Six States’ Growth, Hope and Despair

By Neal Peirce and Curtis Johnson

Our meadows, fields and forests are in peril. Houses are going up all over the place. Rich river bottom land is getting used up. We’re sacrificing two centuries of rural tradition for suburban speculation. Affluent people from “down country” come in and buy land and everyone’s assessment goes up. Even in poor towns, big houses are all that’s coming in. Property taxes are driving people to sell farms, cut more timber when they don’t want to. A chain convenience store opens on an open field beside the general store in town, which then goes out of business. The less traveled road is getting harder and harder to come by.

We gleaned those words from interviews with Vermonters and the sound track of films produced by the Orton Family Foundation. But parallel sentiments of near-despair are heard all across New England.

The more positive news: spirited efforts are underway to preserve New England townscapes, protect open countryside against sprawl, create more affordable housing.

There’s the Vermont Forum on Sprawl, a lead partner in Vermont’s Smart Growth Collaborative, an alliance of advocacy groups for better growth practices, historic preservation, affordable housing and downtown development. It keeps score on state government outlays (sewer, water, school and roads, for example), to see whether state actions help towns grow compactly and provide housing, or actually aid and abet sprawl. Meanwhile, Vermont’s Housing and Conservation Board works on affordable housing, land conservation and historic preservation in building sustainable communities.

Grow Smart Rhode Island, founded by the CEO of a local utility, is fighting hard to stop the onslaught of strip malls and big boxes in a state consuming land nine times as fast as its population grows. The group trains members of local councils, planning and zoning boards to manage growth more effectively. One major accomplishment: adoption of an historic preservation tax credit, which has stimulated development of old structures, many of them former mills, in such cities as Woonsocket, Central Falls and Providence.

In Massachusetts, Republican Gov. Mitt Romney appointed Doug Foy, a Democrat and articulate advocate of smart growth, to head a super-cabinet encompassing the departments of transportation, energy, the environment and housing. The idea: to get these agencies and state investments working in tandem for better growth – an echo of a development cabinet Gov. Michael Dukakis set up to support cities like Lowell in the ‘70s.

With its hyper-housing inflation, eastern Massachusetts faces some of America’s toughest obstacles to affordability and smart growth. Inventive legislation, giving towns extra school aid if they agree to create “overlay districts” for dense development and new housing in their downtowns, commercial and transit hub areas, is helping in a few – but not enough – communities. An active Bay State smart growth alliance, akin to Vermont’s, has been a strong advocate.

New Hampshire’s “Live Free or Die” and low-tax political culture opened the doors to decades of undistinguished suburban expansion, covering the state’s southern section, now impacting Concord and starting to push northward into the state’s lakes district. But vast tracts of land, especially in the north, have been protected through groups such as the Society for New Hampshire Forests.

Now New Hampshire Audubon is trying to get ahead of the familiar growth paradigm by helping towns in its path decide in advance how to shape and guide the growth to maintain their character and quality. An ally, the Concord-based Jordan Institute, has a planning tool kit for communities “to make sure there’s some functional ecosystem, recharged aquifers and green infrastructure, after the bulldozers are finished.”

Maine is witnessing dual phenomena – depopulation of its rural stretches, even while “the market is burning” along the state’s picturesque coastal corridor, where, in the words of Mark Lapping of University of Southern Maine, “People ‘from away’ come, buy, tear down, and put up huge mansions.” Native Mainers, in the process, must then commute from miles away to jobs along the coast.

Significant lands have been saved by the Nature Conservancy and Maine Coast Heritage Trust. The newest hope is intensive, town-by-town grassroots listening and engagement, to build support for land-conserving town plans with real teeth, inaugurated this year by GrowSmart Maine. Critical counsel is coming from the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Programs.

Connecticut has severe growth problems; as Hartford architect and planner Patrick Pinnell put it: “Local fragmentation and development causes constant disputes, and outrage at the sheer damned ugliness of the sprawl. I think the Connecticut Department of Transportation would gladly slice 64 feet off every town green in the state to improve the traffic ‘throughput.’” As for affordable housing, a foundation executive told us: “Racism underlies much of the opposition.”

The better news: Connecticut’s faith community is becoming engaged in the growth and equity issues; the Catholic Archdiocese of Hartford commissioned Minnesota demographer Myron Orfield’s 2003 study, “CT Metropatterns.” And a new 1,000 Friends of Connecticut organization, focused on growth issues with a special eye on the ties to transportation, has just been formed.

[Originally published January 2006]

Photo Credit:

ISC

Idyllic Vermont countryside.