Conscious Choice: Sprawl, Livability, and You

May 1999 | News of the Earth

Sprawl, Livability, and You

by Dave Aftandilian

On January 11, Vice President Gore announced the Clinton Administration’s Livability Agenda "to support America’s communities in their goals of growing according to their best values." Translation: to fight low-density development beyond the edge of present infrastructure and employment, better known as sprawl.

Part of the Administration’s fiscal year 2000 budget request to Congress, the Livability Agenda includes a plan to issue tax credits supporting nearly $10 billion in "Better America Bonds" that could be used to preserve open space, create or restore urban parks, protect air and water quality, and clean up brownfields (abandoned industrial sites). The agenda would also provide $6.1 billion for public transit projects through the federal Department of Transportation, as well as $2.2 billion to support community-based transportation programs via the recently authorized Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21).

While it’s unlikely that the Livability Agenda will pass unscathed through the congressional authorization gauntlet, nationwide results from the November elections suggest that at least one of its central goals — protecting open space — will probably receive significant funding. According to a study conducted by Phyllis Meyers for the Brookings Institution, 240 state and local conservation measures appeared on ballots in 31 states last November (over 50 percent more initiatives than in 1996). Voters approved 72 percent of these measures, which ranged from using tax increases to fund purchases of undeveloped land to securing conservation easements (tax breaks given to landowners in return for promises not to develop their land) and establishing urban growth boundaries. These ballot initiatives show widespread public support for protecting the rapidly dwindling open spaces in our urban and rural areas from the ravages of sprawl.

Trends in Illinois also demonstrate strong local undercurrents of support for open space preservation. In 1997, for instance, DuPage County voters approved a $70 million bond referendum that will protect 2,000 acres of open space. Kane, Lake, and Will County residents voted on similar referenda last month, all of which were approved. And Governor George Ryan has pledged to pass legislation creating the Illinois Open Land Trust, which would provide $40 million over the next four years to acquire natural areas and open spaces for wildlife habitat and recreation.

But sprawl is an exceedingly complex issue, snarled with transportation, regional and local planning, and lifestyle choices, as well as hot-button issues such as race relations and population growth. Protecting open space, although it’s certainly a good idea, won’t stop sprawl unless we combine it with efforts to increase usage and improve the quality of public transit, stop providing economic subsidies for sprawl, and work on improving inner-city problems instead of just fleeing them by moving to the suburbs.

The Problems with Sprawl

Do you enjoy sitting stranded in traffic jams, breathing in gasoline fumes and wasting time that could be better spent with family and friends? How about having your home flooded because floodwater-retaining wetlands in your area were filled to make room for yet another housing development? Thus begins the introduction to sprawl’s evils, but it certainly doesn’t stop there.

In addition to wasting time and gasoline, sprawl and its attendant traffic congestion cause increased air and water pollution. The emissions from all those cars taking people to and from their widely separated jobs and homes are one of the biggest sources of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which are major culprits in global warming. Sprawl has a rapacious appetite for land as well; the American Farmland Trust estimates that one million acres of farmland are bulldozed each year to make way for more widely scattered homes and highways. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says that 117,000 acres of wetlands are destroyed each year for development.

Closer to home, between 1970 and 1990, population in the Chicago region increased four percent while land development increased by 55 percent; more than 450 square miles of agricultural and vacant land were developed in that time period. Considering that the region’s population has grown as much since 1990 as it had in the previous 20 years, and that it is expected to increase another 25 percent by the year 2020, it’s no surprise that the American Farmland Trust considers land between Chicago and Milwaukee the third most threatened farmland in the nation.

And the more prime farmland we lose to sprawl, the more committed we will become to monocultural, pesticide- and fertilizer-laden factory farms in order to feed an ever-increasing population on an ever-decreasing land base. Conventional thinking holds that monoculture farming (growing just one crop instead of intercropping several together, as nature does) is a more efficient means to increase yields per acre, but monocultures are dangerously vulnerable to disease and pests — which is why factory farms need to use so much pesticide on their fields.

