot of business and retail, that's what gives a city an identification. It's not sprawl. It's not suburbs. To help make downtown Phoenix a magnet for new investments in housing, business, and culture, Jerry built his new stadium there. Rebuilding downtown's helps rain in sprawl by attracting growth to a center rather than to the edge. Green development is also a thrifty way to grow. It allows cities and towns to use infrastructure that's already in place.

In America today, there are 4,000 empty malls. There are thousands of schools that have been abandoned. There are neighborhoods that look like Beirut. And we are throwing away millions and billions of dollars of investment. American lots of abandoned buildings, outdated spaces. These discards are opportunities. Around the West, rejuvenating them means millions of people could find new places to live, work, and shop without spreading out on the vanishing open land. Green development often depends on changes in zoning codes, the rules dictate what can be built and where. In the age of heavy industry, zoning was used to keep polluting factories away from people's homes.

Over time, regulations became more extreme. Shops were outlawed. Zone buildings were excluded and different classes of homes were separated from one another. Zoning now prohibits the diversity found in traditional neighborhoods. We need to reintroduce choice by removing some of the restrictions now in place in zoning regulations so we can build multi-family housing. We can mix transportation in with shops, allow people to choose whether or not they want a car. Suburbanites average a dozen trips a day in their cars. When other choices are available, people use them. The alternatives we see working are a combination of light rail, frequent bus service, bicycle paths, and park and ride. It's a whole idea of a system of choices.

People will only get out of their car if it makes sense for them to do so. Creating transportation options encourages alternatives to sprawl, transit systems link a region together. They join suburbs to one another and to downtowns. They create hubs and corridors that attract growth and focus new development. This leaves land outside cities and towns open for wildlife habitat and recreation. That's the future. That is going to be what the 21st century is really going to be all about, this balance between managing nature to preserve the environment that we have and more intensively more beautifully rebuild what we've got. Some communities are now buying open spaces, a way to manage growth. General Colorado adopted this approach 30 years ago, establishing a ring of open country around the city.

Over a 25-year period, Boulder accomplished something really innovative in purchasing 26,000 acres of open space surrounding the community. It created a wonderful sense of identity, protected the habitat, and maintained a compact urban form. But the question remains, what happens on the other side of the line outside the open space? Neighboring down is welcome to sprawled at Boulder didn't want. Now they have to pay for it. Once you've built the units, how are you going to pay for the roads, the schools, the utilities, etc.? The property taxes won't pay for that infrastructure. So the city council say, let's go to the pot of money that's developed by sales tax revenue which comes from the shopping centers. Once you have a subdivision of rooftops, you then have to provide the retail that's going to pay for all the services that those people are looking to have. Hounds end up competing with one another for the latest mall with tax breaks and zoning exceptions.

They bid for the biggest stores they can. Goes on and on, mall after mall, mile after mile. Urban space consumed in arranged war for sales tax revenue. The war will continue until communities plan for growth together. Can cooperation happen on large scale here in the Wild West? Oregon took up regional planning 25 years ago when Sproul was devouring the quality of life people took pride in. In a conservative state, citizens from home buildings to housewives voted for an alternative. In 1973, this legislature, provided by a Republican governor and the people, said enough we're going to plan our future, we're not going to let it happen to us. And they passed a law and that law required every city to have an urban growth boundary, to protect farm and forest land because that was part of the state's economy, and to allow

the market to build more affordable types of housing. Every city in town in Oregon adopted urban growth boundaries. Today these protect 25 million acres of land. Urban growth boundaries give developers incentives to use space more creatively. Their zoning invites a mix of homes, retail, and public spaces. The citizens of Portland took cooperation one step further. They created a regional government, 27 different municipalities now plan together to make the entire region a livable community. Sproul may look different in the rural west, but the challenge is the same, preserving

the beauty and quality of life in this magnificent place. Mountain resort towns have been the biggest magnets for growth in the rural west. That's left a little choice, but to begin guiding development. Making some of the same tools as big metropolitan areas, skate towns from Aspen to Sun Valley have rebuilt downtowns with pedestrian malls. They've introduced transit systems as alternatives to the car and bought open space, not just for recreation, but to focus growth in the right places. In mountain valleys near resorts most of the private open lands are owned by ranchers.

