Website tells Floridians 'the price of sprawl'

An initiative called PriceOfSprawl.com is out to persuade Floridians that too much development has been approved in the Sunshine State—and that people need to get serious about stopping "over-development." 

The tax costs of excessive development "include infrastructure like roads, schools & police/fire services," the intiative asserts on its new "Price of Sprawl" website. Besides pushing up taxes, sprawl "lowers property values for all Florida home-owners while depleting our drinking water supply," the initiative says. 

"Most Floridians are unaware of the huge amount of housing already approved, but not yet built," the website asserts. "It's enough housing for over 100 million people—over 5 times more than Florida's current population of around 19 million."

An interactive map allows people to discover how much housing has already been approved and to get a sense of what a contination of sprawl will cost in various cities and counties. A chart of the build-out costs—and of the population increase, water supply, current vacancy rate, and recent declines in property value—is available here. 

Sponsor of the project is Lesley Blackner of the Florida Hometown Democracy/Amendment 4 initiative. According to a report from the nonprofit Collins Center for Public Policy, Blackner is a Palm Beach land-use attorney who teamed up with Tallahassee environmental attorney Ross Burnaman and others, including some environmental organizations, to campaign in 2010 for a change to the state constitution. The Hometown Democracy group produced Amendment 4, which would have required a voter referendum whenever a local government wanted to write or amend its comprehensive land-use plan.

The state's voters rejected the amendment by a 2-to-1 margin. The Florida Independent said the rejection may have been due to well-funded efforts of a group called Citizens for Lower Taxes and a Stronger Economy—an organization "largely funded by real estate developers and the Florida Chamber of Commerce."

The continuing efforts by Hometown Democracy activists could help alert Floridians to the threat of too much development. Much of that development takes an automobile-dependent form that chews up the landscape and is costly to maintain.

But Bill Spikowski of Spikowski Planning Associates in Fort Myers distinguishes between smart-growth proponents—who generally favor compact, walkable development in transit-accessible locations—and Hometown Democracy, which seems focused primarily on preventing development not already authorized.

As Spikowski sees it, Hometown Democracy thinks "most elected officials are craven and in the pocket of land speculators and business interests." 

There's certainly reason for believing that officials have failed to prevent unwise development. For decades, land speculators and business interests have had a strong hand in shaping the state. 

State oversight weakened

Once in a while, officials get exercised enough to try to change the situation. In 1986, under Governor Bob Graham, Florida established a state Department of Community Affairs, intending to exert some control over rampant development.

In the St. Petersburg Times last May, reporter Craig Pittman observed that over the years, state officials have mostly regarded the department "as an essential safeguard against the runaway growth that damaged the state in the 1960s and '70s — the traffic cop pulling over reckless drivers on the highway to Florida's future."

The department "has irritated some of Florida's most powerful people, including developers, lawyers, the Florida Chamber of Commerce, the Florida Farm Bureau and a coalition of the state's biggest landowners," Pittman noted. 

Those disturbed by overdevelopment, such as Hometown Democracy, have expressed dissatisfaction with the department, seeing it as too easily swayed by the development industry. Meanwhile, development and business interests depicted the department as a bogeyman and succeeded this year in having it dismantled. Its responsibilities have been parcelled out to a variety of departments, making the state even less capable of guiding development—if it had the desire to do so. The current Tea Party-backed Republican governor, Rick Scott, has called for reducing the role of government.

Smart-growth advocates such as Spikowski have mixed feelings about much of what's happened. "Much that was dismantled deserved to be—particularly the mandate that 'adequate' road capacity must be in place before development could occur," Spikowski says. "Regrettably, also dismantled was the concept that rural lands shouldn't be assumed ready for development whenever landowners were willing to jump through bureaucratic hoops."

If it had passed, Hometown Democracy's proposed amendment would have been at odds with some of the aims of smart growth and New Urbanism. The amendment would have made it harder to revise existing comprehensive plans, "most of which dated from the early 1990s and are badly in need of overhaul," according to Spikowski. 

Though "The Price of Sprawl" encourages Floridians to take a critical look at the volume and downsides of development, some of the information posted on the site is open to question. 

Says Spikowski:

I clicked on my home county (Lee) and was presented with this conclusion: "Not enough drinking water for current population due to over-pumping, salt water intrusion and over-development."' That's ludicrous; Lee County's largest city, Cape Coral, has nearly bankrupted itself by having created a water supply based on boom-year projections, a supply that's FAR too large to be supported by the current or foreseeable population. We have a dozen pressing growth-related problems in Lee County, but inadequate water supply isn't anywhere near the top!

In the absence of strong state oversight, expect to see continuing, substantial differences from one community to another in the quality of planning (though differences would not disappear entirely even if the state government were more active).

Frank Palen, a former zoning director for Palm Beach County, points out one of the underlying realities of America's built environment:

My experience with zoning is that "rich people have nice things"—including good planning and zoning. So the result of the new system—or even if Hometown had passed—will be that communities with resources will continue to have "good" planning: there just will be little or no or few state-wide or regional solutions. ...The corollary to my "rich people" observation is that those with fewer resources (including better administered local government) can probably expect not to be treated so well.

For those concerned about environmental justice, Florida's direction is troubling.

For more in-depth coverage on this topic: 

• Subscribe to New Urban News to read all of the articles (print+online) on implementation of greener, stronger, cities and towns.

• See the September 2011 issue of New Urban News. Topics: Walk Score, sprawl retrofit, livability grants, Katrina Cottages, how to get a transit village built, parking garages, the shrinking Wal-Mart, Complete Streets legislation, an urban capital fund, and much more.

• Get New Urbanism: Best Practices Guide, packed with more than 800 informative photos, plans, tables, and other illustrations, this book is the best single guide to implementing better cities and towns.

• See the July-August 2011 issue of New Urban News. Downtown makeover, agrarian urbanism, bike sharing, bike-ped issues, TIGER III livability grants, unlocking remnant land value, selling the neighborhood, Landscape Urbanism vs. New Urbanism, new urban resort, granny flats, The Great Reset. 

• See the June 2011 issue of New Urban News. Mid-rise living, elevated walkways, Jane Jacobs and observational urbanism, affordable transit-oriented development, the coming housing calamity, rental and TOD to dominate market, New Town in bankruptcy, regional approach for high-speed rail, the civic costs of sprawl, redevelopment of mall 

• See the April-May 2011 issue of New Urban News. Transit-oriented development, “Cycle tracks,” gentrification versus revitalization, HUD grants, economic silver linings, light rail development, pocket neighborhoods, close-in Maryland housing less expensive, transit outperforms green buildings, Charter Awards, shift to smaller stores