urban sprawl - The Environment Report

Small Towns Invite Sprawl

Eleven million acres of prime farmland were lost to urban sprawl in a 15 year period. Some small cities are embracing the growth and helping developers circumvent so-called Smart Growth restrictions on sprawl.

Researchers have found that small towns hungry for new tax dollars are making it possible for developers to get around Smart Growth plans. Often the result is urban sprawl that paves over farmland and natural areas. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham has the story:

Transcript

Researchers have found that small towns hungry for new tax dollars are making it possible for developers to get around Smart Growth Plans. Often the result is urban sprawl that paves over farmland and natural areas. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports.

Despite the best efforts of some politicians to slow down the pace of turning farmland into suburbia, the 2000 Census shows population growth is exploding at the edges of Metropolitan areas, and all those people need somewhere to live and shop. So, in the Midwest, often housing developments and shopping malls are built where corn or soybeans grew just the year before.

For example, Kane County, Illinois, as recently as the 1970’s was predominately farmland. Now with more and more people moving there, only about half the county is left for farming.

Randall Road cuts through the heart of the county, although housing developments and retail stores are starting to infringe on the country setting, on one side of the road you can still see rows of crops and pasture, and on the other side of Randall Road, it’s nearly solid shopping malls and subdivisions. But in the middle of all that development, there’s still one dairy farm. Mike Kenyon and his family still grow hay and corn, and milk cows here. But their fields are surrounded by three sprawling towns. Kenyon says Randall Road used to be the line where planners said urban sprawl would stop. They were so confident that they even said so in their planning document for the year 2020.

“And they drew a line in the county and they said ‘we want the growth to occur here and we want to maintain this as rural, as farms. Well, how did developers get around that? Well they go to a little village and they say ‘Well, we’ll put a big housing development over here. Please, annex us and this’ll be more revenue and they’ll even have a sewer system when we get done.’ So, that’s what happens; they kind of bribe the villages so they get around the 2020 plan.”

And that, Kenyon says, is what’s now happening on the other side of Randall Road where Kane County was supposed to remain rural. Kane County officials are trying to implement all kinds of programs to save the remaining farmland from urban sprawl, or at least keep urbanization to certain areas of the county. But at the town and village level, many local politicians see growth as nothing but good and are willing to expand their city limits to include developments. That’s because those developments help increase their tax revenue.

The story is not unique to the Chicago region. It’s being repeated throughout the Midwest and the Great Lakes, as well as across the United States.
So much so that millions, yes millions of acres of prime farmland in the U.S. have been lost in a little more than a decade. Rich Green is a geographer at Northern Illinois University. He’s been tracking the fringes of the ever-growing Chicago Metropolitan area. He’s been adding up just how much former cropland has been turned into suburban lawns and parking lots.

“What we found is this: the nation between 1982 and 1997, that’s a 15 year time period, lost about eleven million acres of prime farmland, cropland, to urban development.”

Green also found, perhaps coincidentally, that an identical amount of land, eleven million acres of rangeland was plowed up and put into crop production during the same period.

“What we’ve been looking at is losing the nation’s best farmland in places like Chicago and other metropolitan areas in the Midwest, and replacing it with marginal lands in the arid West which requires more inputs, particularly water, irrigation.”

Green says shifting farming to less productive and more environmentally damaging land might not be the intent of the small towns that want to grow, but that’s the apparent result.

Just off campus at Northern Illinois’ Social Sciences Research Institute, Director Harvey Smith says Midwest states such as Illinois should take the time to better learn and weigh the costs of continued urban sprawl.

“Economically, Illinois relies very, very heavily on its agriculture. And, it is also the case that a lot of the very rich farmland is in the northern tier of the state which is closest to the moving fringe of the suburbs.”

Many times government at a more regional level, such as at the county level, is struggling with balancing development and farmland preservation. Even though it’s something of a contradiction, Smith says the people who move to the suburbs’ fringes causing further urban sprawl, actually want to preserve some of the farmland.

“The fact is that many of the people who move into the suburbs, while they like the sort of scenic quality of a farm or two over the hill, aren’t in a position to stop the disappearance of the farms themselves. It requires cooperation between local and regional governmental agencies to make a real effort to protect these qualities that are likely to disappear if they don’t.”

For some towns, it’s too late to recover the rural character and small town charm they lost to development, but for those at the fringes of the sprawling large metro areas with adherence to Smart Growth planning, some planners believe there’s still the opportunity to preserve a little of the setting of the suburbs that drew so many people there in the first place.

