Robert Pirani
Director-- Environmental Projects
Regional Plan Association
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At the 1990 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the residents of this planet officially embarked on a new era of conservation practices. The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, agreed to by almost all the nations of the world, declared that "environmental protection shall constitute an integral part of the development process and cannot be considered in isolation.1 Economic prosperity must be pursued not for the benefits of the earth's present residents alone, but in a manner that leaves for future generations undiminished natural resources and limited financial obligations.
This new attitude is striking a responsive chord in public and private leaders throughout the United States. Most people recognize that the attitude that one must somehow choose between the building the economy or preserving the environment is a non-starter; people, quite rightly, want to do both, and we need to create and implement government policies and private business practices that strive to achieve both.
Learning how to create sustainable businesses that respond to a changing economy, provide housing and jobs for a growing world population, and meet other social needs without degrading environmental resources is a great challenge. But the payoff is not just reflected in meeting conservation goals. How we create and maintain environmental quality has profound implications for the prosperity of individuals, businesses and communities.
Preventing pollution costs society far less then end-of-the-pipe treatment measures or cleaning up environmental damage after it occurs. One clear example are the efforts of New York City and upstate communities to protect the city's drinking water through a program of land acquisition, land use regulations, and investments in sewage treatment plants. This partnership effort, which will cost about one and a half billion dollars over ten years, will enable the city to avoid spend four to six billion dollars to build the world's largest water filtration system and $500 million a year to operate it once it is built. As a result of this prevention-oriented strategy, increases in water rates for New York City consumers will be about a tenth of what they might have been.2 And just as important, the investments in pollution prevention will provide multiple benefits far beyond the City's water supply, including new protected parks and open spaces, improved water quality for upstate residents, fish and wildlife, and improved development opportunities in the older hamlet centers that will be served by the sewage treatment plants.
Investments in resource efficiency -- like energy-saving insulation, a double-sided copier, or water-saving appliances -- can cut the long-term costs of running a business or home. They also help protect the environment, first by reducing the environmental degradation caused by producing the energy or delivering raw materials in the first place, and then by reducing the amount of waste that must be disposed. Regional Plan Association studies have shown that meeting current state goals to reduce the production of solid waste in the Tri-State New York/New Jersey/Connecticut metropolitan area (for example, New Jersey is seeking "no net increase" of waste production) equals a 3.7 million ton per year decrease in the production of waste by the year 2015. This is worth about $375 million a year in avoided solid waste disposal costs for residents, municipalities and businesses. The environmental benefits, measured in dollars on a per ton basis, is worth about three times that of the region's recycling programs.3
Investments in environmental quality are also an important way to attract people and new investments. Technological changes that allowed businesses and people to locate anywhere means that many more people can choose where they live and work. Increasingly that choice will depend on environmental quality and access to green open spaces. A recent survey by Regional Plan Association found that 43 percent of the residents of the Tri-State Region who consider lack of greenery and open space a big problem in their community are also dissatisfied with their quality of life -- a correlation equal only to people's feeling about a sense of community and crime.4
A key way to translate these concepts of sustainability into more traditional community planning concerns is through open space conservation and land use planning. Land is the common denominator for many aspects of our economy and our environment. Some aspects of our economy, like farming and recreation-based tourism, are obviously dependent on landscape resources. Our physical well-being depends on affordable delivery of clean air and water, resources delivered in part from taking care of the land. Perhaps most critically, how and where we locate people and jobs on the land determines how much land we consume and how much energy we use to transport goods and people.
Consider the following inter-related principles as a starting point for creating land use policies that will help us build sustainable communities:
The most striking and perhaps most easily understood aspect of a sustainable land use policy is the recognition that land and the natural resources associated with it are finite resources. Will Rogers said it best: "They ain't making any more of it."
Sustainability in land use begins with the protection of those open spaces that are "virgin resources": those places that incorporate landscape values, like old-growth forests and unusual habitat, that cannot be replicated, even in a time frame measured in human generations. To provide just one example, the timber rattlesnake, a state-listed endangered species in New Jersey, breeds in ancestral den sites that have been continuously occupied for five to eight thousand years. Because each mature snake strongly imprints on a specific den site, destruction of the den means the destruction of the ability of the snake to reproduce at all.5 The loss of a piece of our biological diversity -- and one that so strongly symbolizes untamed wilderness -- leaves future generations with an impoverished biota and a world considerably less interesting then the one we now know.
