HomeMy WebLinkAboutOther (2)EAST RURAL AREA PROPERTY OWNERS COMMITTEE
~,,. PROPOSED CONSERVATION SUBDIVISION TIER STRUCTURE
TIER ONE -EXISTING SEMINOLE COUNTY ZONING
A-10 1 DU / 10 10 NA 10
Acres
A-5 1 DU / 5 5 NA 5
Acres
A-3 1 DU / 3 3 NA 3
Acres
Lakefront 5 DU / NA NA 0.2 8712
Hamlet Acre
TIER TWO -CONSERVATION SUBDIVISION
Rural 1 DU / 20 50% 0.425 18513
Conservation I Acre
Rural 2 DU / 30 60% 0.170 7405
Conservation II Acre
Rural 3 DU ! 40 70% 0.085 3703
Conservation III Acre
On Common Ground -Winter 2006 Issue -Keeping it Green Page 1 of 6
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Smart Growth's Biggest Challenge? AEs_._and GADs
by David A. Goldberg
Since returning from Vietnam in 1972, Jim McConnell has worked
with his two brothers doing what three generations did before them:
farming the region west of Cleveland, Ohio that McConnell counts
as some of the most productive agricultural land on the planet. But
as Cleveland and other Ohio cities "empty out", he says, rural Ohio
is being carved into house lots large and small. Where once there
was a clear division between town and country, subdivisions and
mini-estates are bleeding into the countryside. Farmers like
McConnell, whose Hickory Grove Farm raises corn, soybeans,
wheat and dairy heifers on both their own and leased land, wonder
how long they can keep at it.
"Cleveland has sprawled out to where it has pretty much obliterated
the farmland in Medina County," McConnell laments, "and now we
already see it starting to happen in our county," Lorain County, west
of Cleveland.
"You can easily get to the point where it's just not worth it from the
farmer's standpoint to put up with all the issues that come with
working around homes and development," he adds. "There are
certain times of the year when we have to work late at night,
making a lot of noise and kicking up a lot of dust, and someone who
moves out from the city might not understand that. The smells that
come off livestock operations, people from the country just take it
as part of living out here, but the new people don't necessarily see it
that way. You have more traffic and difficulty moving large farm
equipment. You have a field you've been leasing a long time, and
then the owner sells off the frontage and you have inaccessible land,
or five property owners to deal with. At some point, these problems
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On Common Ground -Winter 2006 Issue -Keeping it Green
become almost untenable.
Ohio, of course, is not the only area of the country grappling with
`~, the rapid disappearance of unbroken tracts of farm, forest and range
lands. The nation's recent long run of low fuel costs and high in-
town real estate prices, coupled with a mushrooming second-home
market, have combined to propel housing development deeper into
territory once regarded as anything but urban. As a result, more and
more communities are experimenting with various techniques for
preserving agricultural and natural areas.
To date, their success has been spotty, given the sheer force of the
trend, says Dave Theobald, research scientist with the Natural
Resource Ecology Lab at Colorado State University, who studies
what he calls rural sprawl. "What always struck me is that people
were talking about urban sprawl all the time, but they were ignoring
rural sprawl," he says. Theobald defines rural sprawl simply as
"very low-density growth beyond the urban areas." House lots in
these exurban areas range from two to 20 acres per house, by and
large. As one measure of the impact, he notes that five million
residents ofCensus-identified rural areas spend an hour or more
commuting to work. Nationwide, in 2000, there were roughly
78,000 square miles in urban and suburban residential housing
density, Theobalds has calculated. "There were seven times that at
exurban densities of one house per two to 40 acres," he says. "By
2020, the higher-density urban and suburban land area is forecasted
to expand by 2.2 percent. But exurban land area will grow at more
than six times that rate!"
State and local governments are increasingly concerned, because
rural sprawl not only takes productive farmland out of commission,
but it also can disrupt wildlife habitat, watershed protection and
forestry. Worse, from government officials' viewpoint, far-flung
development costs far more in services than it can support, says
Sandra McKew, a land-use economist who helps Midwestern towns
calculate the costs of services for new development. "These rural
places have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to improve
roads, schools, water and sewer capacity, to extend police and fire
coverage, but there's a total anti-tax attitude. So what do they do?
Go after more development, particularly commercial that will bring
in more tax revenue."
Though this is not a new phenomenon, the pace and ubiquity of
change has reached such a pitch that efforts to combat rural sprawl
are probably receiving more attention than ever before. This comes
at the same time that a reactivated "property rights" movement is
working to counter some of the land protections put in place in the
first wave of such moves 30-plus years ago in states such as Oregon
and Maryland. As a result, states and localities are being challenged
to come up with new approaches and techniques that are both fair
and effective.
