As local politicians across the country get scorched by voter anger over recession-induced budget cuts — laying off teachers, closing schools and libraries and slashing services — perhaps they’ll be more receptive than usual to some powerful and surprising tax revenue numbers.

So what follows is about fiscal prudence as much as it is about smart city planning.

Conventional wisdom, of course, says that to prop up the property tax base, a high-end shopping mall is just the ticket. But when Sarasota County, Fla., looked at where the county government gets the biggest bang for its property tax buck, it found some numbers that may surprise a lot of people.

Sarasota County Director of Smart Growth Peter Katz, speaking to a meeting of Citistates Associates in Minnesota late last month, described a recent analysis of the county’s property tax revenue per acre. He pointed first to residential areas. Not surprisingly, when you work the numbers on a per-acre basis, residential property inside the county’s municipalities offered the biggest revenue per acre — a little more than $8,200 per acre for single family houses within the city of Sarasota. This makes sense, as in-town land values tend to be higher.

Next, Katz showed the results from retail properties. Here comes surprise No. 1.: Big box stores such as WalMart and Sam’s Club, when analyzed for county property tax revenue per acre, produce barely more than a single family house; maybe $150 to $200 more a year, Katz said. (Think of all those acres of parking lots.) “That hardly seems worth all the heat that elected officials take when they approve such development,” he noted in a related, written presentation.

Among retail properties, the biggest per-acre property tax revenue in his county, almost $22,000 per acre, comes from Southgate Mall, the county’s highest-end commercial property with Macy’s, Dillards and Saks Fifth Avenue department stores. That’s not so surprising.

But here’s the shocker: On a horizontal bar chart Katz showed, you see that zooming to the far right side, outpacing all the retail offerings, even the regional shopping mall, is the revenue from a high-rise mixed-use project in downtown Sarasota. It sits on less than an acre and contributes a hefty $800,000 in tax per acre. (Add in city property taxes and it’s $1.2 million.) “It takes a lot of WalMarts to equal the contribution of that one mixed-use building,” Katz noted.

Indeed, that three-quarters of an acre of in-town urban-style (14- to 16-story) development is worth more property tax revenue than a combination of the 21-acre WalMart Supercenter and the 32-acre Southgate Mall.

Even a mid rise (up to about seven stories) mixed use building brings in $560,000, and the low rise (up to three stories with residential over retail) brings in over $70,000 per acre — more than three times the return of Southgate Mall.

Katz quipped, “From a fiscal standpoint, this really puts hair on your chest.”

But Katz and the group that worked with him on the tax analysis, Public Interest Projects, Inc., in Asheville (http://www.pubintproj.com/index.php), N.C., went further than just the revenue analysis. It looked at the payback time, in tax revenue, for the infrastructure costs of various types of residential developments. The payback time for a mixed-use condominium building in the heart of downtown was three years. Want to guess the payback time for the residential portion of a multi-use development out at a highway interchange? It was a whopping 42 years.

Nothing involving tax revenues is simple, of course. For instance, what about sales taxes? Obviously that big WalMart and the shopping mall bring in more revenue than just property taxes. But Joe Minicozzi of Public Interest Projects notes, “Generally speaking, there isn’t a heck of a lot of return to the municipality with sales tax — at least compared to the return from property tax.”

And Katz noted that while sales tax revenue can be important to the specific city or town that snags a big retail development, “At the county level such ‘fiscal zoning’ makes little sense.”

Yes, Sarasota County could probably “steal” some commercial development from neighbor counties. “But we’d ultimately do far better to create value through property taxes in smart growth ‘districts,’” he said:

“With a receptive mindset among citizens and elected officials, such places should be infinitely replicable; doing so may actually be easier than trying to squeeze a little more spending out of our citizens’ mostly fixed disposable income.”

Potential tax revenue shouldn’t be the only factor in determining appropriate development for any community, of course — especially not flawed assumptions about which type of development brings in the healthiest tax revenue. And as Katz pointed out, there’s a limited market in most communities for intensive, mixed use development, even if NIMBY opposition were to evaporate, which isn’t likely.

