Sprawl Threatens Wildlife

Although many species depend upon wetland habitat during their lifecycle, the demand for wetland development is high, leading to the destruction of more than 50% of the wetlands in the United States.

Development fragments large areas of habitat into smaller pieces, exposing wildlife and their habitats to roads and subdivisions. Many native species cannot adapt and are replaced by species that can survive on small parcels of land in close proximity to human disturbances; e.g., pigeons, crows, gray squirrels, rats, and deer.

Populations of raccoons, opossums, skunks, and squirrels increase as fragmentation drives the top carnivores from their native habitats. The increase in these smaller predators is damaging to prey, who are also likely to be losing food sources due to development. For example, the explosion of the coyote population in the eastern United States is most likely due to fragmentation and open areas.

Sprawl Has a Negative Impact on Public Health

Because sprawling developments isolate residents from shopping and employment opportunities, and fail to offer walking or bicycling as practicable alternatives to driving, sprawl leads to declined overall levels of physical activity. According to the Surgeon General’s Report on Physical Activity in America, changes in our lifestyles and communities have played the greatest role in declining activity levels of Americans. Low levels of physical activity lead to heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, and diabetes causing high health care costs and an overall decline in the quality of life.

Sprawl Leads to Urban Decay

As suburbs extend away from city centers and attract affluent residents, scarce funds that are needed to maintain downtown areas are used to provide services and infrastructure for new, suburban developments.

Sprawl Destroys Forests and Farmland

The farmland that is immediately adjacent to metropolitan areas is often the most fertile. Consequently, sprawl can bring the destruction of our most productive farms. Additionally, sprawl destroys wilderness areas near cities that are often treasured visiting places for urban residents.

Descriptions and Examples of Sprawl Deterrents

Metro Regional Governance

Metro governance can effectively plan the growth of an entire suburban and urban region. It is currently being implemented in Milwaukee, Atlanta, Detroit, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Hackensack, and Portland. Proponents of metro governance believe that suburbs and cities are vitally important to each other and development in both areas must be cooperative and coordinated. For example, Georgia created a 15-member superagency under the control of the governor with the authority to oversee regional growth in the Atlanta metropolitan area. The governor has veto power over new highways, shopping centers, and other infrastructure in the entire Atlanta region.

Transferable Development Rights

Transferable Development Rights (TDR) provide communities with a planning technique to control density of development and preserve open space. TDR allows more development on certain parcels of land in exchange for less development on other parcels of land. The process gives owners of environmentally or agriculturally sensitive areas the opportunity to sell off and send potential development of these sites to a “receiving site” where increased development is desired.

Boulder County, Colorado is a TDR leader. The Boulder County Colorado Government Online website has extensive information on the subject. Also, read “Suburban Harvest” which tells about Montgomery County, Maryland’s success with TDRs.

Urban Growth Boundaries

Urban growth boundaries impose a limit on land development beyond a politically designated area to curb sprawl, protect open space and/or encourage the redevelopment of inner-city neighborhoods. UGBs implemented as statewide mandates are most effective and currently exist in Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington. There is also great utility in the use of urban service boundaries, which are a bit less stringent, but tend to be more widely utilized.

Since 1973 each city in Oregon has been required to create urban growth boundaries based on its prediction of economic development and community needs in the next 20 years. The city is also required to create a detailed plan including the steps that it will take to build needed infrastructure for water and sewers, roads and transit, and other public facilities within the growth boundary. The growth boundary also affects the amount the state spends on highways and other roads.

Metro, Portland’s metropolitan planning organization for the region, manages the regional urban growth boundary. Adopted in 1979, the Metro UGB is approximately 365 square miles (about 236,000 acres). It includes 24 cities and the urban portions of Washington, Multnomah, and Clackamas counties. As of February 2000, about 1.3 million people live within the UGB.

Ethan Seltzer, who runs the Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies at Portland University, explains that “this means that multifamily development occurs by right and according to plan even in the suburbs. Outside the boundaries, there is no development at urban densities, there are no urban services, and developers face strict restrictions on what can be built in farm and forest zones. Even road widening for nonfarm uses is closely regulated outside of urban growth boundaries.”

Land Value Taxation

Instead of taxing land alone, most localities currently tax property, of which the most valuable part is the building. One way to contain sprawl is to tax land value and reduce taxes on capital investments, housing, and jobs. If landowners have to pay more taxes on land instead of buildings, they are more likely to put their land to efficient use. The result is that owners of the most valuable sites have to pay the most tax and thus are the ones most eager to attract development. Since the most valuable sites lie near the center of a city or town, it is the center that attracts the development.

