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- Info
Growth management in countryfied cities, Volume I: Change and response
| Author: |
Doherty, J.C. |
| Date: |
1984 |
| Periodical: |
Alexandria, VA: Vert Milom Press |
| Abstract: |
A library, or at least a library stack, of books have been written since 1960 describing, analyzing, and interpreting the planning, land use, and local government implications of urban sprawl. Yet these treat the issue almost entirely as one concerned with the large city and its surrounding suburbs. Interest in nonmetropolitan aspects of the subject has generally been more narrow and concerned with fragments only-farm land lost, state environmental laws and regulations affecting rural areas, social or economic cause and effect, etc. No attempt has been made to add it all up, to look at the urbanization of rural-small town America as a complex new development on the national scene affecting specific communities, causing difficult problems for small governments, creating new city forms, changing how the land is used. This is what we try to do in this report. It was written for professionals, elected officials, and laymen concerned with local government administration and land use -regulation in U.S. nonmetropolitan areas. The report also will be of interest to people whose work, profession, or community service make it necessary or useful to know what is happening in these areas. Although we use localities in six states only for most of our examples, the report includes enough general information, analysis, and suggestions to interest anyone concerned about protecting and preserving the environment of the countryside while improving opportunity there. Finding the happy medium between the one and the other is not always possible, of course. Answers don't come easy. There are as many failures as successes. But the experiences of the areas summarized in chapter two and described in detail in Volume II are instructive. They transmit lessons useful elsewhere. The small cities, towns, and counties surveyed for' this report are located respectively in northern Michigan, the Texas Hill Country west of Austin, the Upper Cumberland Valley of Tennessee, eastern Indiana prairie country, southwestern Pennsylvania, and western Vermont. The six locations run the gamut from ranch and resort rural to urban and exurban impacted rural. One area has barely 18,000 year-round people; another, 400,000. Farming or ranching is important in all six, but critically so in four. However, all have one thing in common: Urban change and increased numbers of people are leaning on the land and forcing local governments to do controversial things as they try to moderate the sometimes harsh effects of rural-to-urban land conversions. We've tried to view the land regulation and planning programs found in the six areas as an evolutionary process, "stumbling" might be the appropriate word, toward a system of control that preserves local environmental values while permitting maximum property rights and preserving old ways of doing things. We've not been hesitant to remark on failures as well as successes. A report on land use planning and regulation in nonmetro areas must, of course, bring in government structure and capability, for the two subjects are closely related. Government practice affects what happens on the ground, so to speak; but what happens on the ground also affects government, weakening or strengthening it, changing its responsibilities, rendering it obsolete, diminishing revenues or increasing them. So we examine not just the usual land regulations and how they're carried out but also the machinery of local government. Most readers of a report such as this will know about planning departments, appointed planning commissions, boards of zoning .appeals, etc. But these are often of less importance in reaching planning goals and influencing land use than are more general government procedures, authorities, relationships, structures, and resources that determine what local government does and how well it performs: How easy (or difficult) is annexation? Whether a general government has run out of authority to contract for more bonded debt to improve the sewers? How many local offices are elective? Whether a local government must go to the state legislature for authority to do every little thing? Answers to such questions as these are often more fundamental in the local land use picture than are rather cut and dried zoning procedures and the rest. Of course once we begin looking into local government, we very soon uncover the infinite tracks of state and Federal government. Local governments are, as the old political science saw has it, "creatures of the state," established for state political or administrative reasons or incorporated and chartered under state rules and controlled thereby. Also since about 1960, state governments have become much more directly involved locally with grants, technical aid, regulations, state permit procedures, overviews, planning mandates, etc. This has resulted in more development as well as environmental controls and interrelations between state and local government people. All of which is evident in Volume II. Some of this state involvement in local activities has been at the urging of the Federal government, of course. Federal policies, programs, regulations, etc. now are among the greatest causes of pressure on rural land and other resources. Conversely, they are also among the major causes of planning and state and local regulation to forestall environmental offense. Whether the dollars distributed by Washington have done more to degrade the environment than they have to protect and preserve it is an interesting question deserving of a much longer and more ambitious report than. this one. We've tried to single out and discuss Federal programs that in the case study areas and elsewhere appear to be the most beneficial or the most adverse, or both at once, from a land use standpoint. Sources used for this report were mainly personal interviews conducted with planners and other local government professionals, elected officials, bankers, developers, realtors, representatives of local conservation groups, and Federal administrators in the six case study areas and officials of state agencies in several capitals. When available, comprehensive land use plans, local codes, state statutes, handbooks, soil surveys, regional studies, U.S. Census and other Federal reports also were used. In addition, we spent many hours "wind shielding," as urban planners call it, in the areas concerned and taking photographs, both of which activities turned out to be more valuable than might be expected. The reader will find essential the simplified maps printed in the appendix. These include not only the usual symbols and markings but also notations for various rural-urban forms we've labeled Countryfied Cities, strip central business districts, linear suburbs, etc. (described on pps10-12) that should be helpful in showing the changes and built environments, as planners call them, in rural space that are important to the argument of our report. Conditions change fast these days in the U.S., even in nonmetropolitan areas. Government, of course, is in constant flux. Laws and ordinances are repealed or amended. Policies and attitudes about what can and should be done change. So, occasionally, do the people in charge. Certainly the Federal government of Ronald Reagan has not been that of Jimmy Carter, although the differences are not quite so overwhelming as the media has made them out to be. Economic conditions are another example. At the start of field work for this book in the summer of 1980, both the farm and industrial sectors in the case study areas, with one exception, were doing well, not so much so as in the mid-1970s, but well all the same. By early 1983, unemployment was serious in at least three of the areas and farm prices on the basic crops had, as one farmer put it, "gone to hell." A time lag between field interview, writing, participants' review, and printed report will always be present in this kind of topical coverage. Yet no matter how much the details change over the short span of a year or two, the basic situation remains: U.S. nonmetro areas are growing, they face lots of land regulation problems, they are working on them, but there is room for improvement. Without doubt, this situation will be as true in the year 1990 or 2000 as it is in 1984.
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