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Suburban sprawl an irresistible force in US

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Suburban sprawl an irresistible force in US

By Alan Elsner Thu Jan 26, 8:19 AM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Across the United States, an unprecedented acceleration in suburban sprawl is prompting concerns about the environment, traffic, health and damage to rural communities, but opponents appear powerless to stop the process because of the economic development and profits it generates.
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Sprawl, defined as the unplanned, uncontrolled expansion of urban areas beyond their fringes, has greatly accelerated over the past 25 years, spurred by low mortgage interest rates and aggressive developers.

According to the National Resources Inventory, about 34 million acres -- an area the size of Illinois -- were converted to developed uses between 1982 and 2001. Development in the 1990s averaged around 2.2. million acres a year, compared to 1.4 million

in the 1980s. By 2001, the total developed area in the lower 48 states was slightly more than 106 million acres.

In other words, around one-third of that total was paved over in the final two decades of the 20th century.

"In the realm of local government, growth is one of the most controversial issues, and we see no-growth or slow-growth groups becoming more sophisticated and powerful over time," said Richard Hall of the Maryland Department of Planning.

However, he said opposition tended to fade during economic downturns, when people became less concerned about the environment. Even when opponents succeeded in blocking a specific development, the net effect was often merely to move it to somewhere else.

"Some politicians have tried to do something but they have rarely succeeded in stemming the tide. Developers and realtors have developed a powerful political lobby," said Joel Hirschhorn, a former director of environment, energy and natural resources at the National Governors Association and author of "Sprawl Kills -- Better Living in Healthy Places."

STEERING DEVELOPMENT

"Smart growth" or "slow growth" advocates usually argue that development should be concentrated in existing urban or suburban areas instead of in new suburbs. Many states and counties have tried to protect open space by buying land and through zoning and other regulations.

Others try to provide incentives for farmers and foresters to remain on their land. None of these has had any measurable effect in slowing sprawl.

For Maryland Rep. Wayne Gilchrest (news, bio, voting record), a moment of truth came when he was flying over the Atlantic coastline close to his own congressional district and he saw in the distance what looked like a massive cemetery.

Gilchrest, a Republican who represents an area of northern Maryland alongside the Chesapeake Bay, looked closer and realized he was viewing a huge new suburban development that had sprung up seemingly overnight.

"I'm afraid our heritage is being arbitrarily and summarily discarded without the slightest thought of what we are losing." Gilchrest said in an interview.

In the Chesapeake Bay watershed, which comprises parts of seven northeastern states, some 128,000 acres of natural land are converted into suburbs every year and the rate more than doubled in the 1990s. The number of houses has expanded at more than twice the rate of population growth.

For centuries, Gilchrest said, his community survived through agriculture, forestry and harvesting the rich resources of the bay. But pollution is killing the bay; it no longer supports a sizeable oyster or crab industry. And farmland is fast being turned into clusters of vacation and retirement homes for residents of Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Philadelphia.

Opponents blame sprawl for a host of problems from traffic jams to bad air, polluted waterways, the destruction of traditional lifestyles and even asthma and obesity.

"Sprawl is killing people, some 300,000 premature deaths annually because of the sprawl sedentary lifestyle, and it is killing our natural environment, scenic vistas, biodiversity, rural towns and much more," said Hirschhorn.

But Robert Bruegmann, a University of Illinois at Chicago professor of architecture and urban planning, and author of "Sprawl: A Compact History" debunked many of these assertions.

SERVING THE MARKET

"What we call sprawl is the process of a lot of people being able to acquire what only the wealthiest people used to be able to have -- a single family home on land with private transportation," he said, echoing the argument of developers that they were merely catering to what the market demanded.

According to Bruegmann, densely populated cities were much unhealthier and worse for the environment than suburbs.

"Agriculture is often worse for the environment that suburbs while cities did a terrible job of protecting water quality," he said.

