"Sprawl" is a word that means many things to many different people. To the real estate developer, it's all about buying cheap and selling dear at the edge of town, while getting to name streets after your favorite people. For families looking for inexpensive housing, the edge of suburbia was traditionally where the most affordable seats in urban living away from downtown could be purchased -- and they were brand new. For government, sprawl was something tacitly encouraged; it always cost government more to extend services than would be drawn from increased property tax revenue, so the critical thing for politicians to do was to bless the mess and troll for votes among the new tracts at the edge of town. With such expansions incorporated with a properly gerrymandered map, you could ensure re-election.

Expensive energy makes all of those ways of thinking about sprawl obsolete. Farmland grows increasingly expensive. Farmers have the best crop prices in years, with the likelihood of bio-derived fuels keeping agricultural incomes rising in the future, not to mention an increasingly hungry world population that gets to compete with the driving habits of Americans for the fruits of farming. The longer the commute is and the more efficacious the internet is about bringing the office into the home, the less wise living at the edge of town or beyond becomes.

Downtowns in Champaign and Urbana are showing the benefits of the re-focus of smart investment on downtown rehabilitation. Older homes near to downtown, the university, or on a bus line are seeing reinvestment as owners continue investing in them. Somewhere between hungry developers and proud home-owners there is a growing balance of power, as older sections of cities spruce up, instead of waiting for the next quick teardown followed by mini-apartment building sprouting up next door.

One example of how neighborhoods can respond to neglect is the Historic East Urbana Neighborhood Association. HEUNA is committed to working to link neighbors together to ensure that those investing in this area of Urbana can see the fruits of maintaining and improving this neighborhood just east of downtown Urbana. One reason it came about was because of the concerns about poorly-thought out, but highly profitable apartments were having on the investments made by owners of the single family homes next to them. While few have any issue with affordable housing, the interests of developers clearly clash with the interests of those they built next to. Government stood aside for some time, as it was clear that existing policies favored those more interested in a quick profit than those interested in creating a long term, sustainable neighborhood.

After more than a decade of work by those in the neighborhood, things are changing to more appropriately respond to the concerns of a majority for a more livable neighborhood. My own participation has been peripheral and sporadic, but the lessons learned about people working together are ones that I believe can be shared by others. Planning and policy are the keys to a more livable world. Global warming, energy depletion, expensive building costs -- we're on what is obviously the front end of a change in the living habits of Americans that reverses the direction of urban growth, changing it from sprawling towards the periphery into a refilling of the urban space as the wisest use of available resources, both private and public.

It's important that government bodies which fund and shape the priorities of growth to reassess where to encourage smart investments in the future. Illinois' archaic fractionation of government units often leave the urban fringes in a state of poorly controlled planning limbo, while cities grow slowly, often resisted by those who are trying to have the benefits of living in an urban area while paying rural tax rate. Whatever the outcome of these specific personal situations, it's important that governments coordinate their planning better on the future than they've done in the past. In Champaign County, I believe the best, economical policy in interest of most taxpayers is to discourage further sprawl, while extending the infrastructure of urban life in the quickest, most rational way to urban areas not yet formally incorporated into urban areas.

I have experience and relationships working with Urbana. While it's very important that the interests of all tax-payers be protected, I feel that this is best achieved by timely, well-thought out improvements that limit further outward growth of the urban area, while investing to assure those near the fringes are able to maximize future investment.