Sprawl Is Not A Synonym For Growth
In an article from the Saturday Gazette, Gravity can matter for growth on the periphery, developer Drew Retz equated sprawl and growth.
Let’s make one thing clear — the word sprawl is a pejorative. It is a term to describe bad development. Sprawl is not a synonym for growth, it’s simply one of many options to grow a community. The worst one. The choice of downtown living or urban sprawl is a false dichotomy.
I don’t doubt that most new buyers in today’s market want single family homes. A new development of single family homes is not sprawl, sprawl is how that development connects with existing infrastructure and development.
A sprawl development is a development that does not connect with nearby communities. An example were probably all familiar with are housing developments with a single access point, meant to be used only by car, and with no street or pedestrian connections. Your kids might live a few hundred yards from their best friend a neighborhood over, but they have to travel three quarters of a mile and onto a major road to get to their friends house. There are no public spaces. The neighborhood does not have a park, community center or public square to host events like a potluck dinner or birthday party. There is only one type of housing stock, most likely single family homes.
A New Urbanist development connects with it’s nearby communities. Streets are linear and go through more than one developments. There are multiple access points that can be used by bikers, pedestrians or cars. If you want to visit someone nearby you can easily walk or bike a direct route to a nearby house. The neighborhood has a park, community center, or public square that can host neighborhood events. The neighborhood has multiple different types of housing on different sized lots. The neighborhood might even have space for commercial development with a focus on neighborhood needs, stuff like a coffee shop, dry cleaners or small convenience store.
The largest New Urbanist development in America is Mesa Del Sol in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It covers 25 square miles and should eventually have 38,000 homes, 100,000 residents and 60,000 jobs. It’s going to take 40 years to develop.
Mesa Del Sol isn’t sprawl. It’s a brand new city within a city. And it isn’t alone. Denver has Stapleton, which will eventually be home to 30,000 people. There’s even development like this in Iowa. Ames has the Somerset community and Iowa City has the Peninsula. New Urbanism doesn’t mean we don’t build single family homes. It means building communities. It’s a proven development model, when houses in Denver were losing value during the height of the recession house prices in Stapleton rose and demand stayed strong.
New Urbanism allows developers to build up areas with a wider price margin between properties. $100,000 condos can be sold alongside $450,000 single family homes, with products available at every price point, size and style that the buying public wants. You can reach everyone in the market, not just a subset. You can go big, like Mesa Del Sol and Stapleton, or you can stay focused like Somerset and the Peninsula. It’s not a one size fits all development model.
New Urbanism is good for local government. Sprawl is, by definition, sprawling and takes over large areas. It requires a lot of infrastructure to serve relatively few people. Making the cost of infrastructure compared to revenue very high. Mixed density land brings in more property taxes per acre than single density or single use land, even though it doesn’t need that much more in infrastructure spending to build out and maintain. It’s a more efficient use of land for the tax-payer.
Sprawl is what happens when communities don’t think ahead. It diminishes civic life, increases traffic and is an inefficient use of tax-payer money. New Urbanism addresses all of these negatives and allows you to get a large single family house with leaves to rake, and a place for your grill in the backyard.
One of the reasons for this blog is to underscore the importance of planning. Sprawl is development with the absence of proper planning. New Urbanism is a model for planning that incorporates many different types of housing, and includes space for commercial development, parks and public spaces.
I don’t doubt that Cedar Rapids will expand south to Ely. We will and we should. The highway 151 extension will almost certainly spur massive investment and development around it’s planned exits. How and what we build in these areas matters. We can satisfy the desire for single family homes with a development model that incorporates the services new homeowners will need in a community.
Growth is good. Our city is growing outward and upward. It’s filling in and pushing out. That’s great! That’s not an excuse to build out without foresight.