Still, evidence is piling up of the benefits of compact, in-town development compared with auto-centric greenfield development. With a smaller carbon footprint, it’s kinder on the environment. It’s kinder on residents’ waistlines, too, as they’re likely to walk more and drive less. And now there’s evidence it’s kinder to government coffers, as well. And that’s an attribute worth some serious attention.

Citiwire.net columns are not copyrighted and may be reproduced in print or electronically; please show authorship, credit Citiwire.net and send an electronic copy of usage to webmaster@citiwire.net.

ATHENS — Each city is a unique blend of history, culture and architecture. But put three dozen urban planners and scholars from around the globe into one room and you discover that their concerns sound astoundingly similar.

In June I spent three days in Athens with a group of former International Urban Fellows from Johns Hopkins University, holding their annual conference this year in the Greek capital city of almost 4 million. I asked those in attendance — most from Britain and Europe, but others from Mexico, India and Turkey — to pinpoint the biggest problem their city faces.

Despite major differences in history, urban form, customs and governance between their cities and U.S. metros, their answers might easily have come from planners in Atlanta, Cleveland, Charlotte or Chicago.

In the U.S., with our primitive rapid transit, our expensive — and expansive — large-lot suburban neighborhoods and our rapacious appetite for oil-based energy, we’re apt to imagine that other countries’ cities have found more effective solutions to problems that bedevil our urban areas. Europe is like a gigantic, well-planned Portland (though with better French fries), we think, while the U.S. is more like sprawling Phoenix.

But if we assume all that, listening to conference attendees from places such as Rome, Edinburgh, Paris and Bern, Switzerland, is a bit like getting ice water splashed in your face.

Some of the problems they listed and talked about:

• Under-developed or unused infrastructure.
• Mobility and car-focused development.
• Accommodating immigrants and/or different ethnic groups
• Corruption or maladministration
• The difficulty of infill development, compared with growth on the urban edge.
• Gentrification and other housing problems.
• Economic troubles and unemployment.
• Sprawl.
• Lack of regional cooperation or regional governance.

Not everyone listed all those problems, except, sadly, an architect from Calcutta and one from Mexico City who said, in effect, “all of the above.”

Mexico City, an urbanized area of 20 million (or maybe 24 million — apparently even population measures there are contested) suffers from “overpopulation, pollution, sprawl, corruption, etc.” architect Alvaro Arellano Farias responded to my informal survey.

And while cities around the globe are worrying about climate-change-induced sea rise, Mexico City can go them one better. Built upon ancient lakebed drained by the Spanish conquistadors, it is sinking at the rate of an inch a year.

As Arellano described the region’s complicated governance, with four boroughs inside Mexico City, 16 boroughs and a mayor in the Federal District, 41 more municipalities in greater Mexico City, 18 more in the larger urban valley — which is, itself, divided among a federal district and two states — I was attempting to make sure I understood this complexity. “Is there any one …?”

” … In charge?” He laughed ruefully. “No.”

They all compete for economic development. The industrial areas in the state of Hidalgo send their air pollution into Mexico City. But with its sewage disposal going to Hidalgo, the city gets its pollutant revenge.

Unlike Mexico City, France is a place many American planners eye with envy for its compact centers, efficient public transit and strict urban growth boundaries. Yet two Frenchmen, one a planner from the northern region and the other an Athenian architect now living in Paris, complained about greenfield development, the lack of cohesive regional governance “and the usual NIMBY attitudes,” as architect Panos Mantziaras put it.

Although French planning is much stricter and more nationalized than in the U.S., nevertheless, the Paris metro region has 500-some governments. France has 36,000 mayors, more than any other European country. But starting with the next election, a new national law has created a direct elected body for the urbanized area of French cities, said Lille-based planner Jean-Marie Ernecq.

Naturally, for such a regional body to be created, it had to be imposed from above.

Calcutta’s problems probably dwarf those of most other urban areas. “Calcutta is a large exploding metropolos tending to megalopolis,” noted Biplab Sengupta, a professor of planning and architecture in Kharagpur, India. He listed slums, traffic congestion and inadequate physical and social infrastructure.

