Paying for Sprawl

For half a century the United States has grown in a new way: Sprawl. In recent years corporations, non-profit organizations and government agencies have studied the impact of sprawl. Every study shows that sprawl has strained public budgets, increased traffic congestion, threatened public health and the environment, over-consumed land, and damaged the social fabric of our nation. "Localities can't keep up with demand for public services like roads; there are traffic jams, schools are overcrowded, and housing has become unaffordable."1 It does not have to be this way, there are smarter ways to develop.

Unbalanced Budgets

• New Jersey's plan for managed growth will save the state $700 million in road costs, $562 million in sewer and water costs, $178 million in school costs, and up to $380 million in operating costs per year.2
• 15 years of continued sprawl would cost Maryland $10 billion more than a more compact pattern of growth.3
• In 1996 Carroll County, Maryland, found that $1.22 was paid out in services for every $1 collected from residential property taxes.4
• In 1970 Maine governments spent $8.7 million to bus students to and from schools. In 1995, with fewer students, the cost had risen to $54 million.5
• A 1989 Florida study demonstrated that planned, concentrated growth would cost the taxpayer 50 percent to 75 percent less than continued sprawl.6
• Minneapolis-St. Paul will spend $3.1 billion by the year 2020 for new water and sewer services to accommodate sprawl.7
• Prince William County, a sprawling suburb of Washington, D.C., has the highest tax rates in the State of Virginia yet it still cannot keep pace with the expenditures needed to accommodate new growth.8
• Since 1980 the City of Fresno has added $56 million in yearly revenues but has added $123 million in service costs.9

Traffic! Traffic! Traffic!

• Between 1970 and 1990, the population of the U.S. increased by 22.5 percent yet the number of vehicle miles traveled increased 98.4 percent.10
• The average American family spends one sixth of its total budget on transportation, more than food, more than clothing, more than healthcare.11
• Between 1980 and 1990 commuting times for residents of Alameda and Contra Costa Counties, California, increased 13 percent.12
• Due to increased congestion, the average speed of the Washington Beltway has decreased from 47 mph in 1981 to 23 mph in 1991.13
• When compared to compact planned development, sprawl growth patterns result in 600 percent higher police response times, 50 percent higher ambulance response times, and 33 percent higher fire response times.14

Dirty Growth

• Air pollutants from cars are responsible for 20,00-40,000 annual cases of chronic respiratory illness and 50-70 million annual respiratory-related restricted activity days.15
• Smog costs Maryland $40 million in crop damage each year.16
• In California sprawl induced air pollution can reduce crop yields by 30 percent and cost $200 million per year.17
• Sprawl worsens non-point source pollution by generating 43 percent more runoff with 3 times greater sediment loads than traditional development.18

America's Disappearing Landscape

• Every hour of every day, 50 acres of prime farmland are lost to development.19
• If sprawl continues, Maryland will consume as much land in the next 25 years as it did in the past 300 years.20
• Between 1970 and 1990 the population of the Los Angeles metro area grew by 45 percent while developing 200 percent more land; the population of the Cleveland metro area fell by 11 percent, while developing 33 percent more land; population of the Chicago metro area grew by 4 percent, developed land increased by 46 percent.
• In contrast, the population of the Portland, Oregon, metro area grew by 50 percent but only consumed 2 percent more land. (In the 1970s Portland instituted growth management strategies. Before that, the consumption of land grew at twice the rate of population growth.)21

Creating a Sense of No-Place

• "Places ... shape people for good or ill."22
• "It is no coincidence that at the moment when the United States has become a predominantly suburban nation, the country has suffered a bitter harvest of individual trauma, family distress, and civic decay." —Philip Langdon 23
• "Sprawl eats up our open space. It creates traffic jams that boggle the mind and pollute the air. Sprawl can make one feel downright claustrophobic about our future."24
• "The physical setting itself — the cartoon landscape of car-clogged highways, strip malls, tract houses, franchise fry pits, parking lots, junked cities and ravaged countrysides — [is] not merely the symptom of our troubled culture, but in many ways a primary cause of our troubles."25

November 1998

Footnotes

1. Smart Growth & Development Summit White Paper, 1997, Office of the Governor of Colorado.

2. Reexamination Report of the State Development and Redevelopment Plan, 1997, New Jersey Office of State Planning.

3. Sprawl Costs Us All, 1997, Sierra Club Foundation.

4. Sprawl Costs Us All, 1997, Sierra Club Foundation.

5. Cost of Sprawl, 1997, Maine State Planning Office.

6. Governor's Commission for a Sustainable South Florida.

7. What's So Bad About Sprawl?, November 18, 1996, Pioneer Press.

8. Costs of Sprawl, 1998, The Sierra Club.

9. The National Sprawl Fact Sheet, 1998, Sierra Club.

10. Selected Highway Statistics and Charts, 1989, Federal Highway Administration.

11. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1995.

12. Beyond Sprawl, 1995, Bank of America.

13. Sprawl Costs Us All, 1997, Sierra Club Foundation.

14. Living on the Edge, American Farmland Trust, 1988.

15. Health Effects of Motor Vehicle Air Pollution, 1995, Institute of Transportation Standards, University of California at Davis.

16. Sprawl Costs Us All, 1997, Sierra Club Foundation.

17. Beyond Sprawl, 1995, Bank of America.

18. Land Development Bulletin, Fall 1995, South Carolina Coastal Conservation League.

19. Farming on the Edge, 1997, American Farmland Trust.

20. Sprawl Costs Us All, 1997, Sierra Club Foundation.

21. Farming at the Edge, 1997, American Farmland Trust and The Atlas of Oregon, 1976, University of Oregon.

22. Vice President Gore, September 22, 1998.

23. A Better Place To Live, 1994, Philip Langdon, University of Massachusetts Press, page ix.

24. Christine Todd Whitman, Inaugural Address as New Jersey Governor, January 20, 1998.

25. Home From Nowhere, 1996, James Howard Kunstler, Simon & Schuster, page 106.