Sprawl things considered: Controlling growth
If there are two sides to the growth management coin, they would be represented by Portland, Ore., and Atlanta. At opposite ends of the country, the two cities have some things in common: Both are among the fastest growing areas of the United States, and both have traditionally taken pride in their forested settings.
That, however, is pretty much where the resemblance ends. Metropolitan Portland is governed by a regionally elected government with a number of regional powers and responsibilities; Atlanta sits at the heart of a metropolitan area that features 13 counties and upwards of 75 cities and towns, each with its own government, and each jealously guarding its autonomy.
By 2040, Portland’s population is projected to reach 2.5 million, almost 70 percent higher than the current figure. Atlanta, which added 420,000 jobs to its economy between 1990 and 1996, is expected to add 1.3 million residents to its current 3.5 million between 1995 and 2020.
That population boom is expected to fuel a growth in Portland’s urbanized area of just 6 percent. Metropolitan Atlanta does half that every year.
More than a theory
Growth management is on the agenda of virtually every metropolitan area in the country. Conditions and circumstances are converging to force the issue out of the decades-old “good government” theory into urgent policy debate.
This convergence represents an historic shift perhaps as significant as the post-war suburbanization boom, now known pejoratively as “sprawl.”
Region after region is moving beyond the question of whether to continue sprawl patterns of the last 50 years or replace them with growth management policies designed to rein in untrammeled development. The question now is how this can be accomplished. And beneath it all lurks the question of who will win and who will lose.
Transforming these conflicts into win-win situations is the high art – and ordeal – of the planner.
The key questions that growth planners must answer include:
* What are the issues forcing reassessment of current sprawl patterns?
* What are the alternative growth patterns and how can they best be explored?
* What steps must be initiated and who must be included in order for cities to move forward?
* What obstacles must be overcome?
Environmental, public policy, economic and political considerations, along with quality of life questions, are independently and in conjunction with each other beginning to put the brakes on sprawl. Over the last 30 years, environmental conditions including air and water quality, solid and liquid waste issues and the land itself, whether built upon or not, have fallen under the purview of the federal government. At the same time, there has been a profound reduction of public development support dollars. Evidence is mounting that the sprawl patterns, with their innate geometric and density inefficiencies, have become unaffordable. At the urging of the mounting anti-sprawl forces, regional politicians are struggling to straddle the divergent forces. The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 and other similar federal legislation spawned metropolitan planning organizations with actual authority over at least growth-related issues, like transportation, though generally not land use or infrastructure. The relationship between MPOs and state highway departments remained relatively benign as long as a consensus existed that road building was the key to growth patterns then considered desirable. That consensus, however, is being increasingly challenged, creating rising tensions between MPOs, which are looking more and more at alternatives to road building, and state DOTs, most of which depend on road building for their very existence.
Over this same period, regional growth patterns, in many instances fueled by “white flight,” and the ensuing makeup of MPOs have contributed to the progressive disenfranchisement of core cities in most regions.
The traditional big city-rural area divergence has evolved into a big city-suburbs divergence in which suburban forces are challenging core city primacy. The resulting tensions have been magnified by racial and income stratification in development investment patterns and the public policies supporting them.
In Atlanta, for instance, recent studies by McKinsey Co. and Research Atlanta, a non-profit policy research group under the auspices of Georgia State University’s School of Policy Studies, focused attention on strategies to attract and retain middle class residents. These paralleled recent federal initiatives to restore the competitiveness of core cities’ attributes for middle class home buyer.
“One of the things we’re seeing [in Atlanta] is a suburbanization of the immigrant population,” says Tom Weyandt, a senior associate with Research Atlanta. “It’s not a trend you see in most cities. It’s creating new social and even racial dynamics in the suburbs.”
Information to accountability
Just as regional organizations did not exist when the sprawl pattern was launched, so, too, was there a dearth of information – or any ability to share what information was available – that would allow citizens the opportunity to act more directly on their living environment. The explosion in information accessibility, as well as a heightened role for citizens in their local governments, has changed the business-as-usual routine of local growth.
“Quality of life” has become a concrete economic imperative for cities and regions that are competing for future investment. The dependence on the car and the long commute and the traditional belief that building more roads alleviates rather than compounds the problems of sprawl are increasingly being questioned.
Portland made its choices over a 25-year period, through mandated implementation of far-reaching and continually evolving growth management policies. Denver, which has been seriously talking about growth management for around five years, has opted for a voluntary approach.
Within the last year, Atlanta has been driven to action by Clean Air Act prohibitions on the building of any more capacity into a highway network whose users already drive more miles on average than anyone else in the world.
Still, state and regional leaders are pushing for construction of a 211-mile Outer Perimeter around Atlanta that would carry sprawl even further from the city center. The $5 billion cost does not begin to take into consideration funding for the necessary but increasingly inefficient infrastructure improvements that would have to follow.