Yet plenty of other cities grapple with those same problems — so many that a planner can get discouraged. As Mantziaras put it, “You create all kinds of tools to foretell the future — and you never can.”

Georges Prevelakis, a Greek urban planner and professor of geopolitics at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University in Paris, described the idealistic goals of the Modernist movement, launched in the 1933 Charter of Athens. It was, he said, an idealism married to a lot of arrogance: “It has been an enormous disappointment. We failed. … Who speaks of trying to contain the growth in cities in Africa?”

Athens’ version of explosive population growth in the mid-20th century created many industrial areas, including land along the ancient Sacred Way, which ran between the city of Eleusis, now a suburban city called Elefsina, to the Acropolis in central Athens. Hellenic Open University Professor Lila Leontidou noted one result — that as runners traced the storied route from Marathon to the Acropolis during the 2004 Olympic Marathon, television viewers around the world saw mile upon mile of undistinguished suburban sprawl until the runners entered the center city.

Like Mexico City and Calcutta, or even Los Angeles or Philadelphia, Athens has urban issues that range far beyond its official municipal boundaries.

Mantziaras spoke with visible affection about growing up in Athens, about yearly birthday parties atop Filopappos hill. “I can close my eyes, and in my mind describe the skyline of the mountains,” he said.

But Athens is in crisis. And in today’s world, to regenerate an urban area one must deal with a city at the supra-urban scale, he said, remembering always that the future of the sprawling industrial and suburban areas is inextricably linked to the historic, tourist-filled center city.

What cities need, said Ernecq, is restored political debate. “We need to have a vision and real political leadership and civic participation.”

That, I’d add, is an important recipe, no matter where in the world you are.

Mary Newsom is an associate editor and opinion writer at the Charlotte Observer, where she writes a weekly column, writes The Naked City blog at www.marynewsom.blogspot.com, and Tweets @marynewsom. Disclosure: Her travel expenses to Athens were paid by the Johns Hopkins University International Urban Fellows Program.

Citiwire.net columns are not copyrighted and may be reproduced in print or electronically; please show authorship, credit Citiwire.net and send an electronic copy of usage to webmaster@citiwire.net.

A little more than a dozen years ago, a collection of three adjacent suburban towns in the sprawling Sun Belt region of Charlotte did something extraordinary. After months of public workshops, lectures and community discussions, months of looking at slide shows to choose what kinds of streets, stores, houses and apartments they wanted for their towns, they revamped their town codes. They aimed to discourage conventional suburbia and encourage traditional neighborhood development, transit-oriented projects and farmland preservation.

It warmed the hearts of planners. It drew national attention and awards and, after a couple of New Urbanist neighborhoods were built, busloads of visiting Smart Growth disciples. Writers, including yours truly, ladled on praise. In 1996 I wrote an editorial calling the new ordinances in Huntersville, Cornelius and Davidson, N.C., “a remarkable exercise in local and regional planning” and “a remarkable vision.”

But as Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys sang decades before, “Time changes everything.”

“It faded away in Cornelius first,” says David Walters, an urban design professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who has worked as a consultant for all three towns starting in the mid-1990s.

“The torch didn’t get well passed,” says Bill Coxe, transportation planner in Huntersville, a one-time mill-town and railroad hamlet that has grown from less than 3,000 people in 1988 to an estimated 39,000 in 2006. In both Huntersville and the next-door town of Cornelius, early enthusiasm for concentrating development into higher density nodes and for pushing more growth into the towns’ tiny, historic downtowns has faltered, victim of elections and the departures of some key planners, mayors and town managers. It hasn’t helped that a long-wished-for commuter rail line remains in funding limbo.

Today, Huntersville town commissioners are thinking of using a city-owned former cotton mill site–purchased years ago with an eye to a mixed-use development clustered at a planned commuter rail stop–to build a new police station. After all, the reasoning goes, it would save money to use land the town already owns. And anyway, conservatives on the town board had successfully scuttled a deal with a willing local developer. That happened back in the pre-recession days when developers could still get financing.

By 2010, only Davidson–an affluent college town of about 9,000, home to Davidson College–was hewing religiously to its strategy: channel most growth into already developed areas, protect the village feel of its historic downtown by requiring new development to fit in with the old and try to protect open land in its fast-disappearing rural surroundings.

