Urban Sprawl Considerations
Urban Sprawl Considerations
by Clan Crawford, Jr. Version 6.0 January 23, 2006
PRELUDE
WHAT IS URBAN SPRAWL?
WHAT CAUSES IT?...2
WHAT ARE THE OBJECTIONS TO SPRAWL?
COST
EXCLUSIONARY ASPECT...3
DESTRUCTION OF AGRICULTURAL INDUSTRY...4
ENVIRONMENTAL CONSEQUENCES
ENJOYMENT OF COUNTRY LANDSCAPES
THE PLAYERS
FARMERS
NON-FARMER COUNTRY DWELLERS AND WOULD-BEs...5
LOCAL OFFICIALS, URBAN AND RURAL
BUSINESS INTERESTS
INDUSTRY
OFFICE USERS
RETAILERS
REAL ESTATE BROKERS...6
BUILDERS AND DEVELOPERS
URBAN DWELLERS
ENVIRONMENTALISTS
LABOR ORGANIZATIONS
ACTIONS TAKEN OR PROPOSED TO COMBAT SPRAWL
LARGE LOT ZONING
AGRICULTURE PRESERVATION...7
ACQUISITION OF FARM LANDS AND VACANT PROPERTY...8
ACQUISITION OF DEVELOPMENT RIGHTS...9
CLUSTER DEVELOPMENT
NEW TOWNS...10
NEW URBANISM
SMART GROWTH...11
MAKING ROOM FOR MORE PEOPLE IN URBANIZED AREAS
ACTION AT THE STATE LEVEL
IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF URBAN LIFE...12
HISTORIC PRESERVATION
OTHER THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
PREDICTIONS...13
PUTTING IT ALL IN PERSPECTIVE
PRELUDE
This was originally written for use by people in Washtenaw (yes, it is spelled that way) County, Michigan. Readers from other parts will find it useful to know that Washtenaw County is located immediately west of Wayne County, where Detroit, Dearborn, and many other municipalities are located. The population of Washtenaw County is over 300,000 and growing rapidly. The county is divided into twenty townships and measures 30 miles, east to west, and 24 miles north to south. There are several cities which occupy land carved out of the townships. The largest is Ann Arbor, located a bit to the east of the center of the country. Its population is about 108,000. It is the county seat and the location of The University of Michigan, its largest industry.
WHAT IS URBAN SPRAWL?
Urban sprawl may be defined as the expansion of an urbanized area into the surrounding countryside, replacing land vacancy and customary country uses, such as forests and farms, with homes and commercial, institutional or industrial facilities.
WHAT CAUSES IT?
Urban sprawl happens where there is a confluence of a demand for land for urban uses and a lack of effective barriers to sprawl development. Demand is the ability to pay the price plus either a lack of available land for such uses in the already urbanized area or a desire to locate urban uses in the country. Effective barriers in a given place include land use regulations, deed restrictions, and owners, including public owners, who are unwilling to sell. Other barriers are soil conditions (particularly as they affect the provision of effective septic tank drain fields), numerous problems with water such as flood hazard, swamp conditions, or lack of water supply, or an inadequate transportation system or governmental infrastructure and services, etc.
The demand element comes from several sources, including a growing population, dissatisfaction with urban life, and changes in the way things are most effectively done.
Changes in land use may, now and then, lead to increases in population. Build a Walt Disney World and you create a demand for worker and tourist housing nearby and for a lot of other things. However, usually it is the other way around. Growing population is not the result but the cause of sprawl.
The development of automobile transportation and an elaborate network of roads has reduced a former barrier. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, manufacturing plants were built in cities where workers without cars could reach them and many factories were 3 or more stories high. Because it is often more efficient to manufacture in 1 story buildings, factories moved to the edge of town where more land was available at reasonable prices when it became practical for workers to get to them.
Demand is also affected by mass preferences, and it seems that a lot of people these days prefer living in the country.
When the construction industry grinds to a halt, from recession, strikes, blizzards, or whatever, sprawl stops.
Those who would control sprawl often concentrate on the supply side, working on measures to “save” land from development, and ignoring the fact that sprawl cannot take place without demand. Some local governments regulate land use and spend money on acquiring a lot of land for parks and open spaces. At the same time, they spend money on chamber-of-commerce-type economic development programs to generate more jobs and on widening roads to accommodate the residents of new subdivisions in the country. They may grant tax relief to new industries. They are really only growing government, not stopping sprawl.
Planner Nancy Pekarek has called to my attention to the fact that in an earlier version of this document I should have mentioned that sprawl may also be caused by perceptions of safety, educational opportunity, the relationship between job and home locations and the available of acceptable transportation facilities. It should be noted that such items can cause sprawl to feed upon itself. If you build a factory in the country, worker housing may be developed nearby. This will cause a demand for stores, schools, etc.
WHAT ARE THE OBJECTIONS TO SPRAWL?
COST
Many public officials and knowledgeable citizens are concerned about the cost of furnishing and maintaining public infrastructure and services. Way back in the early seventies, (worries about sprawl and its consequences are nothing new), the federal Council on Environmental Quality, HUD, and EPA, joined to produce a study of this problem to document what they already knew. The report, entitled “The Costs of Sprawl”, was published in April, 1974. It is about an inch thick and full of charts and graphs. Most managed growth enthusiasts prefer not to talk about it. The conclusion is set forth at p. 6 of the Executive Summary. “The results of the study...show a surprising consistency: “planning” to some extent, but higher densities to a much greater extent, result in lower economic costs, environmental costs, natural resource consumption, and some personal costs for a given number of dwelling units.”
Yes, greater density. It costs just exactly so many dollars to build the sidewalks for a mile of residential road whether 100 or 500 families live along it. It costs just so much to run a police car down a mile of road whether the cop is looking out for the safety of 100 families or 500. The same can be said to some extent about the cost of running a snow plow or street sweeper. Similar, if not quite identical, comparisons exist in the cost of curbs and gutters, storm and sanitary sewers, water mains and wires for electricity, telephone and cable TV.
It costs a lot of money to keep extending a road out into the country to accommodate new development. There is additional cost in widening the old part of the road so it can handle the traffic coming from the new part. The same can be said about sewer and water extensions. In those cases we hear about relief sewers and mains rather than widening. If the additional population were accommodated in the already built up area, the widenings and relief pipes would still be needed, but the cost of the extensions would be eliminated. Obvious, but let’s not do it in my neighborhood, OK?
Consider the fire department. Getting there fast is critical. A fire station in a densely developed area can respond quickly to the needs of more families than one that is in a sparsely populated area. Fire stations and trucks are not cheap to buy or to staff.
Such considerations as those described above are the basis of the currently popular goal called sustainability. We should try to live our lives so that valuable natural resources are not wasted, thus depriving our descendants of them. Our land use practices are a major part of this.
EXCLUSIONARY ASPECT
Since open space near homes is so popular, it seems reasonable to conclude that if the public acquires a parcel of land, or the development rights thereto, or somebody builds a golf course, on land that would otherwise probably be used for building homes, the value of the surrounding unbuilt land will increase. This is because the supply of available land in the area will be reduced and because people like the idea of building in an area where there is permanent open space nearby. Other things being equal, the cost of acquiring a home in the area will go up. The neighborhood will remain affluent. People of modest means will be excluded. This has a tendency to discourage racial and ethnic diversity. This seems to be the most usual reason that courts have frowned on various measures taken to prevent sprawl by limiting growth. Here are a few examples of what Michigan courts have said.
In Frendo v Southfield Twp, 349 MIch 693,700; 85 NW2d 130 (1957), Justice Voelker put it this way:
“[T]ime will not be halted or the clock pushed back either by kings or township zoning ordinances.”
In Green v Lima Twp, 40 Mich App 655,663; 199 NW2d 243 (1972), the Michigan Court of Appeals, striking down a zoning restriction that prevented the development of a mobile home park, said: “To allow the first 600 people in an area to use these artificial boundaries to exclude all but certain kinds of people, or those who can afford to live in favored kinds of housing, or to keep down tax bills of present property owners, subverts the idea of promoting the general welfare.”
Binkowski v Shelby Twp, 46 Mich App 451, 457; (1973) was another mobile home park case. It was opined therein that: “The zoning laws of this state were not adopted as, and the courts will not permit them to be used for, a vehicle by which a fragment of the larger community will be allowed to pick and choose the manner and degree in which it will participate in the development of the larger community with total disregard for the needs of that larger community.”
Yes, there is a reason why the expression “white flight” is often used as a synonym to urban sprawl.
DESTRUCTION OF AGRICULTURAL INDUSTRY
It has been pointed out that many of our cities are adjacent to very productive farmland, and that at least part of the reason such communities have thrived is the ready availability of food supplies. Sprawl around such cities consumes high quality farmland. However, it should be pointed out that there is frequently a lot of formerly farmed but now idle land in areas where sprawl is taking place. Other factors, usually more powerful than sprawl pressure, are contributing to the discontinuance of agriculture. These include technological advances which enable increased production on a given farm, and the phasing out of the national program of farm subsidies. As a result, farming is abandoned on more land than is needed to meet the demand for housing, and in many areas there is a lot of land reverting to brush and, eventually, trees.
However, there is no denying that homebuilding in a farming area has a negative effect on agricultural industry. (See also ENJOYMENT OF COUNTRY LANDSCAPES, below).
ENVIRONMENTAL CONSEQUENCES
Except in some cases of high density sprawl, sprawlers are more automobile-dependent than those who live closer to each other. There is more car driving with related air pollution. In addition, low density sprawl development requires greater road area per resident than more densely populated places.
Home construction does result in tree planting, often on yards that used to be farmed. However, although I have no way to prove it statistically, it has been my observation that the best way to increase the amount of tree cover is to build homes on modest lots, say 60’ by 120’. People who live in country homes plant a few more trees, but not many more per family than their neighbors in urban subdivisions. On a trees planted per acre basis, the owners of smaller lots usually win hands down. Other environmental include ground water pollution, surface water drainage and soil erosion matters, and air pollution from lawn mowing, chemical spraying, etc.
ENJOYMENT OF COUNTRY LANDSCAPES
As buildings, highways, and other construction needed or desired by an urban or suburban population are provided in a rural area, it loses its “country” character. There is a lot of noise about the delights of living in the country, or driving through it, and viewing the rural landscape. Although it is difficult to say just how popular the idea of preserving these landscapes is, particularly if it takes more taxes to do it, it does seem clear that a substantial number of people think that such preservation is important. Furthermore, we don’t hear much objection to preservation from many of those who don’t mind sprawl. (See FARMERS, below.)
This issue has been considered in numerous lawsuits involving land use. In setting aside a zoning restriction limiting home building to a very low density, the supreme court of Pennsylvania made the following frequently quoted comment in National Land and Investment Company v. Easttown Township Board of Adjustment, 419 Pa. 504; 215 A2d 597 (1965) At 419 Pa. 530, the following appears: “There is no doubt that many of the residents of this area are highly desirous of keeping it the way it is, preferring, quite naturally, to look out upon land in its natural state rather than on other homes. These desires, however, do not rise to the level of public welfare. This is purely a matter of private desire which zoning regulation may not be employed to effectuate.”
On the other hand, in a case where land owners were being paid for scenic easements out of public funds, Justice Douglas, writing in Berman v Parker, 348 US 26,33; 99 L Ed 27,38; 75 Sct 98 (1954), noted that : “The concept of public welfare is broad and inclusive...The values it represents are spiritual as well as physical, aesthetic as well as monetary. It is within the power of the legislature to determine that the community should be beautiful as well as healthy, spacious as well as clean, well-balanced as well as carefully patrolled.”
Perhaps the rule is that there is enough of a public interest in the aesthetics of the landscape to permit the use of public funds to protect it but not enough to justify cramming preservation down the throats of unwilling property owners without compensation.
THE PLAYERS
Let us turn our attention to the various groups of people who participate in matters involving sprawl.
FARMERS
Farmers come in many sizes and flavors. Young, full time farmers, who expect to be farming for decades, tend to dislike sprawl because it often causes a dramatic rise in property taxes, and because their new, non-farming neighbors may do unfriendly things.
Some farmers, often older ones, who are deriving income by selling off lots a bit at a time and are not serious about continued farming, often see nothing wrong with sprawl. They maintain that if the public wants to maintain open space it can do so by buying land or by changing zoning and other policies to permit cluster subdivisions with large common open spaces.
“Planning & Zoning News, February, 1999, reports, at p. 4, that Michigan’s 1997 Agricultural Census reveals that during the previous 15 years, the average age of Michigan farmers rose from 49.5 to 53.3 years, and that during the same period, the number of farmers under 35 years of age dropped by 62%. It is also set forth that nearly 40% of Michigan farmland is rented by the farmer.
NON-FARMER COUNTRY RESIDENTS AND WOULD-BEs
Generally speaking, people who have moved to the country did so to avoid rubbing elbows with other people. Although they are sprawlers themselves, they commonly do not welcome anyone else who desires to build a home nearby. As they say in Aspen, Colorado real estate offices: “An environmentalist is a guy who got his cabin built last year.” They are frequently the most vigorous opponents of sprawl and quite eager to make common cause with environmental extremist groups and anyone else who also opposes it.
However, they also frequently oppose certain sprawl control measures. They are not in favor of large public parks near their homes. (See ACQUISITION OF FARM LANDS AND VACANT PROPERTY, below.) They don’t want those people from whom they fled when they moved to the country to be coming near their new homes on weekends for recreation. They don’t welcome the higher property taxes that increased density brings.
