Month: November 2007

Well, if that title doesn’t bring you in to read, I don’t know what will.

Eben Fodor brought up a lot of good arguments as I described in my previous post on this subject. Moreover, most of my commentors on Friday’s post have likened what he described to the situation in Salisbury and I can’t say that I disagree. But before I get back to him, there is the matter of the Wicomico County zoning change I addressed in the early part of that post.

To review, the Wicomico County’s Rural Areas Planning Committee wanted to do away with cluster projects in agricultural areas – in essence a 100 acre parcel would have its allowable number of units fall from 33 (one per three acres) to at most 10. Looking at it from an infrastructure standpoint, with 10 units on the parcel you still have to build roads, sewer lines, and water lines to each residence, and there’s still going to be a lot of it necessary to connect all of the houses, in part because they’re spaced further apart. I’ll concede that fewer units would be less of an impact on fire, police, and schools but not appreciably.

Either way, the ordinance as I understand it seems pretty wasteful unless you wanted to build something like a combination golf course and housing development, otherwise that’s a lot of extra infrastructure to be built amongst the more spread-out residences.

Now to Eben Fodor’s remarks. Many of the comments I received and have noticed on other sites regarding his remarks note that what he said is eerily like the situation in Salisbury. On that I agree to an extent, particularly with the $14 million Old Mall project TIF. In that case, growth will cost the taxpayers of Salisbury dearly despite the fact that the project was a redevelopment and at least in theory had much of the necessary infrastructure in place. Moreover, I tend to favor growth go to areas where the required parts are in place or easily extended, such as water, sewer, and roadways. The city of Salisbury has overreached in this aspect as well at times with “pipestem” annexations.

But I found that Fodor’s argument and those who ally themselves behind it seem to favor stopping growth altogether. It may not happen in the short term, but once a precedent is made that becomes the template for future actions. At first they may succeed in restricting growth to the areas slated for growth in the comprehensive plan (in our case, the axis along U.S. 13 from Fruitland to Delmar.) In the next decade or so, it would be a good compromise but after that the choice land becomes more scarce and land values go in two directions – skyrocketing in the small area allowed for growth and plummeting in other areas where growth is not allowed to go.

It is the aim of some on the fringes of the environmental movement to return vast swaths of land to their natural state, without human intervention. Fodor alluded to that thought when he noted during his presentation that we should “give other species more room.” In 2001, the state of Maryland adopted a program intended to create “green infrastructure” but did not renew it in 2006 as far as I can ascertain. (You’ll note the website’s out of date as well.) Program Open Space does continue though with many of the same goals.

Tying in with this effort to some degree are the zero population growth supporters, another group Eben alluded to. The lengthy comments on my first part can be attributed in part to a group called Negative Population Growth, and we just happen to be in one of their target areas. This comes from their 2007 Progress Report:

The Chesapeake Bay is the third largest estuary in the world and it has been ravaged for decades by overdevelopment in its vast watershed. Today, it is more threatened than ever before as dozens of America’s fastest-growing counties lie within its domain. In the coming months, NPG will be looking to our members who live in New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, Delaware, Maryland and Washington, D.C. to pressure their top elected leaders to take steps now to halt the rapid, uncontrolled development that is proving to be so damaging to this national treasure. It makes absolutely no sense to spend billions of taxpayer dollars a year to “clean up” the Chesapeake while simultaneously permitting sprawling developments that will attract hundreds of thousands more people – and greater sources of pollution. Member response to the early stages of this project will determine whether we take it to a larger scale.

It’s quite possible Fodor is part of an anti-growth full court press being placed on our region by those who have other interests in mind.

But I didn’t want to write this sounding like a conspiracy theorist. Most of what Fodor dealt with was on the financial end of growth. Indeed, infrastructure is not cheap, but my main argument is at the basic fundamental level. Under a capitalistic society growth is truly inevitable. The American Dream has generally been to grow up, get a good job, get married, buy a house, have a family, and spoil the grandkids after you retire. Naturally, each generation wants the next to have a better life, which means a better and bigger house in a nice neighborhood.

Our region happens to be a desirable area, and that’s actually good for us. Many complain that our kids grow up here and go to college here but then leave to the Western Shore because there are no good jobs here. Sometimes they come back to raise the family and start the cycle again but closing the door on development also would shut the door on their hopes of returning to find a good, solid job. Yes, we seem to have an imbalance of new residential units now but the cycle is due to catch up because these people have to have their demands for services met.

I also wanted to make another point on jobs. Yes, creating more local jobs attracts people from outside the area – why do you think I’m here? No one locally had the particular knowledge or skills my employer wanted, so they sought my services from Ohio since I was available at the time. Conversely, my skills and knowledge weren’t necessarily needed in Toledo, Ohio because there was too little growth going on at the time. Thus, they lost population because I moved here.

