Rancher

Arizona farmland disappearing at rate of 55 acres per hour
Arizona Republic; Feb. 27

Suburban sprawl replaced 1 million acres of Colorado farmland
Denver Post; 02/04/2004

Lack of profit, pressure to subdivide erases Colorado farms
Denver Rocky Mountain News; 11/13/2003

Western Montana farmland disappears beneath developments
Missoulian; 07/13/2003

East Meets West: People most concerned about saving the environment couldn't care less about killing a culture.
Range Magazine, Summer 2003

Conservation easements help keep Idaho ranches rural
Idaho Falls Post Register; 05/18/2003

City dweller

Durango directs its future growth with approval of model development
Denver Post; 01/23/2004

Colorado's sprawl costs more than planning, study says
Denver Business Journal; 12/16/2003

Home builder

Idaho city continues its breakneck growth
Idaho Statesman; 11/25/2003

Developers drop plans for Boise community, citing too much red tape
Idaho Statesman; 05/16/2003

Wyoming subdivisions cost more than they pay, study says
Casper Star-Tribune; 05/13/2003

New rural resident

Utah town not willing to part with rural character
Salt Lake Tribune; 09/29/2003

Ogden Valley community plans to live up to its name
Salt Lake Tribune; 09/28/2003

Utah officials spread smart growth to smaller towns
Salt Lake Tribune; 08/08/2003

Greater Yellowstone area on brink of growth boom
Idaho Falls Post Register; 06/23/2003

Colorado town slows growth but needs the money
High Country News; 04/02/2003

North Idaho residents' frustration with growth turns to anger
Spokane Spokesman-Review; 03/16/2003

Conservationist

Idaho towns, county hope to fence in sprawl on the range
Spokane Spokesman-Review; 11/17/2003

North Idaho county rewrites development rules to preserve open space
Spokane Spokesman-Review; 08/14/2003

Wyoming county's plan to control growth isn't legal, AG says
Casper Star-Tribune; 04/18/2003

Low-Income Mom

Colorado city's poor too poor for affordable housing
Denver Post; 01/25/2004

Affordable housing getting more rare in West
Billings Gazette; 10/29/2003

Realtor

Hillside homes fuel Phoenix debate
Arizona Republic; 07/20/2003

Montana county officials try to limit development along Big Horn River
Billings Gazette; 04/06/2003

Montana Smart Growth Coalition

Smart Growth Online

Arizona passed its Growing Smarter Act in 1998.

Colorado: Land Use Planning in Colorado

Idaho has not adopted statewide smart growth planning; local authorities are encouraged to form land-use planning commissions.

Montana passed legislation in 2001 that authorizes local governments to adopt subdivision regulations promoting cluster development and open space preservation, and that requires governing bodies that adopt growth policies to then adopt subdivision regulations that are in accordance with the goals and objectives of the growth policy.

Nevada has no statewide planning, but rapid growth in and around Las Vegas caused the state to create the Southern Nevada Strategic Planning Authority (SNSPA) in 1997.

No comprehensive planning legislation is on the books in New Mexico, although advocacy groups such as 1000 Friends of New Mexico and the New Mexico Chapter of the American Planning Association are working on overhauling the system.

Wyoming has not adopted land use policies to date, although the 1975 State Land Use Planning Act advocates voluntary preparation and adoption of land use plans.

I spend a lot of time asking people in Montana – Republicans and Democrats, businesswomen and builders, waiters and environmentalists – what they want their slice of the West to look like in 20 years.

They almost always talk about open space and clean water, vibrant towns and lack of traffic, and the like. People never say they want more strip malls. They don't say they hope Montana in 2020 will look like California or Colorado today. They don't ask for subdivisions to carpet our valleys.

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We haven't learned how to mesh the legitimately competing desires (and fears) of enough Montanans to make smart growth happen.

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And yet that is just what we are getting. Why, if so few of us want this, are we building it anyway? Why aren't we embracing smart growth?

Partly, this is because smart growth is hard for people to grasp, even if they know it when they see it: It's those older, walkable, and marketable neighborhoods with tree-lined streets, front porches, and affordable homes that are a short hop from thriving downtowns with hardware stores, coffee shops, offices, and lots of people mingling and interacting.

The other side of smart growth is the open spaces and working farms and ranches just outside town, and those undisturbed floodplains, ridge lines, and streamsides. In other words, smart growth is exactly what most people say they want and come to the West for.

