Problems Associated with Sprawl:

• Increased Auto Dependence and Fuel Consumption: Sprawl isolates different land uses causing increased reliance on the automobile. People commute greater distances to work or travel greater distances to shop. The present trend is not sustainable, as highways become clogged with traffic and energy consumption increases. New highways are sprawl magnets–once built, they attract more cars and more development.

-Some Statistics:

-While the average population growth since 1982 in 68 metro areas was 22%, road space grew by 33%.

-Nearly 70% of the growth in driving between 1983-1990 can be attributed to factors influenced by a sprawling development pattern (This is according to Surface Transportation Policy Progress)

Auto Dependence results in road construction, the expenses of which fall on the taxpayers:

-More statistics:

-As reported by the Sierra Club: From 1996 to 1997, 21 states spent over half of their federal transportation dollars on new road construction.

WDIY Features on Transportation Issues and Sprawl: The Environmental and Economic Consequences of the Route 33 Extension How Feasible is it to Take Public Transit and Leave the Car at Home? Influence of the Extension of Route 33 on Suburban Development

 

• Loss of "Sense of Place": Sprawl can turn a landscape, once considered unique, into as James Howard Kunstler says, "the geography of nowhere." Sprawl destroys the unique character of urban and rural areas creating miles of undifferentiated new development. Activities that once took place in the center of cities and towns have been relocated to the periphery of these more densely populated areas. As centers lose their importance as the heart of communities, civic values are also weakened. Individuals become alienated from their neighbors as downtowns and village centers no longer function as meeting places.

WDIY Features on Character Impacts of Sprawl: The Lehigh Valley is in Danger of Losing its Character Because of Rapid Development What's Old is New: A Traditional Approach to Creating Sense of Community

• Environmental Impacts: A sprawl pattern of development not only leads to loss of wildlife habitat, but can also increases hazards to public safety. Wetlands and other natural resources are also put at risk by increased land consumption for roads and housing development.

Wetlands: Swamps, marshland that prevent flooding. They also contain a variety of life and ecosystems that are crucial for a healthy environment. They are natural filters.

Some Statistics:

-According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency more than half of the wetlands in the lower 48 states have been destroyed, not including Alaska.

-According to the 1999 Sierra Club Sprawl Report, Each year, we destroy more than 110,000 acres of wetlands.

-Related to this destruction of wetlands: In the past eight years, floods in the U.S. killed more than 850 people and caused more than $89 billion in property damage. (Much of this damage happened in states and counties where weak zoning laws allowed developers to drain wetlands and build in floodplains.)

 

• Land Consumption and Threat to Farmland: The agricultural landscapes which surrounds most of our cities and towns is being converted to development at a still accelerating rate. Farmland is lost as subdivisions and malls with large parking lots are built. Asphalt replaces topsoil. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as stated in their 1997 National Resources Inventory, between 1992 and 1997 the rate of loss of farmland grew to 3.2 million acres a year.

WDIY Features on Land Consumption: Financing Land Preservation in the Lehigh Valley

• Costs to Local Government- Urban sprawl is a burden on local government because it forces limited resources to be allocated to the creation of new infrastructure rather than maintaining existing infrastructure. As sprawl encourages populations to move outside of older established communities, the tax base of these communities is diminished requiring a reduction of services to the remaining population. Ironically, many state and local government policies actually end up subsidizing a sprawl pattern of development.
• The Inner city (Social Impacts)- Sprawl can have a devastating impact on the poor and racial minorities who are often concentrated in inner city neighborhoods. Not only does sprawl lead to the dispersal of job opportunities, but it absorbs large amounts of government spending (on new infrastructure) which might otherwise be used to deal with inner city problems. In addition, sprawl may well sharpen racial segregation within metropolitan areas.