LOCAL OFFICIALS, URBAN AND RURAL
Many local officials in rural areas oppose sprawl because they fear a demand for public facilities and services that are prohibitively expensive in areas of low density. They tend to look at very large lot zoning and the resulting sprawl as the means of avoiding the need for such facilities and services. Others see increasing population as the road to higher salaries and larger staffs.
Officials of the urbanized municipalities around which sprawl takes place are motivated by a number of different factors which sometimes clash. (See OTHER THINGS TO THINK ABOUT below.)
The views of those officials who are elected are tempered by the fact that reelection depends on pleasing the majority of the local voters. Often, the majority of voters are non-farmers who live in the country and aren’t anxious to get any more neighbors. (See AGRICULTURE PRESERVATION below.)
INDUSTRY
As pointed out above, under WHAT CAUSES IT?, many industrial operations are more efficient if carried on in a one story building. Their owners favor locations where land is cheaper than in cities, where large sites are easily obtained in areas free from industrially caused soil contamination. Sometimes, particularly in the outskirts of large cities, the sprawl location is more convenient for more workers, making it easier to get and keep competent help.
OFFICE USERS
Certain commercial operations, often sales offices, consider easy access to the freeways much more important than easy access to banks, lawyers, accountants and other typical downtown occupants. The demand for offices has outgrown the capacity of downtown in some cities.
RETAILERS
The seemingly endless shopping malls and freestanding “category killers” or “big boxes” are the particular target of many sprawl haters. However, in communities which have experienced substantial growth, the space required for providing goods and services to the enlarged population is simply not available in the good old downtown. Theoretically, one might put in multi-story stores, with parking garages above or below or both, but it would also be necessary to widen the streets, and this would destroy all the quaint Victorian store fronts that make downtown what it is. Furthermore, the main streets leading to downtown would have to be widened, and the large trees which line them cut down.
Those who criticize these large stores ought to investigate the amount of business they do and consider how many friendly little neighborhood stores it would take to provide the goods that these large stores furnish. They should also consider the environmental consequences of people driving around to different little stores instead of one-stop shopping at a big one.
There are certain kinds of commerce that do very well serving the needs of sprawlers. Nurseries, dealers in garden tractors and similar equipment, garden centers, firms that mow lawns and plow snow, all benefit from a growing population in the sticks.
REAL ESTATE BROKERS
They work on commission. The higher the price the greater the commission. It is often as much work to sell a property for $30,000 as for $250,000. Thus, many brokers benefit from anything that results in construction of homes for affluent people.
BUILDERS AND DEVELOPERS
The prices that a builder must charge to make money depend on his control of a large number of mostly rather small cost items. Land costs are one of the most variable. Property taxes are also a significant factor. The level of property taxes also affects the amount of money a purchaser can afford to spend on loan payments.
Where the amount of usable land in a given area is restricted by zoning or environmental regulations, or by public purchase of large quantities of land or the development rights associated therewith, the price that the remaining land in the area will bring tends to rise.
Builders, therefore, tend to oppose certain sprawl control measures. On the other hand, they point out that if municipalities would reduce minimum lot sizes and make more land available for multiple family dwellings, they could meet the demand of a growing population for new housing without consuming so much of the countryside.
Developer bashing is the favorite sport of people who express their opposition to land use proposals at public hearings or through letters to the editors of newspapers. It usually indicates a lack of understanding of what is going on. Developers are people who attempt to make their fortunes by producing what they think people want to buy and can afford. Most of them are not very creative, and their proposals merely reflect what they think will sell. I am not aware that it has been shown that they are any more greedy than college professors or that they cut more corners than truck drivers.
URBAN DWELLERS
Many people who live in cities like to drive through the countryside and hate to see it getting farther and farther away. Others are concerned with the many and varied long term effects of conversion of agricultural lands to other uses. For whatever reason, there are a lot of urban dwellers who declare that urban sprawl is bad and they are against it. However, if you ask them how they view the idea of discouraging sprawl by making room for higher density housing in existing city neighborhoods, including theirs, they lack enthusiasm. Furthermore, many will quickly grope for reasons why their own neighborhood is special and should be exempt from any such policy. Widespread opposition to increased density in existing urbanized areas may well be the primary barrier to doing anything significant to slow sprawl. Planning & Zoning News, May, 2000, p.16, reports that Gary Garczynski, Vice President of the National Association of Home Builders, recently pointed out that “American people are against two things sprawl and density.”
ENVIRONMENTALISTS
Until recently, they opposed sprawl and they also opposed denser development in urbanized areas and they had no answer to the problem of housing a growing population and increasing work, shopping and recreational places to match the increased population. Of late, they seem to have become more realistic, and sometimes favor increased urban densities to meet the needs of population growth. However, On August 31, 1999, the Ann Arbor News reported, p.C1, that one Carl Pope, national executive director of The Sierra Club, was in town and denounced a proposed in-town housing development, mentioning that the river which the site overlooks “needs space.” (Actually, the proposed project is several hundred feet from the river, with a busy street and an industrial area occupying most of the space in between.) Evidently, he did not report on any alternative plan to house the 191 families that would otherwise occupy the development. Perhaps they will just evaporate instead of locating in developments now consuming open lands in the surrounding townships.
LABOR ORGANIZATIONS
Most of them have not been much interested in this issue. The construction trades, however, tend to oppose any measure or program that restricts building activity.
ACTIONS TAKEN OR PROPOSED TO COMBAT SPRAWL
LARGE LOT ZONING
The December, 1997 Planning & Zoning News reported a 1997 Statewide Land Use Survey taken by Public Sector Consultants, Lansing, MI. It concluded that 49% of people in Michigan would prefer to live on a large rural lot. There is a lot of concern for preservation of farmland, forests and scenic areas, but no recognition that this is inconsistent with nearly half the population living on a large rural lot, at least in the parts of Michigan which are at risk from widespread sprawl.
A standard section of land, as laid out by the government surveyors in the part of the country that was once the Northwest Territory, consists of a square mile, or 640 acres. Divided into 10 acre parcels, it would make 64 lots, although it would be usually at least 7 less, to leave space for roads. At most, the section would house 57 families. The Census Bureau says that Michigan households average 2.8 persons. Thus the 57 households, or 159.6 people would occupy a square mile. An entire township, which consists of 36 sections, would have a population of only 5745.6 people. It could only achieve that density if there were no lakes, streams, swamps or other lands that couldn’t be used, and no stores, farms, parks, schools, churches, factories, or any of the other things that land is used for.
On February 24, 1998, www.co.washtenaw.mi.us, Washtenaw County’s web page, contained a document from the county planning department stating that the population of the county was 282,937 and that it contained 104,528 dwelling units. If 49% (51219) of these dwelling units were located on 10 acre parcels, this housing would occupy 512,190 acres. However, there is a problem. There are less than 460,800 acres of land in the entire county. (640*36*20). Thus, to achieve the 10 acre/du standard, it would be necessary to raise an army, conquer Lenawee County, and drive out most of its present inhabitants, probably into Ohio.
In less populous counties, this situation wouldn’t be so extreme, but these are not the places where urban sprawl is a serious problem.
Areas where homes have been built on 5 or 10 acre lots usually don’t look like farm country, since farming is so rare in such places. . Too many driveways, mailboxes, houses and pole barns. On weekends, one can see grown men riding around mowing acres of lawn on little toy tractors, often painted green and yellow and bearing the John Deere label. That doesn’t make them farmers or preserve agriculture in any way.
Although 10 acre lots may seem like a GREAT idea to someone who lives next door to a farm and doesn’t want a lot of us common folk to build houses on the farm, it is madness from a public policy standpoint.
Furthermore, the courts usually won’t buy it. (See EXCLUSIONARY ASPECT above.)
AGRICULTURE PRESERVATION
This is a matter that is far more complicated than merely preventing developers from using farmland. In the end, efforts to preserve agricultural usage may be frustrated by technology, economics and national policy. See DESTRUCTION OF AGRICULTURAL INDUSTRY, above.
It is worth noting that a lot of farming is done by part-timers with income from off-farm employment. Sometimes it seems that the principal crop is bushels and bushels of deductions. A certain amount of land is tilled by hobby farmers without expectation of actually deriving income.
As the invasion by the country gentlemen continues, the day arrives when they outnumber the farmers, even though they occupy only a small part of the land. Sooner or later they gain control of the local unit of government having zoning power. The farmers on the township board or planning commission are gradually replaced by business executives and professional people.
At the same time the country gentlemen are finding out some things about farms and farming that they didn’t know when they built their homes. After all, most of them had made only casual observations of farms, often on Sunday afternoon drives. Until they moved in, many were not aware that farm implements make quite a bit of noise and that sometimes, due to weather or other things, they must be operated around the clock and on weekends.
Farm odors provide another surprise. Manure and various other fertilizers and chemicals emit aromas that are appreciated only by benefiting farmers. The experience of being repeatedly buzzed by a crop dusting plane flying less than 200 feet high with its engines running full blast can be terrifying.
Farm machinery and even animals can be dangerous to children who have not been trained to respect them.
Farm auctions, barn dances and roadside stands frequently attract large crowds and raise enormous and persistent clouds of dust along gravel roads. The periodic influx of transient farm laborers who may belong to minority races or speak Spanish creates fear of security problems in the minds of some nearby homeowners.
Some country gentlemen are even annoyed by the crowing of the rooster at dawn and, having been so rudely awakened, get really exasperated when delayed on the morning commute to town by a slow moving farm vehicle or implement on the road.
The fact is that farming is not simply a picturesque means of producing pleasant and quiet open spaces between country homes but is a combination of commerce and industry that has many incidents of each which, in other circumstances, are regarded as totally incompatible with nearby residential use and occupancy. Consequently, when the city slickers get control of local government in an agricultural area and find themselves receiving the complaints of fellow homeowners, they are inclined by the force of political pressure towards actions which make life more pleasant for the homeowner but which hamper the farmer in his efforts to keep the tax collector from driving him off his land.
Usually they amend the zoning ordinance to make certain agricultural practices either illegal or subject to a special permit which is not forthcoming if neighboring homeowners object. Sometimes this is the straw that breaks the tractor’s crankshaft. The farmer sells out to a speculator who may rent the land for farming but more probably just lets the brush start taking over until he can sell out to a homebuilder.
To deal with this problem, various state legislatures adopted so-called right to farm acts. The Michigan legislature, by Act 93, PA 1981, MCL 286.471 et seq., declared that certain activities and practices of farmers are not to be considered as nuisances. Since the zoning enabling acts declare that zoning violations are nuisances, it would seem to follow that these activities and practices couldn’t be violations. Or could they? There have been various court decisions and amendments of the statute with varying results. However, amendments made late in 1999 seem to make it clear that the Right to Farm Act really is a limitation on local zoning power.
It seems likely that in many areas the purchase of farms, either by governmental agencies or private organizations, and the operation of such farms at a loss, may be the only effective means of preserving agriculture on them.
ACQUISITION OF FARM LANDS AND VACANT PROPERTY
The difficulties in preserving agricultural industry do not preclude the collection of unused farmlands for such purposes as environmental protection, recreation, and as a reserve for unforeseen future needs. Realistically, selection of those lands to be preserved should be closely coupled with determination of which lands are to be sacrificed to the housing and other needs of a growing population. A story in The Ann Arbor News on September 29, 1997 told of a 776 acre site, much of which fronts on Geddes Rd. about a mile north of the city of Ypsilanti, as possibly the first PDR purchase under a state-funded program. This is very close-in land. A few hundred feet from part of it is a manufactured home subdivision and, nearby, a subdivision of conventional, stick-built homes. If there were a plan in place that identified areas to be sacrificed to growth, it would seem that this might well be one of them. Is there any reason to believe that “saving” this land will not merely result in the sprawl accelerating on unsaved lands to the north? There is nothing so great about leapfrog sprawl. It might be more logical to think of lands farther from existing urban development as being better suited for preservation of open space. Without a plan, it’s hard to tell.
Country homeowners are concerned with property values and with the quality of life, of which the snob value of owning a rural estate in an appropriate setting is an element. They react, just like other people, to anything that threatens these values.
In 1939, the Michigan Legislature authorized the creation of The Huron-Clinton Metropolitan Authority to build and operate a system of parks around the then edges of the Detroit Metropolitan Area, MCL 119.51 et seq. It operates in five counties and imposes a small property tax to support its activities. It is generally regarded as highly successful in doing its job.
In the late 1970s, Huron-Clinton Metropolitan Authority proposed to build, in Washtenaw County, a large new park, to be called Mill Creek Metropark. The Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) on the project, prepared by The U.S. Department of the Interior and dated March 22, 1979, describes the project as containing 3501 acres in 131 parcels, mostly in Lima Twp. with 169 acres in Freedom Twp., and anticipated paying nearly 7 million dollars for the land with a total project cost of 23 to 25 million dollars(p.4). It was expected that the park would provide recreational facilities for people living in several counties, and anticipated use by 2 to 2.5 million visitors per year (p4). By damming Mill Creek, a 618 acre lake would be created, enabling HCMA to offer boating, swimming and fishing facilities as well as picnicking areas, athletic fields, a 180 acre 18 hole golf course, and winter sports and nature trails (p7). Nifty, right?
