Kaid Benfield's Blog: U.S. Law and Policy

That sound you just heard was environmental interests bumping heads, or the tale of the Waynesville Best Buy parking lot

2008-06-02T12:54:10Z

Waynesville, North Carolina is a sleepy southern town about 30 miles or so from where I grew up. It's where I got my first traffic ticket, among other things.

You know smart growth is catching on when a place like Waynesville (population 10,000) is trying to do the right thing. They have a zoning ordinance requiring that commercial enterprises place their parking lots behind rather than in front of their buildings, to create a more walkable streetscape. This not only creates a more cohesive, traditional community character; it also makes it easier for a retail customer of one store to walk to a second store on the same trip, or to walk from the doctor's office to the church, or whatever. Each walking trip saves a driving trip and, over time, they add up.

This is not, of course, how big-box stores usually do things, which is why a place like Waynesville needs an ordinance to require them to. To his credit, Waynesville mayor Gavin Brown insisted on compliance when the big retailer Best Buy came to town. As long as he could.

The problem, it turns out, was that the part of the lot close to the street was a contaminated brownfield. Best Buy's developer could afford the level of remediation required to put a parking lot on that part of the site, but it couldn't afford the higher level required if the site was going to be occupied by a structure with people working in it all day. So the city eventually granted a waiver.

Here's part of what the story in the local paper, the Smoky Mountain News, said about the issue:

"What Brown didn’t know then, though, was that Cedarwood had identified a hotspot of tolulene deposits on the Best Buy parcel, left over from the days when the site was the Dayco rubber parts factory. Conforming to the land-use standards would mean the main structure — rather than the parking lot — would sit on top of the tolulene. In that case, major environmental mitigation efforts would have to be taken, doubling the cost of construction and making it too prohibitive for Best Buy to come to Waynesville . . .
"A letter from Best Buy to the town board stated that the project would be in 'serious jeopardy' if the development was made to comply with the town’s land-use plan. Losing it wouldn’t be worth it, Brown says. The company will employ about 65 people with mid-level jobs and rake in up to $25 million in sales."

You can read the whole story here.

I don't really blame the town for caving in. These are not small numbers in a place the size of Waynesville. And it's better for the environment to have the store located on a redevelopment site within the town's jurisdictional limits - a lot better - than plopped down on prime farmland outside of town. But it's a shame they couldn't do it right.

Rethinking environmental impacts to manage growth

2008-05-13T12:00:51Z

When faced with a situation where rapid growth is occurring, such as I discussed yesterday, the best thing to do environmentally is to manage and shape it so that a good quality of life is maintained with the least environmental harm. This is fundamentally about per capita, or per household, thinking: how can we shape the new development so that it has the least impact per increment of growth?

This is the essence of smart growth. But it also represents a fairly radical departure from traditional environmental thinking (and much of environmental law), which focuses our attention not on per capita impacts but on particular pieces of land, parcel-by-parcel.

There are dramatic differences in the results of the two methods of thinking. Consider the two maps of the San Francisco Bay Area, below. The one on the left shows carbon dioxide emissions from cars, on a per-acre basis. The deeper the red, the greater the emissions. The one on the right shows the same emissions on a per-household basis:

The maps are practically opposite images of one another. Someone trying to plan how new development should be located, if not thinking in per capita terms, might look only at the map on the left, and conclude that development should avoid the more densely populated portions of the region, because of higher emissions there. The planner might also conclude that new development should be spread out, to avoid mimicking the apparent effect of density.

But it would be the worst thing to do. The map on the right shows that the densely populated areas actually have lower CO2 emission rates than the outlying areas, when considered on a per-household basis. Overall CO2 emissions in the atmosphere will be minimized if new development, to the greatest extent possible, locates within and mimics the more heavily settled areas. This is because people in denser, more central locations drive less.

You can make the same sorts of comparisons for other environmental media. Stormwater runoff, for example, is exacerbated by pavement, rooftops, and other impervious surfaces. Compare the two maps of Seattle below, which show per-acre impervious surface on the left, and per-capita impervious surface on the right. Again, the deeper the color, the greater the imperviousness:

Remember, the choice is not between growing and not growing. The choice is only about how and where. And what the maps show is that per-person incremental impacts of growth are minimized by density and central locations. In other words, for a given amount of growth, the way to reduce overall impervious surface in the larger watershed is to concentrate it in as few places as possible and keep the overall development footprint of the region as small as possible. The result will be increased per-acre runoff in some parts of the watershed, but it will also mean less runoff in the watershed as a whole. This is mostly because more compact neighborhoods require less pavement - fewer road miles and parking lots - to serve them, on a per-unit basis. For more on how compact, centrally located development can benefit watersheds compared to sprawl, see EPA's terrific research on the subject.

The CO2 maps of San Francisco come from NRDC’s longtime collaborator, the Center for Neighborhood Technology. And the impervious surface maps of Seattle come from another longtime collaborator, Criterion Planners.

How much the US will grow, and where: numbers and a map

2008-05-12T12:50:51Z

The housing market may be in a slump right now - in part because we've been building too much sprawl - but over the next 25 years or so the US is going to experience rapid population growth, and the construction and development to go with it. I've mentioned before the work of Chris (Arthur C.) Nelson of Virginia Tech, perhaps the country's leading researcher on building trends projected into the future.

