What is "Sprawl" anyway?

Phillip Hill, Project Planner, West Jordan City

The Salt Lake Tribune issue of March 26, 2000 ran an article by Spencer Greer titled "Urban sprawl not responsible for the ills of the state, nation".  While I do agree with the title, several invalid points were made which I feel need to be further expanded upon.

First, the article begins by stating that "urban sprawl, an emotional name for nothing more than suburban development outside central urban areas, . . . ", points to the source of headaches for many municipal planners.  We all know that any development within a city which is great distances from surrounding developments has a large impact on existing city services.  Developments of this type have negative effects not only on city services, but traffic counts as well.  These developments being so far removed from the rest of the city do not warrant the location of commercial services due to the lack of rooftop counts, thus increasing traffic through the established areas of the city within the "central urban area".

Mr. Greer then takes on the issue that "cities just do not take up that much space" based upon the fact that only about 2 percent of the land in Utah has been developed.  True, however, it is not how much of the land in the state has been developed that is the issue, rather it is how that land which has been developed occupies that space.  Because there are vast areas of land outside of the Wasatch Front does not justify unordered "leapfrog" development within the valley.  By developing in an orderly fashion, pulling back on the reigns of residential development, and allowing city and commercial services to keep pace, we avoid pitfalls like extended travel distances to work and commercial nodes and stretching city services to the limit.

Now take a deep breath while we try to grasp this notion of why suburban commuters are not causing air pollution, "the number of vehicle miles traveled and traffic congestion actually increases with an increase in population density.  So it is the city autos that cause most of the pollution.".  Now while he does site the fact that cars moving at 55 create less pollution than cars stuck in traffic, what about all of the suburban dwellers stuck on the freeways trying to get to work in the city from their disassociated developments amongst the farms?  Do we truly feel we can blame automobile pollution on only those who drive within the downtown area, or can we place some of that blame on those who park on I-15 for two hours a day?  Ok, just one more point and then I'm done.  Mr. Greer goes on to state that local governments need to help by "increasing the population density in the new developments in suburban cities surrounding Salt Lake, Ogden and Provo.".  This help he is asking for is in response to the Clinton administration making sprawl a federal issue.  Contradictory as it seems, are we (those who work for local governments) being asked to help fix something that at the beginning of the article was referred to as "an emotional name for nothing more than suburban development outside central urban areas,"?  I wonder, why would we increase density and in turn increase air pollution and congestion as previously argued?

While there are several interpretations for the definition of sprawl and opinions of how land on both the front and back of the Wasatch Front should be developed, one thing is certain, we cannot continue to develop communities for only the large lot/large home.  We must provide a mix of housing opportunities and land uses which respond to personal desires as well as income limitations.  We must concentrate on nodes of higher density which will support commercial development and provide attractive housing opportunities near employment centers.  We will never have the entire population living in self sustaining utopia's, so lets not paint that picture for the critics.  A mix of opportunities which satisfies the desires of many while avoiding continuous grid-patterned sprawl is a vision worthy of our attention, because in the end, it is how we use the space available by which we will be judged.