Recently, I saw an Upper Dublin cop put an injured deer out of its misery on Virginia drive. The incident caused a big traffic jam. At first I was sad. But then, I got angry. "Hey, I thought these suburbs didn't suffer from gridlock!" I was a new suburbanite, moved here from Philly and was very critical. Since when does a deer cause gridlock? If this had been Philly, the cars would have kept right on going. My wife and I had also lived in Willow Grove-- and if this had been Moreland Road, we'd've passed the car only a little longer than we would've passed it in Philly, but we certainly wouldn't be rubber-necking as long as these Dreshertowners and Glensiders were now doing. "Why do we pay these high taxes-- to get involved in deer-pitying traffic jams?" Pathetic.

Deer population seemed to vary directly with job loss and traffic jams. Fewer jobs and less deer. More cars and more deer. "Shouldn't it be more jobs and fewer deer?"

I sharpened my antlers by reading statistics listed by organizations such as the Pennsylvania Economy League, 10,000 Friends of Pennsylvania, the Reinvestment Fund, HUD, Brookings Institution, the Metropolitan Philadelphia Policy Center and others. I began to understand the concept of "sprawl."

Pennsylvania has had only 3.4% of population growth since 1990, but developed 545,100 acres of non-federal land between 1992 and 1997. Its rate of land development is fifth in the nation. New York's rate is twelfth in the nation which shows that this former sprawl king is now lagging well behind Pennsy in the race to replace pastures with little boxes. Incidentally, New York has a higher black bear and deer population than Pennsy. Fewer deer and bears, fewer jobs, but more land development than New York. How can this be?

Philadelphia has 26,000 abandoned homes, 31,000 vacant lots and has 36.5 abandoned structures per 1,000 residents among 83 cities surveyed by Brookings. When a town becomes less attractive to its residents because of the loss of its natural beauty and the raising of taxes, people flee the area and it starts to look like a ghost town.

I saw the boom and the sprawl open up in front of me. I saw businesses jettison into the five counties, more schools, more strip malls, more clinics, more WaWa's, less beauty, more animals losing their old habitats.

The reason for the sprawl seemed to be that people get attracted to the rural charm of our area and move here, abandoning their cities. Population soars. The infrastructure booms and taxes rise to accommodate it. Schools and sewers and gas and electric lines and roads are installed permanently. Affordable housing and commercial development move here and more tax revenue is secured. Overnight, the rural charm is gone. People lose interest in the area and move away. Home market value declines. The tax base escapes but taxes don't decline because the infrastructure remains. The "ghost town effect" settles in. Take a look at Langhorne and Bristol and Penndel where this has already happened. Drive along Folly Road in Bucks County and view that a new high school is going up and see the houses that have been assembled and close your eyes and remember the rural charm that Folly Road once had.

I thought I'd try to remember my very first experience with the sprawl-- the moment when I first witnessed Philly Metro changing into a megalopolis.

Once upon a time, free enterprise began to grizzle Route 611--- a road that had resembled a country lane when had I first come here in 1998, suddenly simulating avenues of Queens, New York (an old stomping ground of mine). Home developers built their Arcadias upon the once pastoral swatches flanking Folly road, throwing up three-story homes each of which completely lacked windows on one side in attempts to cull ongoing remodeling revenue. A nursing home opened up on shady Bristol Road. An elementary school opened in Abington and with it, more low-maintenance franchise businesses whose tax revenue would help to fund education. A high school is being built on the recently rural Folly Road.

Neighbors noticed that their old neighborhoods back in Philly had become suddenly filled with old abandoned commercial and residential buildings but that "we tried to escape the city, but the city followed us." The suburbs became just as inconvenient as the old city haunts where the tax base shrank.

Their relatives in the old neighborhoods were still paying high taxes and were getting lousy education, sanitation and security. Soon, the kinfolk left the "old" suburbs and moved up Route 611 near Buckingham, to Reading or Lancaster. They were followed by others. Alas, some of these places have already developed new property taxes to accommodate the expanding infrastructure that has accompanied sudden population shifts.

