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Cincinnati Challenge to Sprawl Campaign

ALERT: STOP THE SPRAWL HIGHWAY BRIDGE, PROTECT THE LITTLE MIAMI SCENIC RIVER

SPRAWL HURTS US ALL IN CINCINNATI

The Sierra Club is for protecting our environment, for our families, and for our future. That means we are for smart growth, rather than dumb, poorly-planned sprawl. Smart growth means planning our communities so that we can protect our parks, farms, and open space. Smart Growth planning will make our streets safer, our neighborhoods nicer places to live, and our air and water less polluted.

Because local, state, and national government policies promote and subsidize sprawl, the Sierra Club's Cincinnati Challenge to Sprawl Campaign is designed to build citizen interest in the sprawl issue and to spark community action to better plan our future.

How bad is the sprawl problem in the Cincinnati metro area? In 1998, Cincinnati was ranked the nation's 4th most sprawl-threatened major metropolitan area in a national Sierra Club report. In 2001, USA Today ranked Cincinnati the 11th worst sprawled city. As residents know, in recent decades, new malls and scattered developments have popped up at the edge of our cities, called "sprawl." According to a University of Cincinnati report, from 1980-2000 the proportion of developed land in the region increased by an astounding 141%, while population increased by just 15%.

Clearly we are not growing very efficiently.

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HOW DOES SPRAWL HURT US ALL?

1. Sprawl hurts us all by creating more dangerous traffic and congestion on neighborhood streets.

Scattered sprawl gives people no choice but to drive more to get from home to work. Sprawl creates traffic gridlock and makes local streets unsafe, costing Cincinnati families $505 million dollars in total wasted time and fuel (44 million gallons of gas wasted!) each year, according to the Texas Transportation Institute.

The average Cincinnati driver, as of 2000, sits 43 hours per year stuck in highway gridlock, a whooping 900% increase since 1982. Tri-State's traffic congestion from 1982-1994 (+200%) was the second largest increase in the U.S. over that period.

Smart growth means focusing the development where people have transportation choices, such as commuter trains and bus service.

2. Sprawl creates more air and water pollution.

Largely due to the worsening traffic congestion on Cincinnati roads and highways, and the lack of efficient mass transit, the air quality in Cincinnati has become a major health problem.

Greater Cincinnati is the only Ohio metro area that fails to meet federal air quality health standards for smog, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says that smog in the Tristate "poses a significant health risk" to children, elderly, and those suffering from asthma and other respiratory diseases.

The American Lung Association gives a failing grade for air quality in all seven Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky counties. The ALA estimates that the "at risk population" in the Tristate region includes nearly 400,000 children ages 14 and under, and over 216,000 adults ages 65 and older ("State of the Air 2002"; online at lungusa.org).

According to a 1999 Clean Air Task Force report, each year Tristate smog causes an estimated 390 hospital admissions, 1170 ER visits, 140 asthma ER visits, 57,000 asthma attacks, and 760,000 minor symptoms. Sprawl also means more asphalt and concrete, which increases polluted run-off that threatens our rivers, lakes, streams, and creeks.

3. Sprawl destroys parks, farms and open space.

Sprawl destroys more than 200,000 acres of parks, farms, marshes, and open space each year in the U.S. In the Cincinnati metro area alone, 18 acres a day in precious farmland from 1970 to 1994 were destroyed by developers, according to a University of Toledo study. That represents one quarter of the entire area's farmland destroyed in one generation, the most of any Ohio metropolitan area.

According to Hamilton County Regional Planning, 477,000 acres (30%) of farmland was converted to development from 1969-1997. In SW Ohio counties (Brown, Butler, Clermont, Hamilton and Warren), 288,00 acres (33%) were destroyed, while 141,400 acres (24%) of farmland in N. KY counties (Boone, Campbell, Gallatin, Grant, Kenton, and Pendleton) were destroyed by sprawl. The report also says that in the 1950s, 1970s, and 1990s, agricultural land in the region "was being lost at a rate that approached 23,000 acres/year."

4. Sprawl hurts us all by crowding our schools.

New sprawl creates crowded schools in the suburbs, and empty, crumbing schools in center cities. One reason for the financial troubles of our Cincinnati Public Schools is the dwindling tax base of the city due to sprawl. The population surge in our outlying areas has also caused chronic school overcrowding. In the Lakota School district in Butler County, for example, taxpayers were forced to pay for 10 new schools in the 1990s, and yet they still need to build more.

5. Sprawl creates more dangerous floods.

Sprawl also increases the risk of flooding by promoting building on floodplains and destroying flood-storing wetlands. Much of the Midwest flooding in recent years occurred on floodplains where weak zoning laws allowed developers to build where they should not build.

In Hamilton County alone, 105 building permits were issued in areas that were later designated Federal Emergency Management Agency flood disasters from 1988-96.

Why support more tax subsidies to bail out flood victims who build in places that we know will flood? Smart growth means no new building in floodplains and other disaster prone areas.

6. Sprawl hurts us all by raising our taxes.

Taxpayer subsidies are being spent in new sprawl areas, rather than where most people live. This sucks needed tax money out of cities and older suburbs which have to pay for aging infrastructure repair and greater services.

The fact is that homes in outlying areas cost more in services than they pay in taxes. In the Midwest, the average house in a sprawling community costs $1.20 to service (for sewers, roads, schools, fire and police protection, etc...) for every $1.00 paid in new taxes. This means that the public is subsidizing developer and road builder profits. Why should we pay higher taxes to hurt our own communities?

Sprawl increases tax costs for local residents while Smart Growth can save taxpayers money. One study by the Southeastern Michigan Council of Governments showed that Michigan communities that have Smart Growth policies saved $53 million on road costs, $33 million in sewer costs, and trimmed housing costs by 6.4%, while reducing open land destruction by 12%.

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WE CAN STOP SPRAWL

Sprawl can be slowed - more than a dozen states have enacted Smart Growth Laws, including Tennessee, Minnesota, and Maryland. Smart Growth will lower the cost of development and protect parks, open space, and wetlands by encouraging more efficient development in existing communities where roads, public transportation, schools, and other public services already exist.

For example, nearly thirty years ago, Oregon enacted urban service areas to protect farms and slow sprawl. As a result, the population of Portland grew by 8 percent between 1970 and 1990, but there was no consequent sprawl. Smart growth in Portland has revived that city, which Money Magazine recently named the nation's best city to live and work in.

What can you do to make your streets safer, your neighborhood nicer, and promote Smart Growth?