This week’s issue of the Sun features the first recent editorial I’ve seen in which the paper (Jake Krob, I presume?) takes a stance on growth with any attempt to support it. Previous editorials have included a pro-residential-development comment or two, but with not justification other than the often heard but irrelevant comment that other towns are losing population.

I’m glad the Sun is getting into the conversation, but am disappointed the editorial ignores the most obvious and troubling problems residential growth will cause for us. It ignores, as well, the data we’ve provided here to highlight the fiscal problems of residential development. Still, it’s a start, and one from which I hope the Sun will proceed to develop an informed, thoughtful take on this, the most serious issue with which our communities are confronted. Maintaining a pro-residential-growth stance would be to support an unsustainable process which would only damage the community.

Time to respond, point by point, to the editorial:

The Sun says,

…viewers of the Mount Vernon and Lisbon candidates’ forums recognized this: Growth is a top issue in both of our communities.

It’s nice to see an editorial in the Sun also recognizing this. In a recent editorial you listed the main issues facing Mt. Vernon and Lisbon. Surprisingly, you left out residential growth. But it dominated both candidates’ forums, revealing it clearly to be the most worrisome issue for our towns.

We don’t believe, as some do, that our communities are exploding with growth

Who believes that? I don’t, and I don’t hear others saying anything like that. We’ll all know it when growth is exploding. It seems you’ve set up a straw man here.

Right now, our communities are growing at a brisk, but not explosive rate. That may change though. If it goes off as planned Stonebrook alone will increase Mt. Vernon’s population by about 25%.

If you understand exponential growth, you know as well that continuing at a rate which might now seem modest will lead in time to accelerating growth of the worst sort. But explosive growth right now? Nope.

That said, why would anyone who’s pro-growth care about the pace of growth? If you like growth, and our cities can create infrastructure to keep up with it, why not grow explosively right now? If you’re in favor of growth, how can that be bad? Let’s grow just as fast as we can develop the infrastructure. If we can double in size every four years, bring it on! That way, in just 28 years, Lisbon will be bigger than Des Moines. Wouldn’t that be great? Where’s the problem?

– that we are growing too quickly

It’s not that we’re growing too quickly. Assuming you’re talking about residential growth, the problem is that we’re growing at all. I doubt anyone would complain about a new house or two going up, but we have no need whatsoever for residential development on the scale of new subdivisions. It will only harm our towns. Over a hundred studies around the country have found such development to be a financial drain on a community.

Much more important, though, is that continued growth will grow us right out of being small towns. It’s indisputable. How big can we get and still be a “small town”? Residential growth will end our status as small towns before our children have a chance to raise their own children here. It will, however, confer on us the status of being two more members of the club of soulless masses of suburban sprawl.

More important still is that this needless, harmful growth necessitates complete environmental destruction of large expanses of land. We’ve had enough of that. It’s time to start valuing the land and its importance to our quality of life and our survival.

and soon our services won’t be able to meet demands.

There’s some concern about roads and schools. I haven’t heard much more than that. In Solon they can’t find the money to bring their water and sewage treatment facilities up to pace with their growth. I’ve heard of no similar problem here, though Solon should serve as a warning for us.

The concerns about roads and schools are well taken. The schools, for instance, are already bursting at the seams with marginal or poor teacher-student ratios in many classrooms. Population growth will make it worse.

…we understand that even at the current rate of growth, we need to continuously have the foresight to plan for more houses, more businesses, more traffic, more school kids.

At the current growth rate, sooner than most would expect, our size will begin accelerating at a frightening pace, completely destroying what we have here. That’s the math of exponential growth. I’ve seen it happen elsewhere. There’s no reason to think we’re immune.

Our school districts (a new high school under construction in Mount Vernon; a recently expanded school in Lisbon) have done that well.

Really? Stonebrook alone will bring new students in the hundreds. Given the current teacher-student ratios, where’s the push hire more teachers? I’ve heard nothing about bringing the ratios to a more respectable level. You can wave new buildings in front of people’s faces, but tell us exactly how they’re going to improve teacher-student ratios?

…we can go along with one suggestion provided by a Sun reader… There should be a study of the potential impact of growth here. If Mount Vernon grows “x” amount, what will it mean for the city’s infrastructure, traffic, schools, recreational spots, etc.?

She further suggested the city work with… Cornell College to conduct the study…

The general idea is fine, but the specifics need tweaking. The particular study you’re suggesting wouldn’t capture the information most useful to community decision makers. I’m not aware of a lot of concern we won’t be able to keep pace with things like infrastructure and recreational spots. As long as the cities can keep adding to these areas, the impact (on ability to provide adequate services) will be unremarkable. I don’t think we need a study to tell us that.