Pennsylvania has striven to counteract this vicious cycle, but it has never moved fast enough.

In the past, the state legislature allowed the opportunity for school districts to shift the local tax burden away from the real property tax and towards the earned income tax if they were approved locally by voters in what was called a "front end" referendum. Known as Act 50 of Municipalities Planning Code Senate Bill 669, 1998, the amendment meant that municipalities like yours had been allowed to choose whether or not they would prefer property revenue to fund infrastructure, instead of shifting the collection to general state income tax. Many districts ignored the front end vote for this referendum because it did not immediately bring lower taxes, but in fact allowed districts to raise income tax by 1.5 percent. Even though that meant that it could tax business profits more, the tax payer was only allowed a "shift" instead of a relief. It didn't seem that this act was what we were looking for. But it did acknowledge the existence of the vicious sprawl cycle. And any consciousness is good.

But how many of us even gave this tax incentive a second thought? How many of us would have attended town meetings if invited regarding it? How many of us currently are local activists who could have lobbied for a better plan than Act 50? Characteristic of our suburban malaise, there have been nothing and nobody locally governing our growth, much like a fattening body run by a thinning brain. Resultantly, the powerful middle class tax base has caused the suburbs to become boomtowns. As the population has expanded, the commercial developers have usually won zoning disputes because a cute country store had already occupied a residential block that a developer argued could also house a recycling plant.

In time, the towns couldn't boom any longer, because there were no more places upon which to build. Towns once resembling Doylestowns and Glensides and Dreshers eventually became tired Norristowns and Bristols and Langhornes. While Montgomery County is first in per capita income ($44,000) among the five counties, 53 percent of students in the Norristown Area School District were receiving free or reduced-price lunches in 2000, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

All around us, houses have lost their market value while the schools and roads and utilities still demand the same amount in tax revenue. Over 220,000 people left Philadelphia in the 1990's. The average price of a house in Philly is $60,000 while the average price of a house in Montco is $155,000. Suddenly, nobody wanted to live in a run-down area that had high taxes and increasing crime rates and lousier schools and shabbier hospitals. The people who hated living in these blighted places got sick of their environments, refused to help to gentrify them and moved to the suburbs. Could you blame them? By the way, these people are us and our neighbors.

Recently, I paused in the parking lot of an abandoned Fuddruckers, located off Oxford Valley Road in Langhorne, to peruse a map. Seeing other abandoned office buildings around me, I awed at the massive amount of cars going to and fro. It was rush hour in a loud city. A few hours later, I returned to this spot. There was hardly any traffic now. Everybody was at their job, and had abandoned this city to get to their jobs located in other burgs. A tumble weed could've whisked by me, not seeming out of place. Weeds covered the Fuddruckers edifice and lot.

If you're ever home from work with a cold and feel up to it, you might look at your own town and see the same "ghost town" phenomenon after your neighbors have gone off to work in commercial hivetowns. But here in Langhorne, Bristol and Penndel, there are so many abandoned buildings that you almost expect Jesse James to hover out of a boarded up medical clinic. I used to eat at Fuddruckers, years ago. Today, I became this place's ghost.

Seeing how long it takes you to drive to the interstate, just imagine how tough commuting will be when folks who came from cities to occupy new reasonably-priced houses and apartment complexes clog your roads. These roads were built when your town used to house people who worked at a nearby steel mill or limekiln. They were never supposed to accommodate this super flow. Corners of your town begin to appear rundown. Like anybody, you realize that if your town had controlled its growth, it might not have these cancer cells. A pharmacy suddenly closes its doors. A CVS opens up down the street, sending its revenue to offices in other states and cities, instead of your own.

You might also wonder why there is no public transportation within walking distance or why there has never been a rail or bus line in your town center-that is if there ever was a town center there at all. Where is the town theatre? Why was there never any municipal planning here? Why couldn't this town have become a place where pedestrians actually socialized, rather than being typical suburbanites who aren't very talkative and are much less interested in activism?

