Pennsylvania Foundations’ Report
Cites State’s Runaway Land-Use Policies;
Fractured Government as Hindering Growth

Land-use patterns associated with Pennsylvania’s splintered government have helped make the state “the worst sprawling large metropolitan area in the country.” This trend threatens not only the region’s beauty, but also the financial health of its older communities, including suburbs that were long thought immune to the hollowing-out effects of sprawl.

This is just one of the striking findings of a recent report by the Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, titled “Back to Prosperity: A Competitive Agenda for Renewing Pennsylvania.” The report, funded by The Heinz Endowments and the William Penn Foundation and completed in December 2003, presents a state-of-the-state view of land use and governing.

The Brookings’ study found that Pennsylvania’s highly decentralized growth patterns are weakening established communities, undercutting the very places whose assets the state needs to compete in the knowledge economy. The report establishes that the economic future of a major rust belt state depends on revitalizing its demographic mix and curbing some of the nation’s most radical patterns of sprawl and abandonment. The report concludes that these trends are not inevitable, and can be reshaped if the state embraces a dynamic new vision of economic competitiveness that links residents’ desire for prosperity to the need to revive older cities and towns.

The study builds its thesis around “older” and “newer” Pennsylvania. Older Pennsylvania includes cities, boroughs and close-in suburbs with older neighborhoods, commercial clusters and infrastructure. New Pennsylvania includes largely rural second-class townships or “outer ring” areas. The study describes Pennsylvania as “blown out” with older communities emptying and outer-ring communities swelling with residential and commercial sprawl enveloping huge swaths of forest, field and farm land in these outer rings.

Some highlights of the 120-page report:

• Pennsylvania spends a disproportionate share of development money on outlying areas while abandoning established communities.
• Stagnant population growth hasn’t stopped sprawl. In spite of the fact that in most of the 1990s, Pennsylvania ranked 48th in population growth, the state is second in the consumption of new land for development.
• Pennsylvania urbanized nearly four acres of land for every new resident during the 1990s — nearly six times the national average.
• There are too many municipalities that do community planning separately rather than regionally, and there is no organized vision of the state’s future.
• Low-density sprawl is raising tax bills, since it costs more to deliver services to far- flung communities. Meanwhile, older Pennsylvania, where services are readily available, stagnates or declines.
• Between 1993 and 2000, real estate values in older Pennsylvania failed to increase. Property values in outer-ring suburbs, by contrast, increased 17 percent.
  

Bruce Katz, Brookings vice president, describes the dilemma facing the state as a double whammy of economic stagnation and rapid sprawl as it spins its population into low-density townships beyond the periphery of the state’s 14 metropolitan areas. He adds that Pennsylvania has been cannibalizing its own population, wastefully building roads and other infrastructure to serve exurbanites, rather than capitalizing on policies to revitalize cities, build on brownfields and otherwise preserve the kinds of amenities that might stop the state’s loss of skilled young people and jobs.

One of the report’s recommendations is to embrace a more expansive definition of city, as an “elastic” entity whose borders stretch to the far edges of the contiguous suburban neighborhoods. In addition, the report urges a change in the laws so that municipal consolidation can be approved by a simple majority of voters in the entire consolidated district.
Municipal consolidation is not a new concept. In fact, in a commencement address at Shady Side Academy in 1895, a young high school senior named Howard Heinz called for the creation of “Greater Pittsburgh” which he envisioned as an enlarged, regenerated and unified municipality.” The words of Howard Heinz, who became one of Pittsburgh’s most dynamic corporate, philanthropic and civic leaders, have just as much relevance 109 years later as Pennsylvania’s cities work to define its future.

More information on the Brookings report can be obtained on the Brookings Institution website at www.brook.edu/metro/speeches/20031209_pittsburgh.htm

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