16. Sprawl and Land Use ManagementRHP-Sprawl and Land Use
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SPRAWL AND LAND
USE MANAGEMENT
Sprawl is dispersed, low
density development that is
generally located at the fringe
of an existing settlement and
over large areas of previously
rural landscape. It is
characterised by segregated
land uses and dominated by
the automobile.
Farmland Sprawl. Carroll County, Maryland. Rural Heritage Slide
Collection.
The Rural Heritage Program has taken a lead in helping communities combat
sprawl through recognizing and preserving their rural communies, heritage, and
lands since its inception. The Your Town program addresses commuity issues
associated with sprawl by introducing community members to principles of
design and leadership. Design Guidelines for New Development in Rural Places,
a forthcoming publication of the Rural Heritage Program, advocates design
guidelines for large and small-scale design issues as a tool for communities.
Sprawl is more than simply unattractive, land consumptive development. It also
introduces far- reaching economic and social changes to rural areas, the final
results of which are still not fully realized or understood.
Understanding the effects of sprawl is of the utmost importance to preservation
efforts, as well. There are many ways for rural communities to avoid sprawl and
the problems associated with it.
Click below for more information about sprawl and rural cultural resources.
• RHP Projects
• Rural Sprawl
• Sprawl and Historic Preservation
• Cost of Sprawl
RHP PROJECTS
Since its inception, the Rural Heritage Program has been in involved in projects
that have had the effect of combating sprawl. The pressures and circumstances
created by the nationwide trend to build farther and farther into the countryside
are very real to many of the communities with which we work.
Corridor Management Plans for Scenic Byways and historic roads and Heritage
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Area Plans are powerful tools that organize land use at the regional level,
eliminating the isolation of each rural community along the corridor or within the
heritage area and allowing the entire region to plan to grow smart. Farmland
preservation has the obvious effect of making less rural and agriculutural land
available for development.
While our counterparts in the urban areas strive to make our historic downtowns
more desirable places to live in an effort to stymie the flow from urban areas, the
Rural Heritage Program has been working to strengthen the other side of the
coin, empowering rural communities to manage their own change and growth
and protect the very things that new residents find so desirable: rural character,
sense of community, beautiful views, etc.
Design Guidelines for New Development in Rural Areas
One of the programs most clearly directed towards combating sprawl is the very
new Rural Design Guidelines Initiative. The most effective means to combat
sprawl is to have clearly written plans for how your rural community expects and
demands to grow before the development pressure is overwhelming.
The qualities we dislike most about sprawl have to do with where the
development is and how it relates to the existing landscape. The congestion, the
dislocation, the environmental and agricultural damage all stem from how the
new development of the past 30 years has been placed on the landscape. These
are questions of design and land use and must be resolved through those means.
The vast majority of land that people tend to call "natural" or "undeveloped" is
actually neither. Those words are an insult to the people who worked for decades
or centuries to "develop" and cultivate that land into a productive, cultural
landscape. In this program, all new development is considered infill. Under the
same theories that led urban preservationists to write design guidelines for infill,
rural communities should do the same for the new growth in their communities,
which is essentially, infill into a full and vibrant rural landscape.
Sprawl is a rural issue, as much, if not more than it is an urban one. It seems a
strangely overlooked fact that sprawl is exclusively built on lands previously
reserved for rural uses. Urban communities feel the effects of sprawl in indirect
ways. They lose populations, sales revenues, and tax base. On the receiving end,
rural areas feel the direct effects of sprawl. Previously productive farms or
timberland are eaten up by dispersed houses, parking lots, and monolithic stores.
Tree -lined country lanes are clogged, widened, and clogged again, as historic
stone fences, bridges, and trees are removed. Small town centers that previously
served populations of under 1000 are sucked dry by stores each with more square
footage than the entire town. While urban areas are left with a shell that may be
returned to life, rural landscapes are sliced and bulldozed beyond recongnition or
restoration.
The only way to efficiently combat the latest trends in sprawl is effective land
use policies for rural communities.
Land use management is the use of regulatory and voluntary policies and
programs on the part of a governemental agency to coordinate the use of land.
