Suburban sprawl drains revenues

[question everything]

The Daily Breeze

Sunday, April 17, 2005

Suburban sprawl drains revenues

By Bonnie Erbe

Too many Americans buy into the common presumption that suburban sprawl is a revenue generator for local government. In fact, it turns out to be closer to gossamer fantasy than reality. Americans have yet to respond (in any unified, outspoken way) to the degradation in the quality of life that suburban sprawl and farmland development inflict.

We fail to protest the never-ending escalation of costs for services including sewer, water, police, fire safety, road maintenance and the seemingly annual hikes in real estate taxes to fund them. There was that one exception, California's Proposition 13. But that was 27 years ago. Meanwhile, we seem to tolerate, without protest, longer and longer commutes, heavier traffic and overcrowded schools. Perhaps the following will provoke a long-overdue rude awakening. Lots of numbers follow, but if you can slog through them, it's worth the work.

Pennsylvania's Shrewsbury Township (in a rural area that borders Maryland) surveyed these costs in 2000 in collaboration with the American Farmland Trust. The astonishing findings compare costs vs. income from different types of land use.

The study found that 77 percent of revenue to the township in 2000 was generated by residential land uses, 19.7 percent by commercial land uses and 3.3 percent by farmland, forests or open land. This plays into the conventional wisdom that residential development boosts income for local government.

But it went on to report that 96.3 percent of the township's expenses were for services for residential land use, compared with 3.1 percent for commercial or industrial uses and a miserly .6 percent for farm, forest and open land. In other words, in fiscal year 2000, for every $1 of revenue generated by residential property in Shrewsbury Township, $1.22 was spent providing services to those lands. By comparison, for every $1 received from commercial and business land uses in the township, only 15 cents was spent to provide services. For every $1 received from farm/forest/open land uses in the township, only $0.17 was spent providing services.

(snip)

Bonnie Erbe, a TV host, writes this column for Scripps Howard News Service. Her e-mail address is [email protected].

Find this article at:
http://www.dailybreeze.com/opinion/articles/1481447.html

[RPM]

1. shocker, no really....

:eyes:

nice to see it quantified...

I always wondered why humans, until 50 years ago, seemed to congregate in towns....

:eyes:

[NEOBuckeye]

2. Suburbanization is the greatest misallocation of resources in history.

In so many, many ways. Certainly, it is a drain on our personal and administrative (government) financial resources as the article mentions, but also our natural resources and our environment.

How many priceless wetlands, forests, rivers and plains have been unceremoniously and irretrievably paved over and buried under asphalt and concrete for the sake of building more "ticky-tacky" housing developments, Big Box Super-Mega-Retail-Grocery Stores and strip malls? Look at the billions of gallons of oil that we've shortsightedly wasted in our cars for 2 hour commutes to and from our central cities in less than a half-century.

Now, only now, do we have the nerve to panic because we're finding out that there are real limits to these resources. That oil is finite and that Mother Earth does need a certain amount of forest and wetland area to sustain the climate to which we've become so accustomed. How stupid we are! All of us.

Another effect of suburbanization: It does absolutely nothing to foster and encourage continuation of the social networks that once permeated our lives and our communities. Actually, it has in fact destroyed most of the social, cultural and ethnic networks that once thrived in our central cities, along with the central cities themselves, loosening the bonds that once held neighborhoods and communities together. Even our families are showing alarming trends of breakdown into domestic abuse and violence.

Crisises eventually and inevitably emerge when we don't TAKE RESPONSIBILITY and address their roots -- problems -- early on, opting instead to sweep them under the rug for another day, another year, even another generation. Is it really all that surprising that we now have multiple "crisises" now creeping up into our awareness and demanding our attention at once? Peak Oil, Climate Change, Environmental Decay, Health Care, Social Decay and Economic Collapse all seem to be converging upon us at once, having grown tired of being ignored by us.

And yet, our answers to many of these problems might be as simple as reclaiming our responsibilities and taking up our collective roles as stewards of the Earth, caretakers of her environment and our communities. And it's still not too late to start.