By Bruce Kettelle
The new census numbers sound an alarm that Ohio continues to experience rapid population decentralization. An effect we commonly call urban sprawl.
Youngstown, Cleveland, Dayton, Cincinnati, Toledo and Akron all lost over 8% of their urban population while the state as a whole grew.
People migrate for many reasons such as rural lifestyles, better schools, seemingly lower taxes, or to be closer to work. But the long-range pitfalls of unregulated sprawl are catching up with Ohio and left unfettered will be difficult to reverse.
One of the biggest real-time costs is providing the ever-expanding transportation and utility network to support these deltas of settlements around our cities. New roads, bridges, and highway widening projects consume valuable resources, and limited state and local budgets.
Rural development stresses limited water supplies. Growing auto usage consumes precious oil and pollutes our air. Deserted housing and commercial areas create blight and encourage crime.
Meanwhile futurists have warned us for over a century that the world population will grow larger than our planet’s ability to provide food for our billions of people. This year we received a wakeup call with droughts in Russia and a below average crop in the US and Ohio. We will not run out of food this year but the supplies are so tight that corn, for example, has tripled from $2 to over $6 a bushel in a few short years.
Capitalism may already be trying to slow the development of rural areas as the price for farmland is rising. Farms that sold ten years ago for $2,200 an acre are now bringing $5,500 and more. That is still far less than the tens of thousands developers are willing to pay, but it is getting closer. And once land is soiled by development it loses its agriculture productivity.
We have a choice. We can wait until food prices skyrocket putting the value of farmland out of the reach of developers or we can be proactive and develop sensible regional growth strategies now to preserve arable land for our food needs. If we wait there is no guarantee the markets will adjust in time and we will have already invested much more in new infrastructure costs.
Smart policies will create demand for vacant buildings and factory sites. Creative redevelopment of these assets will utilize the existing infrastructure already in place. This practice is already proving to work in places like Portland, Oregon and Louisville, Kentucky. Why shouldn’t we do it here in Dayton and all of Ohio?
Regional cooperation and planning is a sound idea whose time has come and it will save taxpayers money.
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