That property is now more valuable for raising houses than raising cattle. To keep agricultural land open and ranchers in business, some unlikely partners have come together. A lot of ranchers in the west are what I like to term dirt rich and dollar poor. They're sitting on a gold mine, but the only way they can capitalize off that is if they actually sell the land. We have to find something that is a better alternative for them. Ranchers who want to stay on the land have a choice. They can lower their taxes and keep speculators away by selling or donating the right to subdivide their property. Land trusts are set up to hold these development rights called conservation easements forever. With limited funds, land trusts can only save bits and pieces.

Regional planning may be what it takes to make sure large areas remain for agriculture and wildlife. One of the tremendous challenges for preserving this landscape is the whole issue of planning. For every landowner you talk to, you're going to get different answers for how they think the best way to go about it is. Often at the very bottom of their argument is going to be the issue of private property rights. I think that's why the most important thing that we can do is start planning initiatives that are incentive-based rather than regulatory-based people respond well to incentives. People don't like being told what to do. The West is far more than a place on a map, it's the inspiration for America's most powerful myths, dime novels and Hollywood westerns have captured our imaginations with tales of cowboy

heroes taming a wild land. The most powerful myth born of the West is the idea of the endless frontier, the notion that there will always be more, more fresh air, more clean water, more land. All across America this is an illusion. Today's open space is destined to be tomorrow's subdivision. The question remains, can we learn to create more livable communities and leave what all Americans prize a little bit of elbow room? This is the last best place.

We want to preserve the vastness of the open spaces of the West, that's going to take a pretty strong stand now. I think we'll be the last generation to be able to make that choice. In the studio this evening to discuss the documentary you've just seen and talked about urban and rural sprawl in New Mexico are Jeff Gersch, one of the producers of sub-dividing conquer, Rob Dixon managing owner of the Albuquerque high school loss, Joseph Montoya, former Santa Fe community services director and Deb Hibbert, middle Rio Grande program

coordinator. Thank you everyone for being here today, Jeff, I'm going to start with you as a filmmaker of this documentary. Why did you decide to do it besides the obvious reasons? Well my co-producer and I grew up in Denver and Denver has the same population as Paris, just over 2 million people. If you look at the city of Paris it covers 40 square miles, Denver covers 550 square miles, and you know it becomes tiring to have to drive everywhere. So that was one reason. The other reason is that in the mid-90s it became clear that sprawl was doing something differently in the West. It wasn't just in big metropolitan areas. It had moved to rural communities, so smaller towns like Durango had the sort of seeds of sprawl that we saw in places like Denver, and I wondered what's going on I wanted to find out about it. Now you've shown this documentary across the country at several PBS stations and also at screenings and in community centers.

What kinds of comments have you heard from people that come up to you after the film? Well it's interesting, one of the things that I find frequently is that people want to show me their sprawl. So I've done a tour to sprawl in dozens of communities all over the country. The other thing is that I like to ask communities, show me your favorite neighborhood, what do you like? And it turns out it's almost always the same answer. They say well we like the area that has mixed use, sidewalks, you can walk to a coffee shop, they're parks nearby, you can jump on a bike if you want to. And they usually take me out to the place that was built in the 20s or 30s, a beautiful neighborhood. The funny thing is the irony is that we can't build those places anymore in the country by and large because zoning makes them illegal. So we can't build the things that people tell me they want. Now Rob Dixon I think you can more than anybody at the table can talk about in fail. You're working on the Albuquerque High School Loughs and that is an in-field project. Is this what people want and can we grow and not sprawl?

