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.