Not only is sprawl bad for land, air, and water, but it’s also bad for our pocketbooks. According to the Metropolitan Planning Council, local traffic congestion costs consumers and businesses $2 billion per year in decreased employee productivity, wasted fuel, and delayed shipments. A recent study by researchers from Northern Illinois University and the American Farmland Trust called "Living on the Edge: The Costs and Risks of Scatter Development" found that "scatter development in Chicago suburbs is often subsidized by those living in adjoining municipalities. . . homes in scatter development sites do not generate enough taxes to educate the children who live there; fall woefully short of paying to maintain the roads leading to and through their subdivisions; and, where municipal water and sewer services are available, the costs of building that infrastructure may be paid by other taxpayers" living nearby.

The same study also demonstrated that sprawl can be bad for our personal safety. We often think that moving away from the city will protect us from crime, but "Living on the Edge" reports that for recently developed outer-ring developments, "police response times were as much as 600 percent longer, on average, than in the adjoining municipality; ambulance response times were as much as 50 percent longer; fire response times were as much as 33 percent longer." A recent study conducted by the Surface Transportation Policy Project, "Aggressive Driving: Are You At Risk?" found that "aggressive driving deaths are much higher in places with uncontrolled sprawl development, where the car is the only way to get around." So, are the suburbs really safer?

Unfortunately, people leaving the city for the suburbs also create a downward spiral for cities. They erode the tax base for crucial city services such as schools, sanitation, public transit, and police/fire/ambulance protection. This, in turn, makes cities less attractive to live in, causing more people to leave for the suburbs.

More Trains & Buses, Less Cars

What can we do to minimize — or reverse — sprawl? First, expand and improve public transit options. Cutting bus lines and reducing service hours on bus and el lines have been the mainstays of recent Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) policy. These cuts disproportionately affect minority and low-income Chicagoans, because these are the folks who most need public transit and can least afford to purchase a car. Now the CTA says that it will have to cut the entire Douglas branch of the Blue Line unless it receives millions in matching funds from the state. The state should pitch in.

Instead of cutting service, we should be adding more bus and rail lines, and running trains and buses more frequently. Fast, convenient, efficient public transit that goes where you need to go when you need to go there gets used; slow service that stops well short of your destination doesn’t provide an attractive alternative to driving.

Obviously this takes money. According to a recent article in the Chicago Tribune, the CTA needs $4.1 billion over the next five years just to upgrade its aging transit system. TEA-21, a mostly good federal transportation bill, exists to provide funds for transportation projects. Like its predecessor ISTEA (Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act), TEA-21 provides ample opportunities for creative community involvement in the transportation decision- making process, of which Chicago area citizens should take full advantage.

It also funds a number of innovative programs, including a plan to provide a portion of an employee’s income in the form of a transit voucher. These vouchers not only serve as an attractive fringe benefit to employees, but they also reduce the employer’s FICA tax and the employee’s income tax. But we need to let companies know this option exists, and we need to encourage them to use it.

Another exciting public transportation alternative for the region that is already well past the planning stage and ready to move toward implementation, with a little help from a supportive public, is a system of Midwest high-speed rail. Chicago would be the hub of this proposed rail network, with spokes radiating to Detroit, Milwaukee, and St. Louis (and perhaps Minneapolis and Cincinnati) and connections to smaller cities in between like Springfield, Ann Arbor, and Kalamazoo. The federal will to support high-speed rail already exists; Amtrak plans to start its "Acela" high-speed rail service in the Northeast corridor between Washington, D.C. and Boston this December.

According to the Environmental Law and Policy Center of the Midwest (ELPC), "these trains will pay their own way. Farebox revenues will cover all operating and maintenance costs for high-speed trains in the Midwest." They would also be convenient, with direct downtown to downtown service, and much faster than driving — the two-hour drive to Milwaukee from Chicago would take only an hour by high-speed rail, and the five-and-a-half to six hour highway crawl down to St. Louis would fly by in three hours and 20 minutes by high-speed rail. As a March 15 editorial in Crain’s Chicago Business put it, "Chicago was the rail hub of the nation in the 19th century, and it is time to assure that it becomes a high-speed train center in the 21st. But for that vision to come true, state, local, and federal government officials need to start planning now."

Smart Planning and Innovative Incentives

Better and more efficient public transit is a start, but we need to integrate transportation with other planning initiatives and economic incentives in the Chicago metropolitan region, as well as across Illinois and the nation. And we need to ensure that citizens have a large voice in this process.

