What Causes Sprawl?

• Zoning Policies
• Lack of Regional Planning and Fragmented Governance
• The Ratables Chase
• Road Construction, Automobile Dependence, and Transit Disinvestment
• Housing Policies

Why should we try to combat sprawl?

"Every part of New Jersey suffers when we plan haphazardly. Sprawl eats up our open space. It creates traffic jams that boggle the mind and pollute the air. Sprawl can make one feel downright claustrophobic about our future."
- New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman, in her January 20, 1988 Inaugural speech.

sprawl \Sprawl\ (spr[add]l), v. 1. To spread and stretch the body or limbs carelessly in a horizontal position; to lie with the limbs stretched out ungracefully.

Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.

• Unlimited outward extension
• Low-density residential and commercial settlements
• Leapfrog development
• Fragmentation of powers over land use among many small localities
• Dominance of transportation by private automotive vehicles
• No centralized planning or control of land-uses
• Widespread strip commercial development
• Great fiscal disparities among localities
• Segregation of types of land uses in different zones
• Reliance mainly on the trickle-down or filtering process to provide housing to low-income households

• Zoning Policies
  Zoning policies were initially implemented with the best of intentions - to separate hazardous or unpleasant land uses from the places where people live, work, and play. Most people would agree that a toxic power plant should not be located next to a school playground, and most people would not choose to live right next door to a steel mill. As time passed, however, zoning codes evolved and began providing a hierarchy of exclusion, from industry through commercial and residential. Because of this, land uses began to become completely separated. And in many communities, downtown areas with shops on the first floor and housing above were actually illegal because "mixing uses" was not allowed in so many zoning codes. [insert cute picture of a downtown area here] With land use so separate, it was forced to spread out. Houses were in one place, businesses were in another, and industrial in another. The exclusion of uses from zones and their isolation by large distances created sprawl, auto-dependence, and social isolation.
  
  Journalist and critic James Howard Kunstler finds zoning policies one of the principal culprits for our current sprawling land use pattern In his book, Home From Nowhere, he notes:

  "Our zoning laws are essentially a manual of instructions for creating the stuff of our communities. Most of these laws have been in place only since the Second World War ... What zoning produces is suburban sprawl, which must be understood as the product of a particular set of instructions. Its chief characteristics are the strict separation of human activities, mandatory driving to get from one activity to another, and huge supplies of free parking. After all, the basic idea of zoning is that every activity demands a separate zone of its own. For people to live around shopping would be harmful and indecent. Better not even to allow them within walking distance of it."

• Lack of Regional Planning and Fragmented Governance
  Land use in New Jersey, as in much of the country, is largely controlled by individual municipalities. Each town is responsible for its own land-use planning, zoning, open space preservation, and development. But, as we all know, municipal boundaries are arbitrary, and often we need to think beyond municipal boundaries to preserve open spaces, develop downtown areas, or develop transportation plans. If we plan within entire regions instead of within small arbitrary municipal, we can regulate development into open spaces and ecologically-sensitive areas while concentrating development into specific areas where it makes the most sense. By preserving broad areas of forest and farmland between developed areas, we preserve the uniqueness of both developed areas as well as open spaces.
  
  Planning historian Laurence Gercken wrote in "Ten Failures that Shaped the 20th Century American City" notes that sprawl is caused, in part, by the diffusion of land use control among multiple municipalities. "Laws empowering individual communities to plan and act to fulfill their own definitions of the public interest might well have made sense at the beginning of the twentieth century when urban settlements were small and isolated from one another. But such 'home rule,' when engaged in by a plethora of communities within a metropolitan area, led to the failure to address pressing area-wide issues."
  
  
• The Ratables Chase
  In New Jersey, property taxes are the primary source of revenue for a municipality. This system fosters competition for tax revenues between local governments that has helped encourage poorly planned development. Former Governor Christine Todd Whitman, in her January 20, 1998 Inaugural speech, highlighted this problem: "Štoo many towns bend over backwards to pursue development, hoping it will help balance their budgets. In the process, they strain not only their backs but also the services needed to support this development. The result is a double whammy: less open space and higher property taxes."

  "The ratable chase since 1950 has involved the disastrous competition to attract new construction of industries, research facilities, office complexes, and shopping malls to a municipality, while minimizing the amount of housing provided to shelter the employees working at these new sites. This situation gave birth to the phenomenon known as the reverse commute, with workers living in the cities and driving to work in suburban communities. The suburbs, which were victorious in the ratable chase, provided few housing opportunities within the reach of the budgets of those who worked on the new research campuses or did clerical work in the new office parks. The staff behind the counters at such places as the Mall at Short Hills were not receiving compensation adequate for them to maintain a residence in the same neighborhood.
  
  During the past few decades in New Jersey, hundreds of developers were invited to build their own fields of dreams in the form of shopping malls, apartment complexes, industrial parks, and research campuses. The phrase 'If you build it they will come' was verified by the initial bumper-to-bumper trafficŠNew Jersey's taxpayers have been forced to ante up billions of dollars to construct the new infrastructures required by these private fields of dreams.
  