In Huntersville, by contrast, “The cadre who believed in it moved on,” Coxe says. “Now you just have a bunch of suburbanites. And they just don’t get it.”

How, he wonders, do you embed into a town’s culture the precepts of smart planning, of building walkable town centers and channeling the growth into the areas where it makes sense to grow? After so much work by so many townspeople and elected leaders, how do you maintain that level of interest, engagement and understanding of the underlying principles? After all, most Americans still equate “density” with poverty.

With so many newcomers, and the generally transient nature of much of America, how many Huntersville and Cornelius residents were even aware of all those hours townspeople devoted 15 years ago? Walters worked with Cornelius, population about 13,000, on an area plan in 2003 and with Huntersville on a 2005 downtown plan. Public participation, he says, was “pretty disappointing.” And, he says, “More worryingly, there was not a whole lot of interest from public officials.”

In addition to the turnover and the influx of newcomers unaware of the past work, I suspect a piece of what has happened relates to starker political partisanship and more liberal-versus-conservative tensions in the past decade. Much about traditional neighborhood design might be considered conservative–such as its aim to hold down municipal services costs and its association with small-town values. But once “smart growth” came to be associated with environmentalism, it became a target for many conservatives suspicious of anything favored by liberals.

Yet the northernmost town of the three, Davidson, has held to its course. Walters credits many things, including its long-time mayor, Randy Kincaid, who only left office two years ago. “He got it,” Walters says. “He really didn’t need any convincing.” The town board, also, has seen little turnover and is generally well-educated about the complexities of growth and planning. And while the town’s top planners have changed, they’ve all been, in Walters’ words, “activist planners.”

And, as if happens, Davidson is a place enamored of itself. “Davidson’s own dynamics, its sense of specialness,” has, over the years, helped it work through difficulties and keep its eye on its goals, Walters says.

Coxe, the Huntersville planner, told me recently that he considers it a personal failure that Huntersville hasn’t held to its much-praised vision of a decade ago. I think he’s too hard on himself. Like a large number of Americans, many of Huntersville’s new townspeople have never lived anywhere but suburbia. That’s the way of life they know and love.

Walters, who has worked as a consultant on planning projects around the country, thinks the inability to stick to community plans is likely a continual problem, especially rapidly growing suburban areas such as Huntersville. He’s right. People move away. They forget. They elect new politicians. Time changes everything.

Even if 15 years ago hundreds of people devoted hundreds of hours to learn a better way to grow, Walters reminds us, you need “constant vigilance, constant education, constant programming of public events to keep the issues alive.”

Citiwire.net columns are not copyrighted and may be reproduced in print or electronically; please show authorship, credit Citiwire.net and send an electronic copy of usage to webmaster@citiwire.net.

The TV bar, “Cheers,” was a perfect, though fictional, example of one. The Paris café Les Deux Magots was a real one, and it famously drew artists and intellectuals such as Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. If you’re lucky, you live near one, too: a coffeehouse, pub, barber shop or general store where you can visit anytime and linger. You’ll see people you know and people you don’t, and no one makes you leave ’til you’re ready.

Sociologist Ray Oldenburg dubbed them Third Places in his 1989 book, The Great Good Place. He wrote that Third Places (not work, not home) are “the heart of a community’s social vitality, the grassroots of democracy.” But in the U.S., he wrote, we’ve almost lost them, as people spend more time in cars, in shopping malls, or at home in front of a screen.

Earlier this month I spent a couple of days in Toronto at a conference for the Information Architecture Institute, which drew hundreds of bright and creative people interested in the human mind, IT and how they intersect. One social media expert spoke about Oldenburg, and proposed that online social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are America’s new Third Places.

Well, no.

This is a defense of the value of real places where real people meet, and the little-heeded but significant role they play in the life of our cities and towns.

Online networks can, of course, create social and business relationships. Facebook, MySpace and Twitter let people meet and keep in touch, and occasionally in-person friendships flower from Facebook “friending.” Indeed, their popularity may well be fed by the lack of true Third Places in our lives.

