For April 9

Excerpt from “From Sea to Shining Sea: Manifest Destiny and the National Land Use Dilemma” By Henry Richmond, Pace Law School

C. Current Development Patterns: Urban Sprawl

The terms "urban sprawl" and "suburbanization" are often used to describe the continuous out-migration of the American economic and population base from its central cities that has occurred since World War II.

As a result of these patterns of development, downtowns no longer dominate metropolitan regions as the location of most employers, office space and housing, or as the most frequent destination to shop or play. Instead, major cities are surrounded by seas of low density residential development, highlighted by "agglomerations" of development, often referred to as "Edge Cities" or "suburban megacenters," where commercial, retail, office, and entertainment development has occurred.

By 1990, 78% of all Americans lived in metropolitan regions, however, 46% of that population lived in the suburbs. Shopping facilities, including huge new malls with large parking lots, were built to serve the new suburban residents. As a result, today, there is a higher volume of retail sales in the malls of suburbia than in the downtown areas of many central cities. For example, in California, more retailing occurs in the South Coast Plaza in Orange County than in downtown San Francisco. Similarly, more shoppers frequent the malls of

King of Prussia in Chester County, Pennsylvania than shop in downtown Philadelphia. During the 1970's, America's shift from a manufacturing to a service economy created a demand for more office space. Most of that demand was met in the suburbs. This expansion of office space in the suburbs occurred very rapidly, twice as fast as the shift in population. In 1970, 25% of the office space in the United States was located in the suburbs, but by 1990, that figure had risen to 57%.

A number of factors contributed to the transition of office space to suburbia: the availability of cheaper land, lower rents, the option of shipping freight by truck rather than rail, and the availability of skilled workers. This trend was demonstrated in Atlanta where, from 1978 to 1983, the city's share of regional office space slipped from 34% to 26%, while the pace of office construction in Atlanta flourished. The loss was the result of massive construction of new office space in the suburbs. Similarly, from 1960 to 1980, Los Angeles's share of regional office space fell from 60% to 34%. In New York, from 1982 to 1984, Manhattan's share of regional office space fell from 75% to 67%, despite the city's considerable efforts to add new office space.

America's industries also relocated to suburbia. Between 1947 and 1967, America's sixteen largest and oldest central cities lost an average of 34,000 manufacturing jobs each, while their suburbs gained an average of 87,000 jobs. This trend continued through the 1970s as America's industrialized cities lost from 25% (Minneapolis) to 40% (Philadelphia) of the manufacturing jobs that remained.

D. Land Use Regulation to Control Sprawl

In the wake of this movement to suburban territory, the nation's cities have suffered severe economic disinvestment. Environmentally pristine areas have been consumed and limited natural resources have been threatened. Yet, despite these profound detrimental impacts of unguided growth, the federal government has never adopted a comprehensive national growth plan or land use policy to balance economic growth, environmental conservation, and urban reinvestment. In addition, no national administration has addressed the question of what type of metropolitan development patterns are compatible with national goals. As a result, the question of how America should develop has been left almost exclusively to the states, the repositories of legislative power under this nation's federal system.

In the 1920s, many state legislatures authorized local governments to regulate the use of land through zoning. These enabling statutes were exceedingly broad and essentially delegated the states' inherent authority to regulate land development to individual municipalities. Today, however, local comprehensive zoning regulations are ineffective to prevent the negative impacts of growth.

While the municipal recipients of comprehensive zoning power initially were relatively isolated and compact cities, today, there exist 86,692 units of local government in the United States that exercise this land use authority.

These municipalities no longer exist in isolation but are interconnected and interdependent, sharing many of the negative effects of sprawling development. A locality's authority to regulate land use, however, extends only to its political boundaries. Today's governmental units are incapable of independently affecting such interests as environmental protection, affordable housing, transportation, economic growth, and the preservation of agricultural lands. Because these interests transcend the boundaries of the municipality, they require regional solutions.

Indeed, zoning's historic function was to separate land uses and to control the neighborhood impacts of development, not to shape community development patterns over time.

One result of current land use policies is the expansion of the land coverage of metropolitan regions in gross disproportion to the expansion of their resident populations. For example, in the past twenty years, the land used for development in the New York metropolitan region increased by 65%, while its population increased by only 8%. Similarly, from 1970 to 1990, the amount of land committed to development in Seattle increased 87%, while the area's population increased only 38%. Developed land in Denver today encompasses 350 square miles. Over the next twenty years, that area is estimated to triple to 1,000 square miles while its population is

projected to increase by only a third.

There exists a twenty to thirty year capacity for accommodating future development within the nation's vastly expanded, Edge City-dominated, freeway-connected, metropolitan regions. However, that growth will come at a very high price economically, environmentally and socially. With the automobile functioning as the nearly exclusive regional transit "system," the sheer size and amount of land encompassed by metropolitan regions generates longer trips, increased fuel consumption, and air pollution. As these vast areas continue to be developed, wetlands will vanish, water supplies will be threatened, and valuable agricultural land will disappear. Taxpayers and utility ratepayers will suffer because as regions expand, the costs of providing public services such as police and fire departments, electricity, sewer systems and water, will increase. Aside from the high costs of servicing sprawling development, the public is also adversely affected by uncontrolled growth because it erodes the local tax base, restricts the accessibility of jobs and housing to less affluent people,[46] and isolates racial minorities and the poor.

The article goes on to note how Portland Oregon created alternatives to the traditional model city—for those who want to know more, the full article is available in the recommended section – “Property Rights vs. Community Betterment”