Did you know that the organization that plans Chicago’s transportation system, the Chicago Area Transportation System (CATS, a branch of the Illinois Department of Transportation), has only one elected official, and no direct public involvement at all? It’s no surprise that the plan CATS came up with doesn’t reflect the priorities of many of Chicago’s residents, especially those from low-income or minority neighborhoods.

To find out what the people really want, the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), along with other area nonprofits and coalitions, organized focus groups of interested private citizens, community and business leaders, and professionals "to identify transportation priorities from the bottom up." The resulting document is the Citizen Transportation Plan for Northeastern Illinois. Here is part of this innovative plan’s vision:

"Imagine neighborhoods both urban and suburban where the mass transit station forms a vital center of the community. Because we value open space, new housing developments are clustered around the transit station, together with the daycare center, market, and cleaners.... Banks now use transportation savings to justify larger mortgages around transit stops. And taxation is fair, supporting schools, infrastructure and communities more equally throughout the region. Because so many people are using public transit, service is frequent, of high quality and secure. Many families feel free not to own a car, saving their money for other needs and pleasures."

Sound like an impossible fantasy? CNT has already taken another important step to make it a reality, demonstrating how the "Location Efficient Mortgage"(LEM) could help home buyers in Chicago shift a portion of savings generated by living closer to public transit to housing. In other words, by choosing to live closer to public transit, a potential homeowner could get a better loan. Provided Fannie Mae agrees to underwrite such loans, several major mortgage lenders in Chicago have agreed to offer LEMs.

Another major way to encourage clustered developments closer to already-existing infrastructure is to get rid of the perverse subsidies for sprawl: "If we didn’t subsidize sprawl, we wouldn’t have sprawl," says Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club. "Low-density, habitat-gobbling, traffic-creating growth doesn’t pay for itself. It only happens because the federal government and states subsidize it."

For instance, limiting the federal tax deduction for mortgage interest to homes bought within a certain distance from the city center would encourage new homeowners to stay close to already-built infrastructure, saving millions of dollars in construction of new roads, schools, etc. Likewise, municipalities should think very carefully before offering developers incentives such as free water and sewer hookups to build yet another widely-spaced subdivision or megamall on formerly open space or farmland.

Giving tax breaks and cleanup assistance to businesses that choose to redevelop brownfields for their industrial sites as opposed to locating on previously undeveloped land is another way to curb sprawl. Progress is being made in this direction on both the federal and local fronts. For instance, the federal Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 included a new tax incentive to spur cleanup and redevelopment of brownfields in urban and suburban areas. "Under the new Brownfields Tax Incentive, environmental cleanup costs for properties in targeted areas are fully deductible in the year in which they are incurred, rather than having to be capitalized." (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)

And in 1993, Mayor Daley created the Chicago Brownfields Initiative "to recycle [Chicago’s] abandoned properties and bring jobs to its inner core." The city received a $54 million federal loan guarantee in 1996 for its brownfields initiative, which spokespersons from the Department of the Environment say will help "create modern urban industrial parks with secured access and direct transportation links designed to meet manufacturing and warehousing needs. Redevelopment projects like this will utilize existing infrastructure and limit the adverse impacts of urban sprawl."

Personal Choice: The Missing Link

None of the innovative programs to fight sprawl described above will work without public support. Even more important, though, are the choices we all make on a daily basis.

Shopping at the locally-owned grocery as opposed to the supermarket, for instance, encourages density. So does choosing to take a train or bus — or better still, walking or biking — instead of driving. Finding a place to live close to where we work, when possible, can help us avoid long, frustrating car commutes that waste time and gas and pollute our environment. Also important is making our voices heard on issues involving open space protection, public transit upgrades and expansion, better planning, and economic incentives.

If we all work together, reinvesting in our inner cities and suburbs, we can turn sprawl around and increase the livability of the entire region.

Resources
American Farmland Trust, 815-753-9347
Center for Neighborhood Technology, 773-278-4800
Environmental Law and Policy Center, 312-759-3400
Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, 312-454-0400
Sierra Club’s report on sprawl
Surface Transportation Policy Project (for information on TEA-21 and more) 202-466-2636

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