Planning in The Age of Sprawl - Hamilton County, Ohio

crops are grown is rising each year. Growth proponents cite that the rate of farmland loss is
actually much lower than it used to be – i.e., the national rate was four times greater during
the 1970’s according to urban economist Samuel Staley. Growth proponents also note that
over the last half-century, more open space has been turned into parks and rural wildlife
preserves than has been turned into suburbs. Also, farmers have become so efficient on the
remaining farmland that they’re growing twice as much food as in 1950, and could easily
grow much more if there were a market for it. So, compact growth or any other alternative
form of suburban development is simply not needed according to most supporters of the
status-quo.
The defense of suburban development continues in the Wells Fargo report, Preserving the
American Dream. It dismisses concern over loss of agricultural land by showing that the
entire population of the U.S. could be arranged in households of four people at typical
“suburban sprawl” densities and still only use 3 percent of the total land area of the
contiguous U.S. 1
A RANGE OF CONSEQUENCES
The Sierra Club’s The Dark Side of the American Dream: The Costs and Consequences of
Sprawl documents consequences of sprawl that reach way beyond the issue of farmland loss.
They also identify: traffic congestion; longer commutes that steal time from family and
work; worsening air and water pollution; loss of open fields, forests and wetlands; increased
flooding; erosion of the central city tax base; raised taxes to pay for services – police, fire,
schools, roads, water, and sewer; destruction of central city commerce; and concentration of
poverty in urban centers. The concentration and separation of poverty and wealth also
results in suburban employers being increasingly unable to fill lower paying jobs due to lack
of affordable transportation links between low skilled workers and job vacancies located in
wealthy suburban enclaves.
The Bank of America’s report, Beyond Sprawl, identifies another laundry list of negative
effects: higher costs of housing, increasing road congestion, excessive travel, dwindling
land availability, poorer public services, loss of agricultural land, poor air and water quality,
decline of central city neighborhoods and older suburbs, deteriorated quality of life,
excessive cost to maintain infrastructure, abandoned and underutilized investments in older
neighborhoods. 1
Richard Moe describes sprawl’s influence on migration and related negative impacts on
older areas. “The continually sprawling metropolis encourages outmigration from the
metropolitan core and first suburbs. Migrations, whether across oceans or municipal
boundaries, are the outcome of factors that push people away from one place and pull them
to another. Pushed out by dropping property values, declining schools, meaner streets, and
rising taxes residents of declining neighborhoods are pulled elsewhere by the opposite. It is
this migratory pattern, played out in neighborhood after neighborhood, that pushes a city
past the point of no return” -- Changing Places - Rebuilding Community in the Age of
Sprawl by Richard Moe.
Myron Orfield clearly reveals the creeping movement of sprawl’s effects in his book,
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HCRPC
PLANNING IN THE AGE OF SPRAWL