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Land use management efforts take the form of comprehensive plans, zoning,
urban growth boundaries, corridor management plans and conservation easement
programs. These efforts are crucial in the battle against sprawl. As is the
education of local officials and community leaders, professionals, such as real
estate agents and developers, and the citizenry as a whole.
Preservation goes beyond the physical preservation and restoration of individual
structures or neighborhoods. Other major objectives of the National Trust that go
to the heart of the consequences of sprawl:
® protecting the economic viability of historic downtowns and
neighborhoods;
® preserving the countryside and local community character;
® maintaining a sense of community.
Sprawl sucks the life out of older downtowns and neighborhoods, where historic
buildings are concentrated. When the economic vitality of a historic area suffers,
the buildings in it often become underused or empty. Over time, many of them
are "demolished by neglect" or torn down to make way for surface parking lots.
Sprawl destroys community character and the countryside. Cohesive Main
Streets, old stone fences, historic trees, country roads-- these and other features
of the American landscape are rapidly being destroyed by sprawl development
and the vast expanses of asphalt required to accomodate it.
Sprawl reduces opportunities for face-to-face interaction among people, thereby
making it more difficult to create, or retain, a sense of community. By scattering
the elements of a community across the landscape in a haphazard way, sprawl
provides no town centers and reduces the sense of ownership --and therefore also
the commitment --that people have towards their community.
Sprawl forecloses alternatives to the automobile as a means of transportation,
thereby adding to pressures to create or widen roads that often result in the
demolition of historic resources or the degradation of their settings.
Sprawl leaves older cities and towns with excessively high concentrations of
poor people with social problems, making these places a very difficult
environment in which to revitalize communities. (From Beaumont, Smart States,
Better Communities)
On the flip side, preservation tools are very effective in combating the urge to
sprawl and its worst effects.
Preservation has been shown to strengthen business districts encouraging even
large conglomerates to invest downtown, rather than on the edges. The National
Trust Main Street program has been shown to counteract the effects of a Wal-
Mart on the edge of town.
Preservation has been shown to be as effective a revenue tool as new
development to increase tax bases through promoting tourism and re -investment.
Preservation is even more effective over the long run, because sprawling
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development usually eats up its tax revenue in services.
When communities are taken care of and are pleasant to live in, the urge to build
new can be somewhat curtailed.
Preservation breathes new life into traditional neighborhoods and shows that
efficient community designs from the past really work. The traditional
neighborhood design movement has grown directly out of an appreciation for
historic districts like those in Charleston and San Fransisco.
However, while urban preservation can encourage people to reclaim urban areas,
rural preservation can also work against the urge to build sprawl in the first place.
In rural communities, the urge to zone huge swaths of land for "economic
development" purposes is strong when the town centers are looking shabby, retail
sales are down, and property values are stagnant. Really, the town faces two
choices, both of which will encourage investment in the community. While
excessive sprawl is investment and can result in a boom of new infrastructure and
schools, its deleterious effects will be felt later. The revitailization of downtown
historic districts and the preservation and marketing of rural cultural landscapes
are also a form of investment, the ultimate result of which is the same increased
revenue for services, but with the added benefit of pride and ownership that
sprawl has never fostered.
In 1993, American Farmland Trust found that, on average, only $.33 was spent
on services for farmland. For low -density residential development the
community spent $1.12 on services for every $1.00 collected. For commercial
and industrial uses, the ratio was $.41 for each $1.00.
In Loudon County, Virginia, doomsday has arrived. In a county where no
expense was sparred on building new schools and virtually no development plan
was ever rejected, the County Board of Supervisors has been forced to ask school
board members to cut back on the next wave of schools. The taxes generated by
what has always been tauted as money -making development have fallen way
behind cost servicing the sprawling development. Loudon's student population is
increasing by 10 percent each year, and school officials predict that they will
have to build 22 more new schools in the next 6 years to meet the need. New
residents and those living in areas that may to redistricted to the scaled -back
schools are angry. They say they purchased their homes in Loudon County
because of the promise of first rate services, particularly in the schools.
(Washington Post, 2/3/99)
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