Pulling It All Together

Sprawl is low-density development, beyond the limits of city services and most employment opportunities, separating where people live from where they shop, work, recreate, and educate - thus requiring cars to move between zones. Suburban sprawl costs us all, as many cities will attest.

Many downtown neighborhoods are now blighted with empty homes and buildings, often boarded up and falling down. Once-thriving urban centers are beginning to look more like ghost towns with the rise in migration to suburbia. This trend affects not only the aesthetic value of our cities, but also has social, economic and environmental impact.

Suburbia evolved as an escape from the fast-paced hustle and bustle of urban life. Increases in pollution, traffic congestion, and crime are reasons some cite for their urban flight. But do these suburban havens really avoid the urban problems suburbanites are trying to escape? In reality, scattered, low-density suburban development (sprawl) is actually contributing more to these problems than most people realize, and it creates problems of its own.

By continuing to develop haphazardly outside our cities we are eliminating open space, farmland and wild lands. Isolated housing developments, strip malls, and the sprawl-prompted dominance of the automobile are fragmenting our communities, contributing to water and air pollution and creating more traffic congestion than ever before.

In summary, consequences of sprawl include:

• Traffic congestion.
• Longer commutes that steal time from family and work.
• Worsening air and water pollution.
• Loss of farmland, open fields, forests and wetlands.
• Increased flooding.
• Increased taxes to pay for services -police and fire departments - and infrastructure - new schools, roads, water, and sewers.
• Increased costs for non-tax-funded utilities in order to extend service to these areas.

Sprawl Hurts Cities by:

• Eroding the city's tax base as people flock to the suburbs, forcing cities to raise taxes on remaining taxpayers to pay for city services that commuting and recreating suburbanites still use.
• Destroying downtown commerce by pulling shoppers from once-thriving, locally-owned stores and restaurants to large regional malls.
• Decreasing employment opportunities and concentrating poverty in urban centers.
• Undercutting property values and investment opportunities.
• Robbing cities of character as abandoned factories, boarded-up homes and decaying retail centers dominate the cityscape.

This Should be our Goal - Well-planned, Liveable Communities that:

• Are designed for people rather than for automobiles. They have shops, restaurants, other amenities, and offices within walking or biking distance for most residents.
• Include a true town center which is a compact area with civic buildings -a church, library, post office, community center - contained in a plaza or other auto-free open space, with a mix of private businesses.
• Plan for greenways, such as corridors of native vegetation along streams, and small nature preserves that make nature accessible to residents.
• Permanently protect productive agricultural areas, wildlife habitats, and key open space.
• Promote regional public transit.
• Revitalize older suburbs, downtowns and rundown commercial areas. New housing and services near existing jobs and shopping areas are provided by filling in and redeveloping older districts and once-contaminated brownfield industrial sites.

What Can You Do?

• Demand transportation improvements and alternatives.
• Vote for city officials who support better land use management.
• Attend planning meetings.
• Support local businesses.
• Promote impact fees on new development so that it pays its share of new services (i.e., roads, parks, schools, police/fire) made necessary by its construction.
• Oppose these destructive development patterns: segregated uses, strip commercial malls, buildings surrounded by parking lots, office parks, ribbons of development into rural areas.
• Join Sierra Club and other community organizations working toward more liveable communities.

Contact Information:

We hope you have found this handbook helpful. Please contact us with comments and suggestions.