WDIY Features on Sprawl's Impact on Cities: Sprawl's Effects on Center Cities How the Development of Suburbs has Drained our Cities of Important Resources

 

Roots of Sprawl:

• Zoning Policies- The physical separation of different land uses into commercial, residential, and industrial zones. Zoning segregates classes and places of living, working, shopping, etc. The physical separation of land means that we must drive longer distances to accomplish simple errands. Zoning also segregates classes and places

James Howard Kunstler:

"Our zoning laws are essentially a manual of instructions for creating the stuff of our communities. Most of these laws have been in place only since WWII…What zoning produces is suburban sprawl, which must be understood as the product of a particular set of instructions. Its chief characteristics are the strict separation of human activities, mandatory driving to get from one activity to another, and huge supplies of free parking. After all, the basic idea of zoning is that every activity demands a separate zone of its own. For people to live around shopping would be harmful and indecent. Better not even to allow them within walking distance of it. While we are at it lets separate the homes by income gradients."

The increased exclusion of uses from zones, coupled with a penchant for low development density (low-density-is best-density) resulted in vast spread cities of huge zones of developmental uniformity and life-style conformity (i.e. income, profession, race, ethnicity, etc.). Most commonly, this meant the exclusion of all but the more affluent from participation in the new modern suburban-American society.

NIMBY’s —"Not in my backyard."

BANANAs —"Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything."

NIMBYs attempt to use their town government to prevent development in their neighborhoods for a variety of reasons some noble, (i.e. unwillingness to accept undesirable industry, traffic concerns, environmental concerns, etc.) Some reasons are less noble. The NIMBY syndrome often pits middle-income neighborhood groups against low-income people who need subsidized housing, thus splitting the urban populist coalition along class lines.

• Competition for tax revenue- Competition among local governments for tax revenues has helped encourage poorly planned development, often a component of sprawl.
• Regional Planning- (This is Related to Zoning) According to planning historian Laurence Gerken, in his "Ten Failures that Shaped the 20^th Century American City", two planning-related failures that helped foster sprawl:

1. The Lost Vision of Regional Planning- Original purpose of planning was to preserve farmland and forest between urban areas. Regional planning has turned its focus to "planning for metropolitan expansion, through the provision of large-scale transportation systems and mass recreation areas."
2. The Fragmented Nature of Metropolitan Governance- A related reason why planning efforts have often accomplished little in dealing with regional development is due to the diffusion of land use control among dozens of municipalities. "Laws empowering individual communities to plan and act to fulfill their own definitions of the public interest might well have made sense at the beginning of the twentieth century when urban settlements were small and isolated from one another. But such ‘home rule’, when engaged in by a plethora of communities within a metropolitan area, led to the failure to address pressing area-wide issues." Many community leaders now recognize that fragmented metropolitan governance, combined with the limited implementation powers of regional planning agencies, have made it more difficult to combat sprawl development.

EXAMPLE: Former Missouri Senator John Danforth, in a 1997 "Report to the Community": "Our region of 2.5 million people consists of two states, the City of St. Louis, eleven surrounding counties and a multitude of municipalities, school districts, taxing authorities and government service providers. It is a system that encourages jealousies and fosters stalemate…A comprehensive answer to our problems of governance is probably beyond our reach, but the status quo is absolutely unacceptable.

• Highway Building: the Interstate Highway System has also led to dispersal of growth and development.
• Housing Policies: Federal housing policy after WWII helped foster the movement of the middle class out of the city into an expanding suburban periphery. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was created in 1934 to "encourage improvement in housing standards and conditions and to provide a system of mutual mortgage insurance." In so doing, Congress encouraged small home construction and established minimum standards for an FHA-insured home mortgage that guaranteed that the unit would be a size and quality desired by those of above average means. It also guaranteed that the dominant American dwelling unit of the future would be the single family home on a suburban lot and that most Americans of below average means would not have access to these newly developed suburban areas.

These policies encouraged white-flight- the exodus of middle, upper-class and, usually, white residents from the urban cores toward ex-urban, suburban communities. White flight results in the concentration of lower-income residents in the urban cores and, as a consequence, lower tax bases in the urban cities. This concentration of the poor in the cities has been linked to the cities’ high crime rates, drug use, poorer municipal services (particularly the education system), and other such urban blights.

WDIY Features on the Segregating Effects of Sprawl: The Allure of Suburban Subdivisions vs. Center Cities

 

Related Terms:

Exclusionary Zoning/ Large-lot zoning- A device for raising the minimum cost of new construction. Sometimes the regulations specify minimum floor-space requirements and minimum street set-backs. This is a device to keep out people with lower incomes.