Wrong! Although the Washtenaw County Metropolitan Planning Commission endorsed the concept of a park of this nature on the proposed site in October, 1971(p18), and endorsed the project again in 1973 and 1974 (p32), the natives did not. Lima township had planned the area for retention and enhancement of existing agricultural industry and preservation of certain natural areas (p19). “The township feels that the development of the proposed park would make these goals difficult, if not impossible, to attain.” (p19).
The township created an historic district which included most of the proposed park (p41), although it contained “no sites or structures which are nationally registered historic or natural landmarks...” (p39).
SEMCOG, on the other hand, had included the proposed park as “a component of the 1990 Regional Recreation and Open Space Plan for Southeast Michigan” (p28).
It is worth noting that “The proposed park is included within an area designated by the Washtenaw County Soil Conservation District (USDA) as prime farmland whose use should not be changed. Use of land is changing, however, from agricultural to suburban residential...” (pp 59-60). It was concluded that “The project is likely to increase numbers of new residences in the township, especially on lands immediately adjacent to park boundaries.” (p. 19). It seems that if we acquire new park lands to save open space by preventing the land from being used for country homes, we attract more homes to the vicinity. If we build it they will come. Should a plan for a substantial park include an area and infrastructure for a village? Mill Creek Metropark was never built.
It is not necessary to buy every acre of every farm to preserve the country feeling. A typical forty acre parcel has nearly 1300 feet of road frontage, twice as much if it is at a corner. Were the county to buy a strip along the road, perhaps 200 feet deep, subject to an easement for a roadway, 66 feet wide, at a location specified in the deed, and with the trees cut and grading done at the time of sale to avoid arguments later, most of the land along the public road could be kept in its natural state and most of the 40 acres could be used for farming, housing, or other purposes. This technique would not work everywhere, due to topography and other factors. But where it can work it may be a lot cheaper than buying the whole farm and may funnel development into the most suitable places.
ACQUISITION OF DEVELOPMENT RIGHTS
According to a statement of land use policies of the Michigan Farm Bureau, as published in Planning & Zoning News, November, 1998, p.5, “The value of the development rights shall be the difference between the fair market value and the agricultural value of the land.” Thus, if a knowledgeable farmer would be willing to pay $1,000 per acre for a certain parcel to use it for farming, and if a knowledgeable developer would be willing to pay $1,500 per acre for the same parcel if he could use it for residential development, the development rights would be worth $500 per acre. It would appear, at least on the surface, that the parcel could be “saved” from sprawl development for 1/3 of the cost of buying it outright. There are, no doubt, places where such a tactic could be successfully used to “protect” a quite large area on a limited budget.
However, in many places where sprawl development is going on or seems about to commence, the property has little or no value for farming. Suppose, the developer is willing to pay $1500 and the farmer is willing to pay only $30. The cost of acquisition of development rights is $1,470, or 98% of the cost of buying the land outright. When you consider that purchase of development rights does not give the buyer any right to use the land, and there is no guarantee that it will continue to be farmed, wouldn’t it make more sense to buy the land outright? A public agency which owns the land can rent it to a farmer, or, if necessary, pay a farmer to farm it if continued farming is considered important. Or, it could plant a forest of quick-growing trees that could be sold for pulp if annual crop farming again became feasible. The owner of development rights has no such options.
To put it another way, wouldn’t it make more sense to buy 98% of the land outright and let the other 2% go, than to get merely the development rights on the whole tract?
Evidently, little of the land used for farming in Washtenaw County has any actual value for agricultural use. In a revealing article in The Ann Arbor News on March 16, 1997, p A6, an appraiser noted that hardly any land is sold between farmers because the land is too valuable to farm. It thus appears unlikely that PDR can be expected to do much to reduce the amount of sprawl in Washtenaw County.
It would be much better, if it is desired to preserve farming activity, to buy land outright or lease it and then rent it out for whatever a farmer will pay. This will probably keep the farming going longer, not only on the purchased land, but also on nearby land owned by the renting farmer. Further, it will give the public unchallenged control over the use of the land when farming ceases.
When development rights are purchased from a farmer it is vital to permit the farmer to make some economically viable use of his land in the event that it ceases to be farmed as a result of subsidy discontinuance or technological change or for some other reason. Otherwise the farmer will have to go on paying taxes and liability insurance on land that yields no cash. Because of the amount of pdr activity going on this seems likely to start happening before long. It will produce pressure to change the tax laws to compel the owner of the development rights to pay the taxes and carry liability insurance. Such changes would create a major financial burden on the private non-profit groups and governmental agencies that own the rights.
This can be avoided by leaving the selling farmer with some potentially profitable use rights besides farming. For example, it might be provided that the only right purchased is the right to use the land for housing or for housing on lots less than 40 acres in area. Or it could be merely a prohibition against any use which requires more than 5% of the land to be covered by buildings, driveways and parking areas. There is probably no universal formula for this, since every parcel of land is unique. There might well be established a procedure for changing the restrictions should circumstances require. The guiding principal should be that the restrictions to not prevent all economically viable use of the land.
Another approach is to buy the land outright but leaving the farmer with a life estate that permits him to live there for as long as he likes and pays the taxes and allows him to farm the property as long as he lives there. It also allows his widow to occupy the property on the same terms.
CLUSTER DEVELOPMENT
Cluster development can result in long-term maintenance of large amounts of open space while accommodating the housing needs of a growing population. Consider an 80 acre parcel of land with 80 townhouses concentrated on 8 of the 80 acres. This 8 acres would have about the density of most townhouse projects in the county and there would be a 72 acre parcel of open space.
There are two methods of protecting this 72 acres from development. The first is through the zoning technique of planned unit development, where the entire 80 acres is included in the plan and the 72 acres are designated as open space. Thus, no development could take place on the 72 acre open space parcel without approval of the zoning municipality. The second is the inclusion of the open space in a condominium project covering the entire 80 acres and designated as part of the common elements of the condominium under the control of the condominium association. The bylaws of such groups usually require a large majority to make changes in things. Thus, anyone eyeing the open space for development would have to convince both the public authorities and the neighbors of the desirability of the development. Barriers don’t get much higher than that.
Cluster development also encourages building homes outside of swamps, forests, and lakesides, because it is usually cheaper to build away from such areas and any amenities they have may be enjoyed by all of the residents of the development. Since the developer must leave most of the land area as open space, little or nothing is lost by staying out of the sensitive areas.
Larger cluster developments often have retail and service establishments which eliminate the need for a lot of driving on minor shopping errands. In Malmo, Sweden, the Caroli City development consists of about 6 stories of apartments and a parking structure, all arranged as a quadrangle. The courtyard in the center is an enclosed shopping mall. The mall roof is landscaped and serves as a park for the residents of the apartments.
Caracas, Venezuela, boasts Parque Central, which consists of a 3 level shopping mall, several 30 story apartment towers and higher office towers, the Caracas Hilton hotel, a church, park, and parking structure. Such developments are capable of meeting the needs of a growing population without consuming enormous amounts of land.
NEW TOWNS
Columbia, Md., a planned community about 35 years old, is probably one of the best examples of how to absorb a lot of population growth without undue squandering of land resources. It was built in accordance with a plan for a community of about 115,000 people on 22 square miles of land. In this regard it is similar to Ann Arbor, Michigan. However, it is better organized. About half the dwelling units are single family homes on lots in the 4,000-5,000 sq. ft. range scattered among townhouse developments at 10 dwelling units per acre and apartment houses at about 12 units per acre, and there is a convenience store within walking distance of every dwelling unit. There are large public open spaces which include most of the environmentally sensitive land. There are several small shopping centers scattered around and a central business area featuring an enclosed shopping mall, several office buildings, and a hotel. Columbia doesn’t quite make it because of a little of the problem of new urbanism, described in the next section, but it certainly points the way.
NEW URBANISM
Some cluster subdivisions, usually with very limited commercial facilities, have been designated by their promoters as new urbanism. Such projects seem to have one thing in common. They avoid aesthetic problems by simply excluding vital land uses. Although they may provide for transit alternatives to the car, their residents still have cars, which they need when they venture out of Paradise. But there are no car dealers, new or used, or junk yards or body shops or even gas stations. There are no huge building materials dealers or garden centers, furniture stores, etc. All such uses have been externalized, banished to nearby municipalities.
Such a Mickey Mouse community has been built at Walt Disney World. It is called Celebration. I have read that there is no hardware store in town. The Disney web site has this to say. “Besides the well known names of AMC, SunTrust Bank and Florida Hospital, you’ll be hard pressed to find other world famous brands in the Town of Celebration. There is no Burger King or McDonald’s. Instead, you’re invited to visit Barnie’s Coffee & Tea, Bread Alone Bakery, Café D’Antonio, Columbia Restaurant, Max’s Café & Coffee Shop, Max’s Grille, or Wm. J. Sweet’s.” “Likewise, you won’t find a Wal-Mart, Target, or Sear’s (sic) in Celebration. Instead, your shopping habits can be satiated at Celebration Cycle, Chambers Jewelers, Downeast - An Orvis Shop, Gooding’s, L’Occitane, Market Street Gallery, M Fashions, Soft As A Grape, Thomas Dunn Interiors, Village Merchantile, White’s Books & Gifts, Wood, Stone & Steel, Wyland Galleries, or Zirbes’ Antiques. Celebration also offers a farmers market on Saturdays and a golf course.”
“To put it simply and bluntly, there is no elected government in the Town of Celebration. Despite it’s name, the Town of Celebration is not a town at all. it’s simply a vast tract of privately owned land known as the Celebration Community Development District. Commercial properties are owned by the Celebration Company while residential properties are owned by the home owners who form the Celebration Residential Owner’s Association. Residents pay fees to this owner’s association, which are then used to maintain the town and parks, including the town’s jewel, Lakeside Park. Through an arrangement with Osceola County, these fees are charged as part of a resident’s annual tax bill to the county.” ”The town’s government, such as it is, consists of a council with both members of the owner’s association and the Celebration Company. The council is designed in such a fashion that the Celebration Company has final say on any and all decisions.” ” There are a variety of houses and apartments to choose from in Celebration, with prices ranging from the steep to the utterly absurd. “
SMART GROWTH
This name has been given to a program, started in Maryland, which has received a lot of publicity around the country. It appears to be a big step in the right direction, even if it isn’t a magic solution to the entire problem. It is described in “Great Lakes Bulletin”, a publication of Michigan Land Use Institute, Spring, 1998, p.6, as follows:
“Smart Growth simply means that the state will not use taxpayer money to subsidize building new subdivisions, new malls, new schools, or new roads in outlying areas, but will direct public resources close to existing cities and towns.”
Planning & Zoning News, May, 2000, reports that Wisconsin adopted legislation to encourage smart growth measures in 1999, p. 15, and that a wide range of Michigan organizations have concluded that smart growth is a good idea, p.16.
This approach has much to offer in most situations as a part of the answer. If a housing project is built on a former farm at the edge of town and relieves a serious overcrowding problem in town, it may be worthwhile.
Consider the railroad underpass at Dexter, a village about 8 miles northwest of Ann Arbor. It causes huge tieups along the Dexter-Pinckney Rd. It reduces the quality of life in the northwestern part of the county and is a deterrent to further sprawl. But the Washtenaw County Road Commission proposes to replace it to eliminate these tieups and make living in the country more pleasant. If it were smart growth minded, it would use the funds on roads closer to major urban populations.
On January 5, 1999, after a particularly bad snowstorm on New Year’s Day, the following appeared in an article on p. A12 of The Ann Arbor News: “If you live on a rural dirt road or in a country subdivision, the last few days have been more miserable than in the rest of Washtenaw County...”. Inadequate snow plowing is an elegant way to discourage living in the country.
As noted above under “WHAT CAUSES IT?”, public funds spent to encourage economic development tend to accelerate job and population growth and provide fuel for further sprawl. Those who work hard on local economic development seem to be putting the desire to make more money and create more jobs above the desire to stop sprawl.
MAKING ROOM FOR MORE PEOPLE IN URBANIZED AREAS
Nobody should be deluded into thinking that there is anything easy about providing additional housing in urbanized areas. City dwellers are at least as good at door-slamming tactics as those who live in the country. Those who oppose greater population density in their urban neighborhoods are often putting the defense of their turf against outsiders above any desire to stop sprawl.
Nonetheless, there is no getting around the fact that we cannot keep providing more homes, stores, offices, etc. in the cities without making great changes in their character. As long as the population keeps growing, something’s got to give. Either we make more room in the city by tearing down old buildings and replacing them with towers, or we allow sprawl to go on.
There is a popular notion that quality of life in an area varies inversely with population density. Back in the 1970’s I checked this out. At that time, Ann Arbor had a population of about 4,500 people per square mile. Detroit had a population of about 9,500 per square mile. Since Ann Arbor is thought of as a better place to live than Detroit, this comparison supports the notion. However, a very popular place to live is Paris, France. It turned out that Paris had a density of 57,000 per square mile.
I once asked a Spaniard, who had lived in the US for several years and was then residing in a condo overlooking the city square in Valencia, why he didn’t go out to the edge of the city and build a house with a nice big yard around it, like the one he used to have in Shaker Heights, Ohio. He laughed a little and then told me that no Spaniard wants to live where there isn’t a bakery and a tavern on the same block. It is evident that not everyone in the world seeks a home in an exclusively residential area in the suburbs.