But the wasteful sprawling development that we have seen so much of in the past 15 years isn't due only to a lack of understanding of smart growth and the tools necessary to make it a reality. Another problem is that we have skewed our state and local infrastructure investments and development permit systems in a way that actively promotes and subsidizes sprawling development.

One reason is that we haven't learned how to mesh the legitimately competing desires (and fears) of enough Montanans to make smart growth happen.

To create the future most Montanans and Westerners want, we need to know how different people in what remains of the undeveloped West see growth. The following are admittedly gross generalizations, but they're also broadly true.

• The rancher: He's concerned the regulations needed to implement smart growth will limit his ability to sell his land for development in the future. But he also resents the encroachment of subdivisions that threaten his operation and the rural life he loves.
  
  
• The city dweller: She enjoys being close to her kids' schools, to the store, and to work, so she doesn't have to spend all her precious free time as a taxi driver. But she also worries about how the new apartment building proposed down the street will impact her property values.
  
  
• The home builder: He works on a thin profit margin from house to house. The more expensive the house, the higher the profit. So he's glad to build McMansions outside town. He recognizes sprawl makes the town less attractive, traffic has gotten worse, and his hunting grounds have been fragmented by ranchettes. But he figures that is the price of progress.
  
  
• The new rural resident: She loves the quiet of her few acres. But she worries about new subdivisions proposed nearby, and about growing traffic, worsening roads, and the threat of new septic systems to her drinking water -- as well as the added taxes needed to fix such problems.
  
  
• The conservationist: He supports smart growth because it will protect wildlife habitat, river corridors, water quality, and open space. But he often forgets we need to ensure that all Montanans can find an attractive and affordable home in town.
  
  
• The low-income mom: Single mothers or low-income families worry most about paying the bills. Their need for affordable rent forces them to live in a poorly built and unattractive home, often on the edge of town, which means they drive a lot. The cost of maintaining the car isn't cheap, and the constant driving is a hassle.
  
  
• The Realtor: He appreciates the open lands and small-town life that make living and buying a home in Montana so attractive. But he doesn't want to support the measures that protect those amenities and property values over the long term because he fears they'll limit his short-term income.

There is some validity in all of these hopes and fears. The trick is how to address enough of them so that a majority of us see smart growth as in our best interest. Let me address the concerns of each of these people one at a time.

The rancher:

Most farmers and ranchers already know that one of the only ways to ensure an adequate land base of working lands is zoning. But many don't know that you can zone working lands to protect them and either allow small parts of those lands to be developed or to sell their development rights.

What if counties helped farmers and ranchers by halting development from eating up most of the best lands while also helping them develop small portions of farm and ranch (mostly the less productive lands) to be used for cluster development?

Put another way, if you've got 200 acres of farmland, you could put 20 houses on 10-acre lots and be forced to quit farming while ensuring that the land will never be used for farming again, or you could put 20 or more houses on 10 acres and still farm most of the remaining 190 acres.

When designed correctly, these types of developments will make the farmers and ranchers more money than simply selling or developing all their land because people are willing to pay a premium for the open space that is the remaining farmland. It's win-win.

The city dweller:

For smart growth to work, most people need to live in town. But people in cities sometimes get nervous when, say, apartments go up down the street. There are two ways to address such fears.

One is to explain how bringing more people to town protects city dwellers. This is because when people move out of town, in-town schools shut down, in-town traffic gets worse, open space is lost, and vibrant downtowns deteriorate as strip malls rise.

Second, we need to show that new development can protect urbanites' property values. Cities can do this by working with neighborhoods to pass design standards that ensure that new development looks like the older parts of town that people cherish.

The home builder:

Cities can do a hundred things to make building in town attractive but most cities in Montana haven't done everything they can.

We need to make our zoning and building codes simple and predictable, and we need to level the playing field by making sure that everyone builds to the same standards, whether you are inside the city boundary or just outside.

Cities and counties need to work together to help with the cost of providing city services including streets, sewer and water for affordable homes inside and immediately adjacent to our cities.

We also need to streamline the permit process for building smart growth so that it takes less time and costs less to build. And cities must convince the Legislature to direct funding away from building bigger roads that are a gigantic subsidy to sprawl and instead address the existing transportation needs of our towns.