Well I think that the film we just watched says to me that Americans want more choices. They want more choices in housing types, they want more choices in modes of transportation. They want more choices to live closer to work, closer to schools, closer to neighborhood businesses and they want to save time and money. And the market today, as Jeff just said, cannot provide these choices because of zoning codes and all the manuals, the design manuals, the city design manuals that sit underneath those codes and I think the market should be able to provide those choices. Does Albuquerque have a developing code that provides incentives for this kind of infill that you're doing? Albuquerque like just about every city in the United States has a conventional suburban development code. These codes were really a lot of them bought off the shelf from the American Planning Association back in the 20s, 30s and 40s and they've been adapted since then.

They don't allow traditional neighborhood development and that's really the only two patterns of development that America has ever had is the traditional neighborhood pattern and the conventional suburban pattern. The patterns are provide housing, shopping and workplaces in schools but they do it in completely different ways. As the film said, the suburban pattern only allows the choice of driving. That's the only practical choice. The traditional neighborhood allows the choice of driving but it also allows the choice of walking, bicycling and efficient transit service. I would like to see Albuquerque as many cities across the country have done, they have passed a traditional neighborhood development ordinance that sits side by side with the conventional suburban development ordinance and this gives developers choices. It gives neighborhoods choices when they're updating their sector plans. Albuquerque relies on neighborhood sector plans to guide zoning.

This would give the neighborhoods another tool in their quiver when they're updating their sector plans to get the kind of neighborhood that they want. If this is what people want and maybe you can give me your perspective as a developer, why do we continue to sprawl? Why do we continue to build on the outskirts? Well again one reason is what we just said. There is really only one development ordinance and developers have to follow the rules and the rules today only allow us to build what we're building and that is the suburban pattern. This is not necessarily a market driven choice and I think as the film also points out there's a certain inertia behind it. Mortgage lenders are used to underwriting subdivisions. Retail lenders are used to underwriting big box malls with national retailers in them. It's a system we've designed but in the end it gets back to the codes and if developers were allowed to build traditional neighborhoods again, as Jeff just said, that is always

people's favorite places in any town that he goes to. If you ask people in Albuquerque what their favorite places are, I think they would say the same thing. So first we need to add this additional development choice. Joseph, you're a land use planner in Santa Fe. What are the kinds of things that they're talking about there in terms of planning for the future? I believe Santa Fe is going through the same kind of aspects that the rest of the nation is going through, although we're coming through it late, which is actually a benefit to Santa Fe. We've had a very traditional land use pattern for many, many years and has been stated. When people think of Santa Fe, they think of the downtown area, they think of the areas immediately around the old areas that were built even far before the thirties. When we were actually able to subdivide and continue to build an organic manner, we are able to build houses for our kids, our auntie, our uncle, our grandfather, maybe our grandfather allowed us to have that land.

You can build this organic kind of process here. Since planners are becoming more powerful in that effect, you put a regulatory system that's actually stopped that, and I've always actually advocated to get rid of those systems, allow the private market to be able to, when people have a choice to be able to subdivide their properties in a manner that's architecturally consistent with their traditional land use patterns. That creates a sense of space. One of the few things that Santa Fe has is this as a tourist industry, and it's been mentioned, no one wants to go as a tourist to go view sprawl. No one wants to go to a suburban environment and say, wow, what a great place. I'm going to actually go to Rio Rancho, and I'm actually going to go see as a tourist to come out from some other place and see something that's not unique. Why not? Why not have our own uniqueness, as we were in Santa Fe, is the city unique, right? It's a city different. It's important to be able to not only maintain that, but continue to live that and continue

to actually provide for not only affordable housing in that sense, but a continuous living environment, and I think that's the only future that we're going to be able to sustain. Well, here in New Mexico, we're facing a serious drought this year, and water is a big issue. Deb, what is the cost of sprawl on the water resources here in New Mexico? Well, it has enormous impact on our water resources and on our river, particularly our river, because in the near future, not only is the city of Albuquerque looking to the river as a water source, but the cities of Santa Fe, Las Cruces, El Paso, and Juarez, Ciudad Juarez are also looking to the Rio Grande to supply its water needs and uses, so the impacts on the Rio Grande for the future are enormous, but we also, the river is engineered now to accommodate human populations up and down its banks, and the river's floodplain used to go all the way to Edith.

