News

Boise sprawls the most in the Pacific Northwest – Once again, Boise tops a list.- What about Montana??

We´ve been named the nation´s best biking town and among the best places to do business, attributes that likely helped attract record numbers of new residents during the 1990s. The result: the most sprawling city in the Pacific Northwest, according to a report released by an environmental group.

Joe Kolman
The Idaho Statesman

http://www.idahostatesman.com/News/story.asp?ID=62892

Sprawl is a dirty word to local leaders and others involved with growth issues, but the analysis Northwest Environment Watch of Seattle released today is based on a simple premise: the fewer people living on an acre of land, the more likely a city faces increasing traffic, limited funding for new services, air pollution and loss of farm land — topics familiar to Treasure Valley residents.

***********

• Critical issues in Idaho and the Northwest

http://www.idahostatesman.com/News/story.asp?ID=62887

***********

The organization compared the greater Boise area, which includes all of Ada County, to the metropolitan areas of Seattle, Portland, Eugene, Ore., and Spokane and Vancouver and Victoria in British Columbia.

The study found that in 2000, about 7 percent of Ada County residents lived in “compact neighborhoods” defined as more than 12 residents per acre. That is more than double the percentage in 1990.

Boise lags behind three similar sized cities in the percentage of people living in compact development. The city lags slightly behind Eugene and Spokane and pales in comparison to Victoria. One of every three Victoria residents lives in a compact neighborhood.

“Boise is still a very rapidly growing city,” said Clark Williams-Derry, the group´s research director, “and the way it manages that growth over the … next couple of decades is really going to shape the city in fundamental ways that maybe we can´t predict right now, but at least we should be paying attention to.”

The population boom may have caught Treasure Valley communities off guard in terms of planning for growth, but officials from Boise to Parma now realize they share many of the same concerns about the effects of growth, said Elizabeth Conner, director of Treasure Valley Partners, a growth issues group made up of elected officials.

“If we plan right, 300 people will do less damage to the environment than 30 people unplanned for will do,” Conner said. “It will behoove us to build in a more cohesive and coherent pattern. And we´ll get there.”

Cities in the valley are working to revitalize downtowns, which includes building more high-density housing. Boise and its two largest neighbors, Meridian and Eagle, encourage development of land within city limits. An Ada County Highway District consultant is talking to officials about a regional development plan, which could set a goal of encouraging compact growth. Each community now has a plan for growth.

The ACHD does not have enough money to keep building roads for far-flung developments, spokesman Craig Quintana said.

Of the cities in the study, the Boise area experienced the fastest growth rate in the 1990s. Also, sprawl in some of the other cities is limited by geography, such as Puget Sound in Seattle, or regulations such as growth boundaries.

Williams-Derry said the study used 12 residents per acre as a benchmark because that is a density at which there are enough people to support public transit. Low- density development is among the reasons ValleyRide, the local public transportation agency, is considering cutting back or eliminating service to some areas.

In the Treasure Valley in 2000, there were pockets with more than 12 people per acre, mostly in Boise, including north of downtown.

But Census 2000 showed only one such area in Meridian and none in Eagle.

The study shows that work needs to be done to increase density, said Jon Barrett of Idaho Smart Growth, a group that promotes compact development. That may include a regional plan and reducing fees charged developers for building in targeted areas, he said.

Barrett added that developers and elected officials are doing a better job of fighting sprawl than a decade ago. “It´s not all bad news,” Barrett said. “I think we have made progress.”

To offer story ideas or comments, contact Joe Kolman
[email protected] or 377-6439

**************

Seeds to grow Everybody wants protection from unbridled growth,
but so few are willing to adopt the necessary principles

By Tim Davis
for Headwaters News

http://www.headwatersnews.org/perspective.html

I spend a lot of time asking people in Montana – Republicans and Democrats, businesswomen and builders, waiters and environmentalists – what they want their slice of the West to look like in 20 years.

They almost always talk about open space and clean water, vibrant towns and lack of traffic, and the like. People never say they want more strip malls. They don’t say they hope Montana in 2020 will look like California or Colorado today. They don’t ask for subdivisions to carpet our valleys.

We haven’t learned how to mesh the legitimately competing desires (and fears) of enough Montanans to make smart growth happen.

And yet that is just what we are getting. Why, if so few of us want this, are we building it anyway? Why aren’t we embracing smart growth?

Partly, this is because smart growth is hard for people to grasp, even if they know it when they see it: It’s those older, walkable, and marketable neighborhoods with tree-lined streets, front porches, and affordable homes that are a short hop from thriving downtowns with hardware stores, coffee shops, offices, and lots of people mingling and interacting.

