From Maggy Hurchalla's Speech at the 2010 Citizens' Growth Management Forum:
THE URBAN BOUNDARY – WHO CARES?
Who cares about the urban boundary? The take home message should be that everyone cares. Taxpayers have to care. People who care about the school system have to care. People who care about quality of life and our environment have to care.
Without an urban boundary that holds still and has teeth we are only pretending to plan. Pretending to plan is a very expensive and exasperating waste of time for both developers and the public.
But what is an urban boundary? It’s the line on the map that shows the area where you want urban development to happen as opposed to the wide open spaces of farmland outside the line.
Planning is about where and when growth is going to happen. If you don’t know where you are going and when you are you need to be there, you can’t plan how to get there. It’s just not possible.
If you really believe that “the market should decide” then growth management is an oxymoron and a useless expensive bureaucracy that is entirely unnecessary.
If you are not going to manage growth, merely massaging it is an expensive charade.
Cities have urban boundaries. Counties don’t. They have large rural areas that dwarf the developed area. Of all the strategies that are important to really managing growth, for counties the key is the urban boundary.
Urban development used to happen in cities. Back then you had to have sewer and water and a train or trolley. Towns grew outward as the facilities radiated outward in a rational manner. Then we invented the automobile and then we invented suburbs. You could grow anywhere there was a road. Especially in Florida, you could grow anywhere there was a road and use individual wells and septic tanks.
And then the game of sprawl began.
Buy a piece of land well outside of town because it is cheap because it has no urban services available.
Get a land use change.
Build a new suburb.
Developers make more money than if they buy an expensive piece of land in town.
Originally sprawl was simply development spilling over outside the city boundaries. Then the definition got more complicated. The new urbanists say that if you create a whole city around an urban core, it’s not sprawl. If you created Levittown with miles and miles of houses and no city in sight, then it was sprawl. Peanut butter everywhere was bad, but peanut butter and jelly everywhere was okay and it didn’t matter if it spilled over outside the urban boundaries.
That newest assumption is wrong. Peanut butter and jelly everywhere is not okay. Planning mixed use all over Martin County is not planning. It is simply an abdication of planning with a slightly neater arrangement.
New urbanism has painted a pretty nostalgic picture to introduce high density and intensity and justify putting it in the wrong place. It’s important to do a reality check on that pretty picture.
Think back to real small towns: one and sometimes two story commercial buildings on Mainstreet; some apartments downtown; surrounded by a small sea of single family homes.
Do any of you envision downtown Washington, DC or New York City or San Francisco as small towns? They have tall buildings, high density and intensity and mixed residential and commercial use. They are great cities. They are not a model for small town living.
The "smart growthers" have mixed big city planning with small town promises that are simply incompatible.
They suggest a need to "mix uses everywhere" as a model for what we want to be. They say that with proper design we don’t need urban service districts, because every cluster of development would be a self supporting, walkable, lovable old home town.
There are a couple of things wrong with that idea. First, the image of the self supporting small town is a fraud. To be self supporting in an age of mass consumption you need to be a city. To incentivize the designs you want you need to be a very intense city.
Some of you know Coral Gables as it was 50 years ago - a very nice small city designed by George Merrick in the roaring twenties. It had a downtown core with one and two story shops. There were apartments in key areas. And there was a small sea of single family surrounding the downtown.
I would ask you to go look at what new urbanism is doing there now. Reality checking is the best way to foresee unintended consequences of nice sounding ideas.
In and around old Coral Gables they are offering incentives for mixed use. To be incentives they have to offer more density and intensity and building heights than exists or would otherwise be allowed. Great blobs of mixed use have popped up around the old downtown core. Carol’s Jewelers is closing and the old downtown is sad and the blobs don’t remind you of any friendly small town or of old Coral Gables.
Then look at downtown Ft. Lauderdale where new urbanism worked. New urbanism works in big city urban centers, They wanted to be more urban. They did not want to be a suburb or a small town. They planned for mixed use, tall buildings and higher intensity. They got it and they got a real working city.