The new rural resident:

Most people in the country want to keep their area lightly developed -- that's why they moved there. Some people call this a "pull up the drawbridge" or "I've got mine" mentality. Perhaps it is.

But it's also an important source of support for smart growth. We need to show rural residents how they can protect the lifestyle that they moved there for, either by working with their county commission to adopt zoning or by creating their own, citizen-initiated zoning district. Without zoning, rural residents have no say in how their areas will grow.

The conservationist:

Conservationists need to continue to work with fishermen, hunters and average Montanans to explain the threat that out-of-control sprawl poses to fish, wildlife, family farming and ranching, and the quality of our drinking water, while actively helping cities and counties implement plans to accommodate growth as efficiently, attractively and affordably as possible into our existing cities and towns.

The low-income family:

We urgently need to convince cities and counties to identify areas inside and immediately adjacent to existing cities where small lots will be encouraged.

Small lots do not mean "low-income ghettos." Rather, mixing small-lot developments with a variety of housing types creates areas just like the historic neighborhoods in and around our downtowns.

These neighborhoods have big and small houses, apartments and townhouses, all mixed together -- and all on modest, town-sized lots. When we build this way, attractive homes that sell for $70,000 can sit next to attractive homes that sell for $170,000, and taxes can be less because streets, sewers and water lines are all shorter.

To achieve this, cities need to give all the incentives and streamlining that I mentioned for the builders, above.

The Realtor:

The arguments for Realtors are mostly the same as for the builders. We need to show them smart growth is not no-growth, that there's a lot of money to be made, and that in the long term, we'll protect the things that make Montana real estate so desirable (and profitable).

These marketable amenities will become ever more important as more and more places in the West refuse to make smart growth a reality and we take the steps necessary to make it a reality here.

Obviously, this will take a lot of education and organizing. A farsighted governor and Legislature will have to redirect growth subsidies. Wise county commissioners and city councilors will have to reform local zoning and building regulations.

It's a tall order, but by not doing it we guarantee the Californication of our part of the West. Do we have any other choice?

Farms, community yield to West's growth

By Greg Lakes, editor
Headwaters News
March 3. 2004

Whether all those diverse interests eventually come together into some sort of consensus about growth in general and smart growth in particular, there's no denying the immediacy of the need.

Across the region, the numbers are startling: the number of farms cut into ranchettes, the number of acres of productive land lost, the number of new homes in outlying areas, the waning numbers on rancher's annual income statements and the rising numbers on their tax bills.

In the past 25 years, Arizona has lost one-quarter of its farm and ranch land, 12 million acres. Most of it was paved or sodded over for new homes and businesses around Phoenix and Tucson, and much of the rest was converted to more rural ranchettes.

A disconcerting side note is that while growth accelerated in the 1990s, the loss of farmland slowed, not because of better planning or smarter growth, but because developers looking for raw land were pushing farther into the non-arable desert.

Colorado yielded more than 1 million acres of farmland just between 1997 and 2002, the third greatest rate of loss, behind Texas and New Mexico.

And while farm land disappeared, the number of so-called farms increased 20 percent, a tribute to a proliferation of ranchettes that officials say contribute little to state's agricultural sector.

In Montana's Flathead County, gateway to Glacier National Park and home to some of the state's most explosive growth, 22 percent of the farmland disappeared between 1997 and 2002.

Farmers said the vagaries of the wheat market, pressure from developers and rising taxes left them little choice but to sell out.

Plum Creek Timber began selling timberlands in development-sized tracts and the state began leasing timber and grazing land for residential and commercial use -- both of which made more land available for growth.

And in what may be the uncontested leader of the one-fell-swoop category, a developer has proposed more than 60,000 homes on 19,000 acres of Arizona desert between Arizona and Phoenix.

Loss of farm and ranch land is not among the concerns there, but there are plenty of others.

According to critics, the planned community would encroach upon a critical Air Force flight-training corridor and force the closure of a $1 billion helicopter base nearby, usurp crucial wildlife habitat on the adjacent Ironwood National Monument and disturb ancient ruins and prehistoric sites.

The community could eventually drop 175,000 new residents, a city the size of Tempe, between the state's major metropolitan areas.

And among all those constituencies and all those issues is another thing that gets lost, and that smart growth tries to re-create.