The other side of smart growth is the open spaces and working farms and ranches just outside town, and those undisturbed floodplains, ridge lines, and streamsides. In other words, smart growth is exactly what most people say they want and come to the West for.

But the wasteful sprawling development that we have seen so much of in the past 15 years isn’t due only to a lack of understanding of smart growth and the tools necessary to make it a reality. Another problem is that we have skewed our state and local infrastructure investments and development permit systems in a way that actively promotes and subsidizes sprawling development.

One reason is that we haven’t learned how to mesh the legitimately competing desires (and fears) of enough Montanans to make smart growth happen.

To create the future most Montanans and Westerners want, we need to know how different people in what remains of the undeveloped West see growth. The following are admittedly gross generalizations, but they’re also broadly true.

* The rancher: He’s concerned the regulations needed to implement smart growth will limit his ability to sell his land for development in the future. But he also resents the encroachment of subdivisions that threaten his operation and the rural life he loves.

* The city dweller: She enjoys being close to her kids’ schools, to the store, and to work, so she doesn’t have to spend all her precious free time as a taxi driver. But she also worries about how the new apartment building proposed down the street will impact her property values.

* The home builder: He works on a thin profit margin from house to house. The more expensive the house, the higher the profit. So he’s glad to build McMansions outside town. He recognizes sprawl makes the town less attractive, traffic has gotten worse, and his hunting grounds have been fragmented by ranchettes. But he figures that is the price of progress.

* The new rural resident: She loves the quiet of her few acres. But she worries about new subdivisions proposed nearby, and about growing traffic, worsening roads, and the threat of new septic systems to her drinking water — as well as the added taxes needed to fix such problems.

* The conservationist: He supports smart growth because it will protect wildlife habitat, river corridors, water quality, and open space. But he often forgets we need to ensure that all Montanans can find an attractive and affordable home in town.

* The low-income mom: Single mothers or low-income families worry most about paying the bills. Their need for affordable rent forces them to live in a poorly built and unattractive home, often on the edge of town, which means they drive a lot. The cost of maintaining the car isn’t cheap, and the constant driving is a hassle.

* The Realtor: He appreciates the open lands and small-town life that make living and buying a home in Montana so attractive. But he doesn’t want to support the measures that protect those amenities and property values over the long term because he fears they’ll limit his short-term income.

There is some validity in all of these hopes and fears. The trick is how to address enough of them so that a majority of us see smart growth as in our best interest. Let me address the concerns of each of these people one at a time.

The rancher:

Most farmers and ranchers already know that one of the only ways to ensure an adequate land base of working lands is zoning. But many don’t know that you can zone working lands to protect them and either allow small parts of those lands to be developed or to sell their development rights.

What if counties helped farmers and ranchers by halting development from eating up most of the best lands while also helping them develop small portions of farm and ranch (mostly the less productive lands) to be used for cluster development?

Put another way, if you’ve got 200 acres of farmland, you could put 20 houses on 10-acre lots and be forced to quit farming while ensuring that the land will never be used for farming again, or you could put 20 or more houses on 10 acres and still farm most of the remaining 190 acres.

When designed correctly, these types of developments will make the farmers and ranchers more money than simply selling or developing all their land because people are willing to pay a premium for the open space that is the remaining farmland. It’s win-win.

The city dweller:

For smart growth to work, most people need to live in town. But people in cities sometimes get nervous when, say, apartments go up down the street. There are two ways to address such fears.

One is to explain how bringing more people to town protects city dwellers. This is because when people move out of town, in-town schools shut down, in-town traffic gets worse, open space is lost, and vibrant downtowns deteriorate as strip malls rise.

Second, we need to show that new development can protect urbanites’ property values. Cities can do this by working with neighborhoods to pass design standards that ensure that new development looks like the older parts of town that people cherish.

The home builder:

Cities can do a hundred things to make building in town attractive but most cities in Montana haven’t done everything they can.

We need to make our zoning and building codes simple and predictable, and we need to level the playing field by making sure that everyone builds to the same standards, whether you are inside the city boundary or just outside.

Cities and counties need to work together to help with the cost of providing city services including streets, sewer and water for affordable homes inside and immediately adjacent to our cities.

We also need to streamline the permit process for building smart growth so that it takes less time and costs less to build. And cities must convince the Legislature to direct funding away from building bigger roads that are a gigantic subsidy to sprawl and instead address the existing transportation needs of our towns.

The new rural resident:

Most people in the country want to keep their area lightly developed — that’s why they moved there. Some people call this a "pull up the drawbridge" or "I’ve got mine" mentality. Perhaps it is.