But where do people go if there are no jobs to be had anywhere, and how do they live? If everywhere you turned there were onerous restrictions on growth, the capitalist economy would be strangled and we’d all be living like North Koreans. There was a reason I talked about the “watermelon” crowd – green on the outside but socialist red in the middle.

And with our state government actively doing its part to place a higher and higher burden on landowners through regulation and taking valuable land off the tax rolls (I don’t buy the answer I got to my question regarding property values going up around open space enough to offset the loss of revenue), the NIMBY mindset plays well with their goals.

Do we need good planning and reasonable regulations for growth? Of course. But, despite the best efforts of Eben Fodor, he could not convince me that growth is not good. Future generations are depending on it.

I just made an executive decision as I wrote this. I’m going to talk about the issues that prompted the post tonight and make my counter-arguments Sunday. Local growth is making my weekend shorter.

Is growth good? That was the question asked last night as a number of Delmarva environmental organizations and Wor-Wic Community College welcomed noted community planner and author Eben Fodor to speak before an audience of about 70 people.

It was a happy coincidence that prompted me to move this post back a few days to check out Fodor’s viewpoints. The original impetus for writing this was a Daily Times article about a bid by Wicomico County’s Rural Areas Planning Committee to do away with cluster projects in agricultural areas along with a possible change to the transfer development rights that landowners currently have but do not use.

While the headline screamed “Limit housing or face ‘death of agriculture,’ committee says” it seems to me that the intention is to actually kill housing projects in agricultural areas, forcing developers to cut the number of houses they can erect in a development. Assuming a 100 acre parcel, current cluster zoning allows 33 houses to be built. Under the proposal, that number is at most ten, one house per ten acres on a lot that’s one acre or less per house. While I’m not convinced that agricultural areas are the best places to put housing, the fact remains that landowners should have the right to maximize their property’s potential and this edict would dampen the possible value of their land to a developer unless they wished to attempt a zoning change.

So I found the timing of Mr. Fodor’s visit to be quite handy for adding a viewpoint that was likely to compete with mine, particularly when I found out as part of his presentation that I was a “special interest” as an architect. Overall, the premise of his visit was to explain some of the “myths” about growth. Seeing that he had about an hour to speak, he only touched heavily on a few: our changing landscape, the cost of growth, growth creating jobs, and the politics of growth. The last part was where I was deemed a “special interest.”

While Eben had a lot of numbers concerning growth, he noted that many of the studies that covered the topic were several years old, with a possible explanation being that the people studying the trends made the developers angry by disclosing the accelerating pace. In one example, Fodor cited a study where growth had been pegged at 2.2 million acres a year from 1992-97, a pace dwarfing the previous decade’s. Another way to put it was that an area the size of Indiana was being developed every decade, while the aggregate area of impervious surface nationwide was now about the same as the area of the entire state of Ohio. So call that hitting me where I lived.

Two of the key “myths” as he posited were that growth creates tax revenue and jobs. He argued that neither was true. Instead, he suggested that the revenue deficit created by growth manifested itself in one of four ways: higher taxes on individuals, more debt for the community to pay off, an “infrastructure deficit”, or reduction in services. Eben also claimed that larger cities paid higher taxes per capita and taxes increased faster with quicker growth. As for putting a price tag on growth, Fodor stated that an average house had a service cost to taxpayers anywhere between $25,000 and $90,000 depending on what facililities were already present.

Eben continued his talk by going into the politics of growth, the part that made me perk up and listen of course. According to him, those in favor of land development were the “most powerful political force” at the local level, while on the other hand the public at-large generally felt that growth was a problem. Using a survey of Eastern Shore voters, Fodor said that 54% of our area felt the biggest problem was something related to growth (sprawl, environment, traffic, etc.) while just 11% cited the economy. He later made the claim that growth begats anti-tax sentiment.

It was in this last portion of his presentation where he started showing his far-left leanings more and more, as he sought to address the problem of developer money in politics by instituting campaign finance limits and public financing. More red meat for the “watermelon” crowd came during the question and answer period when Fodor cited:

• a need to “give other species more room”;
• zero population growth policy was “working” in Europe and was “functional” and “viable”, and;
• we needed to “look at (the) demand side” when it came to energy.

If you watch the rebroadcast on PAC 14, you’ll see that I made it up to the microphone to ask a question, but I stumbled around a bit trying to figure out how to ask it intelligently. I really had two somewhat related questions regarding where the line was between stopping growth vs. private property rights and also about the government buying land to create an open space buffer (as Maryland has a program to do just that – Fodor also spoke about a city in New York he claimed saved taxpayer money by purchasing a greenbelt of land to surround it.)

Eben didn’t really answer the first part, but stated to the second part that the loss of tax base would be made up because the land surrounding the open space would become more valuable. With that, I’m going to wrap up this half of the post and address what I think about some of what he said along with the Daily Times article I spoke of above in a later post.