SOMEWHERE OVER KANSAS -- Professor William Fischell of Dartmouth College routinely asks his freshman economics class to guess how much of the land area in the continental United States is used for urban and
suburban development (including roads, airfields, military bases, and so forth). The median guess is 30
percent.

You need to fly coast-to-coast with a window seat, as I’m doing right now, to appreciate that in fact only
about 5 percent of the land in the continental United States is developed. If enough Americans had a good
look at "flyover country," as we bi-coastal sophisticates call it, the perception that we are "paving over America" would disappear. But it is easy to appreciate how common sense perception might lead you to think that developed urban land is much higher, since most of us live in or near cities, and all most of us see is developed land.

This topic comes to mind again because in recent weeks I have been embroiled in a controversy over growth in
the state of Pennsylvania, where the usual cliches about urban sprawl are causing the usual ruckus.
Prosperity has brought to the Keystone state the typical phenomena of people "spreading out," seeking
after larger houses and yards and lower density neighborhoods for their families. As a slow-growing
northeastern state, Pennsylvania is unused to the kind of disruptions that growth has long brought to the
sunbelt states.

The problems growth brings are genuine enough (though exaggerated), but in the fullness of time Pennsylvania
may wish it had more growth, not less. According to U.S. Census Bureau projections, Pennsylvania will be
the second-slowest growing state of all the 50 states between now and the year 2025. Net population gain will
be less than 600,000 people. By contrast, California will gain about 16 million people in this same time
frame; the Golden State will have real growth problems.

Some Pennsylvanians may think this relative slow-growth sounds great. On the other hand, because of this
relatively slow-growth, Pennsylvania stands to lose as many as 12 seats in Congress over the next three
censuses, the most of any state in the nation. Will Pennsylvanians be excited about this loss of clout in
Washington?

Reasonable people can disagree about growth trends and how we should think about them, but what is most
dismaying is that the problems associated with "sprawl" are being used as an excuse to extend vast new
political controls over land. In all the official reports pouring forth these days about sprawl, there is
virtually no original thinking about how markets, prices, and other incentives and voluntary mechanisms
might be employed to remedy or mitigate the legitimate problems associated with sprawl. Instead we are told
that we must have vast new government power to control where and how people live. Vice President Gore (among others) calls it "smart growth," a sure sign that it is a dumb idea.

--By Steven Hayward