The battle over sprawl rages. On one side are the sprawlaphobics - people who see the new suburban clusters, the big box retail corners, and the strips of doughnut shops-cum-gas stations as a modern-day menace, wiping out swath s of idyllic greenery.

To stop this menace, the sprawlaphobics - or, depending upon your perspective, defenders of open space - debated and voted on 553 limited-growth ballot measures this past year in 38 states. Most focused on keeping open space open. Three-quarters of the measures passed. In the Northeast, 98 percent of the measures involving land acquisition passed - most overwhelmingly.

On the other side of the battle are developers, who make their living building the suburban split levels, the big boxes, and drive-through whatevers. For them, limited growth translates into limited income. They are joined in battle with some unlikely allies: affordable housing advocates, who recognize the Freshman Economics 101 axiom: Limited supply drives up prices. To expand the housing stock, affordable housing advocates want fewer restrictions on where developers - especially not-for-profits - can build.

It is time for a truce in this battle of rhetoric. The sprawlaphobics must recognize that they cannot stop growth. Demographics fuel the expansion. The nation is adding households at a brisk pace. During the 1990s, the population grew by 32.7 million - an increase undergirded by near-record immigration. These families must live someplace.

During the decade, we built 16 million new homes. If, to safeguard open space, we ensure that suburb x, y, or z does not add to its housing stock, we limit the total number of homes available to a metropolitan region's residents. That limitation may well drive up housing costs in the entire region, shutting out many families from homeownership (and leaving others paying more than half their income for rent). That limitation will not stop the demographic growth behind the surging demand. Even if we sealed shut our borders, our demography dictates further growth.

Nor can sprawlaphobics stop our proclivity for suburban living. Long before highways, when horses were the mode of transit, people looked favorably on suburbs. The English talked of bourgeois utopias. Today, although new immigrants disproportionately settle in cities, when those immigrants have scraped together enough to buy a home, they opt for suburbs.

The gentrification that has brought Starbucks to cities has brought a respectable contingent of new urban residents, happy to sip an evening latte after strolling through art galleries. But statistically the return of the new urban-dwellers has been a blip, dwarfed by the exodus of families - including minorities - from cities. The imbalance is especially large for families earning $70,000 or more: For every one household that moved to the city, more than three left.

Highways are not the villain here - the highways facilitated people's movements but did not make them want a backyard. Ironically, limited growth initiatives may foster sprawl, forcing developers to leap-frog over suburbs to the exurban unincorporated areas. Developers, too, must recognize the genuine anguish of people who have watched open space give way to big box corners or rolling hills morph into two-acre McMansion enclaves.

Indeed, the people lucky enough to own McMansions wonder at their good fortune when their trek to work takes an hour in aggravatingly slow traffic. However much a laissez-faire approach to land use will bolster developers' coffers, that approach will aesthetically and qualitatively impoverish the rest of us.

The word density belongs in the discussion over sprawl. Not just density of urban centers - which are less dense today than they were 50 years ago - but density of (at least part of) suburban neighborhoods. To accommodate the growing number of households, suburbs must make room for newcomers, incorporating smaller homes (remember when we used to build starter homes?) on smaller lots, as well as multi-family housing units.

The aging baby boomers happily living in their suburban Colonials may want more clustered housing over the next decade. The people who fear sprawl must welcome more people into their communities, including their own grown children. The limited growth initiatives, whatever their environmental and aesthetic motivations, serve to keep lower-income families out - in effect, trapping them in the cities they want to leave or pushing them to places without barriers.

All of this - whatever the intentions - sounds and looks like racism. As for developers and low-income housing advocates, they must concede that quality of life counts - that the public has a vested interest in preserving open space, as well as in reducing traffic congestion. Density and open space must be compatible and complementary, not mutually exclusive.

In short, sprawlaphobics and developers must stop seeing the other as the enemy, and recognize each other as allies.