Marion has undergone a transition from a classic small town linked to its larger neighbor of Cedar Rapids by interurban railroad to a major urban center in a growing metropolitan area. — From the Introduction to the Marion Comprehensive Development Plan
Image source: City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain ParksCan you see it? It’s bearing down on us.
We’re lucky in our little corner of the heartland. Many of our smaller towns and rural areas haven’t yet been overrun by residential development. (Some, such as Marion, are the sad exceptions.) We still have time to stop it before we lose the character of our towns and rural areas and vast tracts of our undeveloped land.
One challenge we face is that of helping citizens appreciate the gravity of the situation at a stage when their lives have not yet been seriously affected by it. A kind of inertia until a problem is truly in our collective face seems to be a basic human tendency.
(Consider global warming, the depletion of world oil reserves, the problem of overpopulation, or any number of other problems, coming at us like freight trains. And yet we still haven’t committed to stepping off the tracks.) We need a way to sense the impact of development and the need to act before a lot of damage is done.
Our crystal ball
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could peer into the future, see where development in the area was headed, then effect changes now to create an alternate, more desirable future? Actually, we can! We need only look at what’s happened in areas where unchecked residential development got off to an earlier start than it has here. We can look both at the effects on such areas, and at how they’ve responded. We can learn from their mistakes and successes alike. We mustn’t be so arrogant as to assume we’re somehow so different from these other places that we won’t face the same problems they have if we don’t take decisive action to put the brakes on needless development.
In the near future we’ll look at some examples of the ravages of needless growth. For now, having grown up in the West I can’t help simply listing places like Scottsdale, Tucson, Las Vegas, and, oh yes, Santa Fe, which just 25 years ago was a little town unlike any other in America. It’s still unlike any other, only now it holds the dubious distinction of having the only enormous tract of all-adobe-style suburban sprawl in the nation. Our little towns have more in common with those cities, earlier in their existence, than you might imagine. Check into the history of the growth of a town called Surprise, Arizona if you really want a… ahem… surprise.
They’re doing what?
Just seeing how other parts of the country have responded to ongoing growth can show us how serious a problem “development” often becomes. At some point continued growth becomes such an obvious problem that some cities or counties suddenly “wake up” and decide to do something about it. Seeing what tools these folks who’ve “been there” have developed to deal with it highlights how serious the measures we use have to be.
New Jersey — Let’s take a lesson from the Garden State
New Jersey is well ahead of most other states in experiencing and subsequently reacting to needless growth. They’ve seen both the financial and environmental damage needless residential expansion causes. There are lots of legal tools a local government can use to restrict residential growth. In New Jersey, Bob Sutton of Peapack-Gladstone Borough, pop. 2433, writes about an especially effective option that state now uses to protect what open land they have left from residential development: the Open Space trust. This is a tool by which municipalities and counties in New Jersey buy up open land to save it from development. It’s supported by a small sales tax. They’ve been able to leverage their buying power through matching grants as well. Since 1961 they’ve used this method to protect 1.1 million acres. As Sutton puts it:
…municipal, county, and state Open Space trusts address the single largest problem facing New Jersey communities today: runaway growth in residential construction. Voters are learning that when it comes to taming sprawl, the best Defense may very well be a good Offense.
No doubt, however, they wish they’d done much more, much sooner.
Boulder — A model we’d be wise to follow
We talked briefly about Boulder, Colorado in discussion under an earlier post. They do the same thing. During the ’50s and ’60s they experienced enough growth finally to alarm many citizens. As a result they pioneered one of the nation’s first city-funded greenbelt systems. (See map above.) Since 1967, funded by a small (less than 1%) sales tax, the city has protected over 43,000 acres from development through outright purchases and conservation easements. (We’ll look at the latter in an upcoming post.) In doing this, they’ve effectively created a large ring of greenspace around the town, protecting the area from development and keeping the town largely contained within a given land area. The protected land covers about twice as many acres as the developed town!
Do our towns have the courage?
Both New Jersey and Boulder had to experience alarming levels of growth to prompt them to take their land preservation measures. Both undoubtedly wish they’d acted sooner. I went to college in Boulder in the ’70s, and even then many residents lamented that the city hadn’t done more to limit growth at an earlier date.
If we don’t act soon we’ll feel the same regret in a few years. We’re the classic small towns Marion once was. We’re close to Cedar Rapids too, and will soon enough have to fend off its sprawl. Let’s not create our own. But do MV’s and Lisbon’s city officials have the courage to stand up to the growth machine now — before we have to look back with sadness on what we had — and initiate a program of buying up and preserving open land? Unfortunately, at present, I don’t think so. Some would even scoff at the idea. Well, officials in New Jersey and Boulder aren’t scoffing. They’ve seen the problems toward which we’re heading. We should listen.
Let your representatives know how you feel.