Traditionally, there have been a handful of tools available to protect
open space and guide development in rural areas. After a quick
overview, we'll explore some examples to learn what is working,
and what isn't. The first option, of course, is outright purchase of
open space, either by government or nonprofit entity. Though
increasingly popular with voters, the shortcomings are immediately
apparent: Because funds are limited, they can only hope to secure
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On Common Ground -Winter 2006 Issue -Keeping it Green
the most vulnerable sites. The most common tool is large-lot
zoning, in which local governments set large minimum lot sizes of
five, 10, 20 or more acres. Public or nonprofit entities also can
`~+ purchase development rights. This involves paying a farmer or other
landowner for any rights he might have to develop his land, with the
proviso that the owner keeps the land more or less in its current
state. A related concept is the transfer of development rights. Here,
a developer buys the development rights from an area designated
for agricultural or open space and applies those rights to an area
targeted for development, in exchange for being allowed to build at
higher densities. Localities also can allow for conservation
subdivisions, in which houses are clustered together in a small
footprint, rather than scattered among large lots of equal size, so as
to leave a high percentage of the tract undeveloped. Lastly, there are
a variety of ways to construct multi jurisdictional plans in which
adjoining towns, counties or other jurisdictions agree to limit
development in some areas while steering growth to designated
zones; this often involves some sort of tax-base sharing.
Maryland experiments with big lots, buying development rights
Over the last few decades, localities in Maryland, as well as the
state itself, have been among the pioneers in many of these
approaches. Parris Glendening, who was Maryland's governor from
1995 to 2003, has studied them all, having made rural preservation a
centerpiece of his administration. "Preservation of the agricultural
economy and the revitalization of existing communities are two
answers to the same equation," Glendening says. "When farms are
flourishing, they are less likely to be developed. And unless you can
stop the bleeding into the countryside, existing cities and towns will
suffer and decline."
The early experiments with stopping rural sprawl often seemed
aimed primarily at preserving a picturesque landscape rather than
sustaining agriculture and wildlife, he said. "Counties in southern
Maryland relied on large-lot zoning for a long time, and for a while
it seemed to work. I'm personally not an advocate of large-lot
zoning, though. The challenge is you often end up with low-density
sprawl. St. Mary's County, for example, started with minimum five-
acre lots, and ended up with subdivisions on septic tanks. You can
raise the minimum, but with 10 or 15 homes on 100 acres you still
use far more agricultural land, and the costs for services aze high."
Glendening also echoed McConnell's concerns about the
detrimental effects for farmers of the encroachment of former city
folk.
Large-lot zoning also relies entirely on maintaining a regulation in
perpetuity. But the first law of regulations, or course, is that they
change. Inevitably, landowners exert pressure to allow more
development as the growth marches toward them, figuring they
deserve to make the same sort of killing that a farmer down the road
made by selling his land. As we'll see in the Oregon example
below, the pressure can be extremely intense. "I have a lot of
sympathy for farmers who see this as their retirement or children's
college, who don't know that they can pass on to another generation
for farming, and that's why I think a system that pays landowners
for development rights makes great sense," Glendening said.
Maryland has relied extensively on purchase of development rights,
or PDR, in efforts to preserve the rapidly developing Eastern Shore.
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On Common Ground -Winter 2006 Issue -Keeping it Green
A long-time getaway destination and haven for second homes, the
mostly rural Eastern Shore now is growing homes for commuters to
Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, despite treks of up to two hours
~" each way. Using state funds from the Rural Legacy program created
under Glendening, along with other public and private sources,
about a quarter of 1.2 million acres of the Eastern Shore has been
taken off the development table through PDR, with an ambitious
goal to reach 50 percent by 2010. The plan is working, Glendening
and others say, because effective preservation groups are
coordinating with motivated local governments; the conserved land
is located in designated agricultural and environmental preservation
corridors, rather than in scattered locations; and because regional
planning efforts are directing growth to designated areas. "In five or
six years people will look back and see that an enormous amount of
land has been preserved,"
Glendening said. But every success brings new challenges.
"Now developers are using the existence of preserved land as a
selling point, and that is drawing development to the fringes of what
you are trying to preserve, and that was not the intention at all. That
comes down to local officials enforcing their plans and holding fast
on their zoning."
Protecting agriculture through joint planning in Ohio
Creating an enforceable plan that succeeds in curbing rural sprawl
almost always involves cooperation among multiple jurisdictions.
Recognizing this fact, Jim McConnell and others in their Ohio
township of Pittsfield have created a joint economic development
agreement with the neighboring city of Oberlin. (Ohio counties are
divided into townships, rural jurisdictions lacking the capacity to
provide water, sewer and other urban services that cities provide.)
