Piecemeal fixes for sprawl converged into a single land-use mega problem by 1970

Evidence

The critics of tract-house development fit the pattern. For two decades, officials had tried to solve one problem at a time. To preserve open space, the federal government provided funds for open-space acquisition. To restrict development on steep hillsides, cities and counties enacted hillside-development ordinances. To control soil erosion from suburban construction, states passed sedimentcontrol laws. By 1970, however, a number of people had begun to see the environmental costs of homebuilding as disparate elements of a mega problem: land use. To deal with so vast a problem, the critics concluded, the nation needed to develop a new land ethic. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 919

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Caps the sprawl-to-regulation causal chain that earlier chapters built — each separate 1960s reform (open-space, hillside, sediment) individually earlier, here unified into ‘land use’ as the synthesis this book’s argument reaches.
• XREF: Directly parallels the polyad’s cross-course thread: land-use history as a systems problem rather than single-issue fixes, connecting to reading-the-landscape land-use history. — connects to: State land-use laws redefined land development as a public rather than strictly private matter — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 939; Failed pragmatic sprawl fixes drove advocates toward radical property critique — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 574; The erosion crisis migrated from farmland to suburban construction by 1965 — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 825 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Land-use problems resisted the technological fixes that made pollution law politically feasible #complicates (0.75) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 983
• The 1970s economic crisis fundamentally changed urban development patterns #expands (0.72) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 579