Voices for smart growth

Our strategy should be one of promoting balanced growth, preserving productive farmland, encouraging planned growth in underdeveloped areas while revitalizing our cities through brownfield redevelopment...Ohio must be a place where citizens can enjoy clean air, clean water, parks and open places, and a wide array of cultural and recreational attractions.
—Governor Bob Taft

Urban sprawl and its encroachment into the rich agricultural land of northwest Ohio is as clear an example as could be wished of the culture of waste that afflicts this country. Ours is a society that thrives on the disposable, the throw-away...The disappearance of Ohio's farmland is a result of an indifference to waste and a profit-now attitude. Unless checked, it will prove to be a bitter harvest.
—Toledo Blade editorial, October 19, 1997

Support for the maintenance and redevelopment of central cities, and now inner-ring suburbs, has simply not been comparable to the underwriting of sprawl. Unbalanced investment promoted housing and economic growth in outlying areas to the detriment of older urban neighborhoods. That kind of unbalanced investment did not provide people with fair choices if they wanted to remain in more established neighborhoods. That pattern of unbalanced investment has brought us to an anomalous situation in Northeast Ohio—we basically have flat regional population growth yet we spread out over more and more land. We have sprawl without growth.
—Bishop Anthony Pilla of the Cleveland Catholic Diocese

It is becoming more and more apparent that there is an issue that does connect all of us—unmanaged growth. Unmanaged growth reacts like dominoes in a line, one tipping over the next one. Unmanaged growth results in the loss of farmland and open space, the construction of ubiquitous strip malls, the checkerboarding of the landscape with subdivisions, the spiraling of infrastructure costs, and the decline of cities—all in a domino-like effect.
—from the summary report of Community Forum on Smart Growth in Lorain County, October 15, 1997

The mentality of people who think, "Let's move to this quaint, safe, small-town area and cut down its trees and farms to build our subdivisions" is appalling. Get a grip, folks! With all the new people coming in, the small town will no longer be small. What about working together in our cities and suburbs to make them wonderful and safe places in which to live? Then we won't destroy what little open space and small-town atmosphere we have left.
—Robin Coyer from Broadview Heights, Ohio, letter in the December 29, 1997, issue of Time Magazine

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Citizens call for smart growth outside the City Club of Cleveland.