SMALL TOWNS INVITE SPRAWL (Short Version)

Eleven million acres of prime farmland were lost to urban sprawl in a 15 year period. Some small cities are embracing the growth and helping developers circumvent so-called Smart Growth restrictions on sprawl.

The U.S. has lost millions of acres of productive farmland in the last decade to urban sprawl. Researchers say state and county officials are seeing Smart Growth plans circumvented by politicians in small cities. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

The US has lost millions of acres of productive farmland in the last decade to urban sprawl. Researchers say state and county officials are seeing smart growth plans circumvented by politicians in small cities. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports.

Most states have passed legislation or are looking at doing so to reduce urban sprawl. Even some counties are working to restrict development to certain areas. But often developers approach small cities, promising increased tax revenues and infrastructure if the town annexes large areas of surrounding land for the developers. Rich Green is a geographer at Northern Illinois University. He says some small town officials don’t see past their own city limits.

“And in some respects, they may overlook the regional concerns to benefit their own territory, developers, shopping malls, retailers, playing one municipality off the other in terms of getting the best deal to locate.”

And so long debated plans to manage growth become nothing more than lines on a map, while natural areas and farmland are replaced by subdivisions and parking lots. Green says that’s led to eleven million acres of prime farmland being taken out of production in the fertile Midwest and East in a 15 year period due to urban sprawl. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.

A Cure for Sprawl

Sprawl affects urban and rural residents of every Great Lakes state. Rapid development continues to swallow farmland and leave impoverished urban cores in its wake. But one Great Lakes mayor believes there’s still time to preserve land and revive cities. Mayor John Logie shares this commentary:

Transcript

Urban sprawl is alive and well in Grand Rapids, my hometown. The term refers to the insidious way that webs of suburbs, manufacturing plants, etc., are expanding in unplanned, ever-widening circles around our city. Such sprawl results in longer commutes, pollution, and the loss of undeveloped land. The American Farmland Trust reports that 70% of the country’s prime farmland is now in the path of rapid development. On the list of 30 of the most sprawling cities in the entire United States, Grand Rapids, which has experienced a 48% increase in its urban area between 1990 and 1996, ranks right in the middle, behind such hyper-growth communities as Las Vegas, Austin, and Tucson, but well ahead of Cleveland, Chicago, and Portland in our rate of sprawl increase.

This Land-use change has rarely been done in a responsible fashion. Some sprawl apologists say what we’ve ended up with is that’s the American Dream, and any problems are easy to fix. They say there’s plenty of land left in America. They say congestion would go away if we just build more roads. But sprawl matters. Pollsters say it’s the most important issue in the Country.

Distress about urban sprawl arises from many factors: loss of open space, traffic congestion, economic segregation, a lack of affordable housing, and a lost sense of community. According to Harvard University political scientist Robert Putnam, the longer people spend in traffic, the less likely they are to be involved in their community and family.

To solve these problems, it takes a combination of land conservation and real free market economics, which can actually provide smaller lots for those who want them. However, many communities try to maintain what they believe are high property values by allowing only large-lot homes to be built. This effectively excludes several types of households, including singles, some empty nesters, single-parents, and the elderly, along with lower-income people. And the favored “middle-class family” with kids, today represents just 25% of new homebuyers. Only 11% of U.S. households are “traditional” families with children and just one wage earner. One size no longer fits us all.

Here’s what we need now.

We need smaller houses in walkable clusters, town homes in real “towns,” lofts in vital urban neighborhoods, and affordable housing just about anywhere. The development of compact communities that offer urban amenities and street life will show that the market actually supports more density and more housing diversity—not less. But we’re not building communities like those; communities that can help reduce many symptoms of sprawl, including traffic. Instead, we’re just building new roads. But for every 10% increase in new freeway miles, a 9% increase in traffic is generated within 5 years as sprawl continues. You just can’t build your way out of gridlock. More importantly, today we can no longer afford to keep building new freeways. The key is building more walkable communities. All this depends on promoting different land-use patterns, and not just building new roads.