Still, citizens in some states are responding to politicians' calls to slow or halt sprawl. Last year, Democrat Timothy Kaine won election as governor of Virginia partly by promising a solution to the state's crowded highways.

In his first speech to the state assembly this month, Kaine proposed giving local governments more power to slow growth. "We cannot allow uncoordinated development to overwhelm our roads and infrastructure," he said.

In response, home builders and real estate agents immediately sent 200 of their members to the state capital of Richmond to lobby state representatives and remind them of the dangers of halting development.

Though there is little polling information, a Gallup survey in March 2001 found that 69 percent of Americans were worried about sprawl and the loss of green spaces.

But the economic forces behind sprawl are powerful. "It's hard for a farmer to turn down $100,000 an acre from a developer when he's not making a tenth of that from agriculture," Gilchrest said.
 
Ah whatever happened to the suburban dream where you could go into the suburbs and avoid all the city traffic? They should have seen that it would only last temporarily.
 
From Streetsblog.net:

It’s the Sprawl, Stupid — The Budget Buster No One’s Talking About

Map1_large1.gif

Buffalo tripled its area served by infrastructure between 1950 and 2000 but added no population. And we wonder why states are broke. Photo: Urbanophile

Across the nation, there’s a lot of hand wringing going on about how state budget crises will affect local communities. Will trash pickup be less frequent? Will senior services be cut? How will the schools be affected?

All of this obscures, to a certain extent, one of the major ways we got ourselves into this mess in the first place. For roughly 50 years, states have allowed and encouraged their metro areas to grow outward, building countless miles of new roads, sewers, and other infrastructure with little regard for the sustainability and efficiency of the new communities.

This trend is particularly disastrous in places that have had stagnant or declining populations, as Aaron Renn from the Urbanophile explains:

Think Chicago (where the region only gained 362,000 people and the city lost 200,000), or Detroit or Cleveland. In these places sprawl is simply sucking the life out of the heart of the region. This was perhaps best shown in Buffalo, which Chuck Banas described as an example of “sprawl in its purest form.†Between 1950 and 2000, the Buffalo region tripled its urban footprint, but added effectively no population.

Wonder why Illinois and Chicago are in such a horrible fiscal crisis? Yes, Springfield is dysfunctional. Yes, there are sweetheart union deals. This is all true. But the massive exurbanization of the region while the core (excepting the “core of the coreâ€) declines is a massive drain on the treasury. Huge sums of money are being pumped into serving these areas, whether that be a Metra line extension to Elburn or brand new Ogden Ave. in Oswego. This investment is being made at a time when the existing infrastructure cannot be maintained. And that new urbanized footprint has to be maintained itself and operated in perpetuity. Plus, the rump suburbs and neighborhoods being left behind get turned into de facto wards of the state or federal government, a costly enterprise in its own right. It should be totally unsurprising that we’re in a fiscal mess here.

Michigan and Ohio are even worse. Michigan as a whole lost population. The Detroit region did as well, yet there are still all sorts of highway expansion projects on the books there. In Ohio, the state is widening roads in Cleveland while the population on a regional basis dropped. As Ed Glaeser noted, the problem with shrinking cities is that they have too much infrastructure relative to population, so why build even more infrastructure you have to maintain? During the stimulus, Ohio’s #1 highway project was a $150 million bypass around a town of 5,000. With decisions like these, it is any wonder these states are in trouble?​

Budget cuts are going to be painful in Ohio and Michigan and lots of other places. They were inevitable, recession or not, in part because this type of development is simply not sustainable, economically or otherwise. It’s unfortunate that the leaders in these states haven’t taken this opportunity to reexamine some of the macro-level policy decisions that led to the current crisis.