The cost to provide all these services to new residential development is a different matter. A great deal of evidence suggests it will only increase the economic drain created by residential development. (Which have the higher property taxes — bigger cities or smaller cities? There’s no mystery there.)

A study of that issue would provide information of some value. I don’t know if anyone at Cornell is prepared to dig into city (and possibly county) budgets and determine the costs to provide services to our residential developments, comparing them to the revenues those developments generate. If not, I’d be happy to find someone fully qualified to do it. Is either of our cities willing to pay a little for such a study? Perhaps by making use of Cornell students to collect the data, we could keep the cost to a minimum.

There are methods even more involved than that, methods which try to account for a broader array of variables (e.g., this one in Oregon). Though it would be arguably superior, I’m not optimistic our cities would be willing to pay for a study of that magnitude. In any event, the basic studies of revenues compared to costs of services zero in on the key numbers and produce results anyone can understand. I’m guessing it’s as much as we could hope to fund.

But do we need a study at all? No study is necessary to assess the most troubling issues: the loss of our small town character, and the environmental destruction which, sooner or later, are indisputable results of physical growth. Continued residential growth will kill our status as small towns and cost us our open spaces.

We have to ask, moreover, “Even if we wanted to, could we grow forever?” Obviously we couldn’t. So if residential growth really were sustaining us now, what would we do to survive when we ran out of space? I say let’s do that now instead of waiting! That way our towns thrive and the myth that we need residential development for our economic survival becomes the distant memory it should be. (Note that merely ceasing all subdivision construction would be large and economically positive first step.)

…we’re on board with the idea because recent growth discussions seem to be largely anecdotal. …we need factual information…

Man, you should have come here before writing that editorial! Well, you’re in the right place now. The Small Town Project has already provided lots of facts. I’ll review a few:

  • There’s the fact that studies in well over 100 localities around the country have found that residential development nearly always costs more to service than the revenues it generates. It costs a town money, creating a deficit which has to be made up by revenues from commercial development, open land, farmland, and ultimately increased tax rates. Nothing anecdotal there, just the results of rigorous data analysis. The numbers may have been different 30 years ago, but at today’s prices for services residential development has a tough time paying for itself.

    As you can see in a Penn State University publication, these “cost of community services” studies use a clear, repeatable methodology. They provide data which speak for themselves. They’re not perfect. They don’t tell use everything there is to know about a community’s growth, but as a review from Ohio State University (by way of the University of Illinois) concludes, they provide much of the most important fiscal information.

  • There are the even more involved studies such as the one I mentioned above. They tackle the question of the economics of residential development even more comprehensively. They typically arrive at similar conclusions: Residential development doesn’t pay for itself and is subsidized by the existing taxpayers.

  • There’s also the objective evidence, from studies by the NRDC and others, that low density sprawl development is fiscally wasteful, and is some of the most costly to service.

    Are there any studies at all which conclude that residential development has fiscal benefits for a town? Yes, a small number, mostly written or funded by someone in the real estate development business, people with financial stakes in the studies’ outcomes . They are vastly outnumbered by studies showing the opposite. Years ago, many of the latter were conducted by the American Farmland Trust. In the last decade or more, though, a wide variety of other groups (universities, community groups, etc.) have conducted studies and obtained similar results.

  • There are the facts we’ve laid out concerning sustainable development and how it can support a town’s economy without physical expansion. There’s the $1.2 million dollars that Osage saves each year, for example, with its energy conservation program. I don’t think it’s anecdotal. The city of Osage will tell you it’s real money.

  • Let’s not forget the facts we’ve begun to provide on proven methods of limiting physical growth. The tens of thousands of acres and the million plus acres preserved in Boulder and New Jersey respectively are very real.

  • Finally, we mustn’t ignore the myths we’ve exposed here. I’d argue we’ve shown beyond any reasonable doubt that many growth industry assertions are myths. Can you logically refute the main point in any of those articles? In any event, even if only one growth machine assertion were a myth, we would know, for a fact, those speading it weren’t being truthful with us.

And that leads to the question with which I’ll close. Here we’ve shown, essentially beyond doubt, that those powering the growth machine are, to put it bluntly but accurately, lying to us. (Those who push the myths in good faith have just accepted the propaganda without investigating it.) You hear the lies, and now should be able to recognize them as such. Can you really go on supporting unending residential growth, knowing the growth industry is lying to us? I hope you’ll give that some thought.