Still, as Third Places they’re mere metaphors for the real thing.

A Third Place exists in the three-dimensional world inhabited by the bodies of human beings. Sure, at any hangout what people talk about may sound a lot like their Facebook status or Tweets. But being in another human’s physical presence transforms the relationship. You hear vocal inflections and regional accents and notice whether their teeth are straight or their shoes are shabby. You may even smell them–for better or worse.

Not infrequently, when I meet politicians or other public figures whose opinions I completely disagree with, they turn out to be personable and sympathetic people. (And some turn out to be nutty as a Payday candy bar, but that’s a column for another day.) Meeting in person isn’t likely to change my views–or theirs–but seeing someone in the whole shifts the relationship.

Studies find anywhere from 65 percent to 93 percent of our communication with others is nonverbal–through tone of voice, small expressions and body language. That’s why diplomats meet in person. It’s why the president sits down with foreign leaders.

And it’s one of the reasons that real places–and real public places–matter. “Deprived of these settings,” Oldenburg wrote in his introduction to The Great Good Place, “people remain lonely within their crowds.”

Online it’s easy to mingle only with people with whom you agree. In Charlotte, a reporter recently interviewed Facebook users about their opinions on health care reform and found people on both sides of the issue believed most Facebook users agreed with them.

Americans’ growing tendency to migrate toward communities of the like-minded is the subject of Bill Bishop’s book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart. And there’s evidence it might be making us ruder.

Research shows that people in groups where all agree tend to become more extreme in their views, while people in groups that disagree become more moderate.

So as more of us retreat into our self-selected opinion bubbles, and more of our public discourse moves online, where those opinion bubbles grow ever more extreme, public debate gets more shrill, more hostile.

By contrast, if you’re lucky enough to have a Third Place, you run into all kinds of people there: your neighbors whose political yard signs drive you bonkers, the Wiccan from the vegan café, people who may not be like you at all except in their liking for this place. Most likely you’ll have at least a small, civil interaction with them. It will not be like the commentary on political blog sites.

Those in-person encounters are essential to life in a city. As both Oldenburg and urbanist writer Jane Jacobs knew, the seemingly insignificant human exchanges among people who aren’t close enough to be “friends” or “family” and need not be invited home to dinner are one of the undervalued characteristics of urban life. Jacobs wrote that while cities are full of people with whom contact is enjoyable, “You don’t want them in your hair and they do not want you in theirs, either.”

In the two decades since The Great Good Place was published, some developers and planners have incorporated Oldenburg’s observations into their work and have attempted to create “vibrant urban villages.” A few are indeed urban, or villages, or upon occasion vibrant. But too many have the well-choreographed ambience of a shopping mall center court instead the plain, unassuming character of a true Third Place.

One evening years ago, my husband and I sat on the steps of the fountain in the piazza at the heart of Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood. Humanity clogged the piazza: families, children, tourists, workmen, women in stiletto heels, waiters moving among restaurant tables, men in suits hurrying past. Some people were not so reputable-looking. One disheveled man dug through the trash bin. A few slept on the pavement next to empty liquor bottles.

No shopping mall security guards would have allowed that range of humanity. Yet their presence created exactly the “little touch of chaos and danger,” as musician David Byrne wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal, that “makes a city sexy.”

Random, but civilized, humanity brings to life a public space as well as a Third Place. And it’s no exaggeration to say that transactions of that sort that occur in a true Third Place–peaceable and in person–underpin civilization.

Maybe I’m wrong, and someday we’ll recall, together, how posting on our neighbors’ Facebook walls brought society together, and helped us solve poverty and conquer injustice.

But somehow I just don’t see it.

Citiwire.net columns are not copyrighted and may be reproduced in print or electronically; please show authorship, credit Citiwire.net and send an electronic copy of usage to webmaster@citiwire.net.

Maybe somewhere in Obama-land, stimulus money is protecting public school classrooms. But here in the red clay of North Carolina, there’s a teacher layoff bloodbath going on.

