WHAT FLAVOR IS YOUR CONTAINMENT?
Arthur C. Nelson and Casey J. Dawkins
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Just below the national radar screen there is a growing movement to contain urban sprawl
called urban containment. Today, we find more than 100 metropolitan areas engaged in
some form of containment either regionally or among individual communities. More are
added annually.
In this article, we summarize findings of our national survey of urban containment,
sponsored by the National Association of Realtors. We begin with an overview, show the
“flavors” of containment, and speculate on “good” and “bad” containment.
God’s Will?
Urban containment is more than simply “growth management” or what some might call
“smart growth.” It is the explicit effort to prevent the outward expansion of urban areas.
The idea of urban containment is not new. The Old Testament has perhaps the earliest
mention of it:
The Lord said to Moses . . . Command the people of Israel, that they give to the
Levites . . . cities to dwell in; and pasture lands round about the cities . . . The
pasture lands of the cities . . . shall reach from the wall of the city outward . . . all
around.
The city shall be in the middle…
(Numbers 35: 1-5.)
We won’t tempt fate suggesting that urban containment is God’s will, of course.
What is Containment?
In our view, urban containment is an attempt to confront the reasonable development
needs of the community, region, or state, and accommodate them in a manner that
preserves public goods, minimizes fiscal burdens, minimizes adverse interactions
between land uses while maximizing positive ones, improves the equitable distribution of
the benefits of growth, and enhances quality of life. This is a tall order for public
officials since it usually intrudes on the use of privately property.
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At its heart, urban containment aims to choreograph public infrastructure investment,
land use and development regulation, and deployment of incentives and disincentives to
influence the rate, timing, intensity, mix, and location of growth. Broadly speaking,
urban containment programs can be distinguished from traditional approaches to land use
regulation by the presence of policies that are explicitly designed to limit the
development of land outside a defined urban area, while encouraging infill development
and redevelopment inside the urban area.
Why Contain?
In the Old Testament, containment was seen as a way to preserve farmlands to feed the
people. In modern America, the idea to contain urban development is more complex.
Whether knee-jerk or reasoned, the motivations to contain urban sprawl are widely
known. It is mostly a response to rapid suburbanization since World War II. Roads
intended to relieve congestion have become congested. Cookie-cutter subdivisions have
replaced scenic landscapes. Once-vital downtown stores have been abandoned as
shoppers transferred their allegiance to convenient suburban malls. The spread of lowdensity residential development made public transit impractical, making the automobile
virtually the only choice for transportation. Automobile dependence has degraded the air
in some places to alarming levels. Once-tranquil communities with their own unique
character have been overwhelmed by more people, automobiles, and shopping centers.
Urban containment is seen as a way to create vital urban and suburban communities, and
preserve rural heritage. Not all people favor containment, but a growing number do.
A Brief History of Containment
The granddaddy of all containment efforts is found in Great Britain. In 1949, just after
the War, Great Britain purchased all the development rights of land outside urban areas to
create greenbelts. Like them or hate them, greenbelts are now a fixture on Britain’s
landscape. In addition to hemming cities in, they are a tourist attraction.
Urban containment in America is fragmented. Some New England townships in the 17th
century, for example, forbade homes from being built in the nearby farmland. In modern
times, Lexington and Fayette County, Kentucky, are credited with implementing the
nation’s first effort to contain urban sprawl, chiefly by limiting development within an
urban service line and preventing urban-scale residential development in the Bluegrass
area around. Today, one can fly over this part of Kentucky to see development clustered
in the center of Fayette County with open spaces surrounding Lexington, coupled with
conventional urban sprawl in the surrounding counties.
The first statewide effort is Hawaii’s in the 1960s because, after all, its cities have a
difficult time sprawling at least too far out.
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During the 1970s, urban containment emerged in a few more metropolitan areas, chiefly
Miami-Dade County, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Boulder, Sarasota, and Sacramento, and in
one state – Oregon. By the middle 1980s, every urban area in Oregon had a UGB,
including such booming metropolises as Lonerock, population 20. Florida's growth
management legislation in the middle 1980s enabled local governments to adopt various
forms of urban containment strategies, although few have. Washington State adopted
Oregon-style containment laws in the early 1990s and applied it to the most urbanized
counties.
What less than half a century ago was but one clear example of urban containment in
metropolitan America, our research has revealed that more than 100 metropolitan areas
have at least one example of metropolitan-wide or local government containment.