In an Atlanta Constitution editorial, Jeff Humphreys, director of economic forecasting at the University of Georgia’s School of Business,says, “Really, what these numbers argue for is more of the same – more building of infrastructure, primarily asphalt. The danger for Atlanta is, we may outgrow our infrastructure.”
In a related story, however, the newspaper points out the fallacy of that argument. “In a true market economy,” notes the paper, “business operates without subsidy from government, leaving consumers to decide the winners and losers. The real estate development business is the antithesis of that approach. It is entirely dependent on public investment in roads and sewers and other infrastructure.”
In many ways, Portland anticipated the problems with transportation, land use, solid waste and green space priorities and stressed a cohesive, participatory management of those priorities. Metro now has authority over light rail transit systems, downtown parking management, regional solid waste management and regional parks and cultural institutions.
More importantly, however, Portland created an “urban growth boundary,” beyond which most urban developments banned. (It’s not unique to Portland; all of Oregon’s 240 cities and towns have growth boundaries.)
Imitating success
Despite its limits on growth and an economy that is in flux as logging fades, the Portland region is growing at a rate more than two or three times the national average and has been for more than a decade. The city’s success has spawned imitators.
San Jose, Calif., for example, has adopted its own urban growth boundary, partly in an attempt to avoid becoming another Los Angeles. Additionally, Minneapolis and St. Paul have created a regional government to address growth issues.
Still, Portland has advantages many cities do not enjoy; its primacy in the region was secure and class and racial divisions pale in comparison to those in most other older cities. And a larger percentage of its metropolitan population lives in the city.
Exactly the opposite is true in Atlanta, and, to be fair, in many cities. And a like-minded state legislature in Oregon, which mandated the adoption of growth management plans in the first place, helps tremendously.
Recently, for instance, Wilsonville, one of the municipalities that makes up Portland Metro, passed an ordinance allowing it to ration permitted development. When that attempt was rebuffed in the courts, the state legislature passed a law that enabled the town to achieve its aims via different language.
As Planning Director Stefan Lashbrook says, “When we have approved so many developments that the traffic exceeds the capacity of successive interchanges, we will cease to approve projects.” What happens then remains to be seen.
Ironically, the very same growth management philosophy that attracts people to Portland may be the undoing of that philosophy.
An influx of Californians desperate to escape the nightmare of sprawl is causing some local residents to re-think growth limits. But David Knowles, director of the Portland Planning Department, contends that the city’s urban growth boundary is safe. “The urban growth boundary is coming under increased levels of scrutiny,” he says. “But what you have to understand is there is fundamental support for growth limits. Folks interested in limiting expansion are talking about expanding the urban growth boundary by 4,000 acres. Homebuilders are in the 10,000-acre to 12,000-acre range.
“It’s really not that big a difference when you consider in California a 10,000-acre subdivision is not all that unusual. There’s a fundamental consensus here that land use planning works well.”
Portland’s experience, Knowles says, holds lessons for other cities, even those that do not enjoy its advantages. “We focused on preserving the vitality of downtown early on,” he says. “Twenty years ago, we made decisions that are paying off today. Planning for the long term is extremely important. Second, we have listened. This government has been extremely responsive to what its citizens say. Third, we plan for community; we don’t plan for shopping malls. It’s a different approach.”
Denver, on the other hand, is basking in a sustained, robust growth after years of growth-sag cycles, so there is an understandable reluctance on the part of some area residents to limit growth in any way. At the same time, Denverites are afflicted with chronic air quality problems, an upsurge in vehicle-miles-traveled and other persistent environmental threats.
Nearby Boulder is even considering paying commuters a dollar per trip to leave their cars at home.
The Denver Regional Council of Governments, “Dr. Cog,” to residents, has been struggling to respond to these forces for the past five years. About a year ago, Dr. Cog was able to achieve a consensus on a 700-square-mile urban growth limit and other growth management measures. Critical to that success, however, was an agreement not to seek state mandates enforcing the measures and to expressly seek their achievement through voluntary collaboration.
The difficulty for Denver is in creating a continuing commitment to the idea of growth management in a region with a diverse population that has divergent interests and that lives in areas that have dramatically different physical characteristics. A year into attempts to implement the growth policy, Scott Woodward, the council’s executive assistant to the director, still expects it to be a “tough, slow, arduous process.”
Like most core cities, Denver is no longer the center of Colorado’s universe. But its aggressive upgrade of its urban design and quality-of-life assets is helping it create a working, if still fragile, consensus between the landlocked, mature core city and the outlying rapidly growing areas like Douglas County, currently the fastest growing county in the United States.
In metro Atlanta, growth management is just now beginning to advance past the whisper stage. A “Vision 2020” exercise sponsored by the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) and a series of workshops and forums spearheaded by the Georgia Conservancy and supported by the Georgia Homebuilders Association and the American Institute of Architects pointed up the concerns shared by the region’s citizens.