The conversion of forests, wetlands, and fields to homes and businesses has both the direct impact of physically removing habitats as well as the more subtle effect of fragmenting the natural habitat that remains into smaller, disconnected pieces.6 The developing sciences of conservation biology and landscape ecology are creating important tools for measuring the rarity or abundance of various habitat types and for understanding the relevance of size and connectivity between habitats.7 Research endeavors like the Natural Heritage Program have catalogued and ranked the rarity and abundance of certain species and ecosystems and provided a systematic way to communicate that information to landowners and town officials.
However, much of the baseline information on the natural world, whether it is the diversity and complexity of ecological communities or the behavior of individual species, is still missing.8 Perhaps just as important, there is a significant gap between the knowledge that does exist and those who are responsible for managing land in both the public and private sector. We need to do a better job of translating these ecological concepts into land use policies at the site, municipal, and regional scale.
At the same time a sustainable community preserves pristine landscapes, it must consider ways in which it can more efficiently use land to meet human needs. Here in the Tri-State Region, unfortunately, we are becoming less and less efficient in how we use land -- using twice the amount of land for homes, businesses, roads, and shops per person than we did just thirty years ago.9 This is true largely because people and jobs have been leaving our existing cities for low-density suburbs. Between 1970 and 1990, the 12 traditional urban centers of the region lost 30,000 private sector jobs while the region added a million new jobs elsewhere. And while the region added 100,000 more people as a whole, these twelve centers lost 750,000 in population.10
This trend has four critically important and unsustainable aspects: First, we are consuming open space at a prodigious rate, paving more land in the past thirty years then we had in the previous 300; second, this dispersed pattern of growth literally drives us to consume extraordinary amounts of non-energy and produce health-threatening air pollution by forcing people to use their automobiles for every trip; third, as a society we waste limited capital dollars on expensive investments in new infrastructure far from existing schools, roads, and sewage treatment plants; And, finally, we are marginalizing poorer people in our inner cities -- wasting their potential and sapping strength from social service providers -- by physically separating these communities from the places where new jobs are being created.
Our auto-oriented transportation system is the biggest user of energy and non-renewable fossil fuels in today's economy. Moreover, increased use of automobiles trucks and buses is also the key reason why the Tri-State region continues to fail to meet Federal clean air guidelines. Cars, trucks, and buses account for approximately 90 percent of the carbon monoxide and 50 percent of the region's ozone pollution.11 This poor air quality is a serious threat to health. The young, the old, people who suffer from allergies and more severe respiratory ailments, and those who exercise outdoors are most severely at risk.12 New standards for the discharges of air pollutants and technological advances like the catalytic converters, and aggressive measures to inspect and maintain our auto fleets, have improved air quality in the region, but these benefits have been considerably offset by the increase in vehicle miles traveled. While each tailpipe may be cleaner, there are more of them, driving longer distances.
The de-centering of homes and jobs has meant that people are driving more than ever. The number of vehicle miles traveled in the Tri-state Region grew by 60 percent from 1970 to 1990.13 While this is partly due to the convenience, comfort, and utility that cars offer, the impetus toward an automobile-centered economy and lifestyle has also been driven by changes in land use. By trading in our cities for suburban subdivisions and office parks, the Region's residents have far fewer choices when it comes to how they get to work, school, or leisure time pursuits. The automobile is in many cases the only way for people to get around.
We need to re-think our auto-first development pattern. Concentrating development, and especially jobs, in existing transit hubs can be a powerful way to provide people a choice about whether or not they have to use their car to get to their work, school, or shopping.
Building in urban areas can also save money. Urban areas contain the bulk of our existing fixed capital investments in roads, sewers, schools and other infrastructure. Rural areas often lack such infrastructure, which often must be built at great public expense. That is why a Rutgers University study estimated that a centers-oriented development strategy would help save New Jersey municipalities and school districts an estimated $400 million in tax dollars a year as compared to current sprawl oriented development.14 Becoming more efficient when undeveloped land is converted toward homes and businesses will also provide savings. For example, with compact development patterns, fewer miles of roads and utilities have to be built and school districts can more efficiently operate at full capacity. Savings of around 25 percent in road construction and maintenance and 15 percent in utilities, and smaller savings in public education, offer potentially large savings overall in service costs.15
Perhaps, most importantly, center- and transit-oriented development is also a way to bring many of the residents left behind by the modern economy, our urban poor, into the mainstream. New jobs have increasingly been inaccessible to inner-city, minority communities. Between 1970 and 1990, there was only a 2 percent increase in jobs in the region's core urban counties, where one in five residents was living in poverty. In contrast, job growth in the suburban ring, where in 20 people are below the poverty line, was 36 percent.16 Many of these poor do not have access to an automobile: 40 percent of the residents of Newark, for example, do not own a car. By creating jobs in existing centers, or at least building them in locations that can be reached by mass-transit, we can enable people the opportunity to get to a job.
