Given the steady march of adverse environmental impacts and inimical socioeconomic and community change at the local level in many metropolitan areas—due in part to haphazard growth—this Article identifies and examines a significant concern with how we have tried to manage sprawl into the rural parts of regions. Planners' heavy reliance upon programs and policies that are time-limited or mostly serve to pace growth may merely delay an inevitable environmental and economic decline. This Article analyzes the legal possibilities of stronger, more definitive policies. It then proposes an approach that combines several mechanisms that might, acting together, help avoid the pitfalls of relying chiefly upon temporal urban containment tools.