The more politically expedient thing seems to be talking tough about union contracts, or even transit and schools. In Wisconsin, Scott Walker is actually planning to expand highway spending, while taking a hacksaw to everything else. But budget cuts alone can’t help these states out of the disaster they have created until they acknowledge the huge public expense of building and maintaining sprawl. Until then, all this talk of “fiscal conservatism†is just that: talk.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Walkable Dallas-Fort Worth maps the city’s outdoor cafes as a rough approximation of the region’s most vibrant urban places. Wash Cycle celebrates the expansion of Capital Bikeshare. And Chris Leinberger at The New Republic examines how demographic analysis from Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox gives an incomplete picture of the demand for walkable, urban places.
 
Amazing that the Buffalo urban area takes up more space than Mississauga and Toronto combined (367+ sq miles vs 356 sq miles) yet the Buffalo urbanized area has less than 1/3 of the population of Toronto and Mississauga combined (0.95 million vs 3.3+ million). Wow.

I guess it explains why Mississauga Transit alone has 70% higher transit ridership than all of the transit in the Buffalo metropolitan area combined (160k weekday boardings vs 95k).
 
Amazing that the Buffalo urban area takes up more space than Mississauga and Toronto combined (367+ sq miles vs 356 sq miles) yet the Buffalo urbanized area has less than 1/3 of the population of Toronto and Mississauga combined (0.95 million vs 3.3+ million). Wow.

I guess it explains why Mississauga Transit alone has 70% higher transit ridership than all of the transit in the Buffalo metropolitan area combined (160k weekday boardings vs 95k).

Our suburbs have among the highest transit ridership in all of North America.

To be fair ... you're comparing apples to oranges here i.e. comparing Buffalo to the GTA ...
 
The reason for this is because our suburbs are fairly dense compared to the average American suburb. Our new subdivisions are super packed with minimal spacing between houses and smallish lots. At least in the US, when you live in a suburb you see more of nature and the houses are spread out with space to breathe. In GTA, the houses are so crammed in, there isn't any green space around and you're not really near nature. The upside for GTA is better transit usage, the downside is more congestion and ridiculous traffic in the suburbs.
 
The reason for this is because our suburbs are fairly dense compared to the average American suburb. Our new subdivisions are super packed with minimal spacing between houses and smallish lots. At least in the US, when you live in a suburb you see more of nature and the houses are spread out with space to breathe. In GTA, the houses are so crammed in, there isn't any green space around and you're not really near nature. The upside for GTA is better transit usage, the downside is more congestion and ridiculous traffic in the suburbs.

The USA (and some of our suburbs as well) is where they use their gas-powered riding lawn mowers, drive their SUV to a mall to buy a carton of milk, where they chauffeur their obese kids to and from school in their SUV, etc. Back to nature... right.
 
Low-density suburbs are inherently more expensive to build and operate per capita than urban development. It requires more roads, more pipes and more wires. Maintaining all that infrastructure (for example plowing snow) is also proportionally higher per capita. In addition many municipal services, such as providing policing, fire services and schools can be higher if certain distance requirements are going to be met (for example five minutes to a fire station).

Traditionally suburban areas have been effectively subsidized by the more urban core areas. People who live in the urban core pay for maintaining roads and infrastructure in the suburban areas. This is because property taxes are based on property value and property values are always higher in the core even if the core is a “low rent” area. So what happens when the core empties and no property taxes are collected? All of a sudden the suburbs have to pay their own way.
 
The USA (and some of our suburbs as well) is where they use their gas-powered riding lawn mowers, drive their SUV to a mall to buy a carton of milk, where they chauffeur their obese kids to and from school in their SUV, etc. Back to nature... right.
No fat kids downtown -- who knew?

You should go to court to make your divorce from reality official.
 
The USA (and some of our suburbs as well) is where they use their gas-powered riding lawn mowers, drive their SUV to a mall to buy a carton of milk, where they chauffeur their obese kids to and from school in their SUV, etc. Back to nature... right.

