ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the trend of United States suburban residents mobilizing to enact local growth controls. It seeks to delineate the factors that explain why a large number of suburban residents support local growth controls. The predictors of suburban support for local growth controls have been studied by many urban scholars. The supporters of local growth controls, then, are similar to the "New Fiscal Populists" or the New Political Culture (NPC) model of citizen movements. In the 1982 survey, 40 percent thought that local growth restrictions were not strict enough, 51 percent reported that local growth regulations were about right, and 9 percent viewed them as too strict. The final regression equation including all variables indicates that it is the perception of rapid growth, rather than economic attitudes, that is most significantly related to support for local growth controls. The chapter considers a number of hypotheses based upon the New Political Culture model, which were tested using the Orange County.