Then EPA added metropolitan Atlanta to the list of air quality non-attainment areas, meaning that federal money would no longer be available for road projects that would increase the system’s capacity.
Most local officials are still in denial about the potential repercussions; indeed, one of the first actions taken so far was the dedication of $1.5 million (half from federal funds, half from local money) to a Volunteer Ozone Action Partners Program, the purpose of which is to seek to encourage “alternate travel behavior” on the eve of anticipated ozone standard violation days.
ARC is struggling to put together regional development and transportation plans that will meet mandated air quality standards. It is too early to determine whether its efforts are anywhere close to being considered a basis for growth management measures, but they have engendered discussion over better use of existing development, as well as transit, densities and the proposed Outer Perimeter. Before any substantive changes can occur, however, the local developers and the regional political leadership (which largely owes its existence to sprawl) must overcome their commitment to the premise that what has propelled Atlanta for the last 30 years is the only road to take in the next 30.
Indeed, leadership is a key component in Atlanta’s failure to create any meaningful growth management plans. And there is a real question whether the same leaders who have been building sprawl can be expected to help reverse it.
“With few exceptions, we lack any sort of leadership that is willing to engage in looking ahead,” Weyandt contends. “In this region, we just react to crises.” Atlanta also suffers a number of ills peculiar to the South, according to Weyandt.
“We have a tradition of a sort of laissez-faire attitude toward land use regulation,” he says. “There’s no history or legal framework for it in the South. We also have a proliferation of local governments. Along the city’s northern tier, you can be in four major counties in a 20-minute drive. That creates enormous competition for the tax base.
Third, we have issues of race that we find difficult to deal with or even talk about. And last, we have a very, very powerful DOT.”
Weyandt, who lives in the city and says he rarely ventures outside its perimeter, is not optimistic. “I see no near-term change of transportation policy, which is key,” he says. “And it’s not in the cards for Atlanta to deal with regional tax base sharing. It’s hard to see things that will make any significant change.”
“You can’t manage growth unless people want it managed,” agrees Barbara Ray, an associate professor of urban studies in the Georgia State Department of Public Administration and Urban Studies. “Different communities have different value systems. I don’t think Atlanta wants to manage growth. Growth is such an imbedded part of our value system.”
This is not peculiar to Atlanta, Ray says. “Most of the U.S. thinks growth will solve our problems,” she says.
Atlanta, however, is beginning to build communities that take advantage of the strengths inherent in its ethnic and racial diversity. Among its Olympic legacies is Atlanta’s vision of itself as an international city. Intergenerational, mixed-income and cross-cultural communities are showing a small but growing demand on the parts of newcomers, jaded suburbanites and upwardly mobile inner-city dwellers, both in its commercial centers and its older neighborhoods.
The emphasis on transportation is a key element in any successful growth management plan. But it takes a regional approach that is often lacking.
Not in Delaware, however, where the Wilmington Area Planning Council (WILMAPCO) is using Middletown’s sprawl management plan as a template for recreating communities. The “mobility-friendly” design initiative is, according to WILMAPCO Executive Director Alexander Taft, studying new standards that may lead to the implementation of the region’s first pedestrian-oriented model. Here, again, leadership was a key factor in the process. Middletown’s local government, wary of the results of explosive growth, asked to become WILMAPCO’s guinea pig for the project, which was initiated in 1996. The project involves a review of current standards and development of new municipal transportation and land use regulations. Subdivision streets and roads are being reworked to allow new styles of development, such as pedestrian-oriented mixed use and town-centered projects, Taft says.
In an article in the Wilmington Sunday News Journal, Taft wrote, “The 1.7 million auto trips made every day in our region are predicted to grow by 40 percent by 2020. Congestion, suburban sprawl and infrastructure costs will continue to escalate. If growth continues under the shortcomings of current design standards, travel by means other than the automobile will be nearly impossible.”
Middletown’s “traffic calming” process will involve an arrangement of streets, parking, sidewalks, bike paths, transit facilities, landscaping and building locations that will make shorter trips easier and foster a deeper sense of community. Importantly, the Delaware DOT is on board.
Learning from mistakes
Interestingly, some suburbs and exurbs are not waiting for cities to begin the growth management process. Cherokee County, 30 miles north of Atlanta, is projected to double in size by 2010, and that makes local leaders in the largest agricultural county in the Atlanta area, nervous.
So nearly two years ago, the county began creating an ambitious, 20-year comprehensive plan. Cherokee 2017: The Township Plan recognized the fact that only 38 percent of the county’s 278,000 acres were developed and realized that the remaining 62 percent were at risk of the runaway growth that has characterized many of Atlanta’s northern suburbs.