Cities and townships often fight one another for development or
over annexations, but Oberlin and Pittsfield have agreed to support
one another in a plan that designates about 20 percent of the
township's area, just outside Oberlin, as appropriate for
development. The township has agreed not to oppose annexations in
the development zone and to discourage development in its large
farm zones in return for a share of the city's tax receipts. Under the
50-year agreement, the township will receive an 18-percent share on
all withholding from commercial payrolls and 2.35 mills of property
tax on commercial and industrial areas. At the same time, the
township engaged citizens in writing aland-use plan that will guide
land use throughout the township in Smart-Growth fashion.
"Unlike a lot of other parts of rural Ohio, I think agriculture will
continue to be viable into the future here," McConnell says. "The
primary thing we're trying to guard against is rural sprawl. We hope
that we will slow it down, and when something is built it will be
done so it works better and looks better than if we'd done no
planning at all. What would happen if we're hit by a wave of hot
development? I wouldn't bet against the development. You can't
stop it, but maybe you can shape it and direct it."
Transferring development rights on a grand scale in Georgia
The transfer of development rights, in which developers essentially
buy density from one place and build it in another, is brilliant in the
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On Common Ground -Winter 2006 Issue -Keeping it Green
abstract, but very difficult to implement. One key reason is that
while "sending" areas might be eager to receive money for doing
nothing to their land, it is harder to find enthusiastic neighborhoods
~. willing to receive greater density.
The best hope might be to allow for the transfer statewide,
Glendening suggests, with purchased development rights eligible
for use in any city or town.
Another approach is the unique one being taken by the nonprofit
Chattahoochee Hill Country Alliance, in rural Georgia, 35 miles
south of Atlanta. There, one large land holder -Steve Nygren, a
founder of the Peasant Restaurant chain -has pulled together the
owners of 65,000 acres to master plan their development. The area
in south Fulton County is unusual, in that it remains largely
undeveloped even as counties on all sides of have fallen into
Atlanta's ever-waxing orbit. One reason south Fulton was skipped
is that the northern half of the county, which contains much of the
city of Atlanta and its toniest suburbs, has higher taxes and stricter
development regulations than its later-developing neighbors.
Realizing that south Fulton's development was inevitable, given its
relative proximity to Atlanta, and that many landowners would look
to prosper, Nygren and other key property holders developed a
grand plan that would accommodate 100,000 new residents while
conserving half or more of the district's rolling pastures, horse
farms, creeks and granite outcroppings. It would do this by
concentrating development primarily in three compact, walkable
villages, tied together by a greenway and trail system. The scheme,
which in 2002 was adopted into the county's comprehensive land-
use plan and is regulated by an overlay zone, depends largely on
transfer of development rights. Anyone hoping to build homes or
commercial buildings in the villages would need to buy density
from designated conservation zones; at the moment most of the area
is zoned at one house per acre under Fulton's
"agricultural/residential" zoning. Selling landowners are expected to
fetch 40 to 60 percent of market value, while retaining the right to
live on, farm, sell or otherwise use the land, provided they don't
develop it.
"The plan gives most of us at least something of what we want,"
says Nygren. "Those who bought property hoping to develop it still
can make a return, while those of us who bought or inherited the
land hoping it would stay the way it was get an area that is
substantially preserved over what we would get with conventional
sprawl." Nygren himself is developing on a small part of his
holdings, a 70-acre hamlet dubbed Serenbe that will have 224
houses, townhomes and live-work units within walking distance of
a few neighborhood shops, surrounded by 157 acres set aside for an
organic farm, livestock grazing and forests. Some homes already are
complete and a bake shop opened in early September.
(For more information, please see .http://~~~w~~ chatthillcountry.~rg/)
Oregon looks to put it all together
No state has protected more of its rural heritage than Oregon.
~, Nearly all of the rural landscape, 25 million acres, is covered by
zoning that excludes all uses but farming or forestry, meaning it is
off-limits for development of almost any kind. In Oregon, every
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On Common Ground -Winter 2006 Issue -Keeping it Green
incorporated town or city is required to establish an urban-growth
boundary in coordination with the surrounding county that includes
the existing urban area and enough vacant land for 20 years growth.
Outside the boundary, all open land suitable for agricultural use is
required to be zoned for farm or forest use only, and dwellings are
restricted to use by farmers and agricultural and forestry operations.
The system, created in the early 1970s, has worked to help sustain
an economically successful farm industry in Oregon, known for its
Hood River pears, Columbia basin cherries, Yamhill Valley wines,
grass seed and nursery stock. Farm gate receipts have quadrupled
over the last three decades.
Despite that success, the system is threatened by statewide ballot
measure 37, passed last November, which says in essence that those
landowners who saw development prohibited on their property
when the planning laws were passed are entitled either to
compensation or development rights. Now, Oregonians must decide
first, whether they want to preserve the rural landscape, and second,
whether to create a system of transferable development credits or
other compensatory program, says Bob Stacey, executive director of
1000 Friends of Oregon, anon-profit that advocates for the goals of
the land protection program.