Nobody expects us to move back to a ghost town to help to gentrify it. Nobody expects us to fight it out when things get cramped here in Dodge. We can come and go as we please. But we must realize one thing. Our identity is a fragile, natural beauty. Pennsylvania is one of the most beautiful areas of the world. And sprawl is eating it alive. Let's control the growth.

Doylestown's community board recently argued against the founding of a BFI plant that had planned to open on Turk Road, which would have changed the zoning of this rural road forever. Through activism, the Doylestowners won their plight, by petitioning the county congress and then pressuring-out BFI. How did they muster up the strength to run the big guys out of town? I don't know. But take a walk through central Doylestown sometime. It is laid out like an English village, where people can walk to work. People have the opportunity to get together in this thriving, aesthetically planned village, because of a physical nearness that has never infringed upon the natural beauty. So maybe few of us can afford to live there. But this part of Doylestown is an example of good civic planning, where each town square is surrounded by houses and where pedestrian traffic gets the right of way. Doylestown obviously has had some civic control over its growth.

But the physical structure of a town doesn't guarantee success. Jenkintown should certainly have such a thriving civic organ. But its townsfolk are set on preserving the current towny appeal, not allowing new office space. If businesses invested in Jenkintown and new offices were opened in pre-existing structures, then Jenkintown could enjoy new jobs for its citizens. Philadelphians could travel there very easily because Jenkintown has four regional rail lines that could bring in workers who would patronize local businesses on their breaks. Greater civic consciousness might encourage such economic enhancements but Jenky-like too many other places, isn't coming up with a plan to master its sprawl through the injection of new independent businesses that could really thrive in this classic edge-town.

Three years ago, Harrisburg created the amendments Act 67 and Act 68 to its Municipalities Planning Code Senate Bill 300, known as "smart growth" legislation, putting zoning and development power into the hands of Pennsy's staggeringly numerous 2,568 municipalities. The acts, encouraging municipalities to work together, seem to be a means of uniting municipalities which had often tried to shift infrastructure burdens upon each other by pushing commercial development toward town borders. The acts require joint efforts to set their own zoning, and provides funding incentives for multi-municipal planning. Allowing tax-base sharing across municipal boundaries, it helps municipalities virtually to merge and collaborate in settling mutual problems. It also allows farmers the right to sell their land to developers in another municipality whenever a new development plan would cross one municipality into their own, thereby relaxing zoning restrictions but also helping to sustain older developed areas that need the boost. The advantages of Act 67 and 68 are generally unknown to suburbanites who fear the effects of sprawl. There are also the Home Equity Assurance programs that are meant to keep urbanites from moving to the suburbs if their neighborhood devalues, by insuring homeowners against the loss of the resale value of their homes over a five year period. By proposing to install a nominal property tax levy of up to .12 percent proponents of this controversial plan are seeking to give homeowners support for sticking around for a while in hopes that blighting will reverse. Although few urban areas have adopted this program in the USA, it definitely is one worth considering, depending on the degree to which a proud Philadelphian would hate leaving his beloved but currently decaying neighborhood, setting his sights on our own towns.

Although they don't promise drastic changes, at least knowing about these amendments and programs can help us to build awareness at town council meetings or at home.

In summary, we must have a system that brings business to existing communities rather than destroying the open spaces which had made our neighborhoods and towns valuable in the first place. Let's expand the transit system so that it services more of the suburbs. Let's decide which places should remain "open space," and thus preserve our natural wealth. Let's examine the impact of growth on our schools, hospitals and job markets. Let's plan to figure out how to pressure developers to pay for infrastructure (utilities, roads, maintenance). Often these developers are located in other states, and don't have to pay Pennsylvania taxes. Let's reinvest in abandoned buildings and revitalize them.

In conclusion, uncontrolled commercial and residential expansion merely ignite sprawl and inadvertently lead to the devaluation of the structures which our taxes (property and income) have afforded. If we can sustain the value of our current environment through smart planning and the preservation of the natural environment, then, thirty years from now, when the new neighbors have finally paid off their mortgages, it will be likely that they too will want to remain here-that is if they won't have already fled to so-called greener pastures, if there are any left.

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