For Release Sunday, November 22, 2009
© 2009 Washington Post Writers Group
Whoa!! Let’s pause and recalibrate before we equate economic “recovery” with our past practices of devouring land and consuming energy resources with near total abandon.
As a nation we’ve been wastrels, to be sure. Our mall- and big box mania, dependent on 1-to-4-ton vehicles for simple shopping trips, demanding vast acreage of paved-over landscape, left us (before the current eruption of dead malls) with six times the shopping space, per capita, of Europe.
And housing? Sprawling indiscriminately across the countryside, new residences were gobbling up 3,000 square miles of land a year before the current recession. Were we to keep up that pace from now to 2040, we’d turn territory the size of Colorado into roadways, subdivisions and apartment complexes. The cost in land, energy and added greenhouse emissions would be huge, scuttling any carbon reduction goals we aspire to.
But listen to our daily news reports. We viscerally cheer at any news of increased housing starts, rarely asking how many of them represent the “same old” versus a new, more land- and energy-conserving mode.
Such acute real estate and land use experts as Arthur Nelson and Christopher Leinberger see us shifting course toward more dense, transit-oriented, walkable development. But the impulses of some developers to go hog-wild with new, outsized, distantly located, energy-chomping, greenhouse-gas generating development, have scarcely abated.
Consider the plans of developer Robert Congel, super-wealthy CEO/owner of the Pyramid Management Group that’s created 19 shopping malls. Congel is pushing hard to bless his home town of Syracuse, N.Y., with “DestiNY USA,” the mega-mall of all mega-malls–a multi-billion-dollar combination shop-store-restaurant-theater-tourist-hotel center, complete with such features as a 65-acre enclosed park, a 15,000 seat amphitheater, an aquarium, a six-story “climbing wall,” and a re-creation of the Erie Canal.
Seven years ago I found myself writing with partial sympathy about Congel’s plans. He seemed to believe sincerely that his project, modeled a bit after Minnesota’s “Mall of America” –albeit, at 4 million square feet, exceeding it–would draw 35 million visitors a year to economically lagging Upstate New York. Pressed in an interview, he even talked about building a monorail or other connection from DestiNY to Syracuse’s grand old but threadbare downtown.
Today I’d be far more skeptical–and not just because Citigroup, the construction financer, last May halted its DestiNY loan payments. (In court Citigroup called the project a “failure” without a single signed tenant. Construction is now halted.)
The fact is, we have a new global reality. Our post-recession future almost surely holds gasoline at $4 a gallon, maybe a lot more. The prospective car travel of DestiNY visitors would total billions of miles, generating formidable greenhouse gas emissions.
It’s clearer than ever: carbon in the atmosphere imperils the globe. Why should we tolerate unnecessary add-ons?
OK, Congel has promised DestiNY would be America’s largest “green” building–powered entirely by non-fossil fuel energy sources ranging from solar panels to hydrogen cells. Doesn’t that change the picture?
No. Buildings contribute some 40 percent of America’s yearly carbon emissions. The materials and machines to build new structures are significant carbon generators. Studies conducted by the National Trust for Historic Preservation show it would take 65 years to recover the energy lost in demolishing a building and replacing it with a “green-energy-efficient” structure with equivalent floor space. Renovating structures in Syracuse’s downtown would be a dramatically “greener” choice than DestiNY.
Indeed, “greenwashing” has become a tactic de jour for controversial projects. Take New York investor John Rudey’s proposal to build a leading sustainable city in Washington State’s Kittitas County, 90 miles east of Seattle. The new live-work town would have fully-recycled water and fully-contained sewage systems, solar energy, all electric cars and more. There’d even be a massive solar project on 400 cleared acres of the 46,000-acre forestry tracts that Rudey’s American Forest Land Company (AFLC) owns.
Sounds great? Maybe, and Kittitas County commissioners are figuratively salivating at the prospect of new jobs. But critics say the site screams sprawl–it’s on a two-lane highway leading to the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, in heavy snow country, 10 miles from the closest main road. It also requires a major rezoning that has local farmers up in arms, all the more so because it’s reported that AFLC has clear-cut practically all harvestable trees from the vast site it bought from Boise Cascade in 1999.
