Our utopias are the blueprints of our future civilization, and as such, airy structures though they are, they really play a bigger part in the progress of man than our more material structures of brick and steel.
Vice President Henry A. Wallace
Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.
President Barack Obama
Heroes are not statues framed against a red sky. They are people who say, “This is my community and it’s my responsibility to make it better.”
Governor Tom McCall
Activists are hell to live with, but they make great ancestors.
An Oregon activist
Author’s Acknowledgements
Many people helped with this project, and they have my sincere thanks.
I thank Scott Denman Senior Program Officer at the Wallace Global Fund for his foundation’s and his own guidance and support for the project.
Geoff Anderson, Executive Director of Smart Growth America took the time to thoughtfully review various draft reports, to recommend people I should consult, and to discuss and critique my ideas.
The following people generously donated their time in reading and commenting on all, or major parts of the background report and the sprawl-curtailment policy packages: Dr. Gerrit-Jan Knaap, Director of the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education at the University of Maryland, Dr. Arthur C. Nelson of the University of Utah, Professor Bob Johnston of the University of California at Davis (retired), Dr. Alvin Sokolow of the University of California at Davis (retired) Dr. Dave Theobald of Colorado State University, Professor Stuart Meck of Rutgers University, Dru Schmidt Perkins of 1000 Friends of Maryland, Terry Moore, at ECONorthwest of Eugene, Oregon, Joe Molinaro, Director, Smart Growth and Housing Opportunity,National Association of REALTORS® Managing.
Several people helped me with particular research inquiries, including Renee Kuhlman at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Tim Torma, at the United States Environmental Protection Agency, Henry Richmond at the American Land Institute, Michael Beyard, Senior Resident Fellow at the Urban Land Institute and Jim Murley, Director of the Center for Urban and Environmental Solutions at Florida Atlantic University in Fort Lauderdale.
I thank the scores of state legislators, nonprofit organization staff and planners who took the time to answer questions about prospects for anti-sprawl action in their state and localities. In particular I thank Beth Humstone for special help in preparing the report for Vermont. .
Dr. Stephen Frenkel of Portland State University completed the bulk of the research on European sprawl and efforts to control.
Becky Steckler, AICP, wrote and edited several of them and organized and supervised the research by the research assistants.
Research assistants Christina Arlt, Kate Rube, Lauren Swisston and Chris Witt conducted research on state programs and administered most of the surveys of anti-sprawl leaders and experts. Kai Tohinaka assembled research materials for some of the Rocky Mountain states.
Armando Carbonell of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy allowed me access to very important unpublished research on state Smart Growth programs.
Martha Gannett designed the covers, operating on both a tiny budget and very short notice.
Tom McTighe stepped in at the last minute to help with technical editing and document assembly.
And for all those people I should have mentioned, and who deserve my thanks in this acknowledgment, you have both my thanks and my apologies.
Table of Contents
Introduction......
What Has Worked......
Programs That Show Weak Results or No Results......
Programs Without Sufficient Documentation of Results......
Lessons from Europe......
A Brief Note on the Canadian Experience......
Conclusions: Where (and When) Progress Can Be Made Next...... 26
A.The Current Context: The Severe Recession Will Temporarily
Halt Both Sprawl and Efforts to Reform Sprawl………………………………26
B.Some General Opportunities to Advance Anti-Sprawl Policies
and Programs………………………………………………………………… 27
C.Particular Opportunities for Adoption of New Sprawl Curtailment
Programs at the State Level ……………………………………………………34
Introduction
The Subject and Scope of the Project
Smart Growth America, with the support of the Wallace Global Fund, commissioned an analysis of how to stop sprawl in all fifty of the United States.
Stopping sprawl achieves many Smart Growth objectives.
First, it saves the farm, ranch and forestlands that provide food and fiber. Second, it protects natural resources, including wildlife and places that provide or recharge surface and ground water. Third, reducing sprawl can be realized in part by increasing the range of housing choices in our communities. Fourth, compact mixed-use urban development reduces how farm we must travel to work, or shopping or school and increases the effectiveness and reduces the user cost of providing transit. Fifth, it benefits taxpayers because compact growth reduces the cost per taxpayer of providing roads, sewers, water lines and emergency services.[1] It is all of these connections between stopping sprawl and the achievement of Smart Growth objectives that made this project an appropriate undertaking for Smart Growth America.
The scope of this project is very broad indeed; an analysis of the effectiveness of programs to curb sprawl in the United States and Europe, and based on that review, a determination of the prospects for adoption of effective new laws and programs to curb or stop sprawl in each of the 50 states.
The Project Reports
This Summary Report is one of a related set of reports. The other reports are a) the Background Report, b) State Reports (in multiple volumes), and c) a collection of some of the various reports, studies and articles used in preparing these reports. Each of those documents are briefly described below.
The Background Report outlines the idea of sprawl as part of a hierarchy of development patterns, and defines sprawl curtailment as any progress in shifting development up the hierarchy. The Background Report describes different approaches to curtailing sprawl, in the U.S. and Europe, and examines the evidence regarding what has worked.
