Save Our Land, Save Our Towns - Softcover

Thomas Hylton, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist from Pennsylvania, wrote Save Our Land, Save Our Towns as a plea for comprehensive planning to preserve America's traditional towns and countryside. He later produced and hosted a public television documentary also called Save Our Land, Save Our Towns. The program was first broadcast on Pennsylvania PBS stations and has aired more than 100 times on PBS stations nationwide. Since publication of the book, Hylton has given more than 400 presentations in Pennsylvania and 35 other states on land use planning and community building. He addressed the nation s governors at the winter 2001 conference of the National Governors Association. He has given talks to legislators sponsored by both the Democratic and Republican caucuses of the Pennsylvania House and Senate. His book was distributed to every legislator and 500 other state and local officials by James Seif, Pennsylvania Secretary of Environmental Protection. Hylton is an organizing member of 10,000 Friends of Pennsylvania, a coalition of civic groups dedicated to land use reforms and community building in Pennsylvania. A three-time winner of the American Planning Association's annual journalism award, Hylton received a fellowship from the Society of Professional Journalists in 1993 to study state planning issues. Since then, Hylton has written more than 200 newspaper and magazine articles on land use planning and community building. A native of Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, Hylton has lived all his life in Pennsylvania cities and towns. Since 1973, Hylton has lived in Pottstown with his wife, Frances, who recently retired after teaching 35 years in the Pottstown School District. For 22 years, Hylton wrote for Pottstown's daily newspaper, The Pottstown Mercury. His editorials advocating the preservation of farmland and open space in southeastern Pennsylvania won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990. Hylton conceived and organized Trees Inc., a non-profit corporation that raised nearly $500,000 to plant and maintain street trees in Pottstown. He co-founded Preservation Pottstown, an organization dedicated to preserving Pottstown's historic neighborhoods and enhancing the borough's quality of life. He helped bring about the integration of Pottstown's elementary schools through a special edition of The Pottstown Mercury advocating the cause. Hylton serves on the Pottstown Planning Commission and Shade Tree Commission.

Since the 1950s, Pennsylvania has lost more than 4 million acres of farmland, an area larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. It didn't have to happen, writes Thomas Hylton in his new book, Save Our Land, Save Our Towns, a thoughtful and touching reflection on the spatial underpinnings of community that is at once both profoundly simple and complex. It is a first-rate treatment of a significant subject. The book is simple because the truths about the many advantages of small towns over most suburban developments almost leap up from its pages. It is simultaneously complex because it draws together so many separate threads from which our future will be woven, including economic development, farmland preservation, education, racial and socioeconomic diversity, pedestrian-scale communities, public open spaces, and land use and tax policy. Hylton, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials in the Pottstown Mercury on open space, has organized his book in a useful and unusual way: You can open to any two pages and read them as a self-contained mini-chapter consisting of text and photographs (152 color photos by Blair Seitz grace its pages). Should you be sufficiently disciplined to read straight through the individual sections, you'll find that the cumulative impact makes a compelling case for a comprehensive state plan to guide development. Hylton is deeply concerned with sprawl and its consequences. He believes that public policies on land use and growth management in the last 50 years have been misguided, abetting a departure from historic patterns of more efficient, denser settlement. The results are unnecessary costs for redundant roads and highways, water and sewer lines, homes and schools, office complexes and shopping centers; lost agricultural land and open space; more expensive public services arising from low density patterns of housing and jobs; air pollution; and a diminished sense of community. Suburban development in many states has been driven by population growth. California gobbled up huge expanses of land as it grew from 7 million to 30 million people between 1940 and 1990, a 329 percent increase. But in the same half-century, Pennsylvania grew only 20 percent. In Southeastern Pennsylvania between 1970 and 1995, suburban development ate up a quarter of our prime farm land while population actually declined by 140,000. The solution, according to Hylton, is a comprehensive state plan that would be built on the following principles: Economic development, spurred by streamlined building-permit procedures, would be guided by clearly demarcated areas for growth, leaving other areas for open space. Cities, villages and towns would be nurtured and sprawl development discouraged. Communities would be designed so that people could walk to work, shopping and recreation. Neighborhoods would embrace diversity, ensuring that people of all incomes could live together as neighbors. The state would decrease reliance on the real estate tax, which separates communities into haves and have-nots and which induces officials to encourage sprawling development. To ensure equal educational opportunity, regardless of where people live, the state would provide 100 percent of public school funding. The antithesis of a boring tract on planning, Save Our Land, Save Our Towns demystifies the subject of land use and growth management and makes an eloquent, accessible and persuasive case for a rational approach to state, county and local planning. Whether or not you agree with the sweeping changes Hylton advocates for Pennsylvania, his book is a must-read, not only for planners but for all who wish to preserve a high quality of life for themselves and their children. --Ted Hershberg, Philadelphia Inquirer