"New urbanism" works if you want to be big city urban. It is a monster if you don’t want to be like that.
New urbanism, mixed use and all the clichés about smart development have allowed for a great confusion on the issue of sprawl. That confusion needs to be understood and set aside.
Good land use design within the urban boundary is a good thing, but it is not a substitute for a strong urban boundary.
You shouldn’t put all the stores and jobs in Jensen Beach and all the people in South County. But simply mixing uses does nothing to solve the major problems of sprawl. Nor is it a necessary element for all neighborhoods within the urban boundary,
Because we have the automobile, whether we like it or not, walk-in traffic will not support a small business. Can you imagine a convenience store succeeding within Piper’s Landing? Or a hardware store making it out at the end of Sewell’s Point? Does anyone really believe that putting a convenience store at the north end of Map road would reduce Palm City traffic?
To have an urban core that works you need a certain amount of people within a certain radius. Just plunking down jelly amongst the peanut butter doesn’t work. Intensifying peaceful single family neighborhoods so that they are unrecognizable does not bring about a small town feeling.
We can’t solve urban sprawl by design tricks.
That brings us to what urban sprawl is really about.
It is about biting off more than taxpayers can chew.
It is about sprawling out beyond where taxpayers can provide services.
It is about planning to let everything happen everywhere all at once.
It’s about letting the horses out of the barn door and having no idea where they are headed.
The real problem of sprawl is when your growth plan SPRAWLS all over the place. It really doesn’t matter much if it’s sprawling peanut butter or sprawling peanut butter and jelly.
It really doesn’t matter if you allow 1 acre lots all over the rural area or you require them to be concentrated in new cities or you put them in Valliere like clusters of two acre lots.
You have to have some idea where and when growth is going to happen or you can’t plan for it.
To know how big an area to plan for, you need to know how many people are coming.
Current University of Florida estimates show Martin County growing at 600 units a year for the next 30 years. At a low density of 2 units per acre that would require 600 units or 300 acres a year, or 9000 units and 4500 acres in our 15 year planning timeframe or 60,000 units and 30,000 acres in 100 years.
And how many acres do we have?
Inside the urban boundary we have about 65,000 acres. Outside the urban boundary we have 195,000 acres.
So if we declare a free for all outside the urban boundary where clusters and new cities can pop up when anyone thinks it’s a nice idea, we’ve got a huge area to put those units in.
As a consequence we have a huge are to provide urban services.
We could put our growth inside the urban boundary. There is room for it under the current land use. Wherever it went within the existing boundary there would be sewer and water and schools and libraries and grocery stores nearby.
Or we could put the growth outside the urban boundary where there are no urban services and there aren’t supposed to be any urban services. And it could pop up anywhere in the 195,000 acres.
Obviously that makes it impossible to plan for those services or to coordinate them in any way with existing services.
If you don’t plan for what something’s going to cost, you won’t be able to pay for it.
There are several answers as to how to pay for starting from scratch to build a set of urban services when you sprawl outside the boundary of existing service delivery.
Fallacy: The developer will pay impact fees which will cover the cost of new urban services.
Impact fees are calculated based on development happening within the existing urban service district where existing facilities can be used and expanded. It’s much cheaper that way than starting new. If the developer pays impact fees there will be a huge shortfall that the existing taxpayers and ratepayers will have to pick up.
Fallacy: The developer will build all the needed facilities.
First, that never works. The developer cannot afford to build all the needed facilities up front. He may build a sewer and water plant that falls apart when the county takes it over ten years later and he may donate a site for an elementary school. Practically and historical the developer never builds all the facilities needed for his new cluster or his new town. But second, suppose he does build a fire station and supply fire engines and hoses and a dalmation puppy, you’ve still got a problem. You’ve got operating cost. The county just estimated that closing a single fire station would save $1.2 million dollars a year. So the taxpayers in town have got to pay for firemen and upkeep and feeding the dog when the station hardly has any fire calls at all.