Examples include the usual suspects but also some surprises. Sioux Falls, South Dakota
– routinely ranked highly by Money Magazine and Forbes as both a good place to live
and do business – has one of the nation’s oldest programs.
NAR Interest on Containment Flavors
Unlike the national approach used in Great Britain, urban containment in America is a
mixed bag. Few states require it. Outside of Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington, locally or
regionally prepared containment plans are not based on a common methodology or even
common set of principles. Variation is considerable.
A natural question arises from the diversity of American-style urban containment: do
different approaches lead to different outcomes? Developers, builders, realtors, and other
real estate interests need to know what to expect before their markets are “contained” and
even when they already are.
The first thing one needs, however, is a roadmap of the different types of containment.
Once a typology is established, differences in approaches can be compared between
them, and relative to non-containment.
Our charge by the NAR was to compile and evaluate all urban containment plans of
metropolitan areas, counties, and larger cities (roughly over 20,000) that had room to
grow outward. We collected nearly 150 such plans, evaluated them, and analyzed their
content.
As there is no national urban containment reporting service, we used surveys, literature,
the internet, and even word of mouth (a technique called “snowballing”) to find all such
plans. We know we did not collect them all, but we have reason to believe we came
close.
We then conducted a “content” analysis of these plans through techniques we developed
with support from the National Science Foundation. We evaluated plans for their goals,
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factual bases (growth rates, buildable land, land use projections, etc.), and their policies.
Policies came in two generic forms: containment and management.
Containment policies include the usual limits to outward urban growth such as urban
growth boundaries, urban service limits, open space preservation (or “green” lines),
priority investment areas, and so forth. Management policies address the choreography
of infrastructure, zoning, redevelopment, purchase and transfer of development rights,
and other ways in which to guide or steer development.
Through a statistical technique called “cluster analysis” we shook the data up as in a
pick-up-sticks container and threw it out as on a table. We found initially that
containment plans differ primarily along the following two dimensions:
Emphasis on development accommodation – The analysis for the goal clusters
suggested that plans were most clearly distinguished by the presence or absence of an
aggressive program to accommodate projected urban growth. These plans ranged
along a spectrum from the “restrictive” plans, which seek to cap future population
growth, to the “accommodating” plans, which project regional growth and implement
measures to accommodate all projected growth.
Strength of the urban containment program – A strong urban containment program
should include policies that (a) ensure adequate land supply, (b) facilitate the
provision of affordable housing, (c) facilitate the provision of adequate infrastructure,
and (d) promote land conservation in areas outside the urbanizing area. The plans in
our sample can be categorized along a continuum from “strong” to “weak,”
depending on the number of adopted policies supporting these four containment
objectives.
We determined that urban containment plans sorted themselves neatly into four major,
and logical, categories:
Market accommodation with strong containment
Market accommodation with weak containment
Market restrictive with strong containment
Market restrictive with weak containment
For the most part, market accommodation containment plans tend to have more adopted
policies than market restriction ones. Plans that have strong policies of restricting growth
outside of an urban containment boundary also tend to have strong programs designed to
accommodate housing and infrastructure within the boundary. Thus, a strong program of
containing the spatial extent of growth need not necessarily be viewed as exclusionary
towards growth inside the planned urbanizing area. This can also be seen by the fact that
the largest number of plans are those which are simultaneously strong and
accommodating. Moreover, market accommodating plans tend to be more likely to
accommodate growth through an increased emphasis on infrastructure management
policies. Market restrictive plans are clearly more likely to adopt caps on development.
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Somewhat interesting, however, is the observation that restrictive plans do not
necessarily fail to accommodate affordable housing.
Each is different and has important implications for development patterns, let alone
development per se.
Market accommodation with strong containment
Urban containment plans with market accommodation and strong containment have two
basic features: the preservation of rural and other open spaces beyond a boundary for
nonurban uses and the containment of urban-scale development within a boundary.
There are about 20 examples of this kind of containment throughout the nation, most of
which encompass entire metropolitan statistical areas as defined by the US Bureau of the
Census. Two are presented here for illustrative purposes only: Metropolitan Portland,
Oregon, and Palm Beach County, Florida.
