It’s a land-use squeeze play:
Rockford is expanding eastward, while Chicagoland is creeping westward from McHenry County. Boone County is sandwiched in between.
“We’re getting hit from both sides,” says Mark Williams, executive director of Growth Dimensions, a nonprofit organization promoting economic development in that county.
Development spilling out of Chicago, for example, is just miles from consuming Belvidere, the Boone County seat that is more than 70 miles from the Loop.
This is a dramatic example of Illinois sprawl. But Belvidere and the county are prepared to manage growth as far into the future as 2050. The countywide comprehensive land-use plan protects agriculture, promotes mass transit and concentrates expected development into targeted areas. And it’s designed to preserve open space between Belvidere and other Boone County communities. Floodplain areas are to be protected from housing developments. Zoning changes are under way to reduce the size of residential lots.
The goal isn’t to stop growth, but to be ready to manage it. “Without a guide, you’d be going in all directions,” Williams says.
Boone County’s situation isn’t unusual. Development has boomed on the outskirts of urban areas throughout the country since the end of World War II, converting agricultural land to subdivision housing or commercial areas. New construction often brings economic advantages. It also raises concerns about destruction of open space, pollution of water and air, and erosion of quality of life.
Now some Illinois local governments are looking down the road at ways to alter development patterns and tailor growth. Most aren’t, certainly. But those that are, like Boone County, can pick and choose from a sizable toolbox of strategies.
Chief among them is comprehensive planning, which allows local governments to prepare for growth. Once a community creates a vision for its future, it’s up to the local government to enforce compliance. Changes in zoning laws, for instance, often are needed to implement so-called smart growth solutions: more compact, higher density areas that reduce damage to the environment.
“You’re not going to stop the growth, so you might as well do it right,” says Brook McDonald, president of The Conservation Foundation, an environmental protection nonprofit based in Naperville.
The state, though, doesn’t require municipalities to engage in smart growth practices. Rep. Ricca Slone, a Peoria Heights Democrat and anti-sprawl reformer, has been pushing for that. And she’s taking her case to Gov. Rod Blagojevich this summer.
In particular, she plans to discuss ways in which state policies on school construction and transportation contribute to sprawl.
It’s a controversial subject. Some, especially developers and homebuilders, insist government should not be in the business of dictating growth. They argue those decisions should be left to the market.
Some even object to the term sprawl, a word equated with unplanned growth. “It’s pejorative rather than descriptive,” says Jim Ford, an assistant director at the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission. “What some call sprawl, others call home.”
For those who have the word in their lexicon, sprawl is created by converting rural land into single-use, homogenous developments with separate residential, commercial and industrial areas, says Emily Talen, a professor in the department of urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Sprawl occurs downstate as well as in the Chicago area. Cities such as Peoria more than doubled in land size, but decreased in population density from 1960 to 1990. Sprawl in downstate areas is a “matter of scale,” says McDonald of The Conservation Foundation. He says wherever development is happening, it needs to be done in a manner that enhances the quality of life and doesn’t damage the environment.
Whether downstate or in the northeastern suburbs, unchecked growth can bring environmental and social costs. Of primary concern is loss of open land and farmland, a major catalyst for the debate over sprawl.
Illinois ranks first in the nation for acreage of prime cropland. Two-thirds of the state’s total land area — 24 million of 36 million acres — is prime soil used for agriculture. According to Bob McLeese, a soil scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, Illinois farmland is being lost at a rate of approximately 50,000 acres a year, about the size of two townships. “We’re losing the best farmland in the world.”
Sprawl also can degrade the quality of water. Rather than soaking into underground aquifers, in developed areas rain hits impermeable roofs and parking lots. This water then picks up pollutants on the ground — such as oil and gas in parking lots — and runs into storm sewers, then straight into streams, introducing more contaminants into the state’s waterways.
Air quality, too, can be affected. Automobiles are being built with lower emissions, but any gain in the battle against pollution is offset when more people are forced to travel more miles.
A study by the Texas Transportation Institute, part of Texas A & M University in College Station, shows that motorists in the Chicago and northwestern Indiana region were driving nearly 12.2 million more freeway miles in 2000 than in 1990. Those same drivers wasted an average of 67 hours per year stuck in peak-period traffic. “The more you sprawl, the more you have to drive to do anything,” says Richard Acker, regional land use coordinator with the Openlands Project based in Chicago.
Communities and counties that want to slow these trends have begun creating blueprints for what they want to look like in 20 or 30 years. Such comprehensive plans can address transportation, housing and open space. Talen says they should be a “holistic look at what kind of community you are building.”
Kane County, for one, is revising its comprehensive plan. Phil Bus, executive director of the county development department, says it was necessary to stretch the range of that plan from 2020 to 2030 to stay current. The plan targets three regions in the county: established urban areas, new developments and agricultural land. But Bus says it can be difficult to get municipalities in the county to buy into this. Because local governments want development to increase their sales tax and property tax bases, Bus says those become disincentives to good growth practices. “It’s an unceasing effort to try and establish partnerships with municipalities.”
Creating such intergovernmental partnerships can be another tool. Belvidere and Boone County have a standing coordinating committee to discuss issues that arise around the comprehensive plan and other land-use issues. To encourage counties and municipalities to work together, the Openlands Project this spring pushed legislation to offer incentives to governments that create partnerships to preserve natural, agricultural or historical resources. The proposal, which passed both chambers of the General Assembly, encourages governments to inventory the resources they have, then make development decisions around what they want to preserve. Gov. Rod Blagojevich was reviewing the bill at press time.