Even a lot of the newer suburbs in Ontario you have to drive to get a carton of milk, the small mom & pop variety stores don't exist in newer suburbs, it's all houses with no retail. you have to drive to the nearest gas station or Wal Mart super centre if you need a loaf of bread or a carton of milk. At least in the older subdivisions they have variety stores and small strip malls for you're basic needs and they are a lot more pedestrian friendly than the newer subdivisions
 
One of the keys in the article is that "Sprawl, defined as the unplanned, uncontrolled expansion of urban areas".

I can't say I've ever seen the type of sprawl in Canada that you see around many US cities. Not sure why much of the US seems completely devoid of urban planning - perhaps they see it as communism or something ...
 
I think the distance between strip malls is pretty much the same as before. Older subdivisions have alot more strip mall retail but it is a lot more concentrated together and line major streets. I think walking distance to the convenience store is the same. Same with walking distance to schools, community centres, etc.

In terms of obesity, I don't think walking distances are that much a problem in Canada. Suburban kids still walk to school, density is still high enough to support decent transit. In the US, obesity is definitely a big problem in the suburbs due to the walking distances. Walking distance not just about density either. Suburbs in the GTA at least have an open design that makes it easier to walk in a straight line and minimize the actual walking distance. I remember someone posting a photothread on SSP about some suburb in Texas and literally everyone in the photo was either overweight or obese, it really jumped at me. Definitely different from Mississauga, Brampton, etc.

But in the US, obesity isn't just a huge problem in the suburbs. The inner cities also have major obesity problems, but for completely different reason. Consider the ban the City of Los Angeles placed a few years ago on new fast food establishments in one of its poorest neighbourhoods. US inner cities have a very high concentration of poor people, and so there is a lack of grocery stores and lack of fresh produce in inner city residents and an abundance of fast food and processed food. Inner city residents can't afford fresh food so they eat cheap fast food instead, so everyone is forced to eat fast or processed food, even if they can afford fresh food, and hence there is an obesity problem in US inner cities. The continuing depopulation many US inner cities doesn't help either when it comes to the amount of grocery stores...

So yeah, Canadian suburbs have much less obesity than US suburbs, but Canadian inner cities also have less obesity than US inner cities.
 
I think the distance between strip malls is pretty much the same as before. Older subdivisions have alot more strip mall retail but it is a lot more concentrated together and line major streets. I think walking distance to the convenience store is the same. Same with walking distance to schools, community centres, etc.


Not at all. Try walking to one those sprawling big box smart centres,see how long it takes to get around. You need a car just to navigate through the parking lot and get to the stores. I have visited friends and family that live in newer subdivisions in Markham and Vaughan. It would be very very difficult to get around without a car.
 
Not at all. Try walking to one those sprawling big box smart centres,see how long it takes to get around. You need a car just to navigate through the parking lot and get to the stores. I have visited friends and family that live in newer subdivisions in Markham and Vaughan. It would be very very difficult to get around without a car.

What exactly does that have to with walking distance? If people really "need a car just to navigate through the parking lot and get to the stores" then even using a car would be impossible, because walking and navigating through a parking lot would still be required to actually get into the store after the car is parked...

Honestly, I don't the point of this sensationalism. A parking lot may not be pedestrian-friendly but it is not a physical barrier to walking like the distance. Plenty of people in York walk on a daily basis, to school, to the bus stop - aside from the issue of walking distance, suggesting that walking is impossible or "very, very difficult" in York Region seems ridiculous.

Pedestrians aren't wimps, I think walking through a simple parking lot is managable for most people. I think if suburban motorist can walk through a parking lot, then it seems likely the suburban pedestrian or bus rider can do it too.
 
Toronto used to have mom and pop stores in residential areas. That is essentially how Kensington Market was formed, store owners converting their front yards to stores. You can still see houses today in the old city that have large front windows that had been converted from stores to homes. Unfortunately, zoning prevents people putting in a corner store anymore. No more mixed neighbourhoods, everything seems to be single-use only.
 

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