Metropolitan Portland, Oregon
A useful place to begin our discussion is Portland, Oregon. Portland Oregon’s urban
growth boundary (UGB) initiative is one of the nation’s oldest and most well-known
urban containment programs. It was adopted in 1979 based on Oregon’s statewide land
use planning program and is drawn to accommodate a 20-year supply of urban
development. Inside the urban growth boundary, policies such as minimum density
standards have been established to promote higher density development. Outside the
boundary, land is designated for rural uses only. The overall scheme is illustrated in
Figure 1.
Palm Beach County, Florida
At the opposite end of the continent there is a newer but no less comprehensive approach
to containing urban development: Palm Beach County, Florida. Palm Beach County
relies on a tiered approach combined with rural density zoning to preserve land that lies
outside the existing urbanizing area. Within the “rural tier,” land is designated for
agricultural uses and rural residential uses at densities ranging from one unit per five
acres to one unit per twenty acres. All land within the rural tier is located outside Palm
Beach County’s urban service area (see Figure 2). Urban development is targeted to this
area, which is designed to accommodate all projected development needs over a twenty
year period.
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Figure 1: Metro Portland, Oregon
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Figure 2. Palm Beach County, Florida
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Market accommodation with weak containment
Plans that fall into this category may have growth boundaries or urban service limits but
do little to manage development outside the boundary, resulting in low density urban
development extending outward. On the other hand, they are proactive principally by
identifying development needs while accommodating those needs with land made
buildable through a fiscally sound, market responsive capital improvement investment
program. Two examples are presented here: Sioux Falls, South Dakota and Lincoln,
Nebraska.
Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
The Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 2015 Growth Management Plan identifies seven districts
that are contiguous to and immediately beyond the existing municipal boundaries.
Within each of these districts, the city identifies the timing and scope of projected future
urban infrastructure extensions. By phasing infrastructure extensions, the city can direct
the pattern of future growth. To determine the infrastructure provision priorities, the city
employs a scoring system that ranks each district based on development suitability.
Figure 3 illustrates this plan.
Lincoln – Lancaster County, Nebraska
The Lincoln – Lancaster County Comprehensive plan restricts the extension of municipal
water and sewer services to areas that lie within the corporate limits. In addition, by
identifying existing infrastructure needs and proposed infrastructure extensions for a 20year planning period, the city can direct the path of future growth by directing the path of
future infrastructure extensions and annexations. In addition to these limits on
infrastructure extensions, the state of Nebraska has granted Lincoln extraterritorial zoning
authority over land within 3 miles of its boundaries. Thus, the city can coordinate future
annexations and infrastructure extensions with the land use patterns that emerge within
the urban fringe. Furthermore, the state of Nebraska has prohibited the incorporation of
new cities within five miles of the Lincoln city limits without the approval of the city of
Lincoln. These powers combined with relatively flexible state-defined annexation
procedures give Lincoln the ability to manage growth through the planned expansion of
its municipal boundaries. Its plan is shown in Figure 4.
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Figure 3. Sioux Falls, South Dakota
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Figure 4. Lincoln – Lancaster County, Nebraska
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Market restrictive with strong containment
Urban containment plans that are market restrictive with strong containment have the
same two basic features: the preservation of rural and other open spaces beyond a
boundary for nonurban uses and the containment of urban-scale development within a
boundary. However, they differ from strong containment with growth accommodation in
that there is little direct relationship in comprehensive plans between projected growth
needs and land or other provisions made available to meet those needs. There are a
couple dozen examples of such planning. The first highlighted here is the city of
Boulder, Colorado – a central city in the Boulder-Longmont metropolitan area, and
Ventura County, California, north of Los Angeles.
City of Boulder, Colorado
Boulder, Colorado is home to the University of Colorado. Since the 1970s, it has used an
urban growth boundary to reign in urban sprawl and prevent development of the Rocky
Mountain foothills (see figure 5). It has done little, however, to ameliorate housing needs
although it has an elaborate inclusionary housing effort. Housing demand appears to be
displaced to Boulder County's other major city, Longmont, and into the rural areas
around Longmont. Indeed, in the decade from 1988 through 1998, Boulder’s share of
Boulder County’s new housing fell from 29% to 8% while Longmont’s share rose from
10% to 31%.
