Small Steps Toward Smart Growth in Southwestern PA, by Jonathan R. Farrell

Recently, the Pittsburgh region has experienced a blossoming of environmentally sound development projects: brownfields redeveloped, riverfront parks established, and walk and bike paths constructed through greenways around the region.

Yet while Pittsburgh deserves praise for these continuing efforts and has rightly been dubbed a green city, little has been done to control the sprawling, inefficient development that has transformed townships in the outer suburban and rural areas in the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Area.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, the Southwestern Pennsylvania Regional Planning Commission (now the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission) issued a series of reports highlighting the importance of carefully planned suburban “commuter sheds” and open space for conservation. Yet after a quarter century of warnings about the problems of low-density development, most local governments still lack the resources and discipline that are needed to govern haywire development and encourage smart growth.

Decades of data collection and analysis have clearly charted the trend: sprawling, low-density suburban development voraciously filling the space between urban cores and the rural countryside; residential developments further from traditional job centers; highways further out from beltways; center-less cities, and an increasingly protracted utility and transportation infrastructure. As low-density development has become the norm around most metropolitan areas in the U.S., it is now a top concern for many policy makers, planners, and resource managers because of its impacts on increasingly limited natural resources and transportation and utility infrastructures.

Many studies analyzing development trends conducted during recent years have called for greater coordination between municipal planning agencies and more planning on a regional scale. Land use planning and development practices, in Pennsylvania and most parts of the country, are megaliths slow to respond to the recommendations of these reports, but some progress is being made.

Last year, the Tides Center and Pennsylvania Environmental Council, working with the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission (SPC) and the PA Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) and Environmental Planning and Design, LLC, developed a GIS-based land use planning tool, called Natural Infrastructure (NI).

The tool queries various mapped data layers of human and natural infrastructure—roads, soils, biodiversity areas, topography, etc.—and provides an inventory of regional resources as well as a framework to evaluate and resolve conflicts between different land uses.

Natural resource managers, developers, planners, and others have begun using the NI tool for planning, impact assessment, and site selection of projects such as recreational facilities, landfills, and for the identification of water supply protection zones and areas with solar and wind energy-production potential.

The NI Project is a powerful tool and moves decision-makers a step closer to being able to address lingering concerns over sprawl in southwestern Pennsylvania, but more is needed.

Years of extensive documentation and analysis have tracked the increases in the scale and scope of sprawling development trends throughout much of the country. The USDA NRCS National Resource Inventory reported on acreage converted to development every five years, especially monitoring the conversion of farmland. Cost of community studies like those by the American Farmland Trust and, in Pennsylvania, by Tim Kelsey at Penn State University, tracked the balance of expenditures (infrastructure and services) and revenue (in taxes) of different land uses. Remotely sensed spatial data showed us the spread of paved and built land through increases in impervious surface cover.

Other GIS-based processes like road density analysis provided further measures of urbanization, while those more resourceful local and regional agencies in metropolitan areas produced detailed land use and urbanized areas map. Local and national census data outlined sociodemographic trends while economic and housing census tracked employment and building construction behind these population trends.

The 2003 Brookings Institute report Back to Prosperity: A Competitive Agenda for Renewing Pennsylvania summarized some of the most alarming trend data and reviewed recent development trends in southwestern Pennsylvania.

According to the report, in the last few decades, southwestern Pennsylvania has experienced a dramatic increase in developed land amid a significant population decline—a uniquely aberrant development trend.

From 1982 to 1997, the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) (Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Fayette, Westmoreland, and Washington counties) lost more than 5 percent of its population (134,000 residents, loss of 9,000 per year).

In those same fifteen years, more than 200,000 acres of land were converted to development—more than a 40 percent increase in developed land—while the number of households in the Pittsburgh MSA grew by only 23,740, an increase of 2.5 percent. Considering that 201,800 acres of land were converted to urban use during this time, this means that 8.5 acres of land were developed for every added household by population in the region.

This is nearly seven times the national average of about 1.3 acres.

In recent decades, the Pittsburgh region has seen a dramatic trend of population decentralization, the outward movement of population from central, dense, older communities to newly constructed suburban development in outlying rural areas.

Rural areas, or second-class townships (in Pennsylvania, Second-class townships are municipalities with population density less than 300 people per square mile or that exceed this density but have not approved a public referendum changing their classification to a first-class township) in the Pittsburgh region grew by 6.5 percent (43,000) during the 1990s. Pine Township grew by 90 percent, Cranberry Township by 59 percent. These were rather incredible numbers in a region experiencing a net population loss.

In contrast, the Pittsburgh central urban area’s population declined by 4.6 percent. Not surprisingly, density in the region plummeted by over 34 percent during those 15 years as 20,700 acres of prime farmland were lost to development.

Today, the major population declines in the region as a whole are beginning to tail off and urban renewal projects spot the Pittsburgh area, but the region’s population and development continues to its urban exodus from centrally located Allegheny County to the rural outer counties. Recent census estimates show that from 2000 to 2004, the total net population loss in the Pittsburgh MSA was 30,000 or 1.2 percent (7,500 per year). Almost half of these losses occurred in the immediate city of Pittsburgh where there was a 12,000 or 3.6 percent decline from 2000 to 2004.

The population of Allegheny County, the central urban county containing Pittsburgh, fell by 31,000 from 2000 to 2004. In contrast, net population gains were seen in the more rural outlying counties of the Pittsburgh MSA, as Butler County gained 6,600 and Washington County gained 3,000. For every three people that left Pittsburgh, one settled in the outlying suburbs.