Reversing or even slowing the suburbanizing development patterns of post-World War II America is a tall order. State and metropolitan plans that deal comprehensively with managing growth in suburbs and cities, like New Jersey's State Plan for Development and Redevelopment, can provide the right framework. To be effective, however, these plans need to have real carrots and sticks in order to affect change at all levels of government.
A more direct way to increase our efficiency in using land is begin recycling the many acres of abandoned or underutilized land in our cities and older suburbs. The lack of re-investment and re-development in urban centers has left behind tens of thousands of acres of once-built-on and now empty urban land.17
These former industrial areas -- "brownfields" as opposed to "greenfields" --are often prime development candidates and are located in close proximity to major transportation lanes and centers of commercial and industrial activity.
As a result of their former use, some of these sites have been contaminated to some degree by toxic chemicals. In certain cases, these sites may pose a threat to the people who live nearby. Many of these sites have no or limited contamination problems. These sites are simply eyesores that undercut the viability of urban communities, limiting their quality of life and property values.
In order for such sites to be reused, new owners must clean them to public health standards set by state and federal government. But regardless of the actual degree of cleanup required, liability and uncertainty plague any developer bold enough to even take an interest in a "brownfield" site. For older sites, there is often no way of knowing what may lie beneath the surface of the soil. Health standards may change as technology and medical science advance. And since many of the sites have been only cursorily examined, there's always the possibility that further contamination will turn up once remediation is already under way.
Adapting government programs to limit the uncertainty and potential liability of clean-up, especially when the current owner is not the party responsible for the contamination in the first place, has prove to be an effective way to improve our "recycling rate" for these derelict properties.18
The value of conserving open space cannot be measured in acreage alone. One important yardstick is the maintenance and improvement of the ecosystems that are located there. Whether it is a wetland providing storage for floodwaters, a green stream bank intercepting stormwater sediment, a hedgerow providing shelter to wildlife, or a shady street tree keeping city streets cool and free from soot, healthy vegetation and hydrologic systems are key reasons we are concerned about open space conservation.
In many cases, the physical and biological functioning of this green "infrastructure" can provide many of the same services as traditional "gray" infrastructure at a fraction of the cost. These services are provided at a fraction of the cost of the engineering that would be required, and is required, when these systems are mismanaged, disrupted, or simply paved over. New York City's "Bluebelt" project on southern Staten Island is one example of a creative public investment strategy. By constructing wetlands and otherwise improving the ability of island's natural drainage network to handle the rainwater that pours off city streets, New York City has greatly reduced the number of expensive storm sewers it will have to build and has provided wildlife habitat and public open space. Another example is the restoration of New York City's Jamaica Bay estuary, where an innovative water quality program is integrating planned treatment system upgrades and the protection and restoration of natural systems and habitat basin-wide. The results will be improved wildlife and fisheries habitat, new recreational opportunities, and mandated water quality improvements at less than half of the costs of traditional water quality and wildlife management programs.
One way of maintaining the services of green open space is to pave fewer acres for the same amount of homes and businesses, clustering new construction and building at higher densities in "open space subdivisions." But it also means learning how to leave a smaller ecological footprint by locating development in the most suitable areas and by using management practices and performance standards that minimize the impact of development on natural processes. Many planing guidebooks have focused on ways of adapting traditional tools of community planners, zoning, subdivision approval, and site plan review in ways to protect open space, rather then recreating look-alike suburbs.19
We can also achieve many of these benefits by restoring ecological functions to areas where such values have been degraded. Greening cities by planting and managing trees in streets, parks, and backyards can dramatically improve the environmental surroundings of urbanites. Scientists at the United States Forest Service have shown how street trees can reduce a city's peak summertime temperatures by 3 to 5 degrees, cutting the size of air conditioning bills and peak electricity demand and significantly reducing the formation of health-threatening, low altitude ozone pollution.20 Stream and wetland restoration techniques recreate habitat and often clean water more effectively and more cheaply than large-scale engineering solutions such as treatment plants.