In Range Magazine, essayist and Wyoming transplant Bill Woodward savors the cohesion common among few people in a large landscape, and laments its loss as population density increases:

"Simple things — the wave of a hand from a passing pickup; two stock trucks parked in the middle of the road, the drivers chatting.

"I'd seen it before, on sheep stations in the Kalahari Desert and horse farms on the west coast of Ireland. Anywhere a few people ranch or farm in vast open spaces, human contact matters. The result is a civil society and a strong sense of community."

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Author's blog:
One choice already made
The whole point of smart growth is not to force everyone to live in apartments nor is it to disenfranchise any members of the public from being involved in deciding how they want their community and county to grow.

In fact, smart growth is just the opposite. Smart growth seeks to ensure that more people have more housing choices and to empower people who would otherwise be disenfranchised when it comes to how growth will affect their quality of life and property values.

Let me explain.

The idea that we cannot or should not decide on how we want to grow is simply to accept that we will lose the very things we love about the West.

It also overlooks that fact that we have already made policy decisions to support one form of growth over another - in favor of a sprawling, unattractive, and inefficient future where we subsidize the fragmentation of our wonderful mountain valleys, foothills, and river corridors.

We have created a system that perpetuates sprawling development, damages the property rights of people living next to sprawling development but who don't have a voice in how their rights or values are affected, and undermines our economic driving force - our sense of place and quality of life.

We have created a system, in Montana at least, that not only makes it much easier and less expensive to build cookie-cutter sprawling subdivisions outside of our towns where there are minimal planning and regulations, but we subsidize those developments by paying for the efficient services that serve them including wider roads, school busing, and police and fire protection.

As a result, we see a development pattern that, like water, flows in the easiest direction - toward sprawl.

Let's face it, we do not live in a totally free market system, but one that is heavily influenced by our choice of subsidies and regulations.

For example, in much of Montana we have chosen to overlook that fact that by allowing thousands of septic systems to surround our towns that we are slowly poisoning the drinking water those same people rely upon.

We, if we chose to, could take into account the cumulative affect that new growth would have on our water supplies, but to date we have chosen not to, and in the end we are having to bail out homeowners when their water wells dry up or become polluted with sewage - as people living outside Missoula, Great Falls, or Helena can attest to.

Smart growth gives people, for the first time, a voice in how their community and county and state will grow and what we want to subsidize and support through, yes, regulations and incentives.

It then implements those decisions by changing the local and state development system with tools including regulations, zoning, and incentives such as subsidized infrastructure spending that, for example, provides road access to developments that will not undermine a highway's carrying capacity.

Smart growth, in fact, grows the market place of housing rather than limiting it - by making it easier and less financially risky to develop inside our cities, to develop townhouses, apartments, condos, and single family homes in a single development, and to protect open lands through cluster developments outside our towns.

It attempts to mitigate the impact that growth will have on affordable housing, water, wildlife and a viable agricultural land base ahead of time.

Don't kid yourself, we have already made these decisions, but we have just chosen to overlook those impacts.

Efficiency isn't happiness
What Tim Davis and many others don't grasp is that the term "smart growth" is an oxymoron, especially in the third fastest-growing nation in the world.

The concept is admirable: Sprawl can be averted if people live more densely packed. But it is also wishful thinking.

As one who this week visited a "smart growth" development in Santa Fe and thought I'd die of claustrophobia, I must remind that efficiency is not necessarily happiness.

Yes, the Japanese have their tiny apartments, although a Japanese woman interviewed on television recently summed it up, "Everything is too crowded. Too many people."

Chickens in a modern chicken factory experience a smart growth-type atmosphere too, but they don't much like it, nor does smart growth address broader issues associated with an-ever-expanding population: finite water supply, especially in the arid West, resource consumption, and environmental impacts.

A smart-growth community at Durango, Colo., for example, will be built smack in the middle of one of the last undeveloped low-elevation game habitats. From the view of elk, deer and other wildlife, there is probably nothing "smart" about this proposal, with their future made especially grim when one considers the numbers that will die from the increased car traffic.

While high-density developments are not without merit, bottom line, smart growth does not turn off the engines driving this nation's boom growth.

Americans are being asked to subsidize endless growth, first, with ever-rising real estate costs; secondly, by using ever less of valuable resources like water; thirdly, by agreeing to live like sardines in a can in the hopes of inviting the world to America while simultaneously trying to preserve some semblance of environmental quality.