We have essentially put the river in a straight jacket, and we've degraded its habitat by controlling its life, essentially, and now we want to suck more water out of it, and the impact to wildlife habitat and the impact to our Bosque, and the impact just to the quality of life here in the Albuquerque area is enormous. So we're looking at the land water connection, and we're also just deeply concerned that the development community take a very responsible and respectful look at what the consequences are of development to our water supply, our underground aquifer, and our precious Rio Grande. Have you seen this type of scenario in other cities across the West? Well, if I look at the history of Western development over the last couple of hundred years, my sense is that we've never let an environmental limit get in the way of expanding a community.

So when we run up against a limit, we just engineer a solution, we re-plum it, we put a pipe over the mountains and bring water in from someplace else. So I'm concerned that in some communities people feel like they're waiting for the environmental limit to kick into place and to create an opportunity to slow growth down. But I would say, don't wait for that, you know, you sort of have to take responsibility now and move forward because we'll engineer a solution. Does the citizen have a role to play in this issue, or are there merely an audience? Citizens have really the most important role to play in this because this is not a market-driven problem. That's created by policy and the way to change policy is for citizens to say, hey, we want something different. So citizens need to get the word out to the political leadership that what we want is neighborhoods and we want you to start creating incentives so that developers and builders can make those for us very, very important.

I'm sorry, I just robbed. Please tell me what is going on here in Albuquerque in terms of how the developers and the city are working together to come up with a plan to give people what they want, which are these downtown communities with sidewalks, with cafes, and those kinds of things. Well discussions are starting, I'm happy to report, but I do find it, I do find it interesting. The word planning in the West, at one point in time would probably get you strung up. And I find that sort of interesting because, as Jeff just said, the market is not dictating what we're getting, not just in Albuquerque, throughout the country and throughout the West. The market's not dictating its policy and if we want to provide Americans more choices in how they live and where they live, we do have to change our policy. And I think of planning in a little bit different way. I think if I owned a piece of property and I had 11 other landowners around me, could

we possibly increase the value of each of our properties by getting together and coming up with the collaborative vision and a master plan for the future of how we develop our properties together? My answer to that is unequivocally, yes, I think you can add value through collaborative visions. Now take that dozen landowners and make it 10,000 dozens, which is what we are here in Albuquerque. We're 10,000 dozens of landowners. Can we come up with the collaborative vision that makes our city more valuable for each of us? Both financially and socially, I think once again the answer is yes. Now you mentioned earlier before we came on that you moved here from Austin in October from Austin, Texas and you said that Austin was pretty much already far gone in terms of its sprawl and the problems there. Tell me why is it too late now? Is it too late now for Austin and what can we do here in Albuquerque to avoid that?

Well it's never too late anywhere to improve the city that you live in. Albuquerque I think is more fortunate than Austin in that it's a little bit smaller and it's a little bit earlier in its life cycle, in its suburban life cycle, and for other reasons so I do think Albuquerque has tremendous opportunities to make it a better place to live. I think it's a very good place to live but what makes Austin now a bad place to live? Well just as Jeff mentioned about Denver the size, the geographic size of the city, when we look at our fiscal condition in any city you've got to look at how many square miles are you having to provide service to? That's very expensive and then how much tax revenue can that number of square miles produce to service to provide the fundamental government services that we all need that we all depend on. There is a fiscal cost to low density

development that doesn't pay its own way and as an advocate of free enterprise I think that that development must pay its own way. Just if you're over there nodding your head. I just think there's both the fiscal and social costs. On the fiscal side there's a urban economist recently who came out that analyzes suburban model development and urban model development. 42% less land was used in an urban model environment. 12% less cost to the school system and 28% cost in terms of utilities. I mean if you think about it if you only serve four houses with the same amount of pipe that you serve 20 houses of pipe you're going to get a lot more bang for your butt. You're going to be able to provide the kind of police services instead of people driving around all the time you're going to actually know your local police officer in there. You have to provide less fire personnel per square mile so that it's an economic benefit to all the citizens of an area to provide

