ABSTRACT
Advocates of better metropolitan development policies have come up with a clever brand name: Smart Growth. Washington State's growth management law uses both concurrency and growth boundaries. The Portland, Oregon, metropolitan area is a place that has carried out a program of limiting growth at the metropolitan fringe. Because the idea of limiting growth is still widely considered to be un-American, it may be that the most effective way to achieve smart growth would be to deal with underlying causes of sprawl. Metropolitan growth and development patterns are our biggest single sustainability issue. Additional states have planning legislation, environmental impact review laws, or other types of growth management, but there is still a long way to go before all the states have addressed these issues and there is anything like a system of growth management that covers the whole country.