A few days after I heard that the toughest and best history teacher at our daughter’s high school got the ax–one of hundreds of teacher layoffs in Charlotte’s public schools and thousands in $5 billion-in-the-red North Carolina–I listened to Charlotte’s airport manager describe a $300-million parking deck he’s planning, complete with pedestrian tunnel. It’s in a package of projects: a new international concourse, two new hourly parking decks, an expanded ticketing area, a new runway–all to be funded by bond sales, the debt paid with airport revenues. “We’re spending money like drunken sailors,” the manager recently told a Charlotte Chamber of Commerce group.

This is madness.

I live in a city where thousands go homeless every night, where public schools are laying off hundreds of teachers, teacher assistants and other very much needed staff. When the state’s budget is final, hundreds more will almost certainly lose jobs. Although North Carolina’s unemployment rate is now at 11.1 percent and homelessness is growing, essential health care and human services will be slashed–even if the legislature adopts a package of tax increases to shave a billion or so off the projected $5 billion shortfall.

And Charlotte is building a Taj Mahal parking deck at its airport? While teachers are being laid off, and essential human services eliminated? Something is horribly wrong.

The problem is not–as many voters undoubtedly assume–misplaced priorities by city officials. (In North Carolina city governments don’t run school systems.) The underlying problem is that we have too many little governments, each with its own pot of money and sliver of governance. It’s a system that easily undermines the democratic process, leading to startlingly bad public policy.

We’re lost in a labyrinth of local governments, a crazy-quilt that leads to crazy priorities. For instance, most everyone would agree it’s smarter to keep excellent teachers in classrooms than to pamper airport customers with a new parking deck and tunnel.

But if the airport manager scrapped that parking deck, the money saved wouldn’t benefit the schools by a penny. Nor would it help fill potholes, provide mental health treatment or build even an inch of a light rail line. The airport is an “enterprise fund,” run off the airport-only revenues it brings in. Those revenues aren’t legally available to the public schools.

All over America we have city budgets, county budgets, school system budgets, state government budgets and dozens of other budgets: municipal service district budgets, sewer district budgets, enterprise fund budgets, highway trust fund budgets. And that doesn’t even count the federal budget.

Voters are so confused about who pays for what that they don’t know which of their elected representatives to complain to. Charlotte parents outraged over teacher layoffs rail at the elected school board. But in North Carolina school boards must make do with whatever funds are allocated to them by the state legislature and county governments. Most voters, including those trying to protest education cuts, don’t even know who their state representatives are, much less how to reach them.

Maybe a few places are paying attention. The New York Times reported in May that local governments in the New York region, battered by recession, are considering a wave of consolidations, mergers and shared services. New York state government, the Times reported, has spent $29 million over two years to help 140 local governments consolidate services. In addition, it reported, New Jersey–whose 566 municipalities are the most, per capita of any state–last year started slashing funding to more than 300 communities of less than 10,000 population, pushing them to combine services.

North Carolina has 100 counties–a political jurisdiction created to be small enough so a farmer could travel by horse to the county seat and home again, within a day. It’s a quaint and nostalgic delineation, but hardly a 21st-century one. Georgia has 159 counties. Texas has 254.

But it’s safe to assume that most elected officials in cash-strapped jurisdictions are spending the bulk of their energy and political capital these days trying to balance failing budgets, rather than trying to eliminate their own jobs or those of political rivals, or merging cities and counties that don’t want to be merged. Indeed, while a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, a crisis also demands rather a lot of attention, leaving little time for the kinds of essential restructuring and tax reform that so many state and local governments truly need.

So for now, most of us are left with absurdities like this one: Hundreds of teachers are losing their jobs. Meanwhile, over at Charlotte city offices no layoffs are planned or needed. And the airport is going to be just gorgeous.

Sharing the pain?

Hardly.

Citiwire.net columns are not copyrighted and may be reproduced in print or electronically; please show authorship, credit Citiwire.net and send an electronic copy of usage to webmaster@citiwire.net.

Across the U.S., civil engineers are practically giddy–well, they’re as giddy as civil engineers are ever going to be.

“For the first time in my career,” says Wayne Klotz, a Texan who is president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, “infrastructure is a hot topic.”

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, president of the National Governors’ Association, has for a year been trying to spotlight the nation’s serious infrastructure needs–although (don’t tell Klotz) Rendell himself concedes the topic lacks a certain sexiness.

