WASHINGTON, D.C.

In his chapter of the new book, "A Guide to Smart Growth", Steven Hayward, senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco, states that worries about urban and suburban sprawl are unsubstantiated.

According to Hayward, "development alarmists" are hearing cliches like "the paving of America" and not the facts. "All development, including roads, highways and military bases, as well as urban and suburban housing and commercial buildings, consumes only about 5 percent of the total land area of the continental United States", Hayward said.

His book points out that the U.S. Geological Survey of the 1980's estimated that the annual rate of land development is about 1.3 million acres per year, which is only 0.07 percent of the 1.8 billion acres of land in the U.S. He does concede to the fact that recent preliminary figures have the estimation to 3 million acres a year.

His argument deals with arguments about population density. Hayward states that critics "like to cite examples such as the Chicago metropolitan area, whose population grew by just 4 percent between 1970 and 1990 while the developed land area grew by 55 percent." The explanation for this discrepancy in land use is that decreases in density are related to increases in affluence, and therefore smaller families.

To sum up, Hayward says that the "sprawl controversy is really about our collective unhappiness with the rapid changes that growth brings to our communities. This is a reasonable issue and a challenge for governance, but we aren't running out of land. Policies that seek to lock up land will only have the effect of keeping people from achieving their rightful share of the American Dream."

To purchase "A Guide to Smart Growth: Shattering Myths, Providing Solutions", Edited By Jane S. Shaw and Ronald D. Utt, visit www.heritage.org