Cities and towns and suburban areas work because they have enough people close enough together to share the cost of building and operating some very expensive services. Being close together makes it possible to get real economies of scale in:
- the length of the sewer lines
- the distance the school bus has to go
- and the economy of scale that comes from having a busy fire station that covers 10,000 homes instead of a fully staffed station with 1000 homes and one call a week
- the backup that can be provided by having a number of facilities in the same area
Rural areas work because they don’t have urban services. When rural areas get smaller lots, commercial development and new towns, they have to have urban services.
And you have to pay for them.
The problem is you really can’t make the pie higher. Resources are limited. When we talk about taking a business approach to issues we’re talking about how to manage limited resources in the most effective and efficient way.
Putting development inside the urban service district where facilities exist and appropriate expansion is planned is a good business approach.
Opening up the rural area to various kinds of urban development means you don’t have the least idea where the next cluster will pop up. So you can’t plan ahead. You have to start everything from scratch and expensive capital facilities will use only part of their capacity. There is no back up anywhere near.
Let me draw you a very simple picture of what it’s like to plan for growth within an urban boundary versus trying to plan without a strong boundary.
Let’s use fire stations as an example. They need to be staffed 24 hrs a day. They need to be within 2 or 3 miles of the fire.
Look at an urban service district that’s ten miles by ten miles. That’s 100 sections of land or 64,000 acres – just about the size of Martin County’s combined urban service districts. With four fire stations the stations are within 2 or 3 miles of every home. You’ve got everybody covered. If there are two fires at once you have back up close by. We’ve got 143,000 people in our urban service districts today. That translates to 56,000 housing units. So each fire station in this picture can cover 14,000 home. Because of rivers and railroad tracks and other stuff it’s not always so simple, but this is a fair approximation of how the area covered affects service needs.
Now let’s look at the rural area outside the urban boundary. Twenty miles by twenty miles comes to about 250,000 acres which is a little bigger than Martin County’s rural area. Suppose we encourage 2 acre lot clusters and gas stations and little towns and big towns to locate anywhere in that area. If we plan ahead for what we will allow to happen we will need 16 fire stations. If we simply wait and react to whatever happens we will need 16 fire stations to cover the whole area as clusters pop up unpredictably all over everywhere.
That’s what biting off more than you can chew is about.
It’s not just a planning nightmare if you don’t know what is going to happen and where it is going to happen out there. It’s a fiscal disaster. Suppose in the next 15 years ALL of the expected growth goes outside the boundary. That’s not likely, but just suppose it, as a worst case. That puts 9000 units spread like peanut butter or scattered around like peanut butter and jelly with 16 fire stations covering them – about 500 house per fire station.
Who pays?
You pay. Taxpayers pay.
Couldn’t you just put one fire station out there? Yes – if you limited development to a three mile area, but the rural area we’re looking at is twenty miles by twenty miles.
Notice that even if you put all of the next 15 years of growth into one town with one fire engine, at the end of 15 years the station would cover only 9000 homes while the stations inside the urban boundary were almost twice as efficient.
And when we talk about weakening Martin County’s strict urban boundary we’re not talking about just one new town, we’re talking about clustering two acre lots all over and allowing six new commercial centers spread out all over and allowing who knows what or why in the realm of new towns.
Because we are so concerned about our quality of life and our beautiful water and wilderness, we have perhaps failed to emphasize the inescapable fact that fiscal resources are limited. There is no free lunch. Extorting enough from developers to pay the cost of development is not legal in Florida and not practical anywhere.
Right now, Florida’s finances are in big trouble. Schools are in big trouble. They are taking cuts they can ill afford. We are failing to invest in our future because there is not enough money to go around.
All around Florida local governments blew the windfall from growth and did not calculate the cost of operating and paying for it.
Martin county has suffered from the fiscal unreality of commissioners who treat taxpayer dollars like play money to build aquatic complexes and monuments to themselves. We have suffered less in foreclosures and dead shopping centers because of our urban boundary.
It would be a tragic mistake to weaken the urban boundary when we had just proved it worked so well.
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