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If We Don't Like Sprawl, Why Do We Go On Sprawling?
Eben Fodor may bring the answer when he visits Flagstaff
By Donella Meadows - Syndicated columnist
| Editor’s note: Eben Fodor, the author of
Better, Not Bigger: How to
Control Urban Growth and Improve your Community will be speaking in
Flagstaff on October 25, 7 p.m. at Cline Llibrary. The talk is sponsored
by Friend’s of Flagstaff’s Future and other Flagstaff organizations.
This “Global Citizen” column from March 1999 discusses Fodor’s book and
is reprinted with permission.. |
We have planning boards. We have zoning regulations. We have urban
growth boundaries and "smart growth" and sprawl conferences. And we
still have sprawl. Between 1970 and 1990 the population of Chicago grew
by four percent; its developed land area grew by 46 percent. Over the
same period Los Angeles swelled 45 percent in population, 300 percent in
settled area.
Sprawl costs us more than lost farmland and daily commutes through
landscapes of stunning ugliness. It costs us dollars, bucks straight out
of our pockets, in the form of higher local taxes. That's because our
pattern of municipal growth, especially land-intensive city-edge growth,
consistently costs more in public services than it pays in taxes.
In his new book Better Not Bigger, Eben Fodor cites study after study
showing how growth raises taxes. In Loudon County, Virginia, each new
house on a quarter-acre lot adds $705 per year to a town budget (in
increased garbage collection, road maintenance, etc. minus increased
property tax).
On a five-acre lot a new house costs the community $2232 per year. In
Redmond, Washington, single-family houses pay 21 percent of property tax
but account for 29 percent of the city budget. A study in California's
Central Valley calculated that more compact development could save
municipalities 500,000 acres of farmland and $1.2 billion in taxes.
There are dozens of these studies. They all come to the same conclusion.
New subdivisions reach into the pockets of established residents to
finance additional schools and services. Commercial and industrial
developments sometimes pay more in taxes than they demand in services,
but the traffic and pollution they generate reduces nearby property
value. New employees don't want to live near the plant or strip, so they
build houses and raise taxes in the NEXT town. Large, well-organized
companies such as sports teams and Wal-Mart, push city governments to
widen roads, provide free water or sewage lines, offer property tax
breaks, even build the stadium.
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Given all the evidence to the contrary, it's amazing how many of us
still believe the myth that growth reduces taxes. But then, every myth
springs from a seed of truth. Municipal growth does benefit some people.
Real estate agents get sales, construction companies get jobs, banks get
more depositors and borrowers, newspapers get higher circulations,
stores get more business (though they also get more and tougher
competition). Landowners who sell to developers can make big money;
developers can make even bigger money.
Those folks are every town's growth promoters. Eben Fodor calls them the
"urban growth machine" and cites an example of how the machine is
fueled. Imagine a proposed development that will cost a community $1
million and bring in $500,000 in benefits. The $500,000 goes to ten
people, $50,000 apiece. The $1 million is charged to 100,000 people as a
$10 tax increase. Who is going to focus full attention on this project,
be at all the hearings, bring in lawyers, chat up city officials? Who is
going to believe sincerely and claim loudly that growth is a good thing?
Fodor quotes Oregon environmentalist Andy Kerr, who calls urban growth,
"a pyramid scheme in which a relatively few make a killing, some others
make a living, but most [of us] pay for it." As long as there is a
killing to be made, no tepid "smart-growth" measures are going to stop
sprawl. We will go on having strips and malls and cookie-cutter
subdivisions and traffic jams and rising taxes as long as someone makes
money from them.
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We can't blame those who make the money. They're playing the game
according to the rules, which are set mainly by the market, which
rewards whomever is clever enough to put any cost of doing business onto
someone else. They get the store profits, we build the roads. They hire
the workers (paying as little as they can get away with, because the
market requires them to cut costs), we sit in traffic jams and breathe
the exhaust. They get jobs building the subdivision, we lose open
lands, clean water, and wildlife. Then we subsidize them with our taxes. That,
the tax subsidy, is not the market, it's local politics. Collectively we
set out pots of subsidized honey at which they dip. We can't expect them
not to dip; we can only expect them to howl if the subsidy is taken
away.
The "we-they" language in the previous paragraph isn't quite right.
They may profit more than we do, but we flock to the stores with the low
prices. We buy dream homes in the ever-expanding suburbs. We use the
services of the growth machine. (With some equally amateur friends I'm
trying to create a 22-unit eco-development, and I'm learning to
appreciate the skills needed and the risks borne by developers.) We want
our local builders and banks and stores and newspapers to thrive.
So what can we do about this spreading mess, which handsomely rewards a
few, which turns our surroundings into blight, which most of us hate but
in which most of us are complicit – and which we subsidize with our tax
dollars?
Concrete answers to that question take a long chapter in Fodor's book
and will take another column. The general answer is clear. Don't believe
the myth that all growth is good. Ask hard questions.
Who will benefit from the next development scheme and who will pay?
Are there better options, such as protecting undeveloped land? How much
growth can our roads, our land, our waters and air, our neighborhoods,
schools and community support? Since we can't grow forever, where should
we stop?
Donella Meadows’ follow-up column is on the web at
http://iisd.ca/pcdf/meadows/sprawl4.html.
Donella H. Meadows is the director of the Sustainability Institute and
an adjunct professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College. She
lives in New Hampshire and is the author of The Limits to Growth and
Beyond the Limits.
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