Tom Hylton, whom I met during his speaking engagement in Annapolis last week, has written a fine book called Save Our Land, Save Our Towns. The book's subtitle is A Plan for Pennsylvania, but it's a plan for Maryland, too: a plan for any place where citizens wonder if there isn't an alternative to more traffic and less open space; if there is any way to recapture communities that existed in the '50s and '60s. Hylton's book, illustrated with more than 100 color photos by noted Pennsylvania photographer Blair Seitz, captures the tragic connection between sprawl development's uglification of the landscape and the decline of our cities and towns. But mostly this is a positive and hopeful book. Its words and pictures show compelling, real-life examples of people living and working in vibrant centers of community, leaving prime farm soils and rural heritage intact for all to enjoy. It is no armchair philosophy Hylton brings to bear on the subject. He and his wife live on a tenth of an acre in a low-to moderate-income part of Pottstown, population 22,000. Both can walk to work, which explains how he has driven the same car for 21 years. They figure that living close to work has saved 10,000 hours of driving time and $85,000 in transportation costs. She is a teacher. He helped found Preservation Pottstown. He also organized Trees Inc., a nonprofit organization that maintains 3,100 shade trees on Pottstown's streets. In 1990, he won a Pulitzer Prize for editorials he wrote for the Pottstown paper, the Mercury, on preserving open space. In editorials, he also pushed for the integration of local elementary schools. The book grew out of a fellowship he got in 1993. It let him spend a year studying how various states approached the comprehensive planning he thinks is key to preserving both natural and human communities by stopping sprawl and enhancing towns and cities. It is full of insights about a suburban existence we are so inured to that we simply don't think about things such as the following: A person takes up 2 square feet, but each of our cars takes up 30 to 45 times as much space. So all our stores, schools, houses, offices, even our parks, must set aside massive amounts of storage space for cars; for every car registered in Pennsylvania we have six or seven parking spaces. A person growing up in wealthy suburban New Jersey is three times more likely to die young than one raised in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. Car accidents are the main reason. Pittsburgh's urban Golden Triangle contains 140,000 jobs and thousands of residents on less than 400 acres, while a typical in the middle of nowhere industrial park, Chester County's Great Valley Corporate Center, uses 650 acres, mostly for parking spaces for the 15,000 people employed there. New Jersey's 1992 state plan, which emphasizes cities and towns and discourages sprawl, will save government $1.7 billion in infrastructure and operating costs over the next 20 years. Other than Oregon, where comprehensive growth planning is in a class by itself, no state has a good handle on the problem, Hylton says. But he feels Maryland is in front of Pennsylvania and says his comparisons among states have left him impressed with our approaches to shoreline preservation and tree protection, and with the Glendening administration's emphasis on rehabbing schools in preference to building new ones to accommodate sprawl. This book is a wonderful, readable guide to how we can begin redefining progress to better serve humans and nature. --Tom Horton, Baltimore Sun

Thomas Hylton is a man with a mission. He's a teacher and a preacher. Most of us who ply the opinion trade hope we help people to understand the important issues of the day as we write our editorials and columns. Hylton is certified in his role. He won a Pulitzer Prize for writing about open space in Pottstown Mercury editorials. He transformed those editorials along with a year's worth of research into an enjoyable, instructive, beautiful, eminently readable book: Save Our Land, Save Our Towns. The subtitle is A Plan for Pennsylvania, but it's contents and prescriptions for creating livable communities would apply anywhere certainly to Delaware. In fact, Hylton has included a positive reference to Gov. Tom Carper's Shaping Delaware's Future Act in the second edition of the book. We can take pride that Hylton sees promise in Delaware. But not too much. We're a long, long way from solving the social, emotional and economic woes that suburban sprawl has brought to our state. Hylton's book is a straightforward description of what misguided government planning has done to his native Pennsylvania. In language so simple that it belies the complex subject, he offers example after example of what communities- real, livable communities- can be and what so many places have ceased to be. He waxes fondly about growing up in first Wyomissing and then in Reading. But Hylton never devolves into sloppy sentimentality. Throughout the book are facts and figures about industry, about people and their problems, about roads and rails, about education, about racial inequity, about farmland, about tax policies, about planning, about suburban development and urban renewal. These facts and figures are woven with care into a narrative that persuades the reader of the rightness and the righteousness of his message. And the text is wrapped around wonderful photographs taken by his collaborator, Blair Seitz. Unlike other critics of sprawl, Hylton doesn't blame developers, who, after all, are largely followers. He blames misguided government planners who promoted wasteful suburban development rather than encouraging urban redevelopment. And he blames us- you and me- who watched it all happen. In any event, blame isn't the right word, really. Hylton is a preacher yet his sermon is not stern, but instructive. He is a teacher who offers examples as the best way to learn lessons. Far from being depressed about the future, Hylton is confident that things will change. But not soon and not easily. Here is what Hylton says just before he offers tips on how ordinary people can get involved: Just as it took several decades to devastate our cities and create underclass ghettos, it will take many years to reverse the process. But it can be done. And it's going to happen because of people like you - people who care about the environment and social justice, who want a better life for our children, and who are willing to get involved - the elite group Theodore Roosevelt called 'the Fellowship of Doers.' This is a book for anyone who feels that modern life need not be the scramble on the highways and the isolation of homes that are not in neighborhoods. It offers a rich and instructive look at how we live and how we could live much better. --John Taylor, Wilmington News Journal