Stop the Sprawl, Y’all!

If you live out in the country, outside the city limits, you take your chances.  This point was tragically illustrated recently when a Tennessee house burned to the ground because the owners hadn’t paid their firefighting fee.

Enviro Girl is familiar with paying extra to live out of town.  It costs money to expand a city’s infrastructure–and that infrastructure includes a lot of things that make living more comfortable and safe.  Consider what municipal tax dollars cover:

• fire protection/emergency services
• police protection/emergency services
• ambulance services
• garbage/waste/recycling pick up
• sewer service
• road maintenance, including snow removal
• water
• streetlights
• storm water management
• parks and recreation centers
• public transit
• public libraries
• schools
• hospitals
• animal control

Enviro Girl has been told by local animal control that because she lives “outside city limits,” they cannot help her with a stray dog on her property.  She’s on her own to take care of that problem.  Conversely, when her town decided to put in a water system, they claimed her as part of the sanitary district and assessed her household a hefty fee to hook up to city water…or else.  Before building on their rural lot, Enviro Girl’s family lived in town and enjoyed all manner of conveniences, including the ability to walk instead of drive to places like city parks and a public library.  Now they’re preserving 60 acres of native habitat to benefit wildlife, water quality and air quality.  They live in tax-and-service limbo because her family’s property is adjacent to a rural community, not in it, nor miles away from the town limits.  In fact, their house is so close to the town limits that in a school district busing most of the students to school, Enviro Girl’s kids walk across their field to the elementary school–less than half a city block away from their house!  Enviro Girl and her husband felt they were being responsible by purchasing acreage adjacent to the town limits because then any services they needed wouldn’t place a huge burden on the community and they wouldn’t contribute to urban sprawl.  Zoning laws being what they are, their property falls into random categories for water service, sheriff’s department, postal service and garbage pick up.  She’s not complaining, however, because wherever a person lives they enjoy benefits and inconveniences.

One of the selling points of rural developments is the pristine countryside and the quiet.  But what the developers don’t tell buyers is the inconvenience and added cost of building houses far out of town.   Roads don’t get plowed, people sit snowbound until county crews can get through.  Basements flood because storm water management doesn’t reach beyond city storm sewers.   Garbage doesn’t get picked up if you live too far out of reach, you have to privately contract for those services.

Yet it’s not fair to ask city-dwelling taxpayers to foot the bill for urban sprawl.  The cost of busing children to and from school, the cost of police and fire calls, the cost of road maintenance all increase the further people move away from town.  Yet the tax structure is usually set up to distribute the cost equally among taxpayers.  The people living farthest away from school pay no more for their children’s transportation than the people living a few blocks away because the cost is equally divided among everyone.

From a strictly economic viewpoint, it makes more financial sense to require people to live within a city’s limits to receive a city’s services.  According to the Clean Water Action Council, one master plan for infill or  higher density growth in New Jersey would result in a savings of $1.18 billion in roads, water and sanitary sewer construction (or more than $12,000 per new home) and $400 million in direct annual savings to local governments.  Over 15 years, it amounts to $7.8 billion.   That’s a lot of money!  One way to make this happen is to create stricter zoning ordinances, restricting where people can build and develop.   Another way is to hold the line on taxes and services rendered, refusing to tax or extend services to people living outside the city limits.

From a strictly environmental viewpoint, urban sprawl into rural subdivisions and housing developments plows under valuable farmland and destroys natural habitats like wetlands and prairies and forests.  It takes decades to grow a forest, years to establish a prairie, a few weeks to survey and grade the land for a housing development.  We’re allowing development to continue in the name of growing our tax base, but it’s costing us more than we’ll ever receive in return.  As we sprawl beyond the city limits, we pave over thousands of acres of land, creating impermeable surfaces for rainwater which contributes to water pollution and flash flooding.  We’re allowing for more air pollution as more cars drive farther to get home at night.  Urban sprawl contributes to traffic congestion, increased use of energy and other resources, air and water pollution, and light pollution.  The price of cleaning up the effects of urban sprawl is currently incalculable.

Bottom line:  it makes both economic and environmental sense for everybody to put a stop to urban sprawl.