ACTION AT THE STATE LEVEL
The possibility of simplifying land use regulation by replacing 20 township zoning ordinances with 1 county zoning ordinance is not often mentioned, even though enabling legislation is already in place and has been used in several other counties. There are a few places where it is recognized that the county can afford the planning and legal expertise that rural townships often lack. Such a shift would be worthwhile even if some of the more populous and pompous townships opted out as the law allows. However the legislature could change the enabling acts to give the county, rather than the townships, the right to zone unincorporated lands, and to give it the right to directly control the construction, enlargement and maintenance of roads by the county road commissions. Unified responsibility for a substantial area would probably help.
Some have suggested that the legislature amend the property tax laws to value lands used for agriculture at their value for that use rather than true cash value. This would probably extend the farming activity on a lot of land for a significant period, since property taxes are a major cost, particularly on lands having substantial development value. But a lot of tax revenue would be lost, and a lot of the tax savings would go to wealthy speculators who own farmland.
The legislature tried to deal with this problem in the Farmlands and Open Spaces Act, which provides relief from the state income tax, not property taxes, for farmers with low incomes. But the result has not been very favorable, and has merely encouraged leapfrog development, since so many owners can’t take advantage of the available relief. (See also AGRICULTURAL PRESERVATION and SMART GROWTH above.)
IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF URBAN LIFE
It seems to me unfortunate that so many people have left our cities for outlying areas with the result that there is a lot of unused or underused land and infrastructure in the cities and a population mostly poor and unable to do much to improve things. It doesn’t have to be this way. In many parts of the world, the central cities are inhabited by the rich and the poor live out in the sticks.
While avoiding acts that make country living more pleasant, we could concentrate on things which make urban life more enjoyable.
Urban life has one big advantage over living in the country. Things are close together. If the transportation system is good, urban dwellers spend much less time getting from one place to another.
Clean streets and sidewalks, kept free of snow and ice, abundant city parks and gardens, museums and theaters, are among the things that attract people to cities. We could be giving them more attention. Cities have a bad reputation for violent crime, but this seems to be getting under somewhat better control, and it seems that we are hearing more and more about suburban and rural crime in recent years.
The Wall Street Journal, on October 17, 1994, at p. B1, said that over half of homes over 3,000 sq. ft. are occupied by less than 3 people. Six bedroom homes occupied by empty nesters are common. Since 1969, the size of the average new single family home has gone from 1,400 to 2,200 sq. ft. while family size has decreased from 3.6 to 2.7 people. Most new apartments now have two bedrooms. Lots of bathrooms and fireplaces are common features of new homes, and cathedral ceilings are popular.
Much of the existing housing in our cities does not meet these standards. If urban life is to compete, some of it is going to have to be replaced.
HISTORIC PRESERVATION
Historic district preservation is a coin with two sides. People enjoy seeing old buildings if they are well cared for, so that preservation serves to improve the quality of life for a lot of people. The other side of the coin is that it creates barriers to change that tend to drive businesses and housing developments to the outlying areas.
OTHER THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
Way back in the 1950s, or perhaps even earlier, it was noticed by those with a vested interest in prosperous cities, particularly the paid officials thereof, that the popularity of suburban life and the sprawl that resulted was causing many cities to lose population, suffer decreases in assessed value of property, and force increases in tax rates. It is not surprising that they came to the conclusion that those who live in the suburbs somehow owe something to the city.
They beat the drums to this tune and, when the Michigan legislature authorized cities to impose income taxes on their residents, it included a provision for a payroll tax on all people who worked in the city, even if they didn’t live there. Shortly after this law took effect, Detroit imposed such taxes. Shortly after that, Detroit’s large law firms began establishing branch offices in the suburbs, and, before long, many of the lawyers, secretaries, and other employees didn’t work in Detroit at all. Imagine that! In addition, a number of new law firms, some of which became quite large, were founded in the suburbs and didn’t even have offices in Detroit.
Lawyers weren’t the only people who did such things, and the existing trend of business to move to the suburbs accelerated. Today, the fact is that there are a lot of people who live in outlying communities who do not work, shop, or do anything else in Detroit and seldom or never go there. This has reached the place where “suburb” seems a misleading way to describe these municipalities.
In an article purporting to show that “...the small towns we love most would be illegal by today’s zoning.”, it is stated that “Zoning ushered in development that in many places is paving over land at a rate five times greater than the growth in population.” Nonsense. Zoning restrains development. It doesn’t usher it in. The fact that new development results in more paving than older development is caused by many things. The availability of affordable transportation by cars is probably the biggest cause.
Recently I read that “The farmers I’ve met who have been forced out of the business have been forced out because they lost neighboring land to lease for their operations-not because of taxes.” Could it be that the reason they lost the land was that they were unable to pay a rent that would cover the taxes plus some return on the investment? I once bought a farm and for several years rented it to a farmer who paid rent in the amount of about 30% of the taxes. Finally I ceased renting it to him in hopes that the brush and small trees that would grow up would make the property more valuable in the eyes of a potential buyer. It worked.
I saw an article about a place called Whitewater. (This one is a Michigan township located between Traverse City and Kalkaska and contains the village of Williamsburg.) A township official is quoted as saying “Master plans are dreams. Ordinances are reality. We are determined not to have an ordinance that prescribes urban sprawl.”
Let’s mull that one over. Presumably, planning commissioners work for many hours to create a master plan with the hope that it will serve as a guide to future development. It usually reflects the dreams of the planning commissioners for the community they want to have. But if it is so dreamy that it is not realistic, as is often the case, it stands little chance of being carried out. I remember a little bit from “The Man of LaMancha”: “A man with moonbeams in his hands has nothing there at all.”
Someone, undoubtedly annoyed by the dreaminess of many master plans, has observed that the best thing a community can do is work for months or years on a master plan, and, when satisfied that it is just right, adopt it. Then throw it in the wastebasket and start over again. The suggestion is that the process is valuable but that the product is often worthless.
The article regarding Whitewater describes a proposed ordinance designed to prevent sprawl. It calls for a “traditional” village business center and homes on 8,000 sq. ft. lots. But this is what we see over and over again in sprawl suburbs. The trouble is that if an area of 8,000 sq. ft. lots is populoous enough to support a business district, it is large enough so that many people are unwilling to walk to the business district.
Suppose they copied the scheme used in Columbia, Md., described above. They might come up with a workable urban density. Whitewater Township’s proposed ordinance also contains a lot of architectural and site design rules designed to make it look “traditional” and have an appearance unlike the typical modern suburban business area. Among other things, windows in new buildings must be taller than they are wide. This was the fashionable style in the days before Mr. Edison invented electric lights. Unless they can find business people willing to comply with these rules, the businesses may locate outside the township and thus contribute to rather than limit sprawl.
Here is another example. In 1920 the City of Ann Arbor, Michigan, had a population of around 20,000. Three years later, it adopted its first zoning ordinance, which required a lot of 5,000 square feet for each single family home. Numerous subdivisions were built to this specification, although a lot of others had lots in the 5,000-8,000 square foot range and there were a few with even larger lots. By 1960, the population had risen to 62,000 and the city had evidently outgrown its central business district. Its people were patronizing the new Arborland shopping center, featuring Montgomery Ward (moved from downtown), Penney, and Kroger stores. Then came K-Mart, etc., etc. The moral is that even a zoning ordinance that allows a modestly dense pattern of development will not necessarily prevent sprawl.
Like most of the things in this world, many land use proposals are a mixture of good and bad. An example was a proposed mobile home park in Sharon Twp., on the western fringe of Washtenaw County where a developer sought to use 178 acres of land for a 693 unit mobile home park. The density, 3.9 units per acre, is about 2/3 of what is common in modern mobile home parks, and while still in the sprawl range, consumes quite a lot less space than if the homes were built under the typical township single family lot size requirements of 2 or more acres per dwelling unit. However, it would more than double the population of the township, with the possibility that the occupants could vote out the present officers and take over the government of the township, shutting out those who occupy the other land in the township, nearly 23,000 acres. This wouldn’t be a problem if township government were abandoned and unincorporated land was governed at the county level. Then there is the problem of school capacity, etc.
Some Recent events, notably acts of terrorism and the discovery of various dangerous contagious diseases, could increase the popularity of dispersing the population.
PREDICTIONS
The facts relating to urban sprawl are so many, and related to each other in so many different ways, that it is easy to come to all sorts of different conclusions and to point to something to support them. The following are my own conclusions.
Low density sprawl will probably continue in many places for a long time. As long as the land use control powers of our society remain balkanized, and each little fiefdom wants to keep people out and let others assume the costs of population growth, things won’t change much.
There will probably be a trend towards more cluster development.
The acquisition by public agencies of substantial additional quantities of land, although expensive, seems likely to happen. It will probably be most successful where the acquiring agency is one that has jurisdiction over wide areas of land in different municipalities. Perhaps the Huron-Clinton Metropolitan Authority may expand the scope of its activities.
The freedom of local officials to use such exclusionary techniques as large lot zoning and restriction of higher density uses such as multiple dwellings and manufactured housing may well be curbed further, so that it doesn’t take years of litigation to start developments that provide housing without gobbling up unreasonable amounts of land. Each community may be required to accept it’s fair share, (as determined by higher authority), of area population growth and the associated costs.
The improvement of roads and other public facilities and services to increase the comfort and convenience of country life may be stopped.
What seems most likely is that by 2050, little of Washtenaw County will continue to be used for agriculture, and the farms that do survive will be smaller, specialized farms. The county will be generously provided with open spaces, forests, and recreational lands, and will remain a mostly attractive area. Who knows, we may come to prefer driving through the second growth forest lands, prairies and swamps than viewing the not-so-naturalistic farms of the present day.
PUTTING IT ALL IN PERSPECTIVE
The potential impact of urban sprawl often seems exaggerated. After all, around 6 million acres, one sixth of the land area of the state, are in public ownership. Most of this land is forests and swamps, although there are also roads, beaches and sand dunes and some of it is used for schools, post offices, jails, sanitary landfills, etc.
It is true that this vast quantity of public land is heavily concentrated in the northern parts of the state, some is hundreds of miles from the big population centers. There can be little doubt that more public open space around these centers is desirable. It would seem wise for the public to get title to some of this before it is occupied by homes on 10 acre lots.
Much of the land in public ownership got that way because after the trees were cut, and after an enormous amount of labor was expended removing the stumps, it was discovered that the land wasn’t sufficiently fertile for agricultural use. Eventually it was abandoned and title passed to the state because of nonpayment of taxes.
In more recent times, when a farmer decides to quit, the land can often be sold either to a developer who wants to build homes or, if not, to a speculator who anticipates that in a few years the property will be in demand for homes.
The urban sprawl taking place in Michigan today is not unlike what happened, right after World War II, along the Northeast seaboard, mostly from New Hampshire to Virginia. The Twentieth Century Fund sponsored an exhaustive study of what was going on. The report of this study, by geographer Jean Gottman, is entitled Megalopolis, and was first published in 1961. Gottman noted, p.341, that despite the sprawling:
“Megalopolis still has vast forested areas within its bounds. A wooded appearance still predominates in this great urban region.” At p.342 he reports: “This predominance of woodlands results from the imbalance between expanding urbanization and shrinking agricultural lands.”
In other words, farming was being discontinued at a rate faster than the land involved is consumed for housing and other uses. Much the same thing seems to be happening in Washtenaw County at present. One can drive through the countryside and see quite a few fields, evidently formerly farmed, lying idle and accumulating brush. Furthermore, as pointed out above under FARMERS, nearly 40% of Michigan farmland is rented by the farmer. Presumably, that land also is available to developers but has not been sold.
It ought to be kept in mind that what is going on now is a drop in the bucket compared to what happened in this state in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when vast areas of forests were cut down for the lumber and the land was then converted to agriculture. Additional enormous areas of wetlands were drained, also for agricultural more than any other use. The farmlands that some of us are so eager to preserve, are, in many cases the swamps, woodlands and other natural areas of yore. It is interesting to note that because the use of land for agriculture is now declining more rapidly than greedy developers can use it, we see a lot of second growth forests and areas of brush as we drive through the countryside. The slogan, “When it’s gone it’s gone.”, often used to attempt to create hysteria over development, ignores what really is happening.
I recently read that “Michigan is losing valuable farmland at the alarming rate of 10 acres per hour.” (I wonder how many acres per hour of woodlands were stripped during the last decade of the 19th century when a lot of farmland was created by cutting down virgin forests? I wonder how many acres per hour of essential wetlands were lost when swamps were being drained to use the land for farming?) I would guess that if anyone tried to clear a forest to farm the land today, the environmental extremist groups would be up in arms. Actually, the use of the word “lost” to describe land on which farming has been discontinued is misleading. It’s still there. The tax assessor has no difficulty in finding it.
I assume that none of this “valuable farmland” is so valuable to farmers, or we wouldn’t be “losing” it. It seems that some of it is just being abandoned for agricultural use, a rapidly growing phenomena throughout the Midwest which is partly an offshoot of farm subsidy phaseout. (See The Wall St. Journal, May 5, 1998, p. A1.) An article in The Ann Arbor News on February 7, 1999 stated that the amount of farmland is declining faster than ever before. Meanwhile, according to the article, the price of Washtenaw farmland rose 15% in 1998, which was significantly less than the rise in Livingston County, just north of Washtenaw. In any event, it seems that the thing that makes the land “valuable” is not the opportunity to farm but the opportunity to use it for something else.
by Clan Crawford, Jr. Version 6.0 January 23, 2006
PRELUDE
WHAT IS URBAN SPRAWL?