The State Reports describe the programs that have been adopted in each state to curb sprawl and promote more compact growth (if any), review the available evidence about their performance and assess the prospects for improvements to existing programs and for adopting new, more effective sprawl curtailment measures. Interviews with legislators, leaders in nonprofit organizations opposing sprawl and professional planners used to prepare the reports are appended to each state report.
The last report is a digital collection of materials that have been used in the preparation of the Background Report and the States Report. These include academic research papers, abstracts of those papers, newspaper articles or excerpts of those materials, evaluations produced by state agencies or nonprofit groups, excerpts of planning documents and other information.
This Summary Report is more than a distillation of the other reports. It contains analysis and recommendations based on the other two reports, that do not appear in those documents. For the sake of simplicity and clarity it omits references to sources. Those citations and a bibliography can be found in the Background Report and State Reports. Some of the referenced papers are included in the digital collection (described below.)
The Summary Report presents several important conclusions regarding effective and ineffective sprawl curtailment programs, based on the review presented in the Background Report. The analysis of the effectiveness of sprawl-curtailment programs presented in the Background Report is based not only on the expert opinions of practitioners but on available research and information about actual development patterns on the ground.
The Summary offers recommendations about which investments of resources would deliver the best results in stopping or slowing future sprawl. Some of these recommendations refer to opportunities in particular states, regions and localities. Other recommendations are strategic and generalized.
However, because survey responses were not received from policy makers and experts in many states, it is premature to make a comprehensive high quality assessment of exactly which of the effective sprawl curtailment laws and programs could be adopted, if any, by each one of the fifty states.
Alternatively, Smart Growth America and the Wallace Global Fund may decide to focus the remainder of the project on next steps to increase the number of places and people protected from sprawl through the adoption, improvement and better enforcement of effective anti-sprawl programs.
What Has Worked
Urban Growth Boundaries Combined with Intensification of Urban Development Inside of Them and Rural Conservation through Regulation and/or Acquisitions and Easements Outside the Boundaries[2]
Leading Examples at State Level:Oregon, Washington
Leading Regional & Local Examples:Lexington-Fayette County, KY, Baltimore County, MD, Lancaster County, PA, Ventura County, CA, Boulder, CO
Research conducted for this project shows that several places in the United States have stopped or sharply curtailed sprawl in all its forms.
These programs have stopped sprawl in the form of leapfrogging subdivisions in the countryside.
They have stopped the building of malls and commercial strip development on the farmland, rangelands and forestlands that provide our food and fiber, and in the natural areas needed for water and wildlife.
They have succeeded in increasing, instead of decreasing, residential densities in cities and suburbs, by methods that increase choices in housing, including increased opportunities for families of modest means.
This increased density also makes the provision of public transit more feasible, by increasing the number of transit riders living near transit. More compact growth patterns also reduce driving per capita because housing, shopping and jobs are closer together. It also means lower burdens for taxpayers because less money must be spent for new roads, new pipes and new school buses if development is more compact.
These programs have significantly increased the share of growth that is accommodated by restoring and redeveloping instead of abandoning downtowns and neighborhoods, which is good news for residents of those neighborhoods.
In addition, many of these programs have sharply slowed the amount of rural sprawl that takes the form of country estates and ranchettes on 10, 40 or 160 acres (which is sometimes referred to as “exurban sprawl.”). That has benefits for farmers, ranchers and people and companies who grow trees, by keeping land available and affordable for their businesses. It is also a benefit for wildlife and water quality and quantity.
None of these programs have completely stopped all forms of sprawl.
None of them have stopped all rural homesite development. None of them have succeeded in transforming all greenfield development into compact, mixed use development. And certainly, none of them have met all the demand for additional homes and jobs entirely by redevelopment and infill.
But several of these programs have very significantly curbed these forms of sprawl and increased the density of new urban development and the rate of redevelopment. If these programs were adopted and applied across all of America, our future would be dramatically better.
Furthermore, contrary to a common belief in planning policy circles, these urban containment/urban densification and redevelopment/rural conservation programs are not confined to liberal states. Anti-sprawl programs have been adopted at the state, regional and local levels in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Hawai’i, Kentucky, Maryland, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota and Washington.
Here are some examples of efforts of this type that have been successful in stopping sprawl:
- Seattle Metropolitan Area and Central Puget Sound Region, Washington
King County, Washington, has a population of 1.8 million (about the same as Nebraska) and is 2,134 square miles in size, larger than the state of Delaware. Between 2001 and 2006, about 63,000 new homes were approved in the county. Over 95% of them were located within the 460 square miles designated as urban growth areas.
In the high growth counties of central Puget Sound, including King County, the densities for built single family residential developments in the five counties increased from a range in 2002 of 3.8 to 5.0 units per acre, to 5.4 to 7.2 units per acre in 2007, roughly a 40% increase in density in five years. Multifamily densities increased from a range of 3.4 to 22.0 units per acre in 2002, to 14.2 to 37.9 units per acre in 2007 that is, roughly doubling in density.
