Region's growth planning ranges
from exemplary to contentious

By Greg Lakes, editor
Headwaters News
May 15, 2002

Unparalleled growth has stressed community services and residents' patience throughout the West for the past decade, snarling traffic and creating nightmarish commutes in the region's cities and filling farmland and open space with subdivisions in more rural settings.

Smart growth, or new urbanism, has caught on in some areas, Denver in particular, while other communities haven't begun to agree on planning in general.

Denver's former Stapleton Airport is the nation's poster child for smart growth: 4,700 acres of prime metropolitan land that will become lots for 12,000 homes, all within one-quarter mile of shopping and work.

Residential streets will be lined with boutiques and coffee shops and about 30 percent of the acreage will be open space. The area, the size of Manhattan, will be developed in zones over the next 25 years, with the first homes ready for occupancy later this year.

The smart growth plan was a key part of the redevelopment of the airport site, pushed by Denver Mayor Wellington Webb and embraced by eager developers.

By comparison, factions in Los Angeles have been trying to promote downtown redevelopment and cooperation between businesses and local government for years, but with limited success only recently.

According to the Associated Press, Carol Schatz, president of LA's Central City Association, which represents about 300 downtown property owners, said, "We finally have a very supportive council member, but it's not like you have Wellington Webb who made it a cornerstone of his administration."

A developer in St. George, Utah, hired Prince Charles' consultant architect who designed Poundbury — a "new urbanism" village in southwest England.

The consultant will apply the same principles to a 700-acre development in Ivins, Utah.
 
Colorado has led the way in another aspect of growth management, impact fees cities charge developers to cover the cost of supplying roads and other services.

Community leaders have long recognized that new subdivisions don't pay their way. But the past decade's rapid growth drove up municipal costs, and cities have recently and dramatically raised their impact fees, doubling the amounts in some cases.

One Denver-area community charged $30,500 per $100,000 in construction value in 2000, 51 percent more than it charged in 1998, according to a recent survey by the Colorado Municipal League.

While advocates say the fees offset the costs of growth, critics say they drive the cost of housing well beyond affordable. In 2001, Colorado home prices jumped 10.9 percent, compared with a 6.1 percent increase nationwide.

Some cities are farther back on the planning curve. Nampa and Caldwell, near Boise, exemplify the planning struggles of fast-growing rural areas.

Residents and planners have been meeting for a year to revise that county's growth plan. About 84 percent of land in the county is farmland, and 48 percent of the population lives on rural property. The other 52 percent of the population lives on 2.9 percent of the land in or near city limits. The rest of the land, 12.2 percent, is range, forest or water.

Among the most contentious topics is where to allow new homes and how to avoid conflicts between suburban tracts and working farms.

Some of the more cynical -- or perhaps, realistic -- planning participants contend growth won't be determined by any written plan but by whether farmers can get more for their land by growing crops or raising livestock, or by selling to developers.

In Arizona, leaders have been trying to direct growth for six years, with little more than frustration to show for their efforts. Both lawmakers and voters rejected strict growth controls, and after three statewide elections and five legislative sessions, the state has a much-compromised plan that preserves a relatively small portion of Arizona's state lands and calls for long-term community planning.

While communities gained the legal ability to slow leapfrog development and to impose impact fees, there's no master plan and no provisions for enforcement.

The state provides little assistance for communities to develop a plan, which can easily cost more than $100,000, and so far only 13 of 85 cities and towns have written one.

In Rathdrum, the fastest-growing city in north Idaho, residents made it plain they want to limit, not manage, growth. At a series of meetings, they made it clear their first priority is the community's small-town feel, and they want a maximum of 2 percent to 4 percent growth per year.

They want the town's comprehensive plan, required by the state, to impose limits on the amount of land that's annexed and allow development only on property already within the city limits.

Rathdrum's population has more than doubled during the past decade, totaling 4,816 in the 2000 U.S. Census.

In some areas, smart growth options are failing for the simplest of reasons:Local residents don't like them. In Reno, a draft growth-management plan calls for concentrating multiple unit housing on major corridors and near the two downtowns of Sparks and Reno.

But in a January survey of residents, only 28 percent to 43 percent of said they’d prefer to live in high-density areas.

Whether smart growth catches on, the pressure for growth management only will increase with the ongoing influx of newcomers.

Arizona gained 189,263 residents between the 2000 Census and last July 1, pushing the total past 5.3 million. Maricopa County, second only to Clark County, Nev., in growth during the 1990s, is now home to 3.2 million people, its population increasing in the past two years by nearly 8,000 a month.

The greater Boise area's demand for water is expected to double by 2035 and nearly triple by 2050.

Albuquerque's growth strategy plan said the city is already $2 billion behind in infrastructure improvements necessary to keep pace with growth, and that a successful strategy would save the city, county and private developers about $355 million in infrastructure costs and $1.4 billion in private transportation costs over 25 years.

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