It would be a lot wiser, some say, if AFLC put its model new city right beside Cle Elum, an historic but struggling mining and logging town 20 miles distant. Cle Elum has a hospital, schools and big chunks of Washington State-designated urban growth area right beside it.
That might be an exciting, truly conserving and green–and, I’d add–patriotic choice. The kind we need a lot more of.
Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.
For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.
7 Comments
Look at California’s SB 375 Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act that links transportation and land use to reduce the need to drive. This legislation will reduce sprawl, fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions and create new patterns of compact growth with diversified mixes of uses that result in jobs being located closer to housing. Taxpayer spending on major road infrastructure will also be reduced under this legislation. Thanks to California State Senator Darrell Steinberg for introducing and spearheading the effort to pass SB 375; the path to sustainable development that could be a model for the rest of the country.
Neal: As usual, a great thought expressed effectively.
Frank
Received from Marianne Gordon:
Thanks for the great column about what AFLC is threatening to do to the forests of Kittitas County.
We already have one over-priced gated community between Cle Elum and Roslyn, Suncadia, and here someone is trying to start another.
Needless to say many of us are entirely against it. Our local chapter of National Audubon Society is one of the pponents. It seems it is ne thing after another and our county commissioners haven’t learned that more houses don’t bring in enough more taxes to pay for the additional services. It’s not a new concept. My dad preached it way back in the forties when he was on the King County Planning Commission.
I always look forward to reading your columns. What you say makes sense to somebody who was introduced to these ideas at an early age.
Received from Ellen Bynum, Director
Friends of Skagit County
You nailed it – well, almost all of it (minus the tax incentives and other corporate law which drives the greednovators) – with your editorial. On behalf of the Board and members of Friends of Skagit County, we thank you for exposing development that is inappropriate in size, scale or location for what it is – greenwashing at its best (or worst).
We appreciate you pointing out that UGAs are designated so that infrastructure will be compact, and supposedly, costs to taxpayers will be reduced when developers pay their fair share (or pass on to new buyers). With 59.9% of the land in Skagit being untaxed, sprawl (at any rate) is a recipe for disaster to the citizens, all 107,000 of them.
You may want to write next about how this phenomenon seems to have invaded state agencies, especially in Skagit County where most of the 3,000 acres of agricultural lands converted to other uses in 2008 were purchased by agencies for various “projects”. We count another 10,000 acres of the 83,000 zoned Ag-NRL are proposed for future conversion. At this rate we can fully wipe out the largest economic driver in the county in a few years and transform the Valley into Lynnwood. Where we will grow our food is another matter.
Yes, lets not waste energy. But lets talk about the human energy waste and the systematic practice of extracting it by the means of “usury”. This goes on unabated until all the wealth and power is in the hands of a few as the many are left depleted and exhausted. This human energy disease has a name. The Federal Reserve Bank. This human energy disease is terminal. Good Luck to You.
Message from Cynthia Loring MacBain
Skaneateles
Thank you, thank you for your very clear piece on the un-greenness of malls and the building industry. I just wish that we could get members of the television media to develop programs that help people understand what people like you and me — people who read extensively and ask questions — seem to “get.”
One only needs to visit a town like Northampton, MA — or parts of New York City and Boston — to see that
when people can browse stores along a street and take time to stop and share conversation over a cup of coffee in an outside cafe, they find much more pleasure than they do driving an hour to a huge mall and then having to study the categories of shops in the directory to know where they want to turn. Syracuse could be that community, with bike trails and walking trails. New Haven, CT. has changed their buses to “trolleys,” and their bus stops to “trolley stops.” They are so much more colorful than the silver centros, and might tempt people to want to use them instead of cars. (Of course, I’d like the real thing because it might slow the pace of traffic, as they did in my childhood.)
Comment received from Greg Hoover, Syracuse area builder, regarding the Pyramid Management group/Robert Congel — mentioned in this column:
You fail to mention that this Mall was built on one of the most ugly & dirty dump salvage properties one most ever sees and in the inner city as well. … They also got removed the Oil City tanks and their spills in the nearby lots….in the center city… This very same company 1st took more Brownstone reclamation properties in Franklin Square, than anyone else….in the city center again & probably generated more of the dense urban living units than anyone and set the momentum for others to do so now.