One of America's tony new political issues is the preservation of open space. Open space initiatives, also called anti-sprawl initiatives, seek to eliminate or "manage" outer-belt suburban development through zoning, legal challanges and even government subsidized land purchases.

Anti-sprawl is now working its way up the bureaucratic food chain. Once mainly a local concern, state governments are starting to jump on the anti-sprawl bandwagon. At the national level the Clinton-Gore administration has bowed to open space with its "livable communities" initiative. Hey, if you've got a problem, they've got a program.

I live in northern Chester County, on the front line in the battle against sprawl - country roads through rolling hills, farms, horsies and moo cows; you get the picture. Problem is, this little piece of pastoral bliss lies within a reasonable commute to a lot of good paying jobs, so it's getting built up.

Recent development has been mostly zillion-square-foot single family homes on generous amounts of acreage, but occasionally plans for town homes or a strip mall are proposed. Whenever this happens, the locals take up their pitchforks and torches and head down to the township meeting en masse to kill Frankenstein's monster.

Drive around here and you'll like what you see. On the surface, anything to preserve it has to be good, so anything like sprawl that threatens it has to be bad. But there are dark sides to anti-sprawl:

Elitism - Folks out here aren't exactly wondering where their next meal is coming from. Home prices and land are expensive. The subtext of preserving the "character" of the place essentially boils down to preserving the view from your deck and the class of kids that your kids associate with in school.

Now that the aristocracy has its little piece of paradise, it's time to pull up the drawbridge and keep out the hoi polloi.

Anti-sprawl doles out plots in the outer belt suburbs like lifeboat seats on the Titanic.

Regressive taxation - Using government money to stave off development in outer belt suburbs is tax regressive because it takes from the general fund of tax dollars and disproportionately benefits the well-off. As such, it's similar to other middle / upper-middle class methods of gorging at the income redistribution trough, like the mortgage interest deduction and tax-free employer-paid health insurance. You have; you get. Same deal with open space.

Racism - Hand in hand with the class angle of deterring development is the nasty little unspoken aspect of race. Right now, the area is lily white. Open the place up to development with affordable country living and who knows what you'll bring in.

Infringement of personal property rights - If individuals can afford to buy up open space and keep it open, I say God bless 'em. The problem is that nobody is rich enough to preserve the "character" of a whole township, so the gentry wants to make decisions about other people's property, not just their own. This is one thing when it comes to limiting, say, a toxic waste dump in the village, but quite another when you're trying to impose a bike trail and pond on a tract home developer.

There's an interesting map put out by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection which color codes developed areas as distinguished from undeveloped areas (agricultural / woodlands / "barren"). By eye, I'd guess the developed areas total between 5 percent and 10 percent. The rest is relatively undisturbed.

You want open space without intruding on other people's rights? - move to Potter County. And by the way, when all these anti-sprawl folks moved out here in the first place, how come they weren't part of the sprawl problem?

Ed Lawrence lives in Spring City.

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