Well, as the saying goes, "You can have your cake, or you can eat it, but you can't have your cake and eat it too."

Not so smart
Tim Davis certainly speaks "Sprawlese" well. But I don't want "smart growth" advocates planning for me, or anyone else.

I find the concept amazingly, um,
unsmart.

As an example, there's a collaborative group trying to deflect the potential sale of school trust lands around Whitefish. Sure, they could put together a plan where the lands that are best for development, and I would prefer clustered, are developed densely and well, but it won't surprise me if the end result is "save it all from sprawl."

If the Land Board ignores its trust obligations, it'll get sued for sure,
which is a huge waste of money.

But even if the board can legally set these lands aside, that's probably not a good thing due to a leapfrog effect.

Slam the door on these parcels, and the people who are moving here anyway will just jump over to the next-closest lands. So we get higher land prices, less school money for the children, less affordable housing, longer commutes, and a randomly fragmented landscape.

Tell me, what the heck is so "smart" about worsening all the things that "smart-growthers" claim to hate? Nothing.

Then there was Whitefish's attempt to get planning jurisdiction in the
potentially annexable areas near town.

However, people under the
jurisdiction would not be able to vote in Town Council elections and
therefore have even the faintest input into who could sit on the
council-selected planning board.

Regulation without representation? Sorry, but that's patently unfair.

Since a home is the biggest investment most of us will ever make, I'd prefer to make that investment in the way I feel is best -- not be second guessed at every turn by someone who claims to know what is best for me.

Again, there would be unintended consequences here. Buyers would "leapfrog" straight over the "doughnut" into the county jurisdiction, where they could at
least vote for county commission.

I'm sure Tim's standard response would be "comprehensive city-county planning." But joint planning ended under a cloud simply because rural residents found themselves being outvoted by citified planning junkies and
didn't like paying more than their fair share of the budget for the joint
planning office.

Folks, this ain't Sim City. People are not programmable. They are amenable to a good deal, however. If some developer had the guts to offer a cluster neighborhood in the corner of a section, most of which would be a scenic easement held jointly and in common by the 'hood association and leased back to the farmer, or to the neighbors with horses or something, and we could
see if it would fly or die on the open market ... hey, it might be a good
thing.

Of course, the screaming hypocrites that yell loudest at the planning meetings would never allow such a thing in their backyard, would they?

Author's blog:
Steps to get there
I have received a lot of feedback regarding the Perspective piece about the different points of view on smart growth in Montana, but, unfortunately, most of the feedback, while very positive, came from conservationists and a couple county commissioners and ranchers.

I had hoped to get a broader range of opinions on whether the portraits we drew are fair representations of what people want in the West.

And, if a majority of us can agree on the things we would like to see promoted and protected, I hoped to move the discussion to the most effective ways to protect and promote those resources.

I am a pragmatist and that is where I would like to take this discussion: What are the tools that have worked in communities and counties at making similar visions a reality?

We have to propose tools to address specific goals and to ensure those goals lead to smart growth, as most development systems in the Intermountain West currently propagate sprawling development.

The suggestions below are based on research of best practices that we recently completed. We believe they are important steps toward building local development systems that will lead to smart growth in Montana and the Intermountain West.

These tools are overly vague because of the limited space here and of course would need to be adapted to the individual community and county where they would be adopted:

1. Bring community members together to create a vision of future development, and adopt subdivision and development standards, and zoning regulations, to implement that vision - both city and countywide.

2. Identify quality growth areas where growth can be accommodated to ensure the most efficient use of land, water and taxes for infrastructure and services.

These areas would most likely be within or adjacent to existing cities, towns and what are effectively unincorporated towns.

State and local investments in roads, sewer and water systems would need to be directed into these quality growth areas.

3. Identify resource lands and waters essential to maintaining a viable agricultural land base, water quality, wildlife health, quality of life and long-term economic assets.

These could include prime farm, ranch and timber lands, wetlands, river and stream corridors, and critical wildlife habitat. The community must adopt zoning and subdivision regulations and market mechanisms (economic benefits and incentives for these protections) that will guide development away from these areas.

4. Create design standards and streamline the process for affordable housing, infill development and commercial development to make it easier for attractive and affordable growth to be built within our existing towns and downtowns.

Best in a while
"Seeds to Grow" is one of the best articles I've read in a long time.