That’s one reputation. Another is as a hot spot for the young and talented. Martha Riche, former director of the U.S. Census Bureau told a ULI trends conference in Atlanta last month that it’s young professionals who are arriving. One result: while the region is 9th on the charts for population, it’s 57th when it comes to households of marrieds-with-children. Atlanta’s first among Southern regions, she said, in incomes over $100,000 while also showing the lowest rate of poverty. The region’s considerably above average in rates of adults with high school completion, and even with BA degrees or higher.

Some of us Casssandras have been saying that the perils of the reputation for traffic paralysis would eventually undermine the attraction for business and a youthful work force. Now two trends, formerly unfamiliar in this region, make cause us to change our Dixie tune. People in Atlanta’s suburbs are rediscovering their preference for real town centers. From Snellville to Suwanee to Norcross, Duluth, Lilburn and Sugar Hill — town centers, long neglected, are getting put back together or built from scratch. Sidewalks are showing up. Housing close by is making a comeback. The city managers say it’s what the people now want.

Meanwhile, the Trust for Public Land Georgia chapter unveiled a grand plan this winter for a 23-mile bike and walking trail, linking four new parks, expanding nine others, and connecting to 11 existing ones. Simultaneously, MARTA, the transit authority, would build a 22-mile transit ring around the interior of the region. MARTA is studying four route variations, each of which connects many major destinations and town centers.

The transit ring would cost at least $1 billion. Trails about $15 million plus right of way acquisition. New MARTA stations would add another $50-100 million. And there’s a little matter of persuading the CSX railroad to give up its 87-acre Hulsey freightyard, switching those operations to its facility near Fairburn.

But the mere fact that all this is the subject of a robust public discussion, covered extensively by Atlanta media, suggest that the Atlanta region may be getting serious about the quality of its development pattern, and livability, not just setting world records for growth.

In less than a decade this region, this charter member of western individualism culture has shifted from a roads-and-cars (lots of trucks) mindset about transportation toward the balance that comes from a sophisticated system of transit. On top of two highly popular light rail lines, the region’s captured a network of 175 miles of existing rail lines interconnecting most of the valley’s cities and employment centers. Polls show 88 percent of people in the region strongly support more investment in rail transit.

And coming out of the valley floor on the southwest edge, which they call the West Bench along the Oquirrh mountains, is “Daybreak.” It’s the brainchild of Kennecott Land (sister to the giant Kennecott Mining company, which has mined copper on 3000 of its 93,000 acres for over 100 years). 40,000 acres on the valley floor are suitable for development and represent possibly the largest development area near a large city in the United States.

Peter McMahon, Kennecott Land’s president told the ARS gathering that Daybreak will be a showcase of sustainability. Like its sister, the mining company, “we’re in the business of taking calculated risks on a large scale. The plan calls for more jobs than houses. Abundant parks and open space. Schools kids can walk to. A real community where offices, restaurants, schools, libraries, and shops are close to each other and to homes. A rail line running through it and connected to the region’s system. Maybe it’s not so big a risk these days. As the National Association of Realtors recently disclosed, these attributes are no longer reserved to the runaway imaginations of planners. According to their survey of recent homebuyers, 62% of the respondents say they’d take rail transit to work if available and and nearly half would chose a mixed-used setting for their housing.

But what makes Daybreak as breathtaking as the rugged mountains that surround this valley is sheer scale. Kennecott has half of all the remaining developable land in the valley. Building a high-quality mixed-use set of communities delivers density as a dividend. Which means Daybreak can house at least 500,000 people or about half of all the projected population growth of the next generation. With homes already appearing, this commitment is the largest demonstration of the New Urbanism principles anywhere.

How did Salt Lake City make this merlot cultural blend? Most people here say today’s pattern is the harvest of hard work done for the past seven years with Envision Utah (EU). While Kennecott mined copper, EU mined the values of people who live here — finding a core commitment to families and social connections, steady prosperity, and security. People said they live here for “peace of mind.” EU engaged thousands of citizens to find out what that meant. New development here no longer seems dragged down by weary arguments over density; here the talk rings of design and quality, in the clear knowledge that things not only need to be closer together to conserve land and preserve natural resources, but that proximity delivers rewards in access and walkability and quality of life.

In Las Vegas the price of a median price home jumped over half (52.4 percent) in just one year (from mid 2003 to 2004), the biggest gain for any metro area in the nation. Ironically, Las Vegas would seem a place of vast open spaces with lots of land to develop, but most of that space is owned by the federal government which must transfer it to private developers. But the transfer has occurred to slowly to keep pace with the region’s rapid development and as a result lot prices have shot up.

In contrast to land-starved Las Vegas, the Phoenix region, which barely dents the vast spaces of Arizona’s privately held Central Valley, has room to boom. Its home prices rose just 8.6 percent last year, or just under the national average of 9.1 percent.

Land-constrained South Florida also saw impressive house price gains. Because of a federally imposed urban growth boundary to protect the fragile Everglades, the Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach metro areas are rapidly approaching build out. House prices in these markets gained about a quarter since mid 2003.

The story is the same in Southern California where “sprawl has hit the wall”—the wall being the San Gabriel Mountains. Homes in Orange County, now the nation’s most expensive market at $655,300 for the median priced house, gained 38.7 percent in the past year. This was closely followed by Riverside and San Bernardino Counties—LA’s fastest growing areas—which experienced a 38.5 percent rise.

Finally, Portland, Ore., which has a self-imposed growth boundary, had a big gain as its home values rose 23.4 percent from 2003. This rise should trigger a new round of debate on what impact Portland-style growth management has on home prices.

Because this is an election season, the high cost of housing in many major markets could emerge as a sleeper issue in the presidential race, as part of what the Democrats call the “middle-class squeeze.” Many of the fastest price gains, and thus the greatest potential anxiety over housing costs, occurred in the hotly contested states of Florida, Nevada, and Oregon.

- Robert Lang

Now Mark Muro and Robert Puentes, in a research paper published by the Brooking Institution’s Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, bring it all together. They depend a lot on Burchell for the bottom line conclusion — that rational use of modestly more compact development patterns over the 2000-to-2025 period can cut nationwide highway building costs by $110 billion, or 11.8 percent, and water and sewer infrastructure costs $4 billion, or 3.7 percent.

Against 25 years of total national spending on the road, water and sewer infrastructure, those figures really aren’t large. The critical new question is whether today’s immense squeeze on state and local public budgets, likely to last well beyond any current economic recovery, will of itself force more conserving and rational forms of development.

What may be even more exciting, Muro and Puentes suggest, is a new wave of research starting to suggest that smart growth can enhance the performance of whole economies, as well as incomes across whole regions, including the suburbs. Their report reviews several studies pointing in that direction.

Maybe the question should be turned another way: What if a region tapped its full talent pools rather than relying on haphazard development thrusts? What if it mobilized its economic and civic players, devised regional futures that fuse land and water conservation with urban revitalization, strong center cities, tapping university resources, developing workforce skills, focusing business and trade strategies?

That’s the regional vision Curt Johnson and I have entertained ever since our Citistates book in the early ‘90s. Compact development, as sensible as it seems, would then be part of a coherent, more encompassing strategy.