those kind of urban amenities. That provides extra capital to go to those types of things we talked about in terms of parks and in terms of areas by which there is a more public communal effect. Very few people will say that you're going to go meet your buddy and hang out for a while in a parking lot of Walmart. But if you have opportunities to be able to do that in front of smaller storefront systems and a collection of those storefront fences and there's a public sense in a specific place there. You allow yourselves to be able to provide those kind of opportunities to meet and greet your neighbors and actually be a part of the community rather than driving and drive out society. But there are a lot of people who do say they like buying homes in subdivisions or brand new homes. For the most part, they're less expensive than homes within the city. How do we deal with that? How do we make living in the city more attractive, Jeff?

The economics of sprawling development is really interesting and it's important to look at the whole picture. People should remember that it costs about $6 to $10,000 a year to own and operate in automobile. So if you live in a city or a community in your household where you can just have one car rather than two or three so that you can use the buses, you can get around your neighborhood by walking, you can get on mass transit. You've just saved yourself $6 or $10,000 a year that you can spend on all kinds of other things in your household. So that's a very key factor. The other thing is that if we're only building a one-size fits all house by a large lot and the only way to get around is by car, we're missing all kinds of other choices. We're missing bungalows and cottages and mother-in-law apartments and duplexes and other kinds of things mixed together that make neighborhoods. I mean if you look at older neighborhoods around the country, that's what they are.

What is the potential for water conservation if we maintain livable communities within the city? Well, water conservation, the potential is enormous. No matter what we do at this point, but certainly if we have smaller lots and we have community spaces and then we're being more conscientious about the ways in which we use water and if some of the codes change so that we can put in gray water systems and the like, the opportunities are enormous. The other thing I wanted to mention is a number of people in the films said that they moved to subdivisions for open space. I've had friends who have moved to the West Mesa for open space and within a few years they're surrounded by houses much to their chagrin. I think that the kind of planning that we're talking about in the kind of preservation of natural areas and not only the mix of the options that we have of how we live, but

the mix of our environment and how our Bosque again is an enormous resource. People are out there using it. I know a number of people who commute into town on the bike trails and just protecting and enhancing that kind of space and recognizing the value of it is a very important part of the quality of life that we have here. The other thing that we're also being quite careless about I think is agricultural lands because we're turning them into subdivisions. We may have to feed ourselves at some point and so protecting that open space and keeping some of those lands in production is enormously important, but we have created situations where farmers have to sell. They have to sell their water rights. They have to sell their properties and we've got to take a look at that in terms of our planning to. Both farmers and ranchers are very concerned about that and maybe you

could give us a perspective from the rancher. I think they're very concerned and a lot of ranchers are going belly up, so to speak, and some developers are coming in. Yeah, personal history there is it might be. I mean, nationally, we have over 3.2 million acres a year between the years 1992 and 1997 are being taken away out of ranching and farmland to go to suburban sprawl. Some of estimated that 50 acres an hour nationwide are actually being put into being taken away from either forest properties or ranch lands or farming. It has a multiple effect. I mean, when you're actually taking away that you're taking away your ability to feed yourself, you're taking away water resources that can sustain a land in itself. You're taking away from my perspective a quality of life and a way of living, especially here in New Mexico where there's been people that have been farming and ranching for well over 350 years. And not allowing and not respecting that kind of, not to mention the public audience for giving me quite frankly, we've been

doing for several thousand years, right? And not respecting that, both lifestyle, that perspective, those idealisms that way of life. When we're actually having to dry up our asecia systems, in order to feed some fountain in a place that may necessarily have to be there, I think that's a shame. And we really have to quantify the value of water. Exactly. Or several, of course. And also the values, you know, there was a study done through UNM about what the values are of people not only in this urban area of Albuquerque but statewide. And people value their water quality, foremost, that they get clean drinking and bathing water. After that, they value the river and the Bosque. And way to low down on the list were swimming pools, golf courses, and even their lawns. And so I think, you know, we've got to align our development patterns with the actual values that people seem

