Window of opportunity Rhode Island is faring better than a lot of places when it comes to sprawl, but the state’s small size means it also has much less room for error BY IAN DONNIS

MAKING THE 20-minute drive from Providence to the Apeiron Institute in Coventry, it’s deceptively easy to conclude that shortsighted development isn’t a serious problem in Rhode Island. Within about 10 minutes after motoring out of the capital city, after all, the suburban feeling of surrounding communities gives way to woodlands and the glistening waters of the Scituate Reservoir. But it’s just this type of mindset — that the Ocean State is doing pretty well, even with the spread of sprawl and big-box development — which poses one of the most significant threats to the state’s natural character.

Apeiron could well be considered ground zero in the local effort to promote a different way of looking at things. The nonprofit institute is dedicated to spreading the gospel of sustainability, the belief that various societal needs — energy, healthcare, construction, transit, and so on — should be met without adversely impacting the ability of future generations to do likewise. And while sustainability remains pretty abstract to most people, Apeiron’s multi-story headquarters showcases more than 50 environmentally friendly features, ranging from solar panels, composting toilets, a masonry heater, energy-saving insulation, and edible landscapes in the form of such crops as strawberries, blueberries, and Siberian pea shrubs.

The insulation, which is made from shredded newspaper treated with a fire retardant, is typical of many sustainability-oriented products. The Cellulose filling enables it to retain heat and coolness about four times better than conventional fiberglass insulation. But even though it would pay for itself in two to three years, the slightly higher initial cost is enough to scare away many consumers. And because this kind of product remains unconventional in the building industry, relatively few people even know about it in the first place.

Situated on 54 acres leased from the Nickerson Community Center, the Apeiron Institute stands as an elaborate manifestation of a different way of doing things. "I think the strength of this place is that people can come, and see, and touch, and feel a lot of options in an environmentally friendly building" — and learn where to get more information, says Bradley Grove Hyson, the institute’s founder and executive director. More than 6000 people have visited the site since 1998, and some glimmers of change — ranging from the growing popularity of the natural supermarket chain Whole Foods to the adoption of a more energy-efficient building code for state buildings in Rhode Island — give Hyson some encouragement.

Apeiron, which does educational work in schools in Pawtucket, Newport, North Kingstown, Bristol, Woonsocket, and Middletown, has also received backing from the Rhode Island Foundation to explore sustainable approaches to economic growth and other needs. When it comes to setting a different course, Hyson talks energetically about how Rhode Island might look to environmentally sound projects as an economic generator, adding, "I think it’s just a matter of saying where we want to go."

For the most part, though, even with the recognition that many people have of environmental degradation, the wastefulness of our consumer culture, and such pernicious threats as global warming, sustainability remains outside of mainstream thinking and the individuality-centered ethos of American life. It helps that Hyson, a 36-year-old upstate New York native who formerly worked at Save The Bay, brings an almost evangelical enthusiasm to his mission. But there are still moments when he wonders whether our society will come to terms with the forces of environmental destruction before it’s too late.

"I think we’re going to do ourselves in sooner than any of the terrorists," he says, pointing to how the number of people killed on September 11 — about 3000 — is dwarfed by those whose deaths are caused each year by cancer, air pollution, and car accidents. Rather than going to the roots of various problems, Hyson says, "I’m convinced that our society is symptom-focused."

WITH THE SPREAD of big-box development around formerly rural sections of Rhode Island, the threat of sprawl is something more easily grasped by most people. In fact, a 1999 report by Grow Smart Rhode Island, a nonprofit group that promotes sustainable growth, found that more residential, commercial, and industrial land was developed over the previous 34 years in Rhode Island than in the state’s first 325 years. The report by H.C. Planning Consultants and Planimetrics also found that 11,500 acres of farm and forestland — an area almost as large as Providence — were lost between 1988 and 1995. Left unchecked, the report found, "staying on our sprawl course over the next 20 years will cost Rhode Island taxpayers almost $1.5 billion, a figure close to our total annual state budget."

