Street Smarts
An interview with smart-growth expert and author Anthony Flint

By David Roberts

07 Jul 2006

Few debates in the U.S. are more emotionally charged than the one over sprawl -- the exodus, since World War II, of America's middle class from cities to far-flung residential areas. Environmentalists, small farmers, and social-justice activists deplore sprawl for its unhealthy effects on land and communities. Suburbanites bristle at the attacks on their personal choices -- the desire for safety, good schools, and a piece of land.

Anthony Flint.

Into this contentious debate steps unusually cool-headed Anthony Flint, whose book This Land: The Battle Over Sprawl and the Future of America is a chronicle of the fledgling smart-growth movement and the challenges it faces from entrenched interests. For 20 years, Flint was a journalist covering urban development, planning, and transportation, primarily for The Boston Globe. Recently he left behind the daily beat: at the end of July, he will move to the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a think tank devoted to land issues.

I chatted with Flint in a coffee shop in Seattle. Like his book, he is even-keeled and congenial, utterly devoid of the strident ideological fervor so often characteristic of both sides in the land-use wars. But real passion entered his voice when he talked about offering choices to Americans seeking better lives and better communities.

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