Save Our Land, Save Our Towns

• preserve irreplaceable farmland and open space,
• revitalize older communities, and
• encourage walkable, mixed-use, and mixed-income neighborhoods.

Produced originally with a focus on his home state and broadcast in the spring of 2000 under the title Saving Pennsylvania, the program has been expanded and re-edited for a national audience. In April 2001, American Public Television distributed Save Our Land, Save Our Towns to all public television stations in the U.S. Many stations have already shown the program; others are considering it for the coming season. All have unlimited rights to broadcast the documentary for the next three years.

For information on promoting local broadcast of the program, arranging for it to be shown on local public access channels, or obtaining a video copy for educational purposes, see the section Making Use of Save Our Land below.

More on Tom Hylton

A native of Pennsylvania, Tom Hylton moved to Pottstown in 1973 to join the staff of The Mercury, the daily newspaper. Over the next two decades, he became increasingly concerned with issues of livability and local land use, both in Pottstown and in surrounding Chester County.

For his journalistic coverage of these issues, the American Planning Association presented Hylton with its journalism award on three occasions. In 1990, he won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials advocating the preservation of farmland and open space in the southeastern region of the state.

Three years later, after received a fellowship from the Society of Professional Journalists, Hylton left the paper to study comprehensive state planning. His research led to the 1995 book Save Our Land, Save Our Towns, published by RB Books of Harrisburg. Naming sprawl as the number one threat to the state's environmental quality, James Seif, Pennsylvania Secretary of Environmental Protection, subsequently sent the book to more than 500 state and local officials, including every state legislator.

The book also laid the groundwork for Hylton's subsequent film, produced and directed by Dirk Eitzen, an independent filmmaker and professor of media at Franklin and Marshall College.

In February 2001, Hylton was a featured speaker at the winter meeting of the National Governors' Association. Under the auspices of Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening, then chairman of the NGA, copies of both the book and video were given to every governor.

Back home, the author practices what he preaches, serving as chairman of the Pottstown Planning Commission. Hylton also helped found the statewide smart growth organization 10,000 Friends of Pennsylvania, and has established a nonprofit organization — Save Our Land, Save Our Towns Inc. — to advocate for communities based on principles of equity, environmental quality, and sound public investments. He is a frequent lecturer across the country.

For more information on Hylton, his organization, and film and print versions of Save Our Land.

Program Highlights — The Causes of Sprawl

Tom Hylton begins his personal odyssey with a look at sprawl's impact on the places where he grew up and now lives: Wyomissing, Reading, and Pottstown, Pennsylvania. In each case he documents the decline of older, compact neighborhoods and commercial districts and the leap-frogging of population, housing, and businesses across municipal borders, out into what was once productive farmland.

Along the way, he interviews inner-city, suburban, and rural residents. Each shares a personal perspective on what has been lost. Each also wonders at the dynamics that have brought about such disinvestment in once thriving communities and the dispersal of people across the landscape, where they are largely dependent on the automobile to access the unconnected places where they live, shop, work, and recreate.

Among those grappling with these challenges are planners and citizens serving on local planning commissions:

Barbara Kaplan, former Director of the Philadelphia Planning Commission, tells Hylton how subsidies for suburban growth lured the middle class and major industries from the city's neighborhoods over several decades. The result: a 30 percent loss of population, 22,000 vacant residential buildings, and another 30,000 vacant lots where buildings once stood.

Dr. Henry Jordan, former chair of the Chester County Planning Commission, explains how the county has invested over $100 million in special bond revenue to preserve 15,000 acres of farmland since 1989, yet continued to lose ground to sprawl.