WHAT CAUSES IT?...2
WHAT ARE THE OBJECTIONS TO SPRAWL?
COST
EXCLUSIONARY ASPECT...3
DESTRUCTION OF AGRICULTURAL INDUSTRY...4
ENVIRONMENTAL CONSEQUENCES
ENJOYMENT OF COUNTRY LANDSCAPES
THE PLAYERS
FARMERS
NON-FARMER COUNTRY DWELLERS AND WOULD-BEs...5
LOCAL OFFICIALS, URBAN AND RURAL
BUSINESS INTERESTS
INDUSTRY
OFFICE USERS
RETAILERS
REAL ESTATE BROKERS...6
BUILDERS AND DEVELOPERS
URBAN DWELLERS
ENVIRONMENTALISTS
LABOR ORGANIZATIONS
ACTIONS TAKEN OR PROPOSED TO COMBAT SPRAWL
LARGE LOT ZONING
AGRICULTURE PRESERVATION...7
ACQUISITION OF FARM LANDS AND VACANT PROPERTY...8
ACQUISITION OF DEVELOPMENT RIGHTS...9
CLUSTER DEVELOPMENT
NEW TOWNS...10
NEW URBANISM
SMART GROWTH...11
MAKING ROOM FOR MORE PEOPLE IN URBANIZED AREAS
ACTION AT THE STATE LEVEL
IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF URBAN LIFE...12
HISTORIC PRESERVATION
OTHER THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
PREDICTIONS...13
PUTTING IT ALL IN PERSPECTIVE
PRELUDE
This was originally written for use by people in Washtenaw (yes, it is spelled that way) County, Michigan. Readers from other parts will find it useful to know that Washtenaw County is located immediately west of Wayne County, where Detroit, Dearborn, and many other municipalities are located. The population of Washtenaw County is over 300,000 and growing rapidly. The county is divided into twenty townships and measures 30 miles, east to west, and 24 miles north to south. There are several cities which occupy land carved out of the townships. The largest is Ann Arbor, located a bit to the east of the center of the country. Its population is about 108,000. It is the county seat and the location of The University of Michigan, its largest industry.
WHAT IS URBAN SPRAWL?
Urban sprawl may be defined as the expansion of an urbanized area into the surrounding countryside, replacing land vacancy and customary country uses, such as forests and farms, with homes and commercial, institutional or industrial facilities.
WHAT CAUSES IT?
Urban sprawl happens where there is a confluence of a demand for land for urban uses and a lack of effective barriers to sprawl development. Demand is the ability to pay the price plus either a lack of available land for such uses in the already urbanized area or a desire to locate urban uses in the country. Effective barriers in a given place include land use regulations, deed restrictions, and owners, including public owners, who are unwilling to sell. Other barriers are soil conditions (particularly as they affect the provision of effective septic tank drain fields), numerous problems with water such as flood hazard, swamp conditions, or lack of water supply, or an inadequate transportation system or governmental infrastructure and services, etc.
The demand element comes from several sources, including a growing population, dissatisfaction with urban life, and changes in the way things are most effectively done.
Changes in land use may, now and then, lead to increases in population. Build a Walt Disney World and you create a demand for worker and tourist housing nearby and for a lot of other things. However, usually it is the other way around. Growing population is not the result but the cause of sprawl.
The development of automobile transportation and an elaborate network of roads has reduced a former barrier. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, manufacturing plants were built in cities where workers without cars could reach them and many factories were 3 or more stories high. Because it is often more efficient to manufacture in 1 story buildings, factories moved to the edge of town where more land was available at reasonable prices when it became practical for workers to get to them.
Demand is also affected by mass preferences, and it seems that a lot of people these days prefer living in the country.
When the construction industry grinds to a halt, from recession, strikes, blizzards, or whatever, sprawl stops.
Those who would control sprawl often concentrate on the supply side, working on measures to “save” land from development, and ignoring the fact that sprawl cannot take place without demand. Some local governments regulate land use and spend money on acquiring a lot of land for parks and open spaces. At the same time, they spend money on chamber-of-commerce-type economic development programs to generate more jobs and on widening roads to accommodate the residents of new subdivisions in the country. They may grant tax relief to new industries. They are really only growing government, not stopping sprawl.
Planner Nancy Pekarek has called to my attention to the fact that in an earlier version of this document I should have mentioned that sprawl may also be caused by perceptions of safety, educational opportunity, the relationship between job and home locations and the available of acceptable transportation facilities. It should be noted that such items can cause sprawl to feed upon itself. If you build a factory in the country, worker housing may be developed nearby. This will cause a demand for stores, schools, etc.
WHAT ARE THE OBJECTIONS TO SPRAWL?
COST
Many public officials and knowledgeable citizens are concerned about the cost of furnishing and maintaining public infrastructure and services. Way back in the early seventies, (worries about sprawl and its consequences are nothing new), the federal Council on Environmental Quality, HUD, and EPA, joined to produce a study of this problem to document what they already knew. The report, entitled “The Costs of Sprawl”, was published in April, 1974. It is about an inch thick and full of charts and graphs. Most managed growth enthusiasts prefer not to talk about it. The conclusion is set forth at p. 6 of the Executive Summary. “The results of the study...show a surprising consistency: “planning” to some extent, but higher densities to a much greater extent, result in lower economic costs, environmental costs, natural resource consumption, and some personal costs for a given number of dwelling units.”
Yes, greater density. It costs just exactly so many dollars to build the sidewalks for a mile of residential road whether 100 or 500 families live along it. It costs just so much to run a police car down a mile of road whether the cop is looking out for the safety of 100 families or 500. The same can be said to some extent about the cost of running a snow plow or street sweeper. Similar, if not quite identical, comparisons exist in the cost of curbs and gutters, storm and sanitary sewers, water mains and wires for electricity, telephone and cable TV.
It costs a lot of money to keep extending a road out into the country to accommodate new development. There is additional cost in widening the old part of the road so it can handle the traffic coming from the new part. The same can be said about sewer and water extensions. In those cases we hear about relief sewers and mains rather than widening. If the additional population were accommodated in the already built up area, the widenings and relief pipes would still be needed, but the cost of the extensions would be eliminated. Obvious, but let’s not do it in my neighborhood, OK?
Consider the fire department. Getting there fast is critical. A fire station in a densely developed area can respond quickly to the needs of more families than one that is in a sparsely populated area. Fire stations and trucks are not cheap to buy or to staff.
Such considerations as those described above are the basis of the currently popular goal called sustainability. We should try to live our lives so that valuable natural resources are not wasted, thus depriving our descendants of them. Our land use practices are a major part of this.
EXCLUSIONARY ASPECT
Since open space near homes is so popular, it seems reasonable to conclude that if the public acquires a parcel of land, or the development rights thereto, or somebody builds a golf course, on land that would otherwise probably be used for building homes, the value of the surrounding unbuilt land will increase. This is because the supply of available land in the area will be reduced and because people like the idea of building in an area where there is permanent open space nearby. Other things being equal, the cost of acquiring a home in the area will go up. The neighborhood will remain affluent. People of modest means will be excluded. This has a tendency to discourage racial and ethnic diversity. This seems to be the most usual reason that courts have frowned on various measures taken to prevent sprawl by limiting growth. Here are a few examples of what Michigan courts have said.
In Frendo v Southfield Twp, 349 MIch 693,700; 85 NW2d 130 (1957), Justice Voelker put it this way:
“[T]ime will not be halted or the clock pushed back either by kings or township zoning ordinances.”
In Green v Lima Twp, 40 Mich App 655,663; 199 NW2d 243 (1972), the Michigan Court of Appeals, striking down a zoning restriction that prevented the development of a mobile home park, said: “To allow the first 600 people in an area to use these artificial boundaries to exclude all but certain kinds of people, or those who can afford to live in favored kinds of housing, or to keep down tax bills of present property owners, subverts the idea of promoting the general welfare.”
Binkowski v Shelby Twp, 46 Mich App 451, 457; (1973) was another mobile home park case. It was opined therein that: “The zoning laws of this state were not adopted as, and the courts will not permit them to be used for, a vehicle by which a fragment of the larger community will be allowed to pick and choose the manner and degree in which it will participate in the development of the larger community with total disregard for the needs of that larger community.”
Yes, there is a reason why the expression “white flight” is often used as a synonym to urban sprawl.
DESTRUCTION OF AGRICULTURAL INDUSTRY
It has been pointed out that many of our cities are adjacent to very productive farmland, and that at least part of the reason such communities have thrived is the ready availability of food supplies. Sprawl around such cities consumes high quality farmland. However, it should be pointed out that there is frequently a lot of formerly farmed but now idle land in areas where sprawl is taking place. Other factors, usually more powerful than sprawl pressure, are contributing to the discontinuance of agriculture. These include technological advances which enable increased production on a given farm, and the phasing out of the national program of farm subsidies. As a result, farming is abandoned on more land than is needed to meet the demand for housing, and in many areas there is a lot of land reverting to brush and, eventually, trees.
However, there is no denying that homebuilding in a farming area has a negative effect on agricultural industry. (See also ENJOYMENT OF COUNTRY LANDSCAPES, below).
ENVIRONMENTAL CONSEQUENCES
Except in some cases of high density sprawl, sprawlers are more automobile-dependent than those who live closer to each other. There is more car driving with related air pollution. In addition, low density sprawl development requires greater road area per resident than more densely populated places.
Home construction does result in tree planting, often on yards that used to be farmed. However, although I have no way to prove it statistically, it has been my observation that the best way to increase the amount of tree cover is to build homes on modest lots, say 60’ by 120’. People who live in country homes plant a few more trees, but not many more per family than their neighbors in urban subdivisions. On a trees planted per acre basis, the owners of smaller lots usually win hands down. Other environmental include ground water pollution, surface water drainage and soil erosion matters, and air pollution from lawn mowing, chemical spraying, etc.
ENJOYMENT OF COUNTRY LANDSCAPES
As buildings, highways, and other construction needed or desired by an urban or suburban population are provided in a rural area, it loses its “country” character. There is a lot of noise about the delights of living in the country, or driving through it, and viewing the rural landscape. Although it is difficult to say just how popular the idea of preserving these landscapes is, particularly if it takes more taxes to do it, it does seem clear that a substantial number of people think that such preservation is important. Furthermore, we don’t hear much objection to preservation from many of those who don’t mind sprawl. (See FARMERS, below.)
This issue has been considered in numerous lawsuits involving land use. In setting aside a zoning restriction limiting home building to a very low density, the supreme court of Pennsylvania made the following frequently quoted comment in National Land and Investment Company v. Easttown Township Board of Adjustment, 419 Pa. 504; 215 A2d 597 (1965) At 419 Pa. 530, the following appears: “There is no doubt that many of the residents of this area are highly desirous of keeping it the way it is, preferring, quite naturally, to look out upon land in its natural state rather than on other homes. These desires, however, do not rise to the level of public welfare. This is purely a matter of private desire which zoning regulation may not be employed to effectuate.”
On the other hand, in a case where land owners were being paid for scenic easements out of public funds, Justice Douglas, writing in Berman v Parker, 348 US 26,33; 99 L Ed 27,38; 75 Sct 98 (1954), noted that : “The concept of public welfare is broad and inclusive...The values it represents are spiritual as well as physical, aesthetic as well as monetary. It is within the power of the legislature to determine that the community should be beautiful as well as healthy, spacious as well as clean, well-balanced as well as carefully patrolled.”
Perhaps the rule is that there is enough of a public interest in the aesthetics of the landscape to permit the use of public funds to protect it but not enough to justify cramming preservation down the throats of unwilling property owners without compensation.
THE PLAYERS
Let us turn our attention to the various groups of people who participate in matters involving sprawl.
FARMERS
Farmers come in many sizes and flavors. Young, full time farmers, who expect to be farming for decades, tend to dislike sprawl because it often causes a dramatic rise in property taxes, and because their new, non-farming neighbors may do unfriendly things.
Some farmers, often older ones, who are deriving income by selling off lots a bit at a time and are not serious about continued farming, often see nothing wrong with sprawl. They maintain that if the public wants to maintain open space it can do so by buying land or by changing zoning and other policies to permit cluster subdivisions with large common open spaces.
“Planning & Zoning News, February, 1999, reports, at p. 4, that Michigan’s 1997 Agricultural Census reveals that during the previous 15 years, the average age of Michigan farmers rose from 49.5 to 53.3 years, and that during the same period, the number of farmers under 35 years of age dropped by 62%. It is also set forth that nearly 40% of Michigan farmland is rented by the farmer.
NON-FARMER COUNTRY RESIDENTS AND WOULD-BEs
Generally speaking, people who have moved to the country did so to avoid rubbing elbows with other people. Although they are sprawlers themselves, they commonly do not welcome anyone else who desires to build a home nearby. As they say in Aspen, Colorado real estate offices: “An environmentalist is a guy who got his cabin built last year.” They are frequently the most vigorous opponents of sprawl and quite eager to make common cause with environmental extremist groups and anyone else who also opposes it.
However, they also frequently oppose certain sprawl control measures. They are not in favor of large public parks near their homes. (See ACQUISITION OF FARM LANDS AND VACANT PROPERTY, below.) They don’t want those people from whom they fled when they moved to the country to be coming near their new homes on weekends for recreation. They don’t welcome the higher property taxes that increased density brings.
