Sprawl With drawal.

• Author: Morandi, Larry
• Position: Managing urban growth

Managing growth is more than land use planning. Spreading sprawl brings jobs, housing, schools, transportation, tax policies and air quality into the mix.

Sprawl. The very sound of the word is enough to make legislators cringe.

"There's no silver bullet for it," says Maine Senator Sharon Treat.

Sprawl is one of those issues that is more than one issue. It has the advantage of drawing in legislators with diverse interests, but the downside is having so many angles as to be unmanageable.

Which is what sprawl is.

DIVERSITY OF ISSUES

Sprawl is a symptom of unmanaged growth. It's people living farther away from where they work and shop. As office parks and retail malls flow to the places people relocate, sprawl creates traffic congestion and gridlock in both directions of what once were one-way commutes. It entails costs to towns that have to build the roads, sewers and schools to serve new development (costs that may not be fully recouped through increased taxation), and to the surrounding community that may have lost farms and forests that defined a sense of place. Senator Treat notes that "in my district there is the second largest apple orchard in Maine." But, she laments, "it's in the perfect spot for a subdivision."

It used to be that managing growth involved only one issue--land use planning. Amend the planning statutes, and you solved the problem. Bring in the environmentalists and the home builders, lock them in a room, and, you know see what happens. Not that it was ever simple, but it's not even that simple anymore.

Take how sprawl affects education, for example. Senator Treat points out that her state has a declining student base. "And yet we have spent $1 billion over 20 years in new school construction and transportation costs." Why? Because state policy dictates that construction money go to build new schools which increasingly are in rural areas, instead of renovating old ones which are closer to town centers. And new facilities attract families and good teachers. Who can blame them? (A new law hopes to soften this trend by promoting the siting of schools in locally designated growth areas.)

As the demand for new schools increases, local governments have to fig. ure out a way to pay for them. Two colorado counties--Douglas and Boulder--have tried to assess impact fees on developers to cover the construction costs. The state supreme court ruled that counties lack the authority to charge such fees. But in an interesting twist, the court said that counties could deny a development application if there were insufficient funds to pay for necessary schools, encouraging government and applicants to negotiate.

Take tax policy as another example. Sales or property tax revenue accounts for a disproportionate share of many local government budgets. In Colorado, municipalities often rely on sales tax revenue to finance two-thirds to three-fourths of their operations. If that is your cash source, what types of projects are you most likely to site? Retail, not residential.

As residential subdivisions spread out from urban centers, an imbalance occurs between jobs and housing. Commuting distances increase; air polution becomes more of a concern. Paul Barru, a Denver-area land developer who specializes in building housing within the city limits, describes a growing community that has approved commercial projects that will create 8,000 jobs in three years. Good economic development strategy.

"But at the same time, the city has capped residential dwellings at 1,000 over the same period. Where is the equity?" he asks. "Why should one community be able to reap the benefits of 8,000 jobs while shoving off 7,000 of the housing needs on other areas?"

Barru is in the business of building houses. As a specialist in urban redevelopment, however, he's not hesitant to acknowledge that "the farther out you grow, the fewer people there are left in the city to gripe about what you're doing." For him, the issue is accountability: "If you create more jobs, you have a responsibility to figure out a...