Sprawl, defined as the inefficient use of land and infrastructure, is driven by two inter-related trends in Rhode Island, according to the report:

Development, attracted by lower property taxes, open space, less costly land, and new public schools and facilities, has migrated from the state’s five cities to suburban and rural areas. Larger numbers of families have placed more demand on municipal services, sparking increased municipal spending and the need for greater tax revenue. This, in turn, leads communities to seek more commercial and industrial development to broaden the tax base. The increased employment opportunities, however, bring in even more residents, prompting some to start the sprawl cycle anew by moving to a more rural community.

Meanwhile, while Rhode Island’s overall population increased by more than 40 percent between 1940 and 1990, Providence’s population plummeted, from 253,504 in 1940 to 160,728 in 1990, marking one of the most precipitous such declines in an American city. The suburban migration, accompanied by the movement of stores, offices, and industrial plants, made it more difficult to reuse old urban properties. Declining urban property values have reduced tax revenues, while, meanwhile, the greater amount of poor residents in cities carries the need for more public services and investment. This has led many cities to raise their taxes, leading to a situation in which the average effective tax rate was considerably higher in urban communities than in non-urban counterparts.

The situation is harmful for the core cities (Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls, Woonsocket, and Newport) since their total property values declined by 24 percent from 1988-98, a drop of more than $3.3 billion (while their effective tax rates climbed 44 percent, three times the size of the increase in rural towns). At the same time, sprawl isn’t good for the rest of the state, either, since the rapid rate of suburban and rural development threatens Rhode Island’s character and appeal as a place to live. As put by Scott Wolf, executive director of Grow Smart Rhode Island, "Rhode Island sells itself to the outside world on beauty, not brawn."

Some positive developments have taken place since the report’s release in 1999. The safe revitalization of older buildings became considerably easier with the establishment in 2002 of a commercial historic tax credit and a state rehabilitation building code. While the use of the initiatives is at an early stage, the presence of almost 1000 historic commercial properties in Rhode Island suggests their potential application.

Wolf says Rhode Island has less of an overarching smart growth strategy than some other states. It helps, though, that former governor Lincoln Almond created the Governor’s Growth Planning Council, now chaired by Jan Reitsma, director of the state Department of Environmental Management, and Michael McMahon, Governor Donald L. Carcieri’s point man on economic development, to examine long-term development issues and make recommendations.

Carcieri, who emerged as a vocal opponent of Almond’s plan to site a container port at Quonset Point, also routinely emphasized Rhode Island’s distinct sense of place and quality of life during his gubernatorial campaign. As Wolf says, "One of the big conceptual breakthroughs in Rhode Island is the recognition by some key business and government leaders that economic prosperity [is closely linked] to preserving Rhode Island as an authentic locale with a high quality of place." (Carcieri spokesman Jeff Neal says the governor included a request in his budget for $500,000 that would be used to create an office of economic and community development, under the state Economic Development Corporation, to assist local communities with smart growth-based principles.)

Nor is Rhode Island relegated to doing damage control like those metropolitan areas — Atlanta, Phoenix, and Orlando, to name a few — suffering from intense traffic congestion, air pollution, and other more extreme consequences of sprawl. The state has the kind of infrastructure — villages and neighborhoods like Wickford, Garden City in Cranston, Chepachet, the Darlington section of Pawtucket, for example — that lend themselves to reinvention and reuse. "We don’t have to invent authentic communities," Wolf says. "We’ve got them. It’s a matter of preserving them or revitalizing them."

Still, the situation remains serious.

Although Rhode Island’s sprawl problem is less serious than elsewhere, the state’s tiny size means "we’ve got less room for error than those places," says Wolf. "Even a modest rate of sprawl can be the death knell for Rhode Island if it continues over a decade or two."

SEVERAL KEY FACTORS — local zoning codes, the configuration of the state property tax, and various government incentives for development – are most influential when it comes to influencing the spread of sprawl in Rhode Island.