But these days, recession-pummeled Americans are following the federal stimulus package almost as avidly as, in happier times, they obsessed over Anna Nicole Smith or Laci Peterson. They’re arguing whether stimulus money should go to the arts, or to repair and expand infrastructure, such as fixing bridges, boosting transit or finishing urban loop roads.

It’s about time people noticed those public works projects.

Klotz — speaking recently in Raleigh, N.C., at a statewide conference on growth and infrastructure — gave a shiver-inducing rundown of failing bridges, inadequate levees and high-hazard dams. In January the engineering group’s latest report card on the nation’s infrastructure rated it “poor.” Drinking water? D-. Levees? D-. Roads? D-. Transit? D.

“We continue to use the ‘patch-and-pray’ system,” Klotz said. Yet every $1 spent for maintaining infrastructure saves $16 in repair costs when something breaks, he pointed out.

But is the welcome public attention also spotlighting one of the reasons our infrastructure spending is so high–the vast sums required by suburban sprawl? In fast-growing North Carolina, at least, it isn’t.

Amid plenty of talk at that two-day conference about huge needs and inadequate money, about transit funding and open space preservation, one topic went all but unmentioned: Sprawl and its costs.

You’d think more of the leaders in this fast-sprawling state would be paying attention, because huge sums are at stake. For instance:

• The outerbelt highway for Charlotte, the state’s largest city, will have cost at least $1.2 billion in state and federal funds by the time it’s finished, some 30 years after it was begun. Yet uncontrolled development along its route induced congestion almost as soon as each section opened.
• State transportation officials project a $65 billion gap over the next 20 years between transportation revenues and transportation needs.
• Charlotte officials estimate it will cost $7.4 million per mile in state and local money to upgrade old farm-to-market roads now carrying suburbanites to and from home, work and shopping.

While there’s plenty of head-scratching about how to find the money, state policymakers are bafflingly silent about the dollars wasted by spread-out, low-density, metastasizing suburban sprawl–and how much the state needs to reel it in.

Part of the problem is a simplistic yet potent belief that “growth is good,” and any new development is a net revenue gain. That idea is “fool’s gold,” ex-developer Rand Wentworth, president of the national Land Trust Alliance, told the forum. Typical suburban development costs $1.15 in services for every $1 in revenue it brings in, he said.

Another piece of the problem is that in North Carolina, state government types pretend growth is a local issue. They practically stick their fingers in their ears and shout “La, la, la, I can’t hear you!” when state growth policy comes up.

Yet the state has plenty of skin in this game. Consider state road money. The state spent millions in past decades to build so-called “bypass” highways around many of its town and cities. Then local decisions lined those bypasses with big-box stores, fast-food joints and strip shopping centers. Now, because developers have strip-mined the “bypass” highways, the state wants to build expensive “bypass-the-bypass” highways.

In another example, state-maintained roads through cities and towns tend to be major thoroughfares, lined with subdivisions and shopping centers. They carry exponentially more traffic than if the cities had adopted common-sense requirements for connected street grids, and had banned cul-de-sacs and gated subdivisions, which funnel traffic onto those quickly clogged thoroughfares. Then the state must pay for more lanes, wider intersections and other costly “improvements.” Why isn’t the state looking at its expenditures and telling the cities to stop this idiocy?

An intriguing study from Charlotte’s city staff illustrates another of sprawl’s hidden costs, with city taxpayers in this instance footing the bill: Fire station costs are sharply lower in older parts of town where streets connect. The study analyzed eight stations and found the annualized per-household life-cycle cost almost five times greater in disconnected, cul-de-sac-laden suburbia. That’s because fire stations in neighborhoods with traditional street grids can serve more square miles, since they can reach more homes within acceptable response times.

It’s heartening to hear President Obama declare we’re past “building sprawl forever,” that there has to be a smarter way to design communities. Now, we just need more officials at all levels of government to heed his words.

Citiwire.net columns are not copyrighted and may be reproduced in print or electronically; please show authorship, credit Citiwire.net and send an electronic copy of usage to webmaster@citiwire.net.