Ventura County, California
Over the past decade, Ventura County voters have approved several growth control
initiatives. They include a county-wide measure that requires voter approval before
agricultural and open space land may be rezoned and converted to residential or
commercial use, complemented by urban growth boundary (UGB) measures in the cities
of Oxnard, Camarillo, Thousand Oaks, and Simi Valley (see figure 6). The city UGB
measures require voter approval before land outside a city's urban boundary may be
annexed into the city. For their part, the cities appear to do little to identify and meet
their projected housing needs, at least based on our analysis.
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Figure 5. Boulder, Colorado
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Figure 6. Ventura County, California
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Market restrictive with weak containment
The fourth category are those containment programs that are weak in containing the
outward spread of development beyond a development limit but also tend to impede
development by not clearly identifying needs or in other ways facilitating development
needs. Two examples are summarized: Baltimore County, Maryland, and the Pinelands
of New Jersey.
Baltimore County, Maryland
The Baltimore County, Maryland, 2010 Master Plan identifies a traditional urban service
area for public water and sewer service called the “urban-rural demarcation line”
(URDL). However, since public sewer service is provided by the Metropolitan District
of Baltimore County, the boundaries of this special district act serve as the actual
boundary for urban development that relies on public sewer. The County does not
finance public water or sewer services outside this district boundary. This is illustrated
generally in Figure 7. Currently, the County is working to remove the discrepancies that
exist between the URDL and the boundaries of the Metropolitan District, thus making the
special service district boundaries the effective urban service area for the region. Low
density residential subdivisions are allowed outside the boundary and there appears to be
little conscientious effort to accommodate development needs within the boundary
through supply-size zoning.
Pinelands, New Jersey
Perhaps the most successful TDR approach to urban containment has been the New
Jersey Pinelands Commission’s Pineland Development Credit program. These credits are
allocated to landowners within environmentally sensitive portions of the Pinelands.
Those who wish may sell the credits to developers who own land within the designated
“regional growth area.” Once the credits are sold, landowners within the preservation
areas agree to non-residential uses only, enforceable by property deed restriction.
Developers who purchase the credits may apply them toward the construction of four
additional housing units within the regional growth area. A separate Pinelands
Development Credit Bank has also been established to provide loan guarantees using the
credits as collateral and to monitor the ownership and exchange of credits. To date, over
12,000 acres have been permanently protected via deed restriction under this program.
Nonetheless, residential subdivisions at low urban densities can and do occur throughout
the area, and urban areas which are “receiving” areas for transferred rights do not appear
to be sensitive to meeting projected development needs through supply-side zoning. The
Pinelands plan is shown in Figure 8.
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Figure 7. Baltimore County, Maryland
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Figure 8. Pinelands, New Jersey
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To Contain or Not to Contain
The next step in our analysis is to evaluate differences that types or flavors of urban
containment have between them and with respective to “business-as-usual.” We cannot
say conclusively which flavor is “best” because that judgment has to be based on what
the plan intends. We can speculate, however, on the relative sensitivity of different
flavors on the development industry.
Let us begin with the proposition that increasingly business-as-usual is not a long term
option to guide future development in an increasing number of metropolitan areas. More,
not fewer, metropolitan areas will see some form of containment over the next
generation. Not all metropolitan areas will be contained, but the figure could rise to half
in the next generation, maybe more.
Assuming the choice is not between containment and business-as-usual but between
flavors of containment, which is most favorable to the development industry? Perhaps
market accommodation with weak containment. Sioux Falls is the model. Local
government is proactive in determining when and where infrastructure will be provided,
the development community is essentially guided to those locations, and there is a
sufficient inventory of land ready for development at any give point in time. The Sioux
Falls model also allows for acreage homesites on wells and septic systems outside the
urban service limit. As much of the land outside Sioux Falls is not of high agricultural
quality and drilling wells is expensive, our impression is that development outside the
urban area is not problematic despite being an option for some.
What if rural land has important features such as high agricultural quality, scenery, and
historical or cultural significance, not to mention contribution to air cleansing and flood
control? In this scenario, local sentiment may be to preserve rural lands or open spaces.
The choice is then between market accommodation and market restriction both with
strong containment. Business-as-usual as an option is increasingly taken off the table
under these circumstances. The development community may gulp but prefer the market
accommodation with strict containment option as the lesser of two evils. Metro Portland
heads the list of examples but it has plenty of company spread across the nation.
Is urban containment in your future? Do you have control over your flavor of
containment? Which flavor do you like best?
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