Looking at the construction of housing units, Butler gained 4,000 and Washington and Westmoreland each gained about 3,000 from 2000 to 2004. Even Allegheny County—which, remember, experienced a 31,000 net population loss—saw the construction of 5,400 housing units. This rapid construction facilitates the development of sprawling “exurbia” in the rural countryside.

In concert with population decentralization, sprawling development can cause all sorts of problems for residents, communities, governments, and the environment: urban blight, excessive traffic, lack of community cohesion, wildlife habitat loss and fragmentation, watershed degradation, farmland loss. Most appreciably, it can be expensive.

Poorly planned development can inflate infrastructure costs to the community for roads, schools, and utilities disproportionately to the development’s contributions through tax revenue. Cost of Community Services (COCS) studies determine the average fiscal contributions of different land uses (working and open lands, residential, commercial, industrial land uses) as compared to the cost of providing services such as sewage, roadway maintenance, and schooling to these lands.

COCS studies for the Pittsburgh area have found that the ratio of median cost of services provided per dollar of revenue is the lowest for residential land than any land use during the 1990s. While municipal officials often trust in the idea that new residential developments increases tax revenue and so see no need to restrain this type of development, the revenue generated is often not enough—depending on the taxable income of the residence that move in—to cover the high costs of providing infrastructure and public services to these developments.

A study funded by 10,000 Friends of Pennsylvania in 2000 examined increasing transportation costs in the Pittsburgh region, an indirect cost due to longer commutes of workers living in outlying suburban areas farther from urban job centers.

Between 1970 and 1990, vehicle miles traveled (VMT) per person for routine travel increased by over 90 percent in the Pittsburgh area. The average trip length increased from about seven to ten miles per trip, and VMT per household increased by over 60 percent. Annual transportation costs for the Pittsburgh region in 1990 were approximately $9,000 for rural households and $5,000 for suburban households but only $2,500 for urban households.

There are, of course, many and complex reasons for sprawling development in southwestern Pennsylvania. Weak land use planning and the lack of regulations that deter sprawl and support the efficient and coordinated use of land and the conservation of open space amongst development might be considered the final reason. However, weak land use planning occurs amidst a crowd of other problems and pressures.

In many ways, the Pittsburgh region is a nexus of bizarre politics, development, and demographics. It led the nation in recent decades in incongruous and compartmentalized government, a haywire housing market, and population loss and decentralization. Some of these points help explain the context by which weak planning allows sprawl:

Misdirected state investments. Infrastructure and economic development investments—for transportation and other capital projects—are unevenly channeled to outlying areas rather than being reinvested in older communities. The three main state economic investment agencies, the Pennsylvania Industrial Development Authority (PIDA), Opportunity Grant Program (OGP), and Infrastructure Development Program (IDP), allocated about $68 per capita to projects in established municipalities in the Pittsburgh urban area and about $70 to developments in outer suburban areas, according to the Brooking report. Not withstanding the pressing funding needs of urban infrastructure maintenance and urban renewal projects, the state economic development investments strategy seems to reflect the tendency to favor new building rather than old renovation and is subsidizing an ever-expanding labyrinth of highways and toll roads through the countryside.

Simple overproduction. The ratio of housing units constructed far outpaced the actual increase in household units by population. According to the 2003 Brookings report, contrary to sense, 4.25 new housing units were built for every one net new household by population in the 1990s—and this amidst a loss in population and no projection of significant future growth! As mentioned, most of these new housing units were built in outlying second-class townships. Under the pressure of ever-present land speculation, cheap building costs for tract development, and the new interest in real estate by the investor class, the residential building market in the Pittsburgh area has been distorted, disconnected from supply and demand. The number of households in the outer townships grew by only 23,740, but this was an increase of only 2.5 percent and, considering the high nativity rater in the Pittsburgh area, is explained mostly by relocation. Older housing near or in the city was abandoned while a profusion of new housing was built in suburban and rural areas. Married couples moved farther from the city and more singles were living alone in larger housing units.

Governmental fragmentation. Pennsylvania has a lot of local government, and the Pittsburgh metropolitan area has the most balkanized local government in Pennsylvania—due mostly to its large historical population swell and shrinkage. According to a 2002 study by Christopher Briem at the University of Pittsburgh, there are 455 general local governments (cities, boroughs, and townships) in the Pittsburgh MSA—905 counting school districts, special districts, and the seven county governments. This amounts to 17.7 governments per 100,000 residents, the highest governments per capita ratio in the country and triple the national average of 6.1 per 100,000 (from the 2002 U.S. Census of governments). This kind of governmental fragmentation can impede coordinated land use planning and development review across municipal boundaries. Not only might municipalities be unaware of what type of development is occurring nearby, but neighboring municipalities compete with each other for development projects—resulting in an arms race of lowered standards of land use planning and regulation. Multi-municipal planning and inter-municipal agreements are becoming more common, but southwestern Pennsylvania still lags behind other parts of the state in this area.

As these points demonstrate, like many places in the country, land use planning and regulation in southwestern Pennsylvania is a long way from where it should be in order to ensure economical and ecologically aware development.

However, as efforts continue, the techniques to promote smart growth and the tools prevent poor growth are becoming more familiar and attractive to decision-makers who are looking forward to a metropolitan community that is truly smart in its growth.

Jonathan R. Farrell is a student in the School of Forest Resources, Pennsylvania State University. You may contact him at: 412-400-8755 or send email to: JRF289@psu.edu .

The second and final part of this series will be published next week.

For more information, see these links:

Brookings Institute, Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy

Sustainable Pittsburgh

10,000 Friends of Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania State Association of Township Supervisors

American Farmland Trust

USDA NRCS National Resource Inventory (NRI)

Pennsylvania Environmental Council – Ohio Headwaters Initiatives

5/12/2006