Sprawling, Sprawling ...

The sales brochures don't lie, because they show you a picture, a sweeping aerial view of forest stretching toward the distant skyline of Atlanta from the vicinity of vinings estates, from high $200s-500s. The table of travel times puts downtown 20 minutes away (a footnote points out that "times may vary in rush-hour traffic"), and the photos of "historic Vinings" in the sales office are not meant to suggest that homebuyers will actually be shopping in a quaint general store. The houses are as crammed with luxuries as a Pharaoh's tomb; the lots are wooded; the road a peaceful two-lane blacktop. It all conspires to make you fall in love with the place--which requires only that you close your mind to what it might look like in five years, when you're battling your way toward it past the Wal-Marts and Waffle Houses that its very existence will call into being.

Here, just outside Atlanta's I-285 beltway, is the front line of the great lifestyle struggle of the next century. It is taking the paradoxical form of a war not on poverty, but on affluence--or the way affluence is typically realized in America, in suburban enclaves that eat away at the countryside and promote the triple evils of sprawl: air pollution, traffic congestion and visual blight. Al Gore has made an anti-sprawl "livability agenda" the centerpiece of his presidential campaign, warning darkly of commuters who arrive home "too late to read a child a bedtime story." Most of the $8.8 billion the administration was seeking for the next fiscal year--for projects such as mass transit, green-space acquisition and road improvements--has already been approved by Congress. New Jersey Gov. Christine Whitman, a moderate Republican, has ambitious plans to spend almost $1 billion to preserve undeveloped land in the most densely populated state in the union. Even builders here in Atlanta, those prodigious cultivators of affluence, are scrambling to meet an unexpected demand for "simplicity."

But translating this shift of sentiment into lines on the map and trees on the ground is a daunting task. Anyone who has flown over it can see that there is no shortage of empty land in the United States, 95 percent of which is undeveloped. Activists like to cite figures for the overall loss of rural countryside that vary from about 400,000 to 1.4 million acres a year. Those on the other side often repeat a statistic from Steven Hayward of the conservative Pacific Research Institute, which puts the rate of land development for the United States, excluding Alaska, at an infinitesimal 0.0006 percent a year. Last week Hayward admitted he had made "a stupid math mistake" and that the real figure is .07 percent, more than 100 times greater. That's still not a lot, although it means that over the lifetime of a child born today, the developed area of the nation will more than double.

But the problem is that this development is concentrated in a relatively few areas close to big cities--such as Atlanta, whose 10-county metropolitan area population has grown by roughly a quarter just since 1990, to about 3.1 million, as of a year ago. Reversing or even slowing this trend will require a whole new way of thinking by local planners, federal regulatory agencies, developers and homebuyers. Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, thinks that's going to happen: "People are willing to pay [for mass transit and open space]; they are willing to accept regulations," he says, "because this issue more than any other affects the quality of life in communities today." On the other side of the issue, Samuel Staley, an economist with the Reason Public Policy Institute in Los Angeles, points out that "suburbanization by other people is what's unpopular; people love living in the suburbs, they just don't want anyone else out there with them." He adds: "You can't develop a public policy around stopping people from moving to the communities and homes they want to live in, at least not in the United States. Not yet."

Atlanta will be a test of those competing views, and its citizens, business leaders and government officials provide a good window on how this struggle might be waged over the next few years. One who will be watching closely is Julie Haley, a 39-year-old mother of two who moved to a subdivision in Alpharetta back when the neighborhood was mostly horse farms and trees. That was in 1994. Today, she says, "people who visited us five years ago say, 'I couldn't find your house.' The roads have all gotten wider, they've knocked down all the trees, there's a million shopping centers." On business trips, her husband, Michael, leaves the house at 5:30 for a 9 a.m. flight to beat the traffic to Atlanta's Hartsfield airport. Her children, Kaitlin, 9, and Conor, 5, both suffer from asthma, which she attributes to sharing the air with cars whose drivers make the longest average round-trip commute in the country, 36.5 miles. "The kids cry when they see the bulldozers," she says. "They say, 'When I grow up, I'm gonna be president and I'm not going to let them cut down any more trees'."

Of course, Haley, a nonpracticing lawyer, knows it's more important to have the local zoning board on your side than the president. But that body, she has found, responds mostly to the well-connected developers. She has won a few battles, only to lose the wars. Fulton County officials recently declared a moratorium on new development in an area where the sewers were overflowing. But a day later the moratorium was lifted for developers who already had a "land disturbance permit." It turned out there were hundreds of them, she says; "We're in the middle of a moratorium, and there's twice as much building as before." She joined a boycott of a supermarket whose builders, she says, chopped down several oak trees of a protected species. The store went out of business, but that didn't bring the trees back.