Other tools include downtown revitalization, brownfield redevelopment and infill development. They promote using land that has been developed, or filling land between an urban core and sprawling developments on the fringes. Environmentalists note it’s hard to determine if these redevelopment patterns are curbing sprawl. But, says Jack Darin, director of Illinois’ chapter of the Sierra Club based in Chicago, downtown disinvestment encourages sprawl.
People are moving away from urban areas, Darin says, because “there’s something about the city that they don’t like anymore.” Revitalization projects, then, are aimed at reversing this perception and attracting businesses and other activities that rejuvenate interest in the downtown.
Revitalization and redevelopment are occurring, at a minimum, in 56 cities and towns participating in the Illinois Main Street program. Wendy Bell, the program’s coordinator, says though the program isn’t designed to curb sprawl, more communities are looking at revitalization as a land-use issue. “It’s much more cost effective to build on and reuse the current infrastructure than it is to build farther out and have more sprawl issues,” she says.
Much as they are bringing businesses back downtown, communities are using brownfield redevelopment to bring industry back to abandoned industrial sites. Brownfield redevelopment requires former property owners to clean up environmental hazards at the site, so that new owners are not held environmentally liable for any problems developing from the original uses.
Developing areas in between old urban cores and fringe developments — called infill development — can prevent new development on open space farther out. Champaign’s city planning director, Bruce Knight, says that community is planning to inventory the existing gaps to determine the reasons those sites haven’t been redeveloped.One such site, he says, is an old hospital contaminated with asbestos. The city is providing tax increment financing for the site to be cleaned up, demolished and then redeveloped into a high-density residential area. That will allow growth in property tax revenue to be funneled back into the development rather than city coffers.
Municipalities also can try to manage growth — or at least pay for the services required to go with growth — through developer impact fees. These fees are designed to help pay the costs of such capital projects as roads and schools that are associated with new growth. They have been widely used in the Chicago-area suburbs, but have not been prevalent in downstate communities. A 1999 study by the Chicago-based Heartland Institute found that impact fees for schools could range from around $900 for a single-lot, four-bedroom home in Aurora to more than $3,000 for the same type of house in Burr Ridge.
Among the few downstate communities to use this tool is Springfield, which requires developers to post a surety bond of 110 percent of their share of the cost of improving arterial roads around new subdivisions.
Impact fees are controversial. Julie Sullivan, a lobbyist with the Springfield-based Illinois Association of Realtors, counters they can even encourage sprawl. If they are prohibitively high, she says, a developer may opt to go farther out if that area is linked to a different local government with lower fees.
Because sprawl is linked to single-use developments, changing zoning laws that segregate residential and commercial areas is yet another tool municipalities are turning to. “The physical form of development can and is being controlled by zoning,” says Peter Skosey, a vice-president with the Metropolitan Planning Council in Chicago. Changing zoning laws can permit residential and commercial developments to occur in the same area. These mixed-use developments promote mass transit options and more “walkable” communities.
And communities are changing zoning laws to protect agricultural land, making it more difficult to build subdivisions. Sangamon County, for example, changed a zoning ordinance in 2001 that now requires land to be sold in 40-acre parcels rather than one-acre parcels. This change, says Randy Armstrong, Sangamon County zoning and building safety administrator, forces developers to come before the county board to request a zoning change from agricultural to residential. The change aims to protect farmland and encourage development closer to the urban core where it’s easier to provide public services.
Developing around mass transit options or encouraging other forms of transportation also can curb sprawl. “Sprawl cannot support public transit,” Talen says. To fight sprawl, she says, other forms of transportation need to be viable. Bike lanes and pedestrian-friendly routes help.
To prevent land consumption, some municipalities and counties have been looking to preserve open space through a variety of means. Municipalities are choosing to buy land to preserve open space, or the rights to develop that land. Especially in the collar counties, buying land for preservation has been a popular method. According to Chris Slattery, director of the Chicago office of the Trust for Public Land, almost $500 million has been approved in referenda for acquiring open space for forest preserves and parks. The Open Lands Trust program, run through the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, has also funded the purchase of more than 50,000 acres of open space through direct purchase or matching grants to local governments.
Homer Glen, a village of 22,000 in Will County, is setting aside 11 acres of parkland for every 1,000 residents before the village is built-up.
Municipalities also can buy development rights to open space, which is cheaper than buying the land outright. Buying development rights allows the owner to retain the property but collect some of the value of what future developments would be worth.
Ford of the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission and Acker of the Openlands Project see evidence of the use of these tools — and their potential impact. Acker says if 100 infill development projects are completed, 100 businesses have not contributed to sprawl by locating in fringe areas.
So far, Belvidere’s and Boone County’s plan has officials there on track to encourage smart growth. The planning department isn’t approving developments that deviate from the comprehensive plan. They’re currently working on rewriting their ordinances to match it. A feasibility study is being conducted to look at possible commuter rail service development. “It wasn’t just a plan on the shelf,” says Williams. “You have to balance your growth.”
It’s unclear how widely these tools are used, but Talen is confident they work when employed. Still, she worries many communities are talking about sprawl and land-use issues, but failing to put any plans into action. “We’re all just sleepwalking into the future.”
Illinois Issues, July/August 2003