The property tax system, which makes the cities less economically competitive than suburban and rural communities, is "probably the single most influential public policy in place as an obstacle to creating smart growth," Wolf says. The combination of higher property values in the outlying communities, combined with fewer concerns about crime and generally better schools, draws development away from urban centers. But this trend tends to cause bad development, Wolf says, by sparking needless competition among towns over who’s going to get the next big-box store. It also makes towns anti-child, he says, since families with school-age children represent a greater demand on municipal spending.

The good news, Wolf says, is that a growing and increasingly broad group of people is starting to see the current property tax system as an obstacle to better planning. Grow Smart, which, with the Rhode Island League of Cities and Towns, has asked Carcieri to form a working group on property tax reform, plans to provide additional advocacy on the topic over the next year.

One possible route for reform is creating regional compacts that would promote collaborative planning by pooling some of the tax revenue from new development. And although regional planning doesn’t have a particularly strong tradition in Rhode Island, several groups, including the Washington County Regional Planning Council and the Aquidneck Island Planning Commission, have formed for this purpose.

Devon Preston, executive director of the Washington County council, which consists of elected officials from the eight South County towns and Block Island, says the organization was created about 10 years ago when officials in the member communities realized they couldn’t make much of a difference by themselves. And although South County still has a share of undeveloped land, it has been a scene of rapid development over the last decade. The planning council has responded by identifying five major issues — economic development, transportation, water quality, open space, and affordable housing — and making plans for sustainable economic development that focus on South County’s natural resources. Although the long-term outlook is difficult to predict, Preston cites the setting of collaborative goals as an important step in itself.

Elsewhere, although some progress has been made, government incentives still offer more de facto support for doing development on green space, rather than reusing urban property and the polluted industrial sites known as brownfields, Wolf says. But such efforts could get a boost from the Governor’s Growth Planning Council, which is expected to take up the targeting of growth in neighborhoods that could lend themselves to revitalization.

The private sector also remains skittish, however, about funding revitalization projects and mixed-use, mixed-income developments that don’t fit traditional lending patterns. "There’s some consciousness-raising and example-setting that needs to be done," Wolf says. Since smart growth requires a process that looks out over 20 years, "If people don’t have a fairly long-term perspective, they’re going to be tempted to pursue a lot of short-term policies that have a tendency to promote suburban sprawl and urban decay."

ANOTHER PERSON who’s helping to challenge the status quo is Randall Arendt of Narragansett, a land-use planner, lecturer, and author of Dealing with Change in the Connecticut River Valley: A Design Manual For Conservation and Development, who advocates what he calls "conservation planning." Arendt defines this as "basically a way of looking at land use to design new development more compactly, so it doesn’t use as much land. The land it doesn’t use is permanently protected as conservation land to help the community put together a cluster of open space." And given the choice, he says, plenty of affluent homebuyers prefer to buy a smaller home with a plentiful amount of nearby open space. (For more information, visit www.greenerprospects.com.)

Such approaches are important, Arendt says, since although some rural towns try to maintain their rural character with five-acre minimum lots, this tends to fragment 100 acres of former farmland into 25 large-lot homes. "It destroys the resources the [town’s] comprehensive plan says it wants to conserve," he says.

Backed by funding from the state Department of Environmental Management, Arendt has been working with South County towns over the last three years to help local officials understand how their zoning regulations are in need of, as he says, "serious revising." Pointing out the discrepancy between the stated goals and how the existing policies are driving development in a different direction "kind of grabs people’s attention, because they don’t realize how far off-track their planning and zoning regulations have gone," Arendt says.

For his part, Arendt believes that South County is on the right track since local officials and residents recognize the problem that they face. And while smaller lot sizes can partially stop sprawl, the most effective remedy — limiting development to the areas around town centers — is unacceptable to most Americans, he says. It’s more realistic, Arendt suggests, to back policies and approaches that have a positive impact, while also recognizing the limits of trying to completely defy deeply ingrained American traditions.

Ian Donnis can be reached at idonnis[a]phx.com