Property rights advocates argue against regional planning, or any planning for that matter. They say that people should have a right to develop their properties as they please. As a historic preservationist, I have heard that for years. But what if one person’s development decision adversely impacts another’s property, or the whole neighborhood, or the whole region? What if certain choices require more public tax dollars to pay for infrastructure and services than others? At the regional level, it is public dollars that enable development on private property. Without highways, roads, sewers, water systems, and public services, development cannot occur. Therefore, we must use the tool of government spending appropriately – and seek out and implement the most cost-effective public investments which creatively and positively support growth, but discourage sprawl. My name is John Logie, I’m the Mayor of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Mallard Ducks on the Decline

In a narrow swath of grass in a roadside ditch, a mallard hen nests her second brood of the season, a rare event for these ducks. Her first ducklings were killed by a predator.
Researchers Tina Yerkes and John Simpson track the mallard hens by radio transmitters. They've found many of the ducks are killed by agricultural pursuits such as mowing. Lawnmowers can kill hens that are nesting in grass.
John Simpson 'candles' an egg, looking at the silhouette of the developing duckling to see how near it is to hatching.

In the last decade or so, ducks in the Great Lakes region have not been reproducing as well as they have in the past. The number of ducklings hatching out and surviving to adults has dropped by about 25 percent. Researchers are trying to figure out why this is happening and what can be done about it. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham went into the field with researchers and has this report:

Transcript

In the last decade of so, ducks in the Great Lakes region have not been reproducing as well as they have in the past. The number of ducklings hatching out and surviving to adults has dropped by about twenty-five percent. Researchers are trying to figure out why this is happening, and what can be done about it. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham went into the field with researchers and has this report.

(sound of quack, quack overhead / cross fade to truck doors and engine startup/ bed of gravel sounds)

Mallard ducks are the most common duck found throughout the Great Lakes states. You’ll see them on farm ponds, college lagoons, and even in big city parks. But recently the mallard’s population hasn’t been growing as fast. The duck’s rate of reproduction has been falling off in the region since the mid-1980’s. Researchers with the sportsman’s conservation group, Ducks Unlimited, are involved in a three year study of mallards to find out why the ducks are not surviving in as great of numbers.

Tina Yerkes heads up the project. In a truck with something that looks like a TV antenna on top, fellow researcher John Simpson and she are in northwest Ohio, near Lake Erie, headed out to find some of the mallard hens. Tiny transmitters were surgically implanted in the ducks earlier this year and the antenna tracks the signals.

“So, this is the whole gizmo setup here. Everyday these guys go out and they track the birds. Each bird has a unique beep, if you will, uhm, a frequency. And that’s basically how we figure out what they’re doing. We started with 57 and you’re down to 38?
JS: Thirty-eight, roughly. And, eleven? JS: Twelve. Twelve have actually been killed, either by predators or farming operations on this site.”

(Truck sound under)

As the truck gets close to the last sighting of one of the mallard hens they’re tracking. John Simpson flips on the tracker and turns the antenna.

(beep beep sound)

He’s pulled over along a fairly busy road, and starts looking around in the roadside grass.

“So, she’s actually nesting in the ditch?”
“Yeah. I’m not entirely sure where her nest is here, so we’ve got to be careful.”

(sound of grass rustling)

It’s hard to believe a duck could find a place for a nest here. Most of the roadside is mowed except for a little strip of grass where we’re looking. She’s one lucky duck. A mower would kill her and destroy her nest.

“There she is right there. See her sitting on her nest?”

The mallard hen is three feet away and she’s still hard to see. John
Simpson has to flush her so that he can take a look at the eggs in the nest.

(Sound of flapping wings)

“There she goes.”
“She’s got a pile of eggs too. That’s her second nest.”
“That’s her second nest?”
“Yeah. She had a pile in her first nest.”
“Twelve eggs? Is that right?”
“Eleven.”
“Eleven?”
“Yep.”

(Ambience remains under)

The duck lost her first brood to a predator. Since she had nested close to a subdivision, it could have been a dog or cat. But the researchers say in this case it was probably a wild predator, maybe a raccoon.

“And, once we’re finished, we’ll just cover the nest so the predators don’t see it and we leave.”

It’s very rare that a mallard hen tries twice to raise a brood, But in this area the ducks are adopting a lot of unusual behaviors. Since there’s almost no grassland to nest in, hens have nested in hay fields where they’re usually killed at mowing time. One hen made a nest in a large flowerpot. At our next stop we found a duck in the backyard of a mobile home, and her eggs had just hatched.

(Peep, peep, peep of the ducklings)

The owner mowed around the duck’s nest, giving the mother and her eggs a chance to survive. Now that they’ve hatched, they’ll head to the water nearby. Tina Yerkes says development pressures have hurt the ducks here.