A sustainable community is also an affordable community -- one that does not simply buy environmental quality for today and then pass along a financial obligation to pay for it to future generations. While many environmental expenditures, like the purchase of land or planting trees, are lasting capital investments that logically should paid in part by future beneficiaries, many other costs, such as the costs of managing land or treating waste are essentially operations and maintenance costs; costs that each generation should bear on its own.
Many of the principles and policies discussed will save money over the long-term. By re-investing in cities and their people, relying more on mass-transit, using the power of green infrastructure, and being more efficient when we do build, we will lower our costs in the long run as well as achieve some conservation goals we can enjoy right now.
But our current fiscal climate means that we also need to be more creative in our approach to financing conservation. One way is to build partnerships with private landowners, businesses, and community groups to provide and manage open spaces without tax dollars. Whether helping farmers maintain working green landscapes of croplands and forests, using transfer of development rights programs, or creating of park improvement districts that tax neighbors of parks on the property values created from nearby protected open space, linking private-sector activity and investments to public resources can help maintain open space at an affordable cost.
Ultimately, we may also need to recalibrate our tax and other financial policies to ensure that we are not inadvertently promoting the consumption of land by sending the wrong signals to businesses, homeowners, and developers. Our patterns of open space consumption have been fueled by Federal and state investments in highways and sewers far from existing towns, as well as by the artificially low cost of gasoline and driving. They have also been driven by a recurring cycle of "fiscal zoning": as once-rural communities are developed, property taxes rise to meet demands for services. Local elected officials revise their land use codes to bring in commercial uses that pay taxes without requiring services while discouraging smaller lot, higher density housing, whose property taxes are unlikely to pay for the services they require. As a result, affordable housing gets pushed even farther out into the undeveloped countryside.
Restructuring property tax and other fiscal policies so as to raise the tax burden on activities damaging to productivity (such as land clearing and traffic congestion) and lowering the tax burden on essential activities (i.e., employment and investment in center cities, restoration of ecological functions) has been little explored to date and merit serious investigation. At the regional level, green fee policies could translate into competitive advantages in the costs of doing business and the quality of life.21
Sustainability is a concept and a process, and not a set of concrete recommendations. It is a goal to be achieved step by step. The principles and policies discussed in this paper are offered in the hopes that they can be helpful guideposts.
But sustainability is also a promise. And an important one for those who care about the future. Sustainability promises us that if we develop our towns and cities in the right way, they will be efficient and pleasant places to live and work forever. It is a promise that if we manage habitat, drinking water watersheds, farms, and woodlots in the right manner, we can expect to enjoy the fruits of the land forever. And it is a promise that if we build our economy correctly, then we can be both prosperous and have a clean and healthy planet forever.
1 United Nations, Agenda 21: The United Nations Programme of Action from Rio, United Nations Publication # E.93.1.11, June 1992
2 Regional Plan Association, The Quality of Life Polls, 1995.
3 The 12 centers are Trenton, New Brunswick, Newark, and Jersey City, NJ; New Haven, Bridgeport, and Stamford, CT; New York, White Plains, Poughkeepsie, Hicksville, and Mineola, NY. Population data from the US Census. Employment data from the State Departments of Labor.
4 See New Jersey Office of State Planning, Impact Assessment of the New Jersey Interim State Development and Redevelopment Plan. Report II: Research Findings. Trenton, NJ. 1992. and Burchell and Listoskin, Land, Infrastructure, Housing Costs and Fiscal Impacts Associated with Growth: The Literature on the Impacts of Sprawl versus Managed Growth. 1995.
5 Estimate based on extrapolating RPA's survey of brownfield sites: Linda P. Morgan, et al, Union County Model Site Redevelopment Project: Final Report, Regional Plan Association/New Jersey, June 1994.
6 See for example, Staff Report to the New York State Joint Legislative Commission on Toxic Substances and Hazardous Wastes, The Voluntary Cleanup of New York's Contaminated Property: Barriers and Incentives, October 1994, and Linda P. Morgan, et al, Union County Model Site Redevelopment Project: Final Report, Regional Plan Association/New Jersey, June 1994
7 Robert D. Yaro, et al, Dealing with Change in the Connecticut River Valley: A Design Manual for Conservation and Development, Center For Rural Massachusetts, 1988; Randall Arendt, et al, Rural by Design, Natural Lands Trust, 1994; Randall Arendt, Designing Open Space Subdivisions, Natural Lands Trust, 1994; and John Feingold, Robert Pirani and Graham Trelstad, Managing Watersheds: Combining Watershed Protection and Community Planning, Regional Plan Association and New York City Department of Environmental Protection , (Forthcoming, 1996).