  The zoning powers conferred upon municipalities have been used in an unwise, unseemly, ill-advised, counterproductive, and unconstitutional manner. It is possible to document this allegation by citing the number of square miles of forest and farmland lost to the bulldozers - the linear miles of asphalt that accommodate our millions of daily trips to and from home, jobs, schools, shopping, etc. Another, and the most dramatically negative, aspect of the ratable chase concerns the neighborhood center. New Jersey's cities, large and small, were once active retail centers, providing a vast array of goods and supplies. In addition to the commercial cores, nearly every neighborhood had local markets for food and groceries, pharmacies, newsstands and soda fountains, clothing stores and shoe stores, service stations and auto service stations. Highways were used for getting from one center to another, or out to the suburbs and eventually to the farms or seashore. The highway shopping center changed habits and lifestyles. The mom and pop operations had little ability to compete. Small retail businesses all but disappeared from the commercial landscape by the mid-1980s, leaving block upon block where plywood shields pockmarked the face of once-thriving neighborhoods.
  
  The most effective way to absorb all this depressing data is to ... see for yourself. It is impossible to travel fifty miles in New Jersey without being overwhelmed by the sense of opportunities lost, open space jeopardized or wasted, unsightly and depressing commercial sprawl, inappropriate adjoining uses, once-vital cities now gutted and destroyed. As in every race, there were winners and losers. Unquestionably, the cities lost the ratable chase, but what about the winners? What exactly have they won?"

  Excerpted from "Multiple Municipal Madness," a book by Alan Karcher, former speaker of the New Jersey General Assembly and former Mercer County Democratic chairman.
  
  
• Road Construction, Automobile Dependence, and Transit Disinvestment
  In the days before automobiles allowed humans to travel long distances, there was a distinct limit to how far communities could sprawl. It was not financially responsible to develop land beyond the point where people could reasonably walk, bicycle, or ride a horse. The invention of the automobile allowed people immense freedom and allowed them to travel to places they never would have seen otherwise. But the unintended consequence of the automobile has been automobile dependence. While automobiles can be very valuable assets for people, our society begins to encounter trouble when we become automobile dependent - when it becomes nearly impossible for people to survive without a car. Road building, mass transit disinvestment, and restrictive zoning have all contributed to our society's ever-increasing automobile dependence and consequent sprawling land use patterns.
  
  Federal transportation policies for most of the 20th century have favored auto-dependent development. Beginning with the Federal Highway Act of 1916 and continuing with subsequent Highway acts in 1947 and 1956, the federal government over added over 80,000 miles of interstates across the country.
  
  While roads were considered a public good that should be provided free of charge to the country, mass transit was expected to pay for itself.
  
  
• Housing Policies
  Federal housing policy, beginning with the U.S. Housing Act of 1934, has encouraged America's middle class to leave cities and move to the ever-expanding suburbs. The Veterans Administration and the Federal Housing Administration's (FHA) mortgage loan program provided over eleven million low-cost mortgages in the years after the Second World War. These low-cost mortgages were necessary to provide much-needed housing for the returning veterans, but the housing types and locations that these mortgages encouraged inadvertently created considerable sprawl.
  
  These mortgages, which typically cost less per month than paying rent, only insured homes of a typical type and size - generally new single-family suburban construction. Furthermore, a home insured by the FHA was required to be of a certain size and quality desired by those of above-average means, to guarantee quick resale of the home. FHA did not support renovations of already-existing homes, construction of row houses, mixed-use buildings, and other urban housing types. These policies led to deterioration of the urban housing stock and disinvestment in existing urban housing.
  
  Within this economic framework, young families made the financially rational choice: suburban living. Housing gradually migrated away from cities to the periphery.
  
  Historian Kenneth T. Jackson, in his book Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, notes the impact of FHA policies on development patterns:

  "... FHA insurance went to new residential developments on the edges of metropolitan areas, to the neglect of core cities. This occurred for three reasons. First, although the legislation [National Housing Act] nowhere mentioned an anti-urban bias, it favored the construction of single-family projects and discouraged construction of multi-family housing through unpopular terms ...
  
  Second, loans for the repair of existing structures were small and for short duration, which meant that a family could more easily purchase a new home than modernize an old one. ...
  
  The third and most important variety of suburban, middle-class favoritism had to do with the "unbiased professional estimate" that was a prerequisite to any loan guarantee. ... this mandatory judgment included a rating of the property itself, a rating of the mortgagor or borrower, and a rating of the neighborhood. ... The 1939 Underwriting Manual taught that 'crowded neighborhoods lessen desirability,' and 'older properties in a neighborhood have a tendency to accelerate the transition to lower class occupancy.' ... Reflecting the racist tradition of the United States, the Federal Housing Administration was extraordinarily concerned with 'inharmonious racial or nationality groups.' It feared that an entire area could lose its investment value if rigid white-black separation was not maintained."

• Health Impacts
• Automobile dependence
• Traffic
• Loss of downtown areas
• Loss of sense of place or community
• Land consumption
• Fiscal problems
• Excessive resource consumption
• School overcrowding
• Environmental degradation & open space loss
  • Air and water pollution
  • Light pollution
  • Flooding
• Biodiversity loss