Taxing land, not buildings, also cuts down on driving. If people are more attracted to the center of their city or town, they will drive less because they will be able to use mass transit. Furthermore, the tax would force some sites that now have massive parking lots to use the land more efficiently in order to make more money to pay the new tax on land. As a result, parking would become more scarce and expensive and more people would switch from driving to riding.

After being named the second most distressed city in the United States in 1980, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, gradually reformed its municipal tax policy by shifting taxes off of buildings and onto land site values. Now taxes on buildings have dropped and land is taxed five times more heavily. With land sites freed from speculation and underuse and buildings less burdened by taxes, labor and capital went to work restoring the city, now considered to be one of the highest quality of life cities in the US. Seventeen other municipalities in Pennsylvania have put this policy in place, all with proven benefits of economic regeneration as indicated by increased building permits and other criteria. (Source: “Land Value Taxation And Resource Rent Approach To Financing For Development,” Policy Paper Submitted by the International Union for Land Value Taxation to the United Nations Financing for Development Preparatory Process at the NGO Hearings Week, November 2000)

“Open Space Zoning”

Few people realize that conventional zoning actually encourages sprawl by doing little to protect open space or to conserve rural character. Usually zoning standards do not require developers to provide anything more than house lots and streets, which allows for unmitigated development.

Conventional zoning actually “plans sprawl” because every part of the land being developed is converted to front yards, back yards, streets, sidewalks, or driveways. Nothing is left to become open space. Conventional zoning designates every piece of land as residential, commercial, or industrial. Only wetlands and floodplains cannot be developed.

Compulsory “open space zoning” helps solve the problem of developers building on all the open spaces in a community. Open space zoning has been successfully implemented in many counties in New England, Virginia, Washington State, and California. Open space zoning allows the same overall amount of development that conventional zoning allows, but houses are “clustered” and individual lots are smaller. New construction is located on only half of the land being developed, and the county or municipality protects the remaining open space.  Taking this concept a step further are the numerous mixed-use communities springing up across the nation. This urban-oriented form of zoning and planning has already met with great success in many areas. See NRDC’s description of Oregon’s Orenco Station as an example of a successful compact and diverse neighborhood.

Open space zoning offers advantages to all parties. Developers can reduce costs of building roads and other infrastructure due to higher density. Local governments can save on maintenance equipment like snowplowing and road re-surfacing as a result of more compact development. And, homebuyers often pay less because of these cost savings.

There are several options to open space zoning. One is to require the zoning only in districts where certain resources are present. Another alternative is to have open space zoning only when the developer’s conventional plan would destroy more than a specified percentage of certain resources.

Tax Incentives

North Carolina provides an income tax credit equal to 25 percent of the land’s fair market value, with an upper limit of $250,000 if the land is conserved. Since it began, the program has set aside 26,000 acres valued at $40 million through 1995 while the state has lost only $5 million in tax revenue.

Location Efficient Mortgage

The Location Efficient Mortgage (LEM), originally a joint creation of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Surface Transportation Policy Project, and the Center for Neighborhood Technology, looks at how much a person spends on transportation and how close a person lives to public transportation. If a LEM is instated, those who spend less on transportation and live closer to public transit will receive better mortgages and will be able to borrow more than those who live further away from public transportation. Thus, there will be a greater incentive to buy property closer to public transportation, which tends to be more expensive. Studies have shown that those who live near public transportation tend to heavily use the public transportation.

In neighborhoods with car-based transportation like suburbs and rural areas, residents live in a more sparsely populated area and depend mostly upon cars for transportation. In neighborhoods that stress accessibility, like urban areas, residents don’t always rely on cars for transportation. In fact, many residents don’t own a car at all.

Research has shown that buyers of real estate put a large value on accessibility. Thus, homes that are closer to public transit usually have a higher market price than those that are not in accessibility-based neighborhoods. Some of the results of this research are as follows:

• Properties near the Los Angeles Metro Rail have average sale prices of $102.13 per square foot compared to $71.13 for properties that are not near the Metro Rail. 
• In San Francisco, there is an approximate $70,000 depreciation in property values 35 km away from railway stations. 
• In Washington D.C. homes within 1,000 feet of a Metro station have a property value premium of $12,300. 

• Increase homeownership opportunities for low- and moderate-income households. 
• Stimulate home purchases in low-and moderate-income urban communities. 
• Encourage greater population density and growth of local services. 
• Foster housing development opportunities in existing neighborhoods through public and private sector housing projects. 
• Increase public transit ridership. 
• Support local consumer services and cultural amenities. 
• Reduce energy consumption. 
• Improve regional/local air quality. 

SERC would like to thank the Center for Policy Alternatives for providing much of the information in this package.