Our sprawl - and spread - harm our health

Chances are pretty good that you and I are both heavier than we should be. So are 32 percent of our kids. Extra weight puts us and them at increased risk for heart disease and stroke and diabetes and cancer. To make it even worse, a new study by the American Academy of Pediatrics' Committee on Environmental Health lays the problem squarely on our doorsteps and in our garages.

"As cities have expanded into rural areas, large tracts of land have been frequently transformed into low-density developments in a 'leapfrog' manner.... The physical environment of a community can support opportunities for play, an essential component of child development, and for physical activity, a health behavior that not only reduces risk of excess weight gain but also has many other benefits for overall well-being."

Our newer neighborhoods, the study concludes, don't do that.

The conclusion is clear, The health of our children is harmed by the environment in which we raise them. Hampton Roads - with the exception of parts of Norfolk, Portsmouth and a few villages - more often than not seems like one giant, sprawling suburb. Parts of Suffolk, where growth has been particularly rapid in the past decade, can seem like a collection of unconnected neighborhoods leading out onto overused thoroughfares.

Sprawl is the natural result of cheap gas and cheap rural land. Builders move their operations into the exurbs, where they can erect bigger and cheaper houses because neither the cost of land nor the cost of transportation exacts an obvious or immediate penalty. The true cost becomes clear only later.

Planners have long known that sprawl kills community, makes municipal services expensive to provide, and forces residents to drive farther and pollute more. Now, doctors are saying that it's also making our kids sick and dangerously heavy.

The reasoning on weight goes something like this: Because we build neighborhoods that are hard for children to navigate - and because schools have been mostly centralized - kids don't walk or bike for exercise or to get someplace.

I know about this study not because I regularly read the medical journal Pediatrics but because I received an e-mail from the folks at the Coalition for Smart Growth, which obviously has a point of view. But that doesn't make the group wrong. It just makes it strikingly old-fashioned.

The essence of the smart growth movement is that our old ways of developing - houses relatively close together on narrow streets with nearby schools, shopping and parks - are better for people and the environment. And for our kids.

I figured the kind of neighborhood I grew up in - a close-in suburb of D.C. called Maplewood - was so golden in my memory because I'm getting older and those were happier days. It turns out that they were empirically happier days because it was simply a healthier and better place to grow up.

Even so, there's part of me that can't blame kids' weight on newfangled development patterns - what the study calls the "built environment." Anyone who has watched a crowd of kids spend a perfect summer day on the couch with a video-game controller and a bag of Cheetos knows that the problem isn't just the way we lay out neighborhoods, or the fact that you can't get there from here unless you drive.

The Pediatrics study, of course, acknowledges factors aside from the environment even as it focuses on our neighborhoods. However you cut it, though, the problem comes back to the grown-ups. From the people who build the houses, to the politicians who approve them, to the parents who buy them, we're all to varying degrees culpable for the health of the next generation.

Unfortunately, for the kids, this arrangement - and the others we've built for them - doesn't seem to be working out so well.

Donald Luzzatto is The Pilot's editorial page editor. E-mail him at donald.luzzatto@pilotonline.com.