ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, April 11, 1996 TAG: 9604110010
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
Thomas Hylton sees the symptoms of an American mistake so big and pervasive most of us can't even recognize it.
People feel disconnected, estranged, lonely, afraid. They're in a rush, driving around in their isolation-booth cars. They don't know their neighbors, yet lack the inclination to stop and get acquainted. They're scared to death of cities, especially of their crime, their broken schools and neighborhoods.
Hylton, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Pennsylvania editorial writer, comes to Roanoke on Friday to make his case that the post-World War II flight of the urban middle class into sprawling suburbs is a giant experiment that's hurt people and their communities.
He'll make a pitch to the statewide Virginia Preservation Conference that it's in the best interests of affluent and working-class Americans to return to their cities and small towns and learn again to live close to people of different social classes and ethnic backgrounds - the way our towns operated for centuries, the way European cities still do.
"I swear to you that 50 years from now," he said in a phone interview this week, "we'll look back at these strip malls and say, `We were crazy. This wasn't civilization!'''
Hylton, 47, won his Pulitzer six years ago for editorials urging preservation of farmland and open space in southeastern Pennsylvania. He left his newspaper, The Mercury in Pottstown, Pa., and now devotes himself full-time to advocacy of planning to save his home state's towns and countryside.
He says their demise began in the 1930s, when the federal government dumped all its subsidized, low-income housing on certain sections of cities and set in motion the creation of ghettos and the departure of better-off neighbors. Canada, on the other hand, wisely scattered its housing for the poor throughout villages and towns and into all kinds of neighborhoods, reducing segregation by ethnicity and social class.
The assault on cities continued after World War II when the convergence of veterans' loans and wrongheaded zoning turned farmlands into inhumane subdivisions. It was bureaucrats, he said, who decided that home loans should go only for construction on large lots. "Well," he said, "cities didn't qualify for any of that stuff."
People had been living in towns, cities and villages for 6,000 years. "You built on what you had. We took this model that we had been using for thousands of years and threw it right out the window. We wasted huge amounts of land. We degraded our cities."
"After the Second World War, we developed amnesia about what makes a good place'': shade trees, architecture built to human scale, green spaces, a sense of belonging, and the ability to walk and bike to school, drugstore, shoe repair.
With the poor trapped in cities, the suburbanites came to see them only as abstractions, no longer as neighbors. "People care about those things that personally affect them," he says. And few in the middle class care about cities anymore.
Then in the last 20 years, shopping center developers, wanting to save suburban housewives a drive into town, built malls near them, then brought jobs out to the 'burbs in the form of corporate centers encircled by parking lots.
``It's a mess," he says. "It's a total mess."
But not too late to turn around.
Last year, with foundation grants and $50,000 he borrowed, Hylton and a Harrisburg, Pa., couple, Ruth Seitz and her husband, photographer Blair Seitz, published the book "Save Our Land, Save Our Towns" (RB Books, Harrisburg). It's a picture book that describes Pennsylvania's suburban sprawl and urban decline, but Hylton's analysis could stand for any state.
His writing and Blair Seitz's photography of urban, suburban and rural landscapes show how cities like Philadelphia lost 500,000 people since World War II and nearly 250,000 jobs since 1960. More than 50,000 homes there have been abandoned or demolished.
Outside the cities, Hylton writes, "masses of housing subdivisions, corporate centers, industrial parks and shopping malls are scattered as randomly as the stars. This new universe has been designed for cars, rather than people. By rearranging streets and buildings to accommodate the auto, we have devastated the appearance of our towns and countryside."
While the nation has spent billions paving highways across the countryside, it's abandoned thousands of miles of rail lines. Hylton pleads for more passenger trains, public transit and the increased transporting of freight trucks on flatbed rail cars.
He favors statewide real-estate taxes that would divvy school support and other public monies equally among a state's communities. When cities depend mostly on local real estate taxes, he says, "It encourages municipalities to go after development no matter what it is. So you have planning on the basis of `Where are we getting our taxes?'''
In travels around the country for his book, he found humane new communities and rehabilitated old ones in Oregon, Washington, Kentucky and other states.
In Pottstown, Hylton runs errands on his bike. His wife can walk to the school where she teaches in 15 minutes. Hylton organized a group there that raised $500,000 to plant and maintain 1,800 street trees.
His 10 rules for a quality community are: 1) a sense of place, 2) buildings built to human scale, 3) self-contained neighborhoods, with offices, stores, restaurants, schools and even light manufacturing within a short walk from home, 4) diversity of race, age and income, 5) transit-friendly designs, 6) lots of trees, 7) parking lots to the rear, 8) humane architecture, 9) outdoor "rooms," such as public squares and plazas and 10) maintenance and safety, with regular inspections of all buildings.
Hylton doesn't think it will be long before Americans rediscover the pleasures of living in close-knit communities.
"Once we get past that paradigm shift that living in a community where people are close to you is not bad, I think we're going to see an explosion of these kinds of places. I'm finally seeing what I'm talking about in planning magazines. It's just a matter of time before it's on `Dateline' and `60 Minutes.'''
Sooner or later, he says, builders will figure out that they can make as much money and do as much building and rehabilitation in cities and towns as they can in suburbia.
People of all political persuasions warm to the idea, Hylton says.
Last week in Erie, Pa., a man told Hylton, "When you started your talk, you seemed really radical to me. Then I realized that what you're saying isn't radical at all. You're a conservative."
"It's not a liberal idea; it's not a conservative idea," says Hylton. "It's a good idea."
Thomas Hylton's book, "Save Our Land, Save Our Towns" ($24.95 retail), can be ordered at (800) 497-1427.
LENGTH: Long : 127 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: "Save Our Land, Save Our Towns" author Thomas Hylton. Toby CNBread excerpts from his book, see Page 8. color.
Thomas Hylton will speak at 9 a.m. Friday at the 11th Annual
Virginia Preservation Conference at the Hotel Roanoke. Fees for the
conference, sponsored by the Preservation Alliance of Virginia, are
$140 for alliance members and $165 for non-members, with lower rates
for students and one-day attendance.