Digging deeper, Hylton finds the roots of the problem in well-intentioned government programs that sought to spur economic development and expand homeownership as far back as the Great Depression. Singled out for quick critiques are the following:

• The Federal Housing Administration, created under President Franklin Roosevelt, established a pattern of subsidies for new homeowners that would last for decades, yet also favored suburban locations over existing neighborhoods and freestanding houses on large suburban lots over other types of housing.
• The Interstate Highway Act of 1956, signed into law by President Eisenhower, fueled the construction of 41,000 miles of highways, spurring development well beyond established cities. While federal tax revenues picked up 90 percent of the tab for these new roads, little was done to support public transit.
• Federal funding for public housing concentrated the poor in inner cities rather than requiring a more equitable allocation of affordable housing across metropolitan regions.
• Environmental regulations in recent decades have caused many businesses to flee polluted "brownfield" sites for unencumbered, often subsidized, "greenfield" sites on the suburban fringe. The loss of jobs and tax revenue has further isolated inner-city workers and hampered urban revitalization efforts.

In addition to these pervasive forces, Hylton identifies the sheer multiplicity of local government jurisdictions — each controlling land-use decisions within its borders — as aiding and abetting the haphazard pattern of sprawling development around America's cities and towns. In one of the program's many eye-catching illustrations, he shows how local land-use decisions by the 128 independent municipalities in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania (outside of Pittsburgh) could easily result in redundant, low-density strip malls, office parks, and even landfills.

Program Highlights — Emerging Solutions

A mid-program trip to England introduces Hylton to a different approach to community-building and spurs his search for creative solutions back in the U.S. With more than four times the population of Pennsylvania, yet only slightly more land, the United Kingdom has used careful planning to accommodate growth while achieving the country's social and environmental goals.

Unlike their American cousins, the British build more than 60 percent of all new housing on cleaned-up, recycled industrial land. Where new towns are needed, they follow the pattern of compact "garden cities" established over 100 years ago. Bounded by a permanent greenbelt, these towns help preserve critical agricultural land, scenic areas, and habitat beyond their borders. Within that boundary, the layout of streets and sidewalks and the convenient location of diverse housing types, businesses, and public facilities enables residents to walk, bike, or use efficient public transit rather than space-demanding cars to conduct their daily affairs.

Returning to the U.S., Hylton finds signs of hope in innovative planning policies and design practices:

In Oregon, he interviews farmer and former state senator Hector Macpherson, winner of APA's Distinguished Leadership Award in 1999. Concerned that disconnected subdivisions were consuming prime agricultural land in the Willamette Valley, Macpherson lobbied for the creation of a planning commission for his county and then served on it. He later carried the battle for sensible development and livable communities into the state legislature, where he authored Oregon's pioneering growth management act in 1973.

That law established growth boundaries around all cities in the state. Drawn to accommodate 20-year projections of population growth, the boundaries are adjusted every 10 years. Hylton shows how Portland, living within its boundaries, has enjoyed the revitalization of its downtown and neighborhoods, with well-supported public transit and an increase in all types of housing.

In North Carolina, Hylton learns how UNC-Charlotte planning professor David Walters has helped six communities in that burgeoning region adapt English greenbelt principles as they revise local zoning to promote walkable, mixed-use, and mixed-income neighborhoods. Local developer Robert Bowman applauds the predictability and flexibility that the new zoning and design standards have brought to Huntersville, where he is now able to provide housing at a variety of "price points" and small-scale commercial opportunities all within a single neighborhood.

In Florida, Hylton interviews people of diverse ages, incomes, and racial backgrounds, all of whom have been attracted to Celebration, a "neotraditional" community planned, designed, and constructed by the Walt Disney Development Corporation to demonstrate the attractiveness and feasibility of a less car-dependent form of urban life.

Program Highlights — Bringing it Back Home

In the concluding section of the documentary, Tom Hylton returns to Pennsylvania, eager to see where civic leaders are championing some of these same "smart growth" innovations.

Ronald Bailey, AICP, Director of the Lancaster County Planning Commission, links lasting success on the smart growth front to fundamental reforms in state laws and policies. In too many places, the state laws governing planning, zoning, and taxation unwittingly promote sprawl. Bailey calls for state legislatures to:

1. Empower cities and counties to adopt growth boundaries and regional planning,
2. Provide incentives and other tools to promote traditional communities, and
3. Encourage reinvestment in established cities and towns.