LOCAL OFFICIALS, URBAN AND RURAL
Many local officials in rural areas oppose sprawl because they fear a demand for public facilities and services that are prohibitively expensive in areas of low density. They tend to look at very large lot zoning and the resulting sprawl as the means of avoiding the need for such facilities and services. Others see increasing population as the road to higher salaries and larger staffs.
Officials of the urbanized municipalities around which sprawl takes place are motivated by a number of different factors which sometimes clash. (See OTHER THINGS TO THINK ABOUT below.)
The views of those officials who are elected are tempered by the fact that reelection depends on pleasing the majority of the local voters. Often, the majority of voters are non-farmers who live in the country and aren’t anxious to get any more neighbors. (See AGRICULTURE PRESERVATION below.)
INDUSTRY
As pointed out above, under WHAT CAUSES IT?, many industrial operations are more efficient if carried on in a one story building. Their owners favor locations where land is cheaper than in cities, where large sites are easily obtained in areas free from industrially caused soil contamination. Sometimes, particularly in the outskirts of large cities, the sprawl location is more convenient for more workers, making it easier to get and keep competent help.
OFFICE USERS
Certain commercial operations, often sales offices, consider easy access to the freeways much more important than easy access to banks, lawyers, accountants and other typical downtown occupants. The demand for offices has outgrown the capacity of downtown in some cities.
RETAILERS
The seemingly endless shopping malls and freestanding “category killers” or “big boxes” are the particular target of many sprawl haters. However, in communities which have experienced substantial growth, the space required for providing goods and services to the enlarged population is simply not available in the good old downtown. Theoretically, one might put in multi-story stores, with parking garages above or below or both, but it would also be necessary to widen the streets, and this would destroy all the quaint Victorian store fronts that make downtown what it is. Furthermore, the main streets leading to downtown would have to be widened, and the large trees which line them cut down.
Those who criticize these large stores ought to investigate the amount of business they do and consider how many friendly little neighborhood stores it would take to provide the goods that these large stores furnish. They should also consider the environmental consequences of people driving around to different little stores instead of one-stop shopping at a big one.
There are certain kinds of commerce that do very well serving the needs of sprawlers. Nurseries, dealers in garden tractors and similar equipment, garden centers, firms that mow lawns and plow snow, all benefit from a growing population in the sticks.
REAL ESTATE BROKERS
They work on commission. The higher the price the greater the commission. It is often as much work to sell a property for $30,000 as for $250,000. Thus, many brokers benefit from anything that results in construction of homes for affluent people.
BUILDERS AND DEVELOPERS
The prices that a builder must charge to make money depend on his control of a large number of mostly rather small cost items. Land costs are one of the most variable. Property taxes are also a significant factor. The level of property taxes also affects the amount of money a purchaser can afford to spend on loan payments.
Where the amount of usable land in a given area is restricted by zoning or environmental regulations, or by public purchase of large quantities of land or the development rights associated therewith, the price that the remaining land in the area will bring tends to rise.
Builders, therefore, tend to oppose certain sprawl control measures. On the other hand, they point out that if municipalities would reduce minimum lot sizes and make more land available for multiple family dwellings, they could meet the demand of a growing population for new housing without consuming so much of the countryside.
Developer bashing is the favorite sport of people who express their opposition to land use proposals at public hearings or through letters to the editors of newspapers. It usually indicates a lack of understanding of what is going on. Developers are people who attempt to make their fortunes by producing what they think people want to buy and can afford. Most of them are not very creative, and their proposals merely reflect what they think will sell. I am not aware that it has been shown that they are any more greedy than college professors or that they cut more corners than truck drivers.
URBAN DWELLERS
Many people who live in cities like to drive through the countryside and hate to see it getting farther and farther away. Others are concerned with the many and varied long term effects of conversion of agricultural lands to other uses. For whatever reason, there are a lot of urban dwellers who declare that urban sprawl is bad and they are against it. However, if you ask them how they view the idea of discouraging sprawl by making room for higher density housing in existing city neighborhoods, including theirs, they lack enthusiasm. Furthermore, many will quickly grope for reasons why their own neighborhood is special and should be exempt from any such policy. Widespread opposition to increased density in existing urbanized areas may well be the primary barrier to doing anything significant to slow sprawl. Planning & Zoning News, May, 2000, p.16, reports that Gary Garczynski, Vice President of the National Association of Home Builders, recently pointed out that “American people are against two things sprawl and density.”
ENVIRONMENTALISTS
Until recently, they opposed sprawl and they also opposed denser development in urbanized areas and they had no answer to the problem of housing a growing population and increasing work, shopping and recreational places to match the increased population. Of late, they seem to have become more realistic, and sometimes favor increased urban densities to meet the needs of population growth. However, On August 31, 1999, the Ann Arbor News reported, p.C1, that one Carl Pope, national executive director of The Sierra Club, was in town and denounced a proposed in-town housing development, mentioning that the river which the site overlooks “needs space.” (Actually, the proposed project is several hundred feet from the river, with a busy street and an industrial area occupying most of the space in between.) Evidently, he did not report on any alternative plan to house the 191 families that would otherwise occupy the development. Perhaps they will just evaporate instead of locating in developments now consuming open lands in the surrounding townships.
LABOR ORGANIZATIONS
Most of them have not been much interested in this issue. The construction trades, however, tend to oppose any measure or program that restricts building activity.
ACTIONS TAKEN OR PROPOSED TO COMBAT SPRAWL
LARGE LOT ZONING
The December, 1997 Planning & Zoning News reported a 1997 Statewide Land Use Survey taken by Public Sector Consultants, Lansing, MI. It concluded that 49% of people in Michigan would prefer to live on a large rural lot. There is a lot of concern for preservation of farmland, forests and scenic areas, but no recognition that this is inconsistent with nearly half the population living on a large rural lot, at least in the parts of Michigan which are at risk from widespread sprawl.
A standard section of land, as laid out by the government surveyors in the part of the country that was once the Northwest Territory, consists of a square mile, or 640 acres. Divided into 10 acre parcels, it would make 64 lots, although it would be usually at least 7 less, to leave space for roads. At most, the section would house 57 families. The Census Bureau says that Michigan households average 2.8 persons. Thus the 57 households, or 159.6 people would occupy a square mile. An entire township, which consists of 36 sections, would have a population of only 5745.6 people. It could only achieve that density if there were no lakes, streams, swamps or other lands that couldn’t be used, and no stores, farms, parks, schools, churches, factories, or any of the other things that land is used for.
On February 24, 1998, www.co.washtenaw.mi.us, Washtenaw County’s web page, contained a document from the county planning department stating that the population of the county was 282,937 and that it contained 104,528 dwelling units. If 49% (51219) of these dwelling units were located on 10 acre parcels, this housing would occupy 512,190 acres. However, there is a problem. There are less than 460,800 acres of land in the entire county. (640*36*20). Thus, to achieve the 10 acre/du standard, it would be necessary to raise an army, conquer Lenawee County, and drive out most of its present inhabitants, probably into Ohio.
In less populous counties, this situation wouldn’t be so extreme, but these are not the places where urban sprawl is a serious problem.
Areas where homes have been built on 5 or 10 acre lots usually don’t look like farm country, since farming is so rare in such places. . Too many driveways, mailboxes, houses and pole barns. On weekends, one can see grown men riding around mowing acres of lawn on little toy tractors, often painted green and yellow and bearing the John Deere label. That doesn’t make them farmers or preserve agriculture in any way.
Although 10 acre lots may seem like a GREAT idea to someone who lives next door to a farm and doesn’t want a lot of us common folk to build houses on the farm, it is madness from a public policy standpoint.
Furthermore, the courts usually won’t buy it. (See EXCLUSIONARY ASPECT above.)
AGRICULTURE PRESERVATION
This is a matter that is far more complicated than merely preventing developers from using farmland. In the end, efforts to preserve agricultural usage may be frustrated by technology, economics and national policy. See DESTRUCTION OF AGRICULTURAL INDUSTRY, above.
It is worth noting that a lot of farming is done by part-timers with income from off-farm employment. Sometimes it seems that the principal crop is bushels and bushels of deductions. A certain amount of land is tilled by hobby farmers without expectation of actually deriving income.
As the invasion by the country gentlemen continues, the day arrives when they outnumber the farmers, even though they occupy only a small part of the land. Sooner or later they gain control of the local unit of government having zoning power. The farmers on the township board or planning commission are gradually replaced by business executives and professional people.
At the same time the country gentlemen are finding out some things about farms and farming that they didn’t know when they built their homes. After all, most of them had made only casual observations of farms, often on Sunday afternoon drives. Until they moved in, many were not aware that farm implements make quite a bit of noise and that sometimes, due to weather or other things, they must be operated around the clock and on weekends.
Farm odors provide another surprise. Manure and various other fertilizers and chemicals emit aromas that are appreciated only by benefiting farmers. The experience of being repeatedly buzzed by a crop dusting plane flying less than 200 feet high with its engines running full blast can be terrifying.
Farm machinery and even animals can be dangerous to children who have not been trained to respect them.
Farm auctions, barn dances and roadside stands frequently attract large crowds and raise enormous and persistent clouds of dust along gravel roads. The periodic influx of transient farm laborers who may belong to minority races or speak Spanish creates fear of security problems in the minds of some nearby homeowners.
Some country gentlemen are even annoyed by the crowing of the rooster at dawn and, having been so rudely awakened, get really exasperated when delayed on the morning commute to town by a slow moving farm vehicle or implement on the road.
The fact is that farming is not simply a picturesque means of producing pleasant and quiet open spaces between country homes but is a combination of commerce and industry that has many incidents of each which, in other circumstances, are regarded as totally incompatible with nearby residential use and occupancy. Consequently, when the city slickers get control of local government in an agricultural area and find themselves receiving the complaints of fellow homeowners, they are inclined by the force of political pressure towards actions which make life more pleasant for the homeowner but which hamper the farmer in his efforts to keep the tax collector from driving him off his land.
Usually they amend the zoning ordinance to make certain agricultural practices either illegal or subject to a special permit which is not forthcoming if neighboring homeowners object. Sometimes this is the straw that breaks the tractor’s crankshaft. The farmer sells out to a speculator who may rent the land for farming but more probably just lets the brush start taking over until he can sell out to a homebuilder.
To deal with this problem, various state legislatures adopted so-called right to farm acts. The Michigan legislature, by Act 93, PA 1981, MCL 286.471 et seq., declared that certain activities and practices of farmers are not to be considered as nuisances. Since the zoning enabling acts declare that zoning violations are nuisances, it would seem to follow that these activities and practices couldn’t be violations. Or could they? There have been various court decisions and amendments of the statute with varying results. However, amendments made late in 1999 seem to make it clear that the Right to Farm Act really is a limitation on local zoning power.
It seems likely that in many areas the purchase of farms, either by governmental agencies or private organizations, and the operation of such farms at a loss, may be the only effective means of preserving agriculture on them.
ACQUISITION OF FARM LANDS AND VACANT PROPERTY
The difficulties in preserving agricultural industry do not preclude the collection of unused farmlands for such purposes as environmental protection, recreation, and as a reserve for unforeseen future needs. Realistically, selection of those lands to be preserved should be closely coupled with determination of which lands are to be sacrificed to the housing and other needs of a growing population. A story in The Ann Arbor News on September 29, 1997 told of a 776 acre site, much of which fronts on Geddes Rd. about a mile north of the city of Ypsilanti, as possibly the first PDR purchase under a state-funded program. This is very close-in land. A few hundred feet from part of it is a manufactured home subdivision and, nearby, a subdivision of conventional, stick-built homes. If there were a plan in place that identified areas to be sacrificed to growth, it would seem that this might well be one of them. Is there any reason to believe that “saving” this land will not merely result in the sprawl accelerating on unsaved lands to the north? There is nothing so great about leapfrog sprawl. It might be more logical to think of lands farther from existing urban development as being better suited for preservation of open space. Without a plan, it’s hard to tell.
Country homeowners are concerned with property values and with the quality of life, of which the snob value of owning a rural estate in an appropriate setting is an element. They react, just like other people, to anything that threatens these values.
In 1939, the Michigan Legislature authorized the creation of The Huron-Clinton Metropolitan Authority to build and operate a system of parks around the then edges of the Detroit Metropolitan Area, MCL 119.51 et seq. It operates in five counties and imposes a small property tax to support its activities. It is generally regarded as highly successful in doing its job.
In the late 1970s, Huron-Clinton Metropolitan Authority proposed to build, in Washtenaw County, a large new park, to be called Mill Creek Metropark. The Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) on the project, prepared by The U.S. Department of the Interior and dated March 22, 1979, describes the project as containing 3501 acres in 131 parcels, mostly in Lima Twp. with 169 acres in Freedom Twp., and anticipated paying nearly 7 million dollars for the land with a total project cost of 23 to 25 million dollars(p.4). It was expected that the park would provide recreational facilities for people living in several counties, and anticipated use by 2 to 2.5 million visitors per year (p4). By damming Mill Creek, a 618 acre lake would be created, enabling HCMA to offer boating, swimming and fishing facilities as well as picnicking areas, athletic fields, a 180 acre 18 hole golf course, and winter sports and nature trails (p7). Nifty, right?