Between 2000 and 2008, every one of Washington State’s six largest cities (five central cities, one suburban) all experienced population growth attributable to infill, redevelopment and resettlement (not annexation), ranging from 3.7% to 11.9%.
- Baltimore County, Maryland
Baltimore County, (which does not include the city of Baltimore) comprises 598.59 square miles. In 2006 the county was home to an estimated 787,384 people (more people than live in Wyoming), an increase of 33,000 since 2000. It established an Urban Rural Demarcation Line in 1967, which has changed very little. Today the URDL encompasses one third of the County’s land area and is home to 89% of its population. About one-half of the County (roughly 300 square miles) is zoned for Resource Conservation, most of it with lot sizes of 50 acres. Within this area, 57,000 acres is permanently protected through conservation easements and other means.
- Lexington & Fayette County, Kentucky
Lexington (2006 estimated population 270,789) is part of a consolidated urban government with Fayette County, created by merger in 1974. The city-county comprises 285 square miles. The city and county jointly adopted an urban growth boundary in 1958; today 85 square miles is inside the boundary (30% of the county land area), with 200 square miles (705) outside the boundary. The horse and former tobacco farms outside the urban growth boundary have been protected by 50-acre minimum lot size zoning and more than 10,000 acres has been preserved by easements. Inside the urban growth boundary, which has been only reluctantly expanded, the downtown has revitalized, including the construction of mid-rise and high-rise condominium developments.
- Boulder Colorado
The “blue line” limiting development to the west was adopted in 1959 and the boundary around the eastern part of the city was added shortly thereafter. Several years later the residents voted to enact a sales tax to buy open space around the city. Today there are 40,000 acres of protected lands around the city. Boulder has experienced substantial downtown redevelopment, in part because the planning program requires one-third of new housing to be located downtown.
- Portland, Oregon Metropolitan Area
The Oregon portion of the Portland metropolitan region is made up of three counties with combined populations of about 1.6 million – more populous than New Hampshire. The region has a land area of slightly more than 3,000 square miles (one-third the size of New Jersey.) About 400 square miles (13% of the total area) are located inside the Portland urban growth boundary (UGB) and another, roughly 50 square miles, are inside the UGBs of other small cities in the counties. Another 130 square miles or so are rural residential zoned areas. The remainder, roughly 2,600 square miles, are in farm, forest or mixed farm-forest zones.
During the 10.75 years beginning on January 1, 1998, 96% of the residential development permits were located inside urban growth boundaries in the county, 90% in the Portland metropolitan urban growth boundary. Two percent of the homes were built in rural residential zones (generally 1 to 10 acre lots) and 2% were built in sites in farm or forest zones.
The average undeveloped lot size for a single-family home in the Portland metropolitan urban growth boundary has fallen from almost 13,000 square feet in 1978 to about 5,000 square feet in 2001. Much of the central city of Portland has experienced revitalization in the last twenty years. In the last decade, about 6,000 new housing units were built on less than 100 acres that make up the Pearl District, in a former warehouse district.
- Oregon Statewide Farm and Forest Zoning
About 16.4 million acres of private land in Oregon are in the Exclusive Farm Use zones contained in statute and mandated by the state planning program. EFU zoning prohibits urban uses like residential subdivision, shopping malls or office parks. That acreage is about 25,600 square miles, an area five times the size of Connecticut and three times the size of Maryland. In the eleven years from 1997 to 2007 (inclusive) local governments approved 6,485 new homes on the 16.4 million acres in Exclusive Farm Use zones, about one home for every four square miles.
About 8.7 million acres of private land in Oregon are in exclusive forest zoning, which has similar restrictions on development to EFU zoning. That acreage is about 13,600 square miles, roughly the land area of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. In the eleven years from 1997 through 2007, 5,016 dwellings were approved in forest zones, about one every 2.7 square miles.
During this period, Oregon’s population grew by 431,239 people. That population increase required about 172,500 new homes (assuming 2.5 residents per home.). Of the estimated 172,500 new homes that were built, 6.6% were built in farm and forest zones.
During those years 44,563 acres were added to various urban growth boundaries around the state to accommodate the vast majority[3] of the 431,239 new residents of Oregon. Out of the total acreage added to UGBs, 14,480 acres (33%) were added from exclusive farm use zones and 3,390 acres (9%)from forest zones.
- Lancaster County, Pennsylvania
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania is 949 square miles in size (about the size of Rhode Island). It experienced a 5.1% growth rate in the 2000-2006 period, and in 2006 it had an estimated population of 494,486. During 1994–2002, 76% of all residential units were developed inside its urban growth boundaries (13 Urban Growth Areas and 26 Village Growth Areas.) The county protected about 36% of its total land area through regulation and the purchase of title and easements, and a higher proportion of its rural lands.