to be reflecting, whether they're the traditional neighborhoods or the preservation of the natural world, that seems to be what people really care about. And when the development community tells you otherwise that this is what people want, I'm highly suspect of that. I'm sorry, Jeff, where are we headed? Well, I think that I'm very encouraged, because when we started working on the film in the mid-90s, there wasn't a lot of conversation about what are the alternatives. And now, in communities all over the country, not only is there a conversation, but people are building new things. People are experimenting. People are pushing up against status quo regulations and trying to change them. It's great news. I mean, even Martha Stewart has come out and said, I don't like sprawl. So the world is changing. I think in the next 50 years, we're going to be making communities better places to live. So in suburban areas where people are dissatisfied, we'll probably see town centers arising. We'll probably see connections

being made. Sidewalks put in. Parks built, mass transit systems going in. We're going to see more choices for people. And of course, we're going to see that if people in New Mexico and everywhere else around the country say, this is what we want. One of the things that you didn't mention in your documentary is population growth. Why didn't you talk about that? You know, that's usually the first question that people ask when the lights come up. And if you look closely at sprawl, it's not population growth that's creating it. There are cities around the country, many cities, Cleveland is an example that are losing population, but the metropolitan areas are chewing up more land to build more houses. So it's not population growth that's creating sprawl. It's the policy set that we have in place that says you have to use up this much land to build a house. You have to separate commercial uses from other kinds of uses. That's what it's really about.

Rob, in the film, developers are the bad guys. And we were talking about you being the bad guy at this table. Do developers have to be the bad guy? Are there alternatives? Well, developers can only follow what the codes say, because their banks can only lend against what the codes say. So developers have built all the bad places in America, and they've built all the good places. We've just got to give them instructions to build good places. So, you know, some Americans would prefer the suburban lifestyle given all other choices. The problem is today, developers don't have those other choices, and therefore Americans who would like to live a different lifestyle don't have that choice. Another thing I look at as a business person is that we have a tremendous amount of existing infrastructure on our balance sheet here in Albuquerque that we're not utilizing fully. And in business, you've got to always fully utilize all your assets. And I would like to see us continue

the dialogue of how do we utilize all this existing infrastructure to its maximum potential. I think we're doing that at Albuquerque High, something that sat around vacant for 28 years as a piece of community infrastructure is now back in service and paying taxes and providing new residences for people living close to downtown. And it's very exciting. We need to take a community-wide look at our infrastructure and use it more fully. It's important not to villainize the developer and say this is all the developers' problem or fault. I mean, there's the regulatory environment in terms of zoning, subdivision regulations. And that's purely a function of the government. There's the lending environment in terms of what lenders will actually land to, and they have certain models, and they don't like getting out of those models because it's easy, it's quick, it's simple, it fits this, and all of a sudden it goes quicker, and there's an efficiency issue in there, and so we have to be able to look at those issues. Any final thoughts out of time?

Oh, I'm sorry. I'll go ahead, Jeff. I'd like to encourage people to look at our website for additional information at subdividefilm.com. Okay, well, we're out of time. Thank you, everyone, for being here today. Next week, we'll turn our focus to the range lands and ranches of New Mexico, where conservationist and ranchers are working together to develop new methods and revive old ones for ensuring the viability and health of the land. I'm Arcek Chapa for everyone that in focus, good night. Major funding for in focus is provided by the McCune Charitable Foundation, enriching the cultural life, health, education, environment, and spiritual life of the citizens of New Mexico. Additional support is provided by the Liberal Natural Fiber Clothing, located in Albuquerque's historic knob hill. To purchase video cassettes or transcripts of this or other episodes of in focus, call 1-800-328-5663, or write to the address on your screen. Please specify date and subject of the program.