A 53-member Blue Ribbon Panel spent eight months researching, meeting and reviewing 13 successful models of quality growth in the U.S. from areas like Boulder, Colo.; Palm Beach County, Fla.; and Petaluma and Santa Barbara, Calif., all of which are located near major cities. The county also gathered national and international urban design experts like Anton Nelessen to meet with its citizens. (Enthusiasm for his “Visual Preference Survey” session was so high that it got 250 people working together for eight hours on the Saturday before Christmas.)
Eventually, a geographically simple design taking into account the county’s abundance of small-village areas was incorporated into the master plan. Strict design and building codes help the county create a distinctive look for each of its communities, and guidelines ensure that the commercial village areas of each of the 13 townships are surrounded by housing and feature horse trails, open space and parks.
Residents select the “look” of retail/office development. The project is being managed by Kevin Johns, the county’s economic director, who founded the Southern Community Design Center Group, a non-profit network of architects, economists, urban planners and consultants involved in the rebuilding of urban and rural communities nationwide.
Cause and effect
The questions about containing and controlling sprawl, however, remain: What does it take? What barriers exist? Who leads the change?
Recognition that the development industry is always symbiotically linked with public policy is a good starting point. But that could mean drastically altering past practices for both partners in the symbiosis. Federal policy, for example, launched and fueled sprawl through road-building and housing subsidies.
Now it is reversing field both through environmental priorities and sharply reduced funding resources. The great tussle over the reappropriation of ISTEA, for example, is rooted in response to this changing conditions. In the balance are the relative portions of dollars for new highways versus maintaining what we have, of dollars for highways versus other modes, and the respective levels of policy authority between jurisdictions increasingly resistant to sprawl, (though not necessarily in sync) and those that promulgate sprawl.
Maryland, with a “Smart Growth” policy pushed by Gov. Parris Glendening, may be leading the trend recognizing the links between development and public policy. The state, according to State Planning Director Ronald Kreitner, is trying to end “an insidious form of entitlement – the idea that state government has an open-ended obligation, regardless of where you choose to build a house or open a business, to be there to build roads, schools and sewers.”
Consequently, the state is concentrating its resources more where people and communities already exist and limiting – or even withholding subsidies for infrastructure outside the targeted “Smart Growth” areas.
Without sharp limits, Glendening says, the state will have “virtually abandoned [its] . . . historic urban centers, consumed hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland and forests and divided [its] population into enclaves of rich and poor . . .”
Several factors emerge as essential in any sprawl containment strategy: a broad-based acknowledgement of the need to explore new paths; a leadership commitment by a combination of political, business, citizen, media and special interests; regionally scaled ‘visioning exercises;’ identification of steps or benchmarks for launching and then measuring progress; and, finally, sustained follow-through.
“Visioning exercises,” familiar in most regional jurisdictions, are a critical first step. They allow citizens to describe and see together the diversity of their aspirations. An early part of any followup activities should be a critical but progressive assessment of systems already in place. These may prove to already have promise for initiating growth management measures, like restricting extension of base infrastructure like water or sewer lines.
In some places, sprawl is already losing momentum. Curious alliances are forming between sprawl-resistant environmentalist suburban communities and resurgent inner cities. For any momentum to develop, however, cities, suburbs, regional planning organizations and departments of transportation have to find political parity.
That shared vision was suggested in a 1993 address given by Birmingham, Ala., Mayor Richard Arrington to the Alabama Conservancy. “The best way to save the country,” he noted, “is to save the city, and the best way to save the city is to save the countryside.”
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the projected 266 million people now living in the United States will increase in number to 394 million by 2050. That figure prompts a number of critical questions: Will there be enough schools for the children? Will there be an adequate amount of green space? How long will it take to get to work? Will there be enough water? Fuel? Where will everyone live?
In a new book, Douglas Porter, president of the Chevy Chase, Md.-based Growth Management Institute and other members of the institute attempt to answer these questions by explaining how communities can balance their economic, social and environmental concerns. Managing Growth in America’s Communities covers topics such as:
* fiscal issues in growth management;
* where growth should take place and where it should not;
* property rights in growth management;
* transportation planning;
* ensuring citizen support for development planning; and
* achieving economic and social goals.
The book draws on actual community experiences to describe proven strategies, policies, programs and techniques for managing growth in both rural and urban areas. Arlington County, Va.; Fort Collins, Colo.; Lincoln, Neb.; Sarasota, Fla.; Raleigh, N.C.; and Scottsdale, Ariz., all of which have adopted growth management plans, are profiled.
Experts in growth management, including Robert Yaro, John DeGrove and Arthur Nelson, provide informational sidebars throughout the book.
Available from Island Press, 1718 Connecticut Ave., N.W., Suite 300, Washington, D.C. 20009-1148 (ISBN: 1-55963-442-1), the book is $29.95.