Why sensible land use planning is essential for colleges and communities.
By Ben Adler
Tuesday March 6, 2007
For the last 60 years American development has been sprawling outwards in an environmentally unsustainable manner. Single-use, low-density zoning has swallowed up natural land, polluted fragile ecosystems with the detritus of human habitats, imposed a driving requirement on all transportation, and thus contributed considerably to climate change. Many college campuses, unfortunately, have been no exception, as they build more parking lots and fewer sidewalks. James McElfish is Senior Attorney and Director of the Sustainable Use of Land program at the Environmental Law Institute. He has worked with the institute since 1986 and has been an environmental lawyer for 27 years. He recently released a report on sprawl and its consequences. He sat down with Campus Progress to explain this problem and what can be done about it.
Campus Progress: What is sprawl and why and how is it happening?
James McElfish: Sprawl is the prevailing form of development on the American landscape and has been since right after World War II. It’s characterized by separating land uses so that you have residential areas that are separate from industrial areas that are separate from commercial areas, shopping malls, and the like. We have separated land uses that take up a great deal of space, and you can only get from one land use to the other by automobile. It arose for a lot of perfectly logical reasons; one was investment in the federal highway system and another was the availability of funds to make homes easier to construct.
But sprawl is not a natural condition—there are a lot of ways we could have developed or continue to develop, but we’ve basically set up a system where our investments of federal and state dollars on highways and sewers support sprawl development and where our land use laws often support sprawl development. So if zoning requires you have a house on each half acre of land, then your development is going to be a lot more spread out than it is where you can have six houses on each acre of land, or ten houses on each acre of land. So sprawl is not a natural characteristic, it’s an outgrowth.
What are the environmental effects?
Sprawl requires a great deal of material use. Sprawl basically involves building a lot of new infrastructure and a lot of new structures while we are abandoning or under-funding the ones that were already constructed. So what we’re doing is leaving behind a lot of bricks, mortar, concrete, copper wire, and other sorts of things in our older cities and urban areas, and yet we’re extracting a lot of new materials to build essentially a redundant set of these same things in far flung areas. So we’re using a lot more of the planet’s resources to have sprawl than we would if we had more compact forms of development.
Since sprawl land uses are separated by such a great distance and aren’t served, for the most part, by public transportation or bicycle lanes, nor are they easily walkable, we’re encouraging and promoting a lot more use of the automobile. Of course, there we have effects on air pollution with nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and other pollutants, as well as contributing to global climate change. We also have evidence that sprawl contributes to water pollution, in the sense that we’re putting a lot more concrete down on the landscape, and we’re impairing the natural absorbent capacity of forests and farmland. What we’re getting is rapid runoff into the nation’s streams, rivers, and lakes.
Another problem is habitat fragmentation. We have a great deal of land and a rich wildlife resource in the United States, but where you build in a pattern that fragments habitat, we’re giving the nation’s wildlife a lot of trouble finding a place to live, reproduce, and be successful.
Is sprawl simply the result of the free market?
Sprawl represents the interaction of the marketplace with a lot of rules that encourage market failure. We have a system that actually constrains choice; if you want a new house, for the most part, the only place where you can find a new house is in the exurbs, the outer areas of metropolitan areas. It is much harder to find newer housing in older boroughs or inner cities. A part of that is what the rules are for investment, a part of it is what zoning and land use regulation do, and a part of it is what we choose to subsidize. Sprawl actually represents a market failure rather than an effective functioning of a market. We ought to see more choices than we currently see.
What can young people do about sprawl?
Among the solutions are to participate actively in land use decisions. One of the great things about the American legal system is that land use decisions are all public. City councils, township supervisors, and planning meetings are all advertised, all have to be open, and they have to take testimony. It is a system that, at least on the surface, one can interact with in a straightforward way. Get involved and find out what development proposals are on the agenda.
Also you should support good development proposals. We’re looking at another 92 million residents of the U.S. in the next 34 years and that is a huge number of people. If all of them end up in sprawl development, the landscape will be one that we can’t recognize at all. Recognizing that people, their workplaces, and their shopping areas have to go somewhere, think about ways to support denser development. One of the great discoveries recently of the environmental movement and the smart growth movement is that it is important to testify for things as much as it is to testify against things.
In terms of personal choice, look to live in places that are walkable, where you can use bicycles, or where there are options for transportation. Insist on things like bike lanes and on safe pedestrian connections between places where people live and places where people shop.
What should students on campus do?
Well the college campus should be connected with the town and the life of the town that either they are adjacent to or that grows up around them. Oppose schemes to build towers or parks that don’t connect to the surrounding community. For instance, oppose a new research lab that is a gleaming tower surrounded by three acres of parking, which provides nothing to the community.
In some ways colleges provide a model for sustainable living. There is no rigid separation between where people live, work, and buy things. Students should heed those lessons and try to carry them over to neighboring communities.
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Comments
A growing trend in city councils and urban planning initiatives is the concept of “walkable” or “livable” communities. There are several groups out there that specialize in helping communities and developments plan more pedestrian-centric and business inclusive neighborhoods. One such group is the Local Government Commission, a sort of nonprofit consulting group for local governments looking for the “smartgrowth” solution to expanding their communities. Organizations such as this have extensive fact sheets detailing additional ways community members can get involved.
— Kate - Mar 9, 11:31 AM - #Mr. McElfish is right that colleges, at their best, are models for sustainable living.
It’s ironic that so many of us have the time of our lives in college, and then upon graduation, immerse ourselves in a lifestyle that is 180 degrees from that of a college.
We as a society must wean ourselves off of oil sooner or later, and a big way of doing that is to live in close proximity to one’s work. Not only is it better for the environment; not only is it cheaper; it’s more fun, too!
— Chris - Mar 9, 06:54 PM - #what do you know?
— ehjghn - Mar 11, 07:36 PM - #problems meridia
— nicoderm meridia - Aug 1, 05:17 PM - #eng buy meridia
— meridia buy pal - Oct 30, 07:22 PM - #Amen. The commute is the least fun part of the work day, and I resent having to drive to go shopping, dining, etc. That’s why I’d like to live somewhere that’s right on a metro stop, and/or within walking distance of my workplace. And then I don’t need to worry about how long I need to wait to drive home after having a cocktail with my dinner in a restaurant. Really, I’d think Americans would see what’s in it for them when it comes to sustainable land use.
— Kripa Patwardhan - Sep 11, 06:51 PM - #