by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow
The Daily Sentinel
Building a new subdivision is complicated. Almost every city and county in America have master plans dictating “conforming uses” of land. Most specify lot and home sizes, rules for vehicle access, water supply, sewage disposal, flood control, affordable housing and park space. Those are addressed in lengthy application processes and public hearings, all preceding building the infrastructure, and then the homes.
The National Association of Home Builders says government regulations account for 24% of the final price of new homes. Sixty percent of that comes during planning and development, only 40% during actual construction. Those costs are many times higher when building businesses or industries. So, how much cheaper would homes and businesses be if the builder did not have to pay for streets, sidewalks, electricity, water and sewer or drainage? What if they built where that infrastructure already existed?
There are dilapidated old sites and empty lots in every city in the U.S., where the required infrastructure is already there. Most large cities have square miles of such places. Yet development continues to sprawl ever further from the cities, gobbling up farmland like Pac-Man instead of redeveloping inner cities, despite decades of talk, debate and controversy about preserving open space.
Urban sprawl is a serious problem in U.S. cities. It threatens productive agricultural areas, causes longer commutes, burns more gasoline and causes more air pollution. Inner cities further decay, consuming more natural resources in less efficient ways. Thus, natural resources policy has long been influenced by concerns about sprawl and how to stop it, including encouraging developers to build on these older properties in the cities. These areas are called “brownfields” and there are hundreds of projects designed to redevelop them.