8 In Green Fees: How a Tax Shift Can Work for the Environment and Economy, Robert Repetto et al. argue that such a corrective change could generate an annual savings of more than $50 billion nationally. (Washington: World Resources Institute, 1992.)
9 According to Regional Plan Association estimates and the United States Census. In 1965, there was less than .08 acre of urban land for every person in the Region. Today, there is roughly .17 acres per person.
10 The 12 centers are Trenton, New Brunswick, Newark, and Jersey City, NJ; New Haven, Bridgeport, and Stamford, CT; New York, White Plains, Poughkeepsie, Hicksville, and Mineola, NY. Population data from the US Census. Employment data from the State Departments of Labor.
11 US EPA 1992 Transportation and Air Quality Planning Guidelines, EPA 420/R-92-001, July 1992, p,. 4; Center for Resource Economics, Annual Review of the US EPA, Island Press, May 193, p. 92. (from Tri State Transportation Campaign, Citizens Action Plan, December 1993)
12 RPA, The Health Affects of Ozone, Project Clean Air N. 3, April 1990.
13 New York Metropolitan Transportation Coordinating Council.
14 "Impact Assessment of the New Jersey Interim State Development and Redevelopment Plan: Executive Summary," prepared by Rutgers University Center for Urban Policy Research for the New Jersey Office of State Planning, February, 1992.
15 See New Jersey Office of State Planning, Impact Assessment of the New Jersey Interim State Development and Redevelopment Plan. Report II: Research Findings. Trenton, NJ. 1992. and Burchell and Listoskin, Land, Infrastructure, Housing Costs and Fiscal Impacts Associated with Growth: The Literature on the Impacts of Sprawl versus Managed Growth. 1995.
16 RPA defines the urban core of the Region as New York City, Essex, Hudson, and Union Counties. Data is from the Us Census and the State Departments of Labor.
17 Estimate based on extrapolating RPA's survey of brownfield sites: Linda P. Morgan, et al, Union County Model Site Redevelopment Project: Final Report, Regional Plan Association/New Jersey, June 1994.
18 See for example, Staff Report to the New York State Joint Legislative Commission on Toxic Substances and Hazardous Wastes, The Voluntary Cleanup of New York's Contaminated Property: Barriers and Incentives, October 1994, and Linda P. Morgan, et al, Union County Model Site Redevelopment Project: Final Report, Regional Plan Association/New Jersey, June 1994
19 Robert D. Yaro, et al, Dealing with Change in the Connecticut River Valley: A Design Manual for Conservation and Development, Center For Rural Massachusetts, 1988; Randall Arendt, et al, Rural by Design, Natural Lands Trust, 1994; Randall Arendt, Designing Open Space Subdivisions, Natural Lands Trust, 1994; and John Feingold, Robert Pirani and Graham Trelstad, Managing Watersheds: Combining Watershed Protection and Community Planning, Regional Plan Association and New York City Department of Environmental Protection , (Forthcoming, 1996).
20 Robert D. Yaro, et al, Dealing with Change in the Connecticut River Valley: A Design Manual for Conservation and Development, Center For Rural Massachusetts, 1988; Randall Arendt, et al, Rural by Design, Natural Lands Trust, 1994; Randall Arendt, Designing Open Space Subdivisions, Natural Lands Trust, 1994; and John Feingold, Robert Pirani and Graham Trelstad, Managing Watersheds: Combining Watershed Protection and Community Planning, Regional Plan Association and New York City Department of Environmental Protection , (Forthcoming, 1996).
21 Urban Forests, August/September, 1993; E. Gregory McPherson, David Nowak, and Rowan Rowntree, Chicago's Urban Forest Ecosystem: Results of the Chicago Urban Forest Climate Project, USDA Forest Service General Technical Report NE-186
22. In Green Fees: How a Tax Shift Can Work for the Environment and Economy, Robert Repetto et al. argue that such a corrective change could generate an annual savings of more than $50 billion nationally. (Washington: World Resources Institute, 1992.)
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