Chris projects the following changes between 2005 and 2030, nationally:

Population growth: 70 million (roughly twice the current population of California, or the current population of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland combined)
Job growth: 40 million
New households: 32 million
New and replacement homes: 50 million (because buildings deteriorate, a portion of our current stock must be rebuilt or replaced each year)
New and replacement nonresidential space: 78 billion square feet

The growth will not be distributed evenly, which means that some regions will not experience its benefits while others will experience the benefits but will also have to bear a greater share of the burden. Consider the map below, which comes to us courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design and the America 2050 Initiative:

The map is delineated by county. The deeper the red color, the more rapidly a particular county is expected to experience population growth. The deepest red counties will double in population by 2050. The gray counties are projected to lose population, and the darker the gray the more rapid the loss is likely to be. The darkest gray areas will lose 10% or more of their current population.

How we accommodate this growth matters a great deal to the environment and to the maintenance of our quality of life. The areas in red need to get their act together. As I will discuss in a future post, this will require a new approach to environmental thinking - one that may not come naturally to regulatory agencies or even to groups like NRDC.

The country’s best smart growth project – the Atlanta Beltline

2008-03-14T18:09:53Z

I’m a bit fickle about this. At first I was sure the country's best example of smart growth was Atlantic Station, in Atlanta. Then I thought it was one of the iconic transit-oriented developments in the west, The Crossings in Silicon Valley or Orenco Station outside Portland. We featured all three of those in NRDC’s book of smart-growth successes. Then I was really, really sure it was Highlands’ Garden Village, in Denver. Exciting projects, each one.

But my heart has been stolen once again. My friends, the best smart growth project I have come across yet is the Atlanta Beltline, an ambitious 22-mile proposed loop around the city’s downtown that will incorporate state-of-the-art transit, new parks and trails, workforce housing, and lots of smart, green neighborhood development, all taking place in the city rather than sprawling out on the fringe. The project takes advantage of an abandoned rail corridor and parcels of other abandoned and/or deteriorated property ripe for redevelopment, and it enjoys the support of nearly all the city’s civic and business leaders.

The Beltline also faces some significant challenges, and I’ll get to those. But first let me tell you about it. In its current state, the corridor largely looks roughly, and I do mean roughly, like this:

That’s abandoned industrial property, scrub land, a neighborhood needing a lift and, this being Georgia, lots of kudzu.

The Beltline has a short but rich history. Amazingly, credit for the project’s inspiration is given to a master’s thesis written in 1999 by Ryan Gravel, at the time a student at Georgia Tech. Gravel sent copies to various influential Atlantans and began to advocate the Beltline concept in earnest. By 2003-2004, the project’s enthusiastic supporters included Mayor Shirley Franklin and former city council president Cathy Woolard, and the project was formally approved by the city council, board of education, and Fulton County Commission.

One particularly instrumental leadership role was taken by the Trust for Public Land (my favorite conservation group), which undertook a study of existing and potential park space around the Beltline, releasing the influential report The Beltline Emerald Necklace. (Let’s forgive the mixed-metaphor title, shall we?) A result is that the Beltline will create an interconnected system of 40 new and existing parks, adding over 1,200 acres of new green space for residents to use and enjoy.

The city’s detailed, comprehensive plan for the Atlanta Beltline includes the following:

Parks—over 1,200 acres of new or expanded parks, as well as improvements to over 700 acres of existing parks;
Trails—33 miles of continuous trails connecting 40 parks, including 11 miles connecting to parks not adjacent to the Beltline;
Transit—22-mile transit system (streetcars or light rail) connecting to the larger regional transit network, including the MARTA rail transit system;
Jobs—more than 30,000 permanent jobs and 48,000 year-long construction jobs;
Workforce housing—5,600 new workforce housing units;
Streets—new and renovated streets and intersections including 31 miles of new streetscapes connecting neighborhoods and parks to the Beltline;
Environmental remediation—cleanup of contaminated sites;
Neighborhood preservation—preservation of existing single-family neighborhoods;
Tax base—an estimated $20 billion increase in tax base over 25 years; and
Industrial base—preservation of viable light industry.

(More history here, and a frequently updated blog here.)

The challenge is assembling the necessary funding. The overall budget for public investment is $2.8 billion. But the city had been planning to raise a little less than a third of the total by issuing bonds that would be repaid from increased property tax revenue due to increased property values. But the problem is that such revenues usually go to schools. In this case, the school board approved the plan because they saw the investment as increasing revenues available to schools in the long run. But last month the Georgia Supreme Court agreed with a sole taxpayer that the financing scheme was unconstitutional. Because the implications of the court decision go beyond the Beltline and threaten many other initiatives around the state, city leaders are hopeful that a legislative remedy can be found. In any event, they are fully committed to the project and vow that, one way or another, they will find the money.

If they do, the citizens of Atlanta will be able to enjoy the country’s best smart growth project.

The kids are alright - Smart Growth America grabs a good one

2008-01-04T19:52:41Z

As you know, I've been sad to see my friend Don Chen leave Smart Growth America, the national coalition that Don and a handful of others including myself founded several years ago to promote sustainable development.

Fortunately, I can now report that this cloud has sprouted the most silver of linings. The most able Geoff Anderson, pictured on the far left, will be taking over as SGA's new president and executive director. In my opinion, there could be no better choice.

Geoff has headed up the Development, Community and Environment Division of the US Environmental Agency (aka "EPA's smart growth office") for most of the last decade, and he has been superb in navigating the tricky political waters of maintaining support for our issue in administrations not known for being innovative in promoting environmental proection, and he has also been a master at bringing together a diverse collection of interests (e.g., NRDC, the National Association of Realtors, and the Florida Department of Public Heath, to name just three) around a common purpose. Geoff's office has also funded some of the best research in the field and provided seed money for important initiatives like LEED for Neighborhood Development. He knows the field, knows the participants, and is one of the nicest guys on the planet.

Congratulations both to Geoff and SGA! Read the press release here.