Planning in The Age of Sprawl - Hamilton County, Ohio

More documents

Recommendations

Info

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, 6 HCRPC PLANNING IN THE AGE OF SPRAWL
Metropolitics. “Contrary to popular belief, socioeconomic instability does not stop neatly at central-city borders. As it crosses into inner suburbs, especially into suburbs that were once blue-collar and middle-class neighborhoods, it accelerates and intensifies. Central cities have a fiscal, governmental, and social infrastructure to slow these powerful trends. Lacking the central city's central business district tax base, welfare infrastructure and network of organized political activity, inner suburbs often decline far more rapidly.” Older suburbs in urban counties, also known as “first suburbs” and “grayfields” are mature, land-locked and built-out. They can quickly spiral into decline due to erosion of population, housing stock, jobs and tax base. The decline is often rooted in state policies that encourage “greenfields” development (building on vacant undeveloped land) and do not provide equal opportunities to established communities with “grayfield” redevelopment opportunities. Avoiding rapid decline of older suburbs in urban counties requires partnerships that promote public policies for maintaining the vitality of our established communities rather than creating disposable communities. This partnership of “first suburbs” will be a critical element in any strategy to reverse the decline of older communities in Hamilton County. A RANGE OF CAUSES The literature also contains various explanations regarding the causes of sprawl. Sprawl is no doubt the outcome of two great American liberation movements: personal transportation and a spread of your own—largely born in the 1950’s and going strong today. Both are outgrowths of federal policies and the availability of money after World War II. The National Defense Highway Act of 1956 created the interstate highway system for quick inter-city and inter-coastal mobility and to deliberately disperse industry into the countryside – theoretically making it less vulnerable to nuclear attack. The Federal Housing Administration created the other suburbanization driver – the guaranteed mortgage. This financial instrument built the American suburbs with low down-payment, long term, fixed interest mortgages, essentially riskless to banks. These behemoth federal policies continue to drive the suburban character and overpower local planning initiatives that may attempt to change the conventional suburban development pattern. According to Roberta Gratz, “Sprawl continuation makes sense only with recognition that to tame it, stop it, unravel it, and dramatically alter a 50-year, entrenched national development pattern, an entire interrelated network of rules must be fundamentally changed. Inertia is the enemy of change”. New levels of inertia are expected to emanate from technology. Digital electronics will continually make it possible for cities to become more and more dispersed and polarized since office work will travel rather than office workers. The irrelevance of geography will drive the trend toward rural and decentralized workplaces -- High Technology and Low- Income Communities: Prospects for the Positive Use of Advanced Information Technology, edited by Donald Schon. We are reminded of the importance of American values during the past two centuries by Richard Moe in Changing Places: Rebuilding Community in the Age of Sprawl. He writes that Americans desire newness and change at the expense of context and stability. “Escape and start over” is a long-held American tenet. The 21 st Century will no doubt bring new technological forces that will continue decentralization trends. HCRPC PLANNING IN THE AGE OF SPRAWL 7
Page 1 and 2: PlanninginTheAge of Sprawl: Conflic
Page 3 and 4: PLANNING IN THE AGE OF SPRAWL CONFL
Page 5 and 6: INTRODUCTION Planning in the Age of
Page 7 and 8: admits to being pro-sprawl—it’s
Page 9: Landscape is no longer about public
Page 13 and 14: “We must eliminate the two princi
Page 15 and 16: spatial orientation and human scale
Page 17 and 18: Bibliography Bank of America (1995)
Page 20: HamiltonCounty Regional PlanningCom

Planning in The Age of Sprawl - Hamilton County, Ohio

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?