Restrictive (Racial) Covenants- was former practice of the Federal Housing Administration and the Real Estate Industry that was declared illegal in a Supreme Court decision in 1948. The FHA and Real Estate Industry believed that the entry of a nonwhite family into a white neighborhood inevitably led to declining property values. The FHA administrators advised developers of residential projects that they should draw restrictive covenants barring sales to nonwhites before seeking FHA-insured financing. It established federally sponsored mores for discrimination in suburban communities in which 80% of all new housing was being built! Between 1946 and 1959 less than 2% of all the housing financed with the assistance of federal mortgage insurance was purchased by blacks.

 

Redlining- Banks draw a red line on maps to designate neighborhoods considered poor investment risks. Banks refuse to make home loans in certain areas regardless of the qualifications of individual loan applicants.

Some Solutions to the Sprawl Problem:

• Principles of NEW URBANISM : From Home from Nowhere, Kunstler:

(Aside: New Urbanism is also referred to as Neo-Traditional Planning, Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND’s), and Transit-Oriented Development)

According to Kunstler, the following principles produce settings that resemble Pre-WWII communities. The principles apply to villages, towns and cities.

1. The basic unit of planning is the neighborhood. Clusters of neighborhoods become a city. The population of a neighborhood can vary depending on local conditions.
2. The neighborhood is limited in physical size, with well-defined edges and a focused center. The size of a neighborhood is defined as a five-minute walking distance from the edge to the center and a ten-minute walk edge to edge. Automobiles are permitted but do not take precedence over human needs, including aesthetic needs. The neighborhood contains a public-transit stop.
3. The secondary units of planning are corridors and districts. Corridors form the boundaries between neighborhoods. Corridors can incorporate natural features like streams, canyons or can take the form of parks, travel corridors, railroad lines, or some combination of these. Districts are made up of streets.
4. The neighborhood is mixed-used and provides housing for people with different incomes. The needs of daily life are accessible within the five-minute walk. Commerce is integrated with residential, business and manufacturing uses. Apartments are permitted over stores. Forms of housing are mixed, including apartments, duplex and single-family houses.
5. The street is the pre-eminent form of public space, buildings are expected to embellish it.
6. The street pattern allows the greatest number of alternative routes from one part of the neighborhood to another (i.e. it is gridded, has rotaries, diagonals, T intersections, and NO cul-de-sacs. This relieves traffic congestion.
7. Civic buildings, such as town halls, churches, schools, libraries, and museums are placed on preferential sites, in order to serve as landmarks and to symbolize their importance.

WDIY Topic Related Stories Featuring National Experts: Author James Howard Kunstler Talks About the Evolution of the American Town Author Thomas Hylton Talks About Rediscovering our Cities and Towns

 

Solutions Continued:

• Clustered Development or Open Space Zoning: Clustered Development or Open Space Zoning unlike typical Space subdivisions which divide the land into large lots, allow development on only a portion of the land while conserving the remainder as open space. Open Space Zoning preserves open space, natural areas, and farmland.

WDIY Features on Development Strategies: New Development Strategies Aimed at Saving Land

 

• Transfer of Development Rights (TDRs): Provide an economic incentive for preserving undeveloped land. TDRs create a market by which farmers, for example, can sell their development rights to someone wishing to develop in a receiving area for TDRs.
• Conservation Easements and Land Purchases- offer long-term protection for especially valuable open space, natural areas and farmland. Land trusts from across the country have tried to accomplish this. Strategically located easements and conservation land purchases can help keep development away from important natural areas. They can also help structure a region’s pattern of growth and development. Greenways, parks, and other open space can help focus where growth will occur-a means of changing from sprawling pattern of development.
• Reinvestment in the downtown areas/Urban Renewal- Involves reinvesting in abandoned urban infrastructure. However, it is not always beneficial to city residents, particularly poorer communities because it raises property taxes to unaffordable levels. It often replaces affordable housing with more expensive housing, forcing the lower-income residents to relocate to yet poorer neighborhoods.

Related terms:

Brownfields- Abandoned, idled, or under-used industrial and commercial facilities where expansion or redevelopment is complicated by real or perceived environmental contamination