Suburban Sprawl, Regional Economics, and Regional Governance (Say What?)

Most people think suburban sprawl must be ugly, but it doesn't pertain to them. They're not even sure of the definition. They think it has to do vaguely with bad architecture or something. But the effects of urban sprawl include a negative impact on regional economics and the very suburban landscape where it was born.

Seriously, who would have thought that we would be talking about the metropolitan level on a website about community development? When we get our communities organized, we would like to think that everything in a neighborhood can be resolved without interacting much with the outside world. It's so hard to get neighborhood action, we're too exhausted to think of the politics of the entire city or metro region.

Why Talk About Regions?

1. An economic picture that tends toward the smiley face or the sad face, depending on how globalization, technology, and consumption trends have affected your traditional economic reason for being (regional competitiveness)

2. A formal and informal set of laws, rules, relationships, and customs that either does a good job or a lousy job of solving problems that go beyond political boundaries (regional governance)

3. Creeping urbanization, often called suburban sprawl or urban sprawl, but ironically you can still have sprawl in a small town.

Rural areas may not identify much with the notion of region, but in the United States about 83% of the population lives within the MSAs. Metropolitan Statistical Areas are set up by the U.S. Bureau of the Census to show economically interdependent regions centered on a major city or small number of cities. Many rural counties are included in an MSA if a number of people commute to work in a nearby city. Another 10% live in micropolitan statistical areas centered on a city of at least 10,000 people.

So in the U.S. we could say that more than 93% are in a region. One of us grew up in a very rural area with a distinct identity of 19 counties. So the reality is that most of us live in a region.

Regional Economics

If you live in the Rust Belt, where good quality manufacturing jobs have fled the country, or at least to the South, you know times are not good for attracting new industry. If you live in a climate such as Florida, you figured out maybe you could rent out beach houses in the winter. And maybe you hop on the ethanol bandwagon if you’re in Iowa.

Regional Governance (Huh?)

Who's in charge of sewers? Drainage? The airport? Bus service? Air pollution? Roads? Crime data sharing? Making sure first responders can communicate on the same frequency? Permitting new hospitals? Allowing you to build a bridge in a wetland? Fighting a major fire? Figuring out where the next landfill can be built?

Any of these might be of vital interest to your neighborhood or community at some point.

We’re not here to lecture you about learning how all these things work (although it's not a bad idea). But we are telling you that it could be very important to you whether roles are clearly defined, and whether any agreements among governments, districts, and utilities are in place and workable. The buzz word for how governmental entities mesh is regional governance.

Suburban Sprawl

The definition we like is simply that the percentage increase in the amount of land used for urban (or town) purposes exceeds the percentage increase in the population. So within our definition, a town or city can grow its physical boundaries outward without necessarily sprawling. If the population growth is matching the physical growth.

The effects of a dispersed development pattern on built communities usually are negative. Some argue that suburban sprawl is a good thing because we live in America, and we need to have freedom to choose everything, even if it costs our town an arm and a leg to run a water line out there to our little slice of freedom. However, if you're a fan of efficiency and economy in government as well as in the business sector, you should be upset about this issue.

Urban neighborhoods often neglect the connection between urban sprawl and community development. You fight a losing battle if your competition for residents and sales tax dollars is on the outskirts of the region where the growth is. People stop maintaining their places in the city because they have started to daydream about moving out to the far edges of the suburbs where everything is shiny and new.

Suburban sprawl even impacts the likelihood that we'll stay in good health, as our public health connection page details.

The causes of excess land consumption are really fairly simple. Cheaper land prices cause developers or households looking for housing sites go further from the urban core, where in theory, and usually in practice, the cost of land is highest. Throw in a streak of Yankee or Western independence, the extreme desire for privacy, and the fascination with the new, and you have a powerful force pushing people out of the city.

Sprawl in small towns has accelerated with the retail trend toward discount stores. These discount stores naturally will want to locate on the highway and away from downtowns because they can obtain cheaper land without worrying about assembling many parcels close to downtown. And since Americans are no longer willing to pay Main Street prices when the big discounter can provide the exact same item at a much lower cost, the spreading out of smaller cities is driven by retail trends as well as values of freedom, privacy, and newness.

The solution for suburban sprawl is tough, because it involves several things people don’t want to do:

• Entertain the idea of a harder solution for housing (existing housing renovation or rehab), rather than an easier one (go buy a new house)

• Stay engaged in the region rather than bury your head in the sand and pretend that bad things don’t go on in the worst neighborhoods

• Consider the possibility that driving one's own personal car a long distance on a highway to work isn't the most efficient use of personal and government funds

• Think about the fact that the price that your one-acre lot forces your government and utilities to pay to run their roads, utility lines, police cars, and garbage trucks to your house.

In short, you might need to live closer together to prevent physical growth from getting out of hand. You most certainly need to deal with abandoned properties at the center of town or your city that are no longer used productively. You need to figure out what to do with obsolete housing that is lacking in the garages, storage spaces, and open flow or rooms that are now in vogue.

Suburban sprawl is a good issue for community networking. Suburbs share some common interests, and working on suburban sprawl tends to bring those to the forefront. If you are in a suburb that is the newest and best right now, but your metropolitan area continues to sprawl, soon enough it will be your housing that will be considered obsolete, your storefronts that will be vacant, and your sales taxes that no longer deliver the services.

If you are in the central city, consider devoting about a quarter of your time and effort to this issue, if your region has one. The cost of suburban sprawl is really high, and we need to call a halt to it.

Perhaps the most politically acceptable way to halt suburban sprawl is by promoting open space around the current edge of the built city. An actively sought and managed open space can be a positive rallying cry, and an engaging cause tends to be more riveting than constantly opposing what many people have been conditioned to see as progress. So just be pro-green space, rather than anti-development, which your opponents can too easily translate into anti-prosperity and anti-growth and anti-progress.

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