Wrong! Although the Washtenaw County Metropolitan Planning Commission endorsed the concept of a park of this nature on the proposed site in October, 1971(p18), and endorsed the project again in 1973 and 1974 (p32), the natives did not. Lima township had planned the area for retention and enhancement of existing agricultural industry and preservation of certain natural areas (p19). “The township feels that the development of the proposed park would make these goals difficult, if not impossible, to attain.” (p19).
The township created an historic district which included most of the proposed park (p41), although it contained “no sites or structures which are nationally registered historic or natural landmarks...” (p39).
SEMCOG, on the other hand, had included the proposed park as “a component of the 1990 Regional Recreation and Open Space Plan for Southeast Michigan” (p28).
It is worth noting that “The proposed park is included within an area designated by the Washtenaw County Soil Conservation District (USDA) as prime farmland whose use should not be changed. Use of land is changing, however, from agricultural to suburban residential...” (pp 59-60). It was concluded that “The project is likely to increase numbers of new residences in the township, especially on lands immediately adjacent to park boundaries.” (p. 19). It seems that if we acquire new park lands to save open space by preventing the land from being used for country homes, we attract more homes to the vicinity. If we build it they will come. Should a plan for a substantial park include an area and infrastructure for a village? Mill Creek Metropark was never built.
It is not necessary to buy every acre of every farm to preserve the country feeling. A typical forty acre parcel has nearly 1300 feet of road frontage, twice as much if it is at a corner. Were the county to buy a strip along the road, perhaps 200 feet deep, subject to an easement for a roadway, 66 feet wide, at a location specified in the deed, and with the trees cut and grading done at the time of sale to avoid arguments later, most of the land along the public road could be kept in its natural state and most of the 40 acres could be used for farming, housing, or other purposes. This technique would not work everywhere, due to topography and other factors. But where it can work it may be a lot cheaper than buying the whole farm and may funnel development into the most suitable places.
ACQUISITION OF DEVELOPMENT RIGHTS
According to a statement of land use policies of the Michigan Farm Bureau, as published in Planning & Zoning News, November, 1998, p.5, “The value of the development rights shall be the difference between the fair market value and the agricultural value of the land.” Thus, if a knowledgeable farmer would be willing to pay $1,000 per acre for a certain parcel to use it for farming, and if a knowledgeable developer would be willing to pay $1,500 per acre for the same parcel if he could use it for residential development, the development rights would be worth $500 per acre. It would appear, at least on the surface, that the parcel could be “saved” from sprawl development for 1/3 of the cost of buying it outright. There are, no doubt, places where such a tactic could be successfully used to “protect” a quite large area on a limited budget.
However, in many places where sprawl development is going on or seems about to commence, the property has little or no value for farming. Suppose, the developer is willing to pay $1500 and the farmer is willing to pay only $30. The cost of acquisition of development rights is $1,470, or 98% of the cost of buying the land outright. When you consider that purchase of development rights does not give the buyer any right to use the land, and there is no guarantee that it will continue to be farmed, wouldn’t it make more sense to buy the land outright? A public agency which owns the land can rent it to a farmer, or, if necessary, pay a farmer to farm it if continued farming is considered important. Or, it could plant a forest of quick-growing trees that could be sold for pulp if annual crop farming again became feasible. The owner of development rights has no such options.
To put it another way, wouldn’t it make more sense to buy 98% of the land outright and let the other 2% go, than to get merely the development rights on the whole tract?
Evidently, little of the land used for farming in Washtenaw County has any actual value for agricultural use. In a revealing article in The Ann Arbor News on March 16, 1997, p A6, an appraiser noted that hardly any land is sold between farmers because the land is too valuable to farm. It thus appears unlikely that PDR can be expected to do much to reduce the amount of sprawl in Washtenaw County.
It would be much better, if it is desired to preserve farming activity, to buy land outright or lease it and then rent it out for whatever a farmer will pay. This will probably keep the farming going longer, not only on the purchased land, but also on nearby land owned by the renting farmer. Further, it will give the public unchallenged control over the use of the land when farming ceases.
When development rights are purchased from a farmer it is vital to permit the farmer to make some economically viable use of his land in the event that it ceases to be farmed as a result of subsidy discontinuance or technological change or for some other reason. Otherwise the farmer will have to go on paying taxes and liability insurance on land that yields no cash. Because of the amount of pdr activity going on this seems likely to start happening before long. It will produce pressure to change the tax laws to compel the owner of the development rights to pay the taxes and carry liability insurance. Such changes would create a major financial burden on the private non-profit groups and governmental agencies that own the rights.
This can be avoided by leaving the selling farmer with some potentially profitable use rights besides farming. For example, it might be provided that the only right purchased is the right to use the land for housing or for housing on lots less than 40 acres in area. Or it could be merely a prohibition against any use which requires more than 5% of the land to be covered by buildings, driveways and parking areas. There is probably no universal formula for this, since every parcel of land is unique. There might well be established a procedure for changing the restrictions should circumstances require. The guiding principal should be that the restrictions to not prevent all economically viable use of the land.
Another approach is to buy the land outright but leaving the farmer with a life estate that permits him to live there for as long as he likes and pays the taxes and allows him to farm the property as long as he lives there. It also allows his widow to occupy the property on the same terms.
CLUSTER DEVELOPMENT
Cluster development can result in long-term maintenance of large amounts of open space while accommodating the housing needs of a growing population. Consider an 80 acre parcel of land with 80 townhouses concentrated on 8 of the 80 acres. This 8 acres would have about the density of most townhouse projects in the county and there would be a 72 acre parcel of open space.
There are two methods of protecting this 72 acres from development. The first is through the zoning technique of planned unit development, where the entire 80 acres is included in the plan and the 72 acres are designated as open space. Thus, no development could take place on the 72 acre open space parcel without approval of the zoning municipality. The second is the inclusion of the open space in a condominium project covering the entire 80 acres and designated as part of the common elements of the condominium under the control of the condominium association. The bylaws of such groups usually require a large majority to make changes in things. Thus, anyone eyeing the open space for development would have to convince both the public authorities and the neighbors of the desirability of the development. Barriers don’t get much higher than that.
Cluster development also encourages building homes outside of swamps, forests, and lakesides, because it is usually cheaper to build away from such areas and any amenities they have may be enjoyed by all of the residents of the development. Since the developer must leave most of the land area as open space, little or nothing is lost by staying out of the sensitive areas.
Larger cluster developments often have retail and service establishments which eliminate the need for a lot of driving on minor shopping errands. In Malmo, Sweden, the Caroli City development consists of about 6 stories of apartments and a parking structure, all arranged as a quadrangle. The courtyard in the center is an enclosed shopping mall. The mall roof is landscaped and serves as a park for the residents of the apartments.
Caracas, Venezuela, boasts Parque Central, which consists of a 3 level shopping mall, several 30 story apartment towers and higher office towers, the Caracas Hilton hotel, a church, park, and parking structure. Such developments are capable of meeting the needs of a growing population without consuming enormous amounts of land.
NEW TOWNS
Columbia, Md., a planned community about 35 years old, is probably one of the best examples of how to absorb a lot of population growth without undue squandering of land resources. It was built in accordance with a plan for a community of about 115,000 people on 22 square miles of land. In this regard it is similar to Ann Arbor, Michigan. However, it is better organized. About half the dwelling units are single family homes on lots in the 4,000-5,000 sq. ft. range scattered among townhouse developments at 10 dwelling units per acre and apartment houses at about 12 units per acre, and there is a convenience store within walking distance of every dwelling unit. There are large public open spaces which include most of the environmentally sensitive land. There are several small shopping centers scattered around and a central business area featuring an enclosed shopping mall, several office buildings, and a hotel. Columbia doesn’t quite make it because of a little of the problem of new urbanism, described in the next section, but it certainly points the way.
NEW URBANISM
Some cluster subdivisions, usually with very limited commercial facilities, have been designated by their promoters as new urbanism. Such projects seem to have one thing in common. They avoid aesthetic problems by simply excluding vital land uses. Although they may provide for transit alternatives to the car, their residents still have cars, which they need when they venture out of Paradise. But there are no car dealers, new or used, or junk yards or body shops or even gas stations. There are no huge building materials dealers or garden centers, furniture stores, etc. All such uses have been externalized, banished to nearby municipalities.
Such a Mickey Mouse community has been built at Walt Disney World. It is called Celebration. I have read that there is no hardware store in town. The Disney web site has this to say. “Besides the well known names of AMC, SunTrust Bank and Florida Hospital, you’ll be hard pressed to find other world famous brands in the Town of Celebration. There is no Burger King or McDonald’s. Instead, you’re invited to visit Barnie’s Coffee & Tea, Bread Alone Bakery, Café D’Antonio, Columbia Restaurant, Max’s Café & Coffee Shop, Max’s Grille, or Wm. J. Sweet’s.” “Likewise, you won’t find a Wal-Mart, Target, or Sear’s (sic) in Celebration. Instead, your shopping habits can be satiated at Celebration Cycle, Chambers Jewelers, Downeast - An Orvis Shop, Gooding’s, L’Occitane, Market Street Gallery, M Fashions, Soft As A Grape, Thomas Dunn Interiors, Village Merchantile, White’s Books & Gifts, Wood, Stone & Steel, Wyland Galleries, or Zirbes’ Antiques. Celebration also offers a farmers market on Saturdays and a golf course.”
“To put it simply and bluntly, there is no elected government in the Town of Celebration. Despite it’s name, the Town of Celebration is not a town at all. it’s simply a vast tract of privately owned land known as the Celebration Community Development District. Commercial properties are owned by the Celebration Company while residential properties are owned by the home owners who form the Celebration Residential Owner’s Association. Residents pay fees to this owner’s association, which are then used to maintain the town and parks, including the town’s jewel, Lakeside Park. Through an arrangement with Osceola County, these fees are charged as part of a resident’s annual tax bill to the county.” ”The town’s government, such as it is, consists of a council with both members of the owner’s association and the Celebration Company. The council is designed in such a fashion that the Celebration Company has final say on any and all decisions.” ” There are a variety of houses and apartments to choose from in Celebration, with prices ranging from the steep to the utterly absurd. “
SMART GROWTH
This name has been given to a program, started in Maryland, which has received a lot of publicity around the country. It appears to be a big step in the right direction, even if it isn’t a magic solution to the entire problem. It is described in “Great Lakes Bulletin”, a publication of Michigan Land Use Institute, Spring, 1998, p.6, as follows:
“Smart Growth simply means that the state will not use taxpayer money to subsidize building new subdivisions, new malls, new schools, or new roads in outlying areas, but will direct public resources close to existing cities and towns.”
Planning & Zoning News, May, 2000, reports that Wisconsin adopted legislation to encourage smart growth measures in 1999, p. 15, and that a wide range of Michigan organizations have concluded that smart growth is a good idea, p.16.
This approach has much to offer in most situations as a part of the answer. If a housing project is built on a former farm at the edge of town and relieves a serious overcrowding problem in town, it may be worthwhile.
Consider the railroad underpass at Dexter, a village about 8 miles northwest of Ann Arbor. It causes huge tieups along the Dexter-Pinckney Rd. It reduces the quality of life in the northwestern part of the county and is a deterrent to further sprawl. But the Washtenaw County Road Commission proposes to replace it to eliminate these tieups and make living in the country more pleasant. If it were smart growth minded, it would use the funds on roads closer to major urban populations.
On January 5, 1999, after a particularly bad snowstorm on New Year’s Day, the following appeared in an article on p. A12 of The Ann Arbor News: “If you live on a rural dirt road or in a country subdivision, the last few days have been more miserable than in the rest of Washtenaw County...”. Inadequate snow plowing is an elegant way to discourage living in the country.
As noted above under “WHAT CAUSES IT?”, public funds spent to encourage economic development tend to accelerate job and population growth and provide fuel for further sprawl. Those who work hard on local economic development seem to be putting the desire to make more money and create more jobs above the desire to stop sprawl.
MAKING ROOM FOR MORE PEOPLE IN URBANIZED AREAS
Nobody should be deluded into thinking that there is anything easy about providing additional housing in urbanized areas. City dwellers are at least as good at door-slamming tactics as those who live in the country. Those who oppose greater population density in their urban neighborhoods are often putting the defense of their turf against outsiders above any desire to stop sprawl.
Nonetheless, there is no getting around the fact that we cannot keep providing more homes, stores, offices, etc. in the cities without making great changes in their character. As long as the population keeps growing, something’s got to give. Either we make more room in the city by tearing down old buildings and replacing them with towers, or we allow sprawl to go on.
There is a popular notion that quality of life in an area varies inversely with population density. Back in the 1970’s I checked this out. At that time, Ann Arbor had a population of about 4,500 people per square mile. Detroit had a population of about 9,500 per square mile. Since Ann Arbor is thought of as a better place to live than Detroit, this comparison supports the notion. However, a very popular place to live is Paris, France. It turned out that Paris had a density of 57,000 per square mile.
I once asked a Spaniard, who had lived in the US for several years and was then residing in a condo overlooking the city square in Valencia, why he didn’t go out to the edge of the city and build a house with a nice big yard around it, like the one he used to have in Shaker Heights, Ohio. He laughed a little and then told me that no Spaniard wants to live where there isn’t a bakery and a tavern on the same block. It is evident that not everyone in the world seeks a home in an exclusively residential area in the suburbs.
