By Peter Fleischer, Executive Director, Empire State Future
Travel upstate to, say, Buffalo, and visit not only its downtown but many of its older suburbs, and you'll find decaying sidewalks, half-empty shopping centers, vacant lots and abandoned homes.
But travel a few more miles out into what was until recently open countryside, and you'll find big new suburban homes on former farm fields.
Meanwhile, the population of the county Buffalo is in, Erie, continues to decline.
This odd combination of declining population and accelerating sprawl is actually quite common across upstate New York -- the vast area north and west of the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge. It's the Upstate Paradox. And for the past two years, as I've crisscrossed the state seeking ideas for making our communities more economically and environmentally sustainable, no land use challenge, among the many in New York, seems more problematic.
Why is this occurring? And what relevance does it have to downstaters and Tri-staters, who are are currently experiencing accelerating land values and population gains in the centers?
There are many reasons for this, including lack of planning and the presence of actual incentives to develop and use land inefficiently. Fortunately, the state legislature is currently considering a bill that would help to change this.
The Public Infrastructure Policy Act (A-8011/S-5560), sponsored by Assembly member Sam Hoyt (D-Buffalo), and Senators Susan Oppenheimer (D-Westchester) and Velmanette Montgomery (D-Brooklyn), seeks to align the planning, grant-making and capital funding efforts of state entities with smart growth criteria. It would direct and redirect funds to projects or places with existing investments in public infrastructure.
Why is the Public Infrastructure Policy Act a good idea?
Simply put, upstate cannot afford its current pattern of sprawl without growth. The population trends and fiscal reality upstate suggest that we need to use public funds to catalyze community economic revitalization within the bounds of already developed areas. If state policy does not curtail upstate's sprawl without growth patterns, higher property taxes and service cuts may well continue.
According to a recent Cornell University study, between 1990 and 2010, the 49 upstate counties lost roughly 100,000 people, while the 13 downstate counties gained more than 1.7 million residents. By 2035, the study suggests, upstate will lose an additional 670,000 residents, even as downstate gains an additional 1.4 million. Six western and central counties -- Erie, Niagara, Monroe, Onondaga, Broome and Oneida -- are projected to be 18 percent smaller by then, compared to 1990. In contrast, between 1990 and 2035, New York City is expected to grow by 30 percent, and the U.S. population overall by more than 50 percent.
Yet new development outside upstate cities and villages continues, seemingly unabated by the population patterns and economic realities, as too many local leaders and citizens try to solve development-caused problems through more development.
This upstate type of sprawl is not not just an aesthetic blight of generic strip malls, cookie-cutter tract home developments, big box stores, enormous parking lots and roads so wide with turning lanes that few dare to cross. It is far worse.
Today's upstate sprawl extends considerably farther away from town and city centers; consists of larger homes built on larger lots (many of which demand more in services than they create in tax revenue); demands extension of increasingly costly municipal services to far-flung communities; and requires more infrastructure that is more difficult and expensive to build, operate and maintain. The associated cost and tax burden is borne by a shrinking and aging pool of taxpayers, and ultimately by the state as a whole.
Upstate New York's future requires that we refocus development and growth around its strengths -- its educated work force, existing infrastructure and housing stock, educational and medical institutions, natural resources, working farms and aging but committed population.
It is here where the interests of the downstaters coincide. Quite obviously, it's in the interest of the entire state, whether one lives in Manhattan or Buffalo, to see state resources used wisely and efficiently. The costs of supporting decaying inner-city infrastructure will ultimately be borne in large part by the state as a whole. How much better to see growth focused inward toward reusing and adapting the roads, water lines and housing of Buffalo and other cities. It's clear that there are big trends at work.
State subsidies, when there are any, should be used as investments designed to enhance the needs and potential of places -- whether they be urban areas, main streets or town centers -- where there is an existing public investment in human and physical capital. That is what seeds Smart Growth, and that is the essence and intent of the Public Infrastructure Policy Act.
Note: A version of this commentary first appeared in The Albany Times-Union
@RegionalPlan
This is dead-on!
It is about time this issue be put on the forefront. This is what America should be rebuilding!
Peter: This is an excellent article. I am forwarding it to people I know who would be interested in this topic. Vanessa
I agree that smarter growth patterns should be encouraged, if not incentivized. the only issue I have with the article is lumping every thing north and west of the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge as Upstate.
having lived in many parts of the state, I am aware that Buffalo is not Syracuse, and the issues faced in both metro areas is not the same as Rochester, roughly halfway between the two. I would argue that the differences that exist through out the state is one of the greatest assets to addressing smart growth solutions.
Hi Peter,
Your comments about our once-Emprie State are well thought and written.
The disconnect between up- and down- state is an historic economic change, the global economy favoring NYC while the netherlands of greater NY State languish.
The functional disconnect is between finance and indusry, as most NY corporations & investors pour money into low cost manufacting abroard leaving upstate NY awash in social costs with little income earned from the larger economy. Globalisation has proved to be a boon to large corporations at the expense of working communities across the USA.
Meanwhile the traditional river/canal transport that made NY State a convenient waterway system is but a vague memory of better times. But the channels are still there.
Proposals to provide a mondicum of Hudson-Mohawk-NYS Canal - Great Lakes cargo & passenger ships transport business have been blithely dismissed by local business leaders, banks & State agencies.
Alas! relative to other countries, and expressing a profound lack of initiative, New York State, once a leader in world commerce based in its local initiative has no such service and opportunity for its citizens. When will New York State realize the value of its waterways and fund the facilities to realize the economic potential of its natural resources? To view the contrast, visit the Rhine, Danube, Nile, Amazon, Yangzi or even the Irrawady, where international visitors help keep local communities afloat and ready to greet the world.
We planners have difficulty discussing the fact that people want and continue to buy large lot single family homes, and why that market exists. After all, in most places it is not the ONLY housing type being offered, yet a critical mass of people seem to want this lifestyle. If we look at ancient and some modern third world developments, they, too, sprawl and consist of homes or huts with individually walled in yards.
"The power to tax is the power to destroy" and in NYS, if an anti-sprawl or fair cost allocation consensus exists on a state level, there should be more "frontage"-based property taxes and less ad valorum property taxing systems. This would then reflect the way that these large lots gobble up municipal services for roads, sanitation, etc. and educational costs because there are usually more kids per large lot. People will continue to go with their wallets, but at least sprawl will pay what it should.