“In Ohio, we’re looking at pretty bad brood survival which tells us that probably we need to alter the landscape by putting wetlands back—by restoring wetlands and managed marshes for the broods. And then, probably also coupling that with some grassland habitat, ’cause as you can see, there’s not a lot of grassland habitat for them to nest in here. We need to improve that.”

The Ducks Unlimited researchers are getting some indications about what kinds of things are hurting the ducks ability to reproduce. Besides the loss of wetlands the researchers are finding that farming practices such as frequently mowing ditches and urban sprawl taking up grasslands are all contributing to a high mortality rate among ducklings and sitting hens. But the researchers haven’t collected enough information yet to make any solid conclusions. It’ll be two more years and many more sites before the Ducks Unlimited researchers have enough hard data.

Robert Payne is the Curator of Birds at the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology. He says while to researchers it might seem pretty clear that people are causing the lower rates of production in the duck population. Information like the Ducks Unlimited group is gathering will be helpful.

“Well, it seems to be common sense: the more people, the more development you have, the fewer places there are going to be for birds. But the people in our society who make the decisions like to have some data out there. (They) Like to know how many ducks, how much land, and so on. Otherwise, these people can’t really figure how much land the really should set aside for the ducks. No data, no well informed decisions.”

(sounds of birds and bullfrogs)

But some people might find data that are supposed to help ducks gathered by a group that’s chiefly supported by people who kill ducks for sport might be a bit of a conflict, or at least very self-serving. Ducks Unlimited researcher Tina Yerkes says there’s a larger purpose here than merely making hunters happy.

“The purpose is not necessarily to create more ducks to shoot, but the purpose is to alter and affect the landscape in a positive way for all the species that need the landscape. So, we’re trying to take a step back and determine what the wildlife needs and help put it back on the ground for the wildlife.”

Predictions are that the human population around the Great Lakes will steadily increase for the foreseeable future, and if the researchers’ early indications hold, it’ll likely affect the duck population even more. This study, when it’s complete, might give policy makers the information they need to find a balance between the needs of people and the needs of wildlife as the conflict between the two grows in the Great Lakes region.

For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.

MALLARD DUCKS ON THE DECLINE (Short Version)

Mallards are the most common duck in the Great Lakes region, but their numbers have been declining during the last few years. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

Mallards are the most common duck in the Great Lakes region, but their numbers have been declining during the last few years. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Lester Graham reports.

The sportsmen’s conservation group, Ducks Unlimited is involved in a three year study, trying to learn why mallard duck populations are not increasing in the same numbers they once were. Tina Yerkes is a research biologist with the organization. She says starting in the mid-1950’s mallard flocks were growing at a pretty rapid rate.

“In the Great Lakes area, after the mid-80’s until now the production ratio has dropped and it’s dropped pretty sharply. And that for us is a warning bell, if you will, that something is going on in this area that’s causing birds not to do well.”

Yerkes and a team of biologists in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio are tracking mallard hens and their broods. Early indications are that loss of habitat is beginning to affect the duck populations in the region. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.

PAYING FARMERS TO PRESERVE LAND (Part 1)

Following World War Two, many Americans moved from cities to the suburbs for clean new houses and big lawns. The resulting urban sprawl eventually became a concern in eastern states because of their large populations and small land mass. But sprawl has only recently become an issue in the once land-rich Midwest. This spring, 135 people from Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana took a bus trip to the east coast to get ideas about containing development and protecting farmland. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Julie Grant reports:

ROOM FOR DEVELOPMENT &Amp; FARMING? (Part 2)

Some Midwesterners concerned that urban sprawl is eating up too much farmland recently took a bus trip to the east coast. They wanted to visit states such as Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Planners in those states have been dealing with the problem of too many people and not enough land for decades. The bus tour participants looked at different ways to preserve open spaces while still allowing development. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Julie Grant looks at a program that doesn’t cost taxpayers money:

Tag: urban sprawl

Small Towns Invite Sprawl

Transcript

SMALL TOWNS INVITE SPRAWL (Short Version)

Transcript

A Cure for Sprawl

Transcript

Mallard Ducks on the Decline

Transcript

Related Links

MALLARD DUCKS ON THE DECLINE (Short Version)

Transcript

PAYING FARMERS TO PRESERVE LAND (Part 1)

ROOM FOR DEVELOPMENT &Amp; FARMING? (Part 2)

Living Next to Wild Neighbors

Region Grades Poorly on Sprawl

Small Town Fights to Preserve Downtown