ACTION AT THE STATE LEVEL
The possibility of simplifying land use regulation by replacing 20 township zoning ordinances with 1 county zoning ordinance is not often mentioned, even though enabling legislation is already in place and has been used in several other counties. There are a few places where it is recognized that the county can afford the planning and legal expertise that rural townships often lack. Such a shift would be worthwhile even if some of the more populous and pompous townships opted out as the law allows. However the legislature could change the enabling acts to give the county, rather than the townships, the right to zone unincorporated lands, and to give it the right to directly control the construction, enlargement and maintenance of roads by the county road commissions. Unified responsibility for a substantial area would probably help.
Some have suggested that the legislature amend the property tax laws to value lands used for agriculture at their value for that use rather than true cash value. This would probably extend the farming activity on a lot of land for a significant period, since property taxes are a major cost, particularly on lands having substantial development value. But a lot of tax revenue would be lost, and a lot of the tax savings would go to wealthy speculators who own farmland.
The legislature tried to deal with this problem in the Farmlands and Open Spaces Act, which provides relief from the state income tax, not property taxes, for farmers with low incomes. But the result has not been very favorable, and has merely encouraged leapfrog development, since so many owners can’t take advantage of the available relief. (See also AGRICULTURAL PRESERVATION and SMART GROWTH above.)
IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF URBAN LIFE
It seems to me unfortunate that so many people have left our cities for outlying areas with the result that there is a lot of unused or underused land and infrastructure in the cities and a population mostly poor and unable to do much to improve things. It doesn’t have to be this way. In many parts of the world, the central cities are inhabited by the rich and the poor live out in the sticks.
While avoiding acts that make country living more pleasant, we could concentrate on things which make urban life more enjoyable.
Urban life has one big advantage over living in the country. Things are close together. If the transportation system is good, urban dwellers spend much less time getting from one place to another.
Clean streets and sidewalks, kept free of snow and ice, abundant city parks and gardens, museums and theaters, are among the things that attract people to cities. We could be giving them more attention. Cities have a bad reputation for violent crime, but this seems to be getting under somewhat better control, and it seems that we are hearing more and more about suburban and rural crime in recent years.
The Wall Street Journal, on October 17, 1994, at p. B1, said that over half of homes over 3,000 sq. ft. are occupied by less than 3 people. Six bedroom homes occupied by empty nesters are common. Since 1969, the size of the average new single family home has gone from 1,400 to 2,200 sq. ft. while family size has decreased from 3.6 to 2.7 people. Most new apartments now have two bedrooms. Lots of bathrooms and fireplaces are common features of new homes, and cathedral ceilings are popular.
Much of the existing housing in our cities does not meet these standards. If urban life is to compete, some of it is going to have to be replaced.
HISTORIC PRESERVATION
Historic district preservation is a coin with two sides. People enjoy seeing old buildings if they are well cared for, so that preservation serves to improve the quality of life for a lot of people. The other side of the coin is that it creates barriers to change that tend to drive businesses and housing developments to the outlying areas.
OTHER THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
Way back in the 1950s, or perhaps even earlier, it was noticed by those with a vested interest in prosperous cities, particularly the paid officials thereof, that the popularity of suburban life and the sprawl that resulted was causing many cities to lose population, suffer decreases in assessed value of property, and force increases in tax rates. It is not surprising that they came to the conclusion that those who live in the suburbs somehow owe something to the city.
They beat the drums to this tune and, when the Michigan legislature authorized cities to impose income taxes on their residents, it included a provision for a payroll tax on all people who worked in the city, even if they didn’t live there. Shortly after this law took effect, Detroit imposed such taxes. Shortly after that, Detroit’s large law firms began establishing branch offices in the suburbs, and, before long, many of the lawyers, secretaries, and other employees didn’t work in Detroit at all. Imagine that! In addition, a number of new law firms, some of which became quite large, were founded in the suburbs and didn’t even have offices in Detroit.
Lawyers weren’t the only people who did such things, and the existing trend of business to move to the suburbs accelerated. Today, the fact is that there are a lot of people who live in outlying communities who do not work, shop, or do anything else in Detroit and seldom or never go there. This has reached the place where “suburb” seems a misleading way to describe these municipalities.
In an article purporting to show that “...the small towns we love most would be illegal by today’s zoning.”, it is stated that “Zoning ushered in development that in many places is paving over land at a rate five times greater than the growth in population.” Nonsense. Zoning restrains development. It doesn’t usher it in. The fact that new development results in more paving than older development is caused by many things. The availability of affordable transportation by cars is probably the biggest cause.
Recently I read that “The farmers I’ve met who have been forced out of the business have been forced out because they lost neighboring land to lease for their operations-not because of taxes.” Could it be that the reason they lost the land was that they were unable to pay a rent that would cover the taxes plus some return on the investment? I once bought a farm and for several years rented it to a farmer who paid rent in the amount of about 30% of the taxes. Finally I ceased renting it to him in hopes that the brush and small trees that would grow up would make the property more valuable in the eyes of a potential buyer. It worked.
I saw an article about a place called Whitewater. (This one is a Michigan township located between Traverse City and Kalkaska and contains the village of Williamsburg.) A township official is quoted as saying “Master plans are dreams. Ordinances are reality. We are determined not to have an ordinance that prescribes urban sprawl.”
Let’s mull that one over. Presumably, planning commissioners work for many hours to create a master plan with the hope that it will serve as a guide to future development. It usually reflects the dreams of the planning commissioners for the community they want to have. But if it is so dreamy that it is not realistic, as is often the case, it stands little chance of being carried out. I remember a little bit from “The Man of LaMancha”: “A man with moonbeams in his hands has nothing there at all.”
Someone, undoubtedly annoyed by the dreaminess of many master plans, has observed that the best thing a community can do is work for months or years on a master plan, and, when satisfied that it is just right, adopt it. Then throw it in the wastebasket and start over again. The suggestion is that the process is valuable but that the product is often worthless.
The article regarding Whitewater describes a proposed ordinance designed to prevent sprawl. It calls for a “traditional” village business center and homes on 8,000 sq. ft. lots. But this is what we see over and over again in sprawl suburbs. The trouble is that if an area of 8,000 sq. ft. lots is populoous enough to support a business district, it is large enough so that many people are unwilling to walk to the business district.
Suppose they copied the scheme used in Columbia, Md., described above. They might come up with a workable urban density. Whitewater Township’s proposed ordinance also contains a lot of architectural and site design rules designed to make it look “traditional” and have an appearance unlike the typical modern suburban business area. Among other things, windows in new buildings must be taller than they are wide. This was the fashionable style in the days before Mr. Edison invented electric lights. Unless they can find business people willing to comply with these rules, the businesses may locate outside the township and thus contribute to rather than limit sprawl.
Here is another example. In 1920 the City of Ann Arbor, Michigan, had a population of around 20,000. Three years later, it adopted its first zoning ordinance, which required a lot of 5,000 square feet for each single family home. Numerous subdivisions were built to this specification, although a lot of others had lots in the 5,000-8,000 square foot range and there were a few with even larger lots. By 1960, the population had risen to 62,000 and the city had evidently outgrown its central business district. Its people were patronizing the new Arborland shopping center, featuring Montgomery Ward (moved from downtown), Penney, and Kroger stores. Then came K-Mart, etc., etc. The moral is that even a zoning ordinance that allows a modestly dense pattern of development will not necessarily prevent sprawl.
Like most of the things in this world, many land use proposals are a mixture of good and bad. An example was a proposed mobile home park in Sharon Twp., on the western fringe of Washtenaw County where a developer sought to use 178 acres of land for a 693 unit mobile home park. The density, 3.9 units per acre, is about 2/3 of what is common in modern mobile home parks, and while still in the sprawl range, consumes quite a lot less space than if the homes were built under the typical township single family lot size requirements of 2 or more acres per dwelling unit. However, it would more than double the population of the township, with the possibility that the occupants could vote out the present officers and take over the government of the township, shutting out those who occupy the other land in the township, nearly 23,000 acres. This wouldn’t be a problem if township government were abandoned and unincorporated land was governed at the county level. Then there is the problem of school capacity, etc.
Some Recent events, notably acts of terrorism and the discovery of various dangerous contagious diseases, could increase the popularity of dispersing the population.
PREDICTIONS
The facts relating to urban sprawl are so many, and related to each other in so many different ways, that it is easy to come to all sorts of different conclusions and to point to something to support them. The following are my own conclusions.
Low density sprawl will probably continue in many places for a long time. As long as the land use control powers of our society remain balkanized, and each little fiefdom wants to keep people out and let others assume the costs of population growth, things won’t change much.
There will probably be a trend towards more cluster development.
The acquisition by public agencies of substantial additional quantities of land, although expensive, seems likely to happen. It will probably be most successful where the acquiring agency is one that has jurisdiction over wide areas of land in different municipalities. Perhaps the Huron-Clinton Metropolitan Authority may expand the scope of its activities.
The freedom of local officials to use such exclusionary techniques as large lot zoning and restriction of higher density uses such as multiple dwellings and manufactured housing may well be curbed further, so that it doesn’t take years of litigation to start developments that provide housing without gobbling up unreasonable amounts of land. Each community may be required to accept it’s fair share, (as determined by higher authority), of area population growth and the associated costs.
The improvement of roads and other public facilities and services to increase the comfort and convenience of country life may be stopped.
What seems most likely is that by 2050, little of Washtenaw County will continue to be used for agriculture, and the farms that do survive will be smaller, specialized farms. The county will be generously provided with open spaces, forests, and recreational lands, and will remain a mostly attractive area. Who knows, we may come to prefer driving through the second growth forest lands, prairies and swamps than viewing the not-so-naturalistic farms of the present day.
PUTTING IT ALL IN PERSPECTIVE
The potential impact of urban sprawl often seems exaggerated. After all, around 6 million acres, one sixth of the land area of the state, are in public ownership. Most of this land is forests and swamps, although there are also roads, beaches and sand dunes and some of it is used for schools, post offices, jails, sanitary landfills, etc.
It is true that this vast quantity of public land is heavily concentrated in the northern parts of the state, some is hundreds of miles from the big population centers. There can be little doubt that more public open space around these centers is desirable. It would seem wise for the public to get title to some of this before it is occupied by homes on 10 acre lots.
Much of the land in public ownership got that way because after the trees were cut, and after an enormous amount of labor was expended removing the stumps, it was discovered that the land wasn’t sufficiently fertile for agricultural use. Eventually it was abandoned and title passed to the state because of nonpayment of taxes.
In more recent times, when a farmer decides to quit, the land can often be sold either to a developer who wants to build homes or, if not, to a speculator who anticipates that in a few years the property will be in demand for homes.
The urban sprawl taking place in Michigan today is not unlike what happened, right after World War II, along the Northeast seaboard, mostly from New Hampshire to Virginia. The Twentieth Century Fund sponsored an exhaustive study of what was going on. The report of this study, by geographer Jean Gottman, is entitled Megalopolis, and was first published in 1961. Gottman noted, p.341, that despite the sprawling:
“Megalopolis still has vast forested areas within its bounds. A wooded appearance still predominates in this great urban region.” At p.342 he reports: “This predominance of woodlands results from the imbalance between expanding urbanization and shrinking agricultural lands.”
In other words, farming was being discontinued at a rate faster than the land involved is consumed for housing and other uses. Much the same thing seems to be happening in Washtenaw County at present. One can drive through the countryside and see quite a few fields, evidently formerly farmed, lying idle and accumulating brush. Furthermore, as pointed out above under FARMERS, nearly 40% of Michigan farmland is rented by the farmer. Presumably, that land also is available to developers but has not been sold.
It ought to be kept in mind that what is going on now is a drop in the bucket compared to what happened in this state in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when vast areas of forests were cut down for the lumber and the land was then converted to agriculture. Additional enormous areas of wetlands were drained, also for agricultural more than any other use. The farmlands that some of us are so eager to preserve, are, in many cases the swamps, woodlands and other natural areas of yore. It is interesting to note that because the use of land for agriculture is now declining more rapidly than greedy developers can use it, we see a lot of second growth forests and areas of brush as we drive through the countryside. The slogan, “When it’s gone it’s gone.”, often used to attempt to create hysteria over development, ignores what really is happening.
I recently read that “Michigan is losing valuable farmland at the alarming rate of 10 acres per hour.” (I wonder how many acres per hour of woodlands were stripped during the last decade of the 19th century when a lot of farmland was created by cutting down virgin forests? I wonder how many acres per hour of essential wetlands were lost when swamps were being drained to use the land for farming?) I would guess that if anyone tried to clear a forest to farm the land today, the environmental extremist groups would be up in arms. Actually, the use of the word “lost” to describe land on which farming has been discontinued is misleading. It’s still there. The tax assessor has no difficulty in finding it.
I assume that none of this “valuable farmland” is so valuable to farmers, or we wouldn’t be “losing” it. It seems that some of it is just being abandoned for agricultural use, a rapidly growing phenomena throughout the Midwest which is partly an offshoot of farm subsidy phaseout. (See The Wall St. Journal, May 5, 1998, p. A1.) An article in The Ann Arbor News on February 7, 1999 stated that the amount of farmland is declining faster than ever before. Meanwhile, according to the article, the price of Washtenaw farmland rose 15% in 1998, which was significantly less than the rise in Livingston County, just north of Washtenaw. In any event, it seems that the thing that makes the land “valuable” is not the opportunity to farm but the opportunity to use it for something else.
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