Smart Growth not so dumb? Annexations good?
Maryland's Smart Growth effort gets a bad rap, according to a former state planner, who argues that one of the much-maligned effort's successes can be seen in Eastern Shore towns looking to grow by annexing neighboring farmland.
So says James Noonan, a former senior manager with the Maryland Department of Planning, who until several months ago helped handle the state's pioneering approach to promoting more compact development. He delivered an at-times provocative defense of Smart Growth during a three-day conference last week reviewing the effectiveness of the state's pioneering growth-management effort.
Despite its widely publicized shortcomings in curbing the spread of suburbia, the 10-year-old program did help revitalize the state's sleepy downtowns, points out Noonan, now a senior planner with a Hunt Valley consulting firm.
"It wasn't all about sprawl," Noonan said in a brief interview at the end of last week's conference. "And even when they were passing the (Smart Growth) legislation, they didn't think they would do anything about sprawl in a decade."
More than $679 million was pumped into community revitalization through a variety of state programs, Noonan and co-author Jacquelyn Magness Seneschal point out in a paper presented at the conference. Cities, small towns and unincorporated communities benefited, from Glen Burnie to Cumberland and from Hyattsville to Vienna. Every dollar "invested" in redevelopment by the state drew out $2 in private and local funding, the authors say.
The state needs to do a better job of publicizing these redevelopment efforts, Noonan and Seneschal argue, because the mere perception of success draws out other private investors who can make the revival self-sustaining. Small towns and communites need even more help in applying for and taking advantage of the varied grants, loans and tax credits that might help breathe new life into their neighborhoods, they say.
The key to curbing sprawl, suggest Noonan and Seneschal, is not blocking all state spending in spread out suburbia, but in making the designated growth areas more attractive places to live, work and play.
Toward that end, they argue that towns like Trappe on the Eastern Shore don't deserve the grief they've gotten from some for proposing to annex enough land to increase the population seven- or eightfold, from the 1,100 souls who lived there in 2000.
Towns making annexation deals with developers are getting builders to invest private money in their downtowns, as well as badly needed public facilities that they cannot afford otherwise, such as fire stations and town halls. Muncipal annexations have become a lightning rod in growth debates across the state, especially on the Eastern Shore, where many residents rebelled at the loss of the peninsula's rural small-town character.
But if the growth is going to happen anyway, Noonan said, better for water quality and the Chesapeake Bay to have it clustered around a town than spreading out into the countryside.
"Whether or not you think a town has annexed too much," Noonan said, "any house on water and sewer ... is one less house on sprawl."
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I report on the environment and Chesapeake Bay. A native of West Virginia, I have focused mainly on Maryland's environment since moving here in 1983. Along the way, I've crewed aboard a skipjack in the bay, canoed under city streets up the Jones Fall from the Inner Harbor, and gone deep underground in a western Maryland coal mine. Recently, I have been covering the growth and development transforming the landscape. I love seafood, rambles in the country and good stories. I hope to share some here.
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This story, Tim's story on growth and sewage issues in cecil County last year, and J. Gidjunis' story on Phipps-Dickerson's firing over growth conflicts in Wicomico all point to very related issues.
Regardless of what we all treasure as our civil rights and freedoms, particularly our property rights and freedom to live our lives as we want, free from excessive governmental interference, regardless of the fact that these civil liberties have been, and are, a major factor in building the greatness of America, there are environmental limits as to how many of us can live--either in a given community, or on the earth as a whole.
Certainly we can and have transgressed those limits in times and places. The paybacks are often far away in time and space, and most of us easily ignore them, for a time--sometimes for an individual's whole lifetime. And further, with science and technology, we have --in many, but not all cases--made the earth much more able to support more of us, in far greater good health and comfort than ever before.
Hardly anyone noticed when the Maryland Darter slipped into extinction a few years ago. At their endings, systems break down "...not with a bang, but with a whimper."
Nevertheless, there are limits. And regardless of what we want and what we can do in the short term/near field,
nature, the world, the environment, the Bay ecosystems, whatever your frame of reference, nature doesn't care. When nature gets overloaded, it simply doesn't continue to work as well. The more stressed it gets, the less well it works, The paybacks get bigger, and they get closer to home.
There are simply too many of us wanting too much from the land's systems that we have to get those wants from. In a way, the concept is as simple as cutting up a pie among many people or among few people. The more there are, the smaller each slice is.
What does happen, we need to ask, if we succeed in raising the standard of living for the whole world to one similar to ours in the U.S. ?
But can one reasonably argue that someone in, say, Africa, cannot enjoy what we do here, because we here need them to continue living brutishly so that we can live wonderfully ? Of course not, neither rationally nor humanely.
The arguments will continue to swirl, and continue to be oversimplified to the point of confusing most everybody. How many people can live at what standard of living, with what technological fixes ? How free can we continue to be, how much of our precious tradition of liberty can we maintain in the face of my rights imposing on yours, multiplied infinitely ?
There won't be any easy answers, and nature doesn't care whether someone starves to death, or chokes, or broils or dies in warfare or lives in misery.
But this much is sadly clear: None of these conflicts will be made easier by continued growth in human numbers, either in the world or in our Chesapeake watershed. None of them will go away by failing to face the facts and grapple with them. All of them them become more complex and less tractable by increasing the number of interacting people.
Posted by: W. R. "Nick" Carter, III | October 10, 2007 7:55 AM
Ah, someone finally raises the population question! Nick, you must have been talking to our friend Tom Horton.
In case anyone doesn't know who he is, Tom's a noted Bay author and former Sun columnist who's long argued that Smart Growth, even if it works, is little more than a Band-Aid to dealing with the environmental harm caused by more and more people living, playing and, er, using toilets in the Bay watershed.
As our population grows, so do the tension between individual rights and freedoms and the cumulative impact on nature and the community at large. But can anyone really say what the Bay's human carrying capacity is? And even if you can agree on what the limits to population growth ought to be, how would you go about achieving them?
"Growth is inevitable, and welcome," is an oft-repeated mantra even among the most ardent proponents of Smart Growth. I know Tom disagrees with that, but I wonder if he's alone. Is growth inevitable? Is it possible for a community to be stable and still prosperous? Or is this the necessary tradeoff, that humanity must grow to thirve, and so nature must give way?
Posted by: Tim Wheeler | October 10, 2007 5:45 PM