But it’s also an important source of support for smart growth. We need to show rural residents how they can protect the lifestyle that they moved there for, either by working with their county commission to adopt zoning or by creating their own, citizen-initiated zoning district. Without zoning, rural residents have no say in how their areas will grow.

The conservationist:

Conservationists need to continue to work with fishermen, hunters and average Montanans to explain the threat that out-of-control sprawl poses to fish, wildlife, family farming and ranching, and the quality of our drinking water, while actively helping cities and counties implement plans to accommodate growth as efficiently, attractively and affordably as possible into our existing cities and towns.

The low-income family:

We urgently need to convince cities and counties to identify areas inside and immediately adjacent to existing cities where small lots will be encouraged.

Small lots do not mean "low-income ghettos." Rather, mixing small-lot developments with a variety of housing types creates areas just like the historic neighborhoods in and around our downtowns.

These neighborhoods have big and small houses, apartments and townhouses, all mixed together — and all on modest, town-sized lots. When we build this way, attractive homes that sell for $70,000 can sit next to attractive homes that sell for $170,000, and taxes can be less because streets, sewers and water lines are all shorter.

To achieve this, cities need to give all the incentives and streamlining that I mentioned for the builders, above.

The Realtor:

The arguments for Realtors are mostly the same as for the builders. We need to show them smart growth is not no-growth, that there’s a lot of money to be made, and that in the long term, we’ll protect the things that make Montana real estate so desirable (and profitable).

These marketable amenities will become ever more important as more and more places in the West refuse to make smart growth a reality and we take the steps necessary to make it a reality here.

Obviously, this will take a lot of education and organizing. A farsighted governor and Legislature will have to redirect growth subsidies. Wise county commissioners and city councilors will have to reform local zoning and building regulations.

It’s a tall order, but by not doing it we guarantee the Californication of our part of the West. Do we have any other choice?
Tim Davis is the executive director of the Montana Smart Growth Coalition.
column | analysis | join this discussion

Farms, community yield to West’s growth

By Greg Lakes, editor
Headwaters News
March 3. 2004

Whether all those diverse interests eventually come together into some sort of consensus about growth in general and smart growth in particular, there’s no denying the immediacy of the need.

Across the region, the numbers are startling: the number of farms cut into ranchettes, the number of acres of productive land lost, the number of new homes in outlying areas, the waning numbers on rancher’s annual income statements and the rising numbers on their tax bills.

In the past 25 years, Arizona has lost one-quarter of its farm and ranch land, 12 million acres. Most of it was paved or sodded over for new homes and businesses around Phoenix and Tucson, and much of the rest was converted to more rural ranchettes.

A disconcerting side note is that while growth accelerated in the 1990s, the loss of farmland slowed, not because of better planning or smarter growth, but because developers looking for raw land were pushing farther into the non-arable desert.

Colorado yielded more than 1 million acres of farmland just between 1997 and 2002, the third greatest rate of loss, behind Texas and New Mexico.

And while farm land disappeared, the number of so-called farms increased 20 percent, a tribute to a proliferation of ranchettes that officials say contribute little to state’s agricultural sector.

In Montana’s Flathead County, gateway to Glacier National Park and home to some of the state’s most explosive growth, 22 percent of the farmland disappeared between 1997 and 2002.

Farmers said the vagaries of the wheat market, pressure from developers and rising taxes left them little choice but to sell out.

Plum Creek Timber began selling timberlands in development-sized tracts and the state began leasing timber and grazing land for residential and commercial use — both of which made more land available for growth.

And in what may be the uncontested leader of the one-fell-swoop category, a developer has proposed more than 60,000 homes on 19,000 acres of Arizona desert between Arizona and Phoenix.

Loss of farm and ranch land is not among the concerns there, but there are plenty of others.

According to critics, the planned community would encroach upon a critical Air Force flight-training corridor and force the closure of a $1 billion helicopter base nearby, usurp crucial wildlife habitat on the adjacent Ironwood National Monument and disturb ancient ruins and prehistoric sites.

The community could eventually drop 175,000 new residents, a city the size of Tempe, between the state’s major metropolitan areas.

And among all those constituencies and all those issues is another thing that gets lost, and that smart growth tries to re-create.

In Range Magazine, essayist and Wyoming transplant Bill Woodward savors the cohesion common among few people in a large landscape, and laments its loss as population density increases:

"Simple things — the wave of a hand from a passing pickup; two stock trucks parked in the middle of the road, the drivers chatting.

"I’d seen it before, on sheep stations in the Kalahari Desert and horse farms on the west coast of Ireland. Anywhere a few people ranch or farm in vast open spaces, human contact matters. The result is a civil society and a strong sense of community."

Sorry, we couldn't find any posts. Please try a different search.

Leave a Comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.