In Pittsburgh, Hylton visits two places where the state's land recycling program of grants and loans is bringing about the transformation of former industrial sites into new neighborhoods. Across the river from downtown, Washington's Landing is a thriving new district with homes, offices, a marina, and a restaurant, all built on land where a meat-packing plant and scrap yard once stood.

Further upriver, Don Carter, AICP, managing principal with the firm Urban Design Associates, explains how the same incentives will convert an enormous slag heap into the neotraditional neighborhood of Somerset, overlooking reforested hillsides and riparian wetlands.

Back in Pottstown, Hylton uses birds-eye drawings to show how these same techniques could bring about the revitalization of a vacant industrial site near downtown. He proposes adapting historic factory buildings for offices, shops, and apartments; building a mix of large and small houses; and keeping cars in the background with garages positioned along alleyways. Front porches, streetlights, sidewalks, and trees would knit the neighborhood together. Residents could gather at a new public park and playground and one day even use the new light rail line and riverside bike path proposed for the former railroad right-of-way along the Schuylkill River.

The program concludes as it opened, with a quiet, yet moving testimony. Hylton acknowledges the personal as well as civic benefits of living alongside people of different backgrounds and income levels in an attractive, walkable neighborhood. The physical fabric of the community thus reinforces its social fabric and makes possible the tangible realization of this nation's democratic aspirations. Or, to quote Hylton's closing words:

Making Use of Save Our Land, Save Our Towns

Planners and other advocates of livable communities can make use of this excellent documentary in several ways:

Promote its broadcast by your local public television station

Contact your local public television station to see if the program is scheduled for future airing. If not, encourage the station to schedule it and offer to help promote it. If the program has already aired once, remind the station that it has the rights to rebroadcast it through 2003. Encourage the station to show it again, preferably in concert with a televised follow-up forum on local and regional planning issues.

Show the video to public officials, civic leaders and other interested citizens

A government agency, such as a planning department or planning commission, or a nonprofit organization, may purchase a video of the program for educational uses from Bullfrog Films in Oley, Pennsylvania. Call 800-543-3764.

Encourage your public access cable television channel to show the film

While American Public Television retains exclusive rights to distribute the film for broadcast purposes, Tom Hylton retains the rights to allow local public access channels to show the program. A government agency or nonprofit organization intending to purchase a video for use on a public access channel should give Bullfrog Films the following information at the time of purchase:

1. The name, address, and fax number of the purchaser

2. The name of the public access cable television channel

Bullfrog Films will send this information to Tom Hylton, who will then fax or mail a signed permission form giving the designated public access channel the right to televise the program up to three times a week for not more than a total of 100 times in a one-year period.

Encourage teachers to use Save Our Land in their classrooms

For teachers in middle schools, high schools, and colleges, Tom Hylton has prepared a special 40-minute version of the video and a 78-page curriculum, with learning activities keyed to program segments. The relevant Pennsylvania education standards in such subject areas as Environment and Ecology, Civics and Government, Science and Technology, Geography, and Mathematics are also listed for each activity.

The classroom video may be ordered from Bullfrog Films. The entire curriculum may be downloaded.

Among the agencies and organizations that have acquired Save Our Land, Save Our Towns to spark discussion and local action are:

• Cobb County Planning Commission, Acworth, Georgia
• Community Development Department, Gainesville, Florida
• Metro Planning Department, Nashville, Tennessee
• City-County Planning Board, Winston-Salem, North Carolina
• Town of Easton, Maryland
• Silver City Planning Commission, Silver City, New Mexico
• Mansfield Main Street Program, Mansfield, Ohio
• Troy Main Street Program, Troy, Ohio

Check back for brief descriptions of uses in these and other communities. Send information on your use of the program.