Commentary: Cities Cannot Live On Growth Alone

NWA Media/Michael Woods Construction crews work early this year on the Cardinal apartment complex at Duncan Avenue and Center Street in Fayetteville as The Vue apartments can be seen in the distance to the right.

NWA Media/Michael Woods Construction crews work early this year on the Cardinal apartment complex at Duncan Avenue and Center Street in Fayetteville as The Vue apartments can be seen in the distance to the right.

Sunday, April 20, 2014

Several years ago, an extremely successful local developer made an offer to the Fayetteville City Council he figured they couldn't refuse. Four hundred trees, he announced, would be his gift to the city. I no longer remember exactly why he proffered what he considered a generous enticement, except that it had to do with tree issues in developments, where wooded areas were being leveled in order to plant subdivisions and apartments.

Our effort for tree preservation in Fayetteville at that time of rapid development was one of constant strife. Because I'd been a part of an organization, Friends For Fayetteville, that had formed to address growth impacts on our town, and was heading up our "NeighborWoods" project to get trees planted, I probably laughed out loud at the tree offer. He might as well have said he was gifting us with 400 kittens because, as we volunteers who were digging holes and watering over a hundred trees weekly in the summers realized, it was not plant material that was the issue. As with raising anything, whether children or kittens or trees or towns, it's the "raisin,' " the parenting, that's the hard and expensive part. I felt then, as I do now, that one must beware of those bearing gifts of seeming value.

In his analysis of what makes or breaks a town's ability to sustain itself physically and economically, Chuck Marohn, a civil engineer and land-use planner, spoke recently about city growth to an audience hosted by the Applied Sustainability Center at the University of Arkansas. Marohn's message to the gathering of city planners, engineers, finance managers, public administrators, students, etc., addressed what has happened to our towns since World War II.

Explaining that for thousands of years of civilization's trials and errors in urban building, people had, until recently, figured out human scale, layout, design, and a kind of sustainability of place. To illustrate, Marohn shared photos of his hometown in Minnesota from its early days of clapboard construction to a thriving main street lined with brick buildings. The problem, as he sees it, is the thriving city photo was taken in 1894, and today that same street is "an empty wasteland of parking lots and low-value, partially-abandoned buildings."

In recent decades, our cities have been experimenting socially and financially with "suburbanization," sprawling across the landscape through our use of automobiles and in accommodating motoring needs (parking lots, streets, highways, fueling locations, etc.). His general thesis was to point out the Ponzi scheme of growth on which we've been building our places, an unsustainable scheme that depends on new growth to shore up older growth's declining infrastructure, which requires more more growth as it too ages.

Marohn described growth phases. In the first phase, city risk is minimal because of state or federal subsidies (sewers, water, highways, etc.), and because private development invests in property and in its use (streets, buildings, utilities, houses, etc.). This early phase excites cities because such growth is seen as a tax base being created with minimal local public investment.

The second (parenting) phase arrives when infrastructure "improvements" become public after they are built out, and cities assume the care and feeding of these "free" kittens ... er ... streets, sewers, etc. "Cities routinely trade near-term advantages associated with new growth for long-term financial obligations associated with maintenance of infrastructure," and "[i]f cities are not raising enough revenue to repair and replace their infrastructure, the system cannot sustain itself," Marohn writes in his book, "Strong Towns." One is tempted to say, "Well, duh!" However, he reminds us this is "the American pattern of growth-based development," and he has numerous examples of how most towns are to some degree in this Ponzied predicament. "The first generation of suburbia we built on savings and investment, but we built the second -- and maintained the first -- using debt."

Marohn outlines other phases as well, but his recommended main strategy for towns is "placemaking."

"We need to wring more value out of our places and that is only going to happen if we understand how to create value in the first place," he wrote.

As I watch Fayetteville become Apartmentville, probably thanks to the Univesity of Arkansas' policies and techniques for increasing enrollment, I wonder how much more care and feeding costs our taxes can pay for this expansion. And how much is our town is getting -- or losing -- in return?

At some point we need to remind ourselves that growth feeding growth is the working philosophy of a cancer cell.

Commentary on 04/20/2014