"For 30 years Oregonians thought we had the answer to rural
sprawl," Stacey says. "We probably will have to do what others
have done and make use of conservation easements and transferable
development rights. The one thing that we do have that other states
don't is a planning and zoning system that reinforces such a
program."
Conclusion
~• As the stories above make clear, the effort to preserve a viable rural
landscape in the face of development requires abundant creativity,
motivation and savvy. States and localities are grappling with these
issues today as never before, with the result that many are
struggling toward creative solutions that might -just might -
work to ensure that our children and grandchildren know what
working and unspoiled landscapes look like.
David A. Goldberg is the communications director for Smart
Growth America, a nationwide coalition based
in Washington, D.C. that advocates for land-use policy reform. In
2002, Mr. Goldberg was awarded a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard
University where he studied urban policy.
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Development and conservation can coincide: The original farm stone wall and part of the farm pasture
(above) have been preserved at Trim's Ridge. This ten-acre conservation design subdivision in New
Harbor, New Shoreham, RI, protects 3/4 of the site as open space. The original zoning designated an
unimaginative layout of ten one-acre lots, five on each side of a cul-de-sac, which would have destroyed
the stone walls, pastures and natural areas.
~:
Simple Sketch Site Plan for Trim's Ridge
Courtesy Randall Arendt
Contrary to popular belief, conservationists and developers make a very profitable team, reducing costs
while increasing the desirability and market value of new developments. Few landowners, citizens and
planning commissioners realize such options exist.
Conservation designs include creatively placed homes surrounded by significant areas of the land's best
natural features: woods, prairies or lakes. Subdivisions developed with a plan for conserving open space
have proven to be a tremendous success for landowners, developers, townships and homebuyers.
Randall Arendt recognizes that communities can conserve farmland, wooded habitat and natural areas
and maintain landowner equity while accommodating land development. "Landowners who view their
property as their'pension' no longer have to destroy their woods and fields in order to retire with a
guaranteed income, as their equity is not diminished." Arendt's simple process involves identifying
conservation areas, then locating house sites, streets and trails, and lot lines. Conservation subdivision
design permanently preserves 50 to 70 percent of the property's total buildable land as natural areas.
Trails meander through natural areas and provide outdoor recreation for subdivision residents.
Land developer Kurt Andrae, president of Red Wing Land Company has adopted Arendt's conservation
design processes. "When I became a developer, I knew that there had to be a more respectful way to
treat the land while also creating unique living spaces. Conservation subdivision design accomplishes
both of these goals and is the only way I approach development."
Many people mistaken believe that it costs more to develop land with open space conservation in mind.
According to Andrae, that is not the case. "More often than not, this approach saves on project costs and
accelerates approval timelines."
In fact, grading costs on one conservation development in Texas plummeted from $300,000 to $50,000
when conservation development was chosen. It also saved 24 of 25 large trees that would have
otherwise been lost. The trees and open space add value compared with traditional development.
"A client of mine in Indiana told me that my design for his 40-lot subdivision enabled him to charge
$20,000 to $25,000 more per lot, compared with house lots without open space. The total added value
was between $800,000 and $1,000,000," said Arendt.
Conservation Subdivision Design, and Limited Development are the answer for landowners who want or
need to sell their land for development, yet would like to see a majority of the property conserved.
Conservation Subdivision Design is a simple, four-step process to identify the most unique features and
natural resources on a given tract of land, then determine the most suitable places to sensitively place
home sites in order to preserve the special features of the land. Conservation subdivisions normally
preserve 50% - 70% of the buildable land, while still allowing the same maximum number of home sites
as conventional subdivision development.
Why Large Lot Zoning does not work
If you look at many townships in the fast growing suburbs that have (or had) large lot zoning, you will
notice that many of these large acreage houselots have been rezoned, by a request to zoning
variance, to smaller tracts and split up for development. In addition, in many cases large lot zoning
simply gives the community more lawn for a number of years until the parcels are rezoned, not
necessarily preserving any of the rural character. Unfortunately, in most cases, large lot zoning is
temporary at best.
"One of the "solutions" that many conventional zoning ordinances use for presumably maintaining open
space and rural character is large lot zoning -- that is establishing large, five to ten acre, minimum lot
sizes in rural zoning districts. Although large lot zoning does reduce the number of homes that can be
built, it also spreads out the homes in such a way that none of the remaining land is useable for farming,
forestry, or even recreational trails. Houselots become "too large to mow, but too small to plow," and the
greater distance between homes effectively stifles the emergence of any sense of neighborhood." Randall
~ Arendt
Written by LandChoices retrieved on November 28, 2005 from http://www.landchoices.com/