Editorial: Smarter growth -- Twin Cities must grow more creatively

Twenty years ago it was widely assumed that the emerging Information Age would render cities obsolete. People would take their computers and scatter to the hills. But the opposite has happened. Technological talent and wealth have clustered in a few urban hot spots, setting off an intense competition among metropolitan regions to retain and attract the best and brightest.

Boston, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Dallas, Austin and other cities bustle with high-tech energy. Only recently has the Twin Cities awakened to find itself behind in the chase. If it hopes to catch up, one of its tasks must be to temper its overwhelmingly suburban-style development pattern and begin to grow smarter.

That means offering people creative choices about where and how to live - not just the large-lot, detached house five miles from the nearest strip mall and 20 miles from work, but also a townhouse with a corner store down the block, a day-care center around the corner and a transit station a short walk away.

Why is this more compact option so important? Because regions hoping to compete in the new economy can't afford the wasted time, space and money that the post-1945 style perpetrates. It simply generates too many cars, too many trips, too many expensive roads, too many delays, too much pollution and - as many suburbanites are now discovering - way too much aggravation.

Taken together, these complaints have come to be known as suburban sprawl, an unfair term, perhaps, because so many of sprawl's critics come off as elitists attacking America's bedrock agrarian values. We don't consider ourselves among them. Our plea is not for the discontinuation of the post-1945 form but for a saner balance, one that will allow the countryside more elbow room and the cities more vitality.

It's this equilibrium that the Twin Cities lack. More than its competitors, this metro area is obsessed with building out its edges while abandoning its thinning core. Of all structures built in the metro area in 1998, only 2.5 percent were in Minneapolis or St. Paul. But in Dallas, 30 percent of all new structures were in the city proper, according to a Brookings Institution study. In Denver, it was 20 percent; Portland, 18 percent; Seattle, 15 percent; Boston, 6 percent.

Among these cities, only Minneapolis and St. Paul are expected once more to show major central-city population losses in the '90s, while competitors have begun to grow again, surely a healthy sign for their entire regions. Growing smarter has played a part in each case.

With a greater commitment from governments, builders, lenders, designers and customers, the Twin Cities could join this trend toward more balanced growth, a trend that offers considerable savings. The choice, after all, is really not whether to grow but how.

If, for example, half of the 330,000 households the metro area expects to gain over the next 20 years were housed on slightly smaller lots, some of them clustered in mixed-use suburban and city neighborhoods near new rail and bus transit corridors, then the region could save: