MODERN TIMES

Art Hobson

ahobson@uark.edu

NWA Times 25 Nov 2006

A green belt for Fayetteville

High quality cities happen not by accident but by considered decisions. City development is a process of making choices: Do you want a walkable city, or freeways? Do you want a vibrant downtown, or outlying malls and big box stores? Do you want property rights restrictions, or suburban sprawl?

Freeways, malls, and sprawl developed along with America’s car culture shortly after World War II. They now form the all-pervasive “geography of nowhere” of which James Kunstler writes so eloquently in his book of the same name, a geography defined by compulsive commuting, crushingly boring suburbs, alienated downtowns, vulgar highway strips, and destroyed countryside. Fayetteville followed this downward path through the 1980s, by which time downtown and Dickson Street had become a mostly hollow and often scary shell where nobody lived and few walked the streets.

Then Fayetteville ventured on a new path. Around 1990, following a citywide vote, the decision was made to build the Walton Arts Center on Dickson Street rather than out on I-540. This civic commitment to downtown was followed up with new lighting and other amenities, and we soon had the bustling street you see today. In 2000 we elected a progressive mayor and council that, as part of its commitment to a high quality city, initiated discussions involving city officials and hundreds of citizens leading in 2004 to a Downtown Master Plan embodying the principles of “a supremely walkable environment, downtown living, smart parking, smart rules, and special places.” These were certainly steps in the right direction, but the schlock continued spreading at the fringes where big box stores and uninspiring suburbs ruled the landscape.

This year, the city took another step toward civic sanity, one that could replace sprawl at the fringes with additional substance at the center. Following a second series of discussions, the city developed guidelines known as “City Plan 2025.” It’s six goals, practically a definition of a high-quality city, are: infill and revitalization, discouraging suburban sprawl, traditional town form, a livable transportation network, a green network, and attainable housing.

Nothing would do more to translate these good words into reality than a “green belt” around Fayetteville. Green belts were pioneered by Oregon in the 1970s when a coalition of farmers, tree huggers, and Republican governor Tom McCall—who claimed to be a nature lover first and a city lover second—passed statewide growth control laws mandating that all cities and localities draw precise growth boundaries, submit them for state approval, and stick to them.

The desire to live in the country while working in the city is sprawl’s driving force. In Fayetteville, people move outward to find cheap land and country living. But the jobs are in Fayetteville, so longer commutes, congestion, suburban shopping, and so forth become the order of the day, a process that nearly killed midtown Fayetteville during the 1980s, that has destroyed the center of most big cities, and that has wrecked much of the nation.

Oregon’s growth law stops this unhealthy process, because real estate development is limited to the permanently fixed boundaries of both the central cities (like Fayetteville) and the perimeter towns (like Elkins, Farmington, etc). An Arkansas statewide growth law would save our cities and rejuvenate the entire state by directing growth inward toward city centers rather than outward toward farmland. But our rabidly individualistic me-oriented culture’s fixation on personal property rights prevents anything this rational from happening here anytime soon.

However, cities like Boulder, Colorado, have done quite well without a state law, by putting a green belt around their particular city. In Boulder, the city purchased a broad swath of rural land at the edge of town for regional open space, maintained without roads or development. Far from scaring away development, this has attracted high-quality non-car-dependent development in the center.

As you can see by glancing at the green regions on the “Future Landuse Map” at the City Plan 2025 website at http://cityplan2025.accessfayetteville.org/, Fayetteville has the makings of a two-mile-wide greenbelt on its east, west, and southern sides. This rural land is outside the city limits but within the city’s “planning area.” County government (the quorum court) passed an ordinance two weeks ago restricting development in such planning areas throughout the county to agricultural and single-family residential on lots of not less than one acre. Some quorum court members complained that one acre is too large for most people to build homes. But this misses the point. If we want liveable cities and meaningful countryside, we need to zone the planning areas permanently agricultural, with minimum lots of 10 or 20 acres, precisely to prevent residential development. Washington County could then develop along the healthy lines followed years ago by Oregon.

If the quorum court cannot zone the planning areas to prevent development, then city government needs to declare a permanent moratorium on development in Fayetteville’s planning area and instead encourage healthy compact infill (such as the planned Ruskin Heights development south of Mission Boulevard) in less-developed spaces within the present city limits. Perhaps the city can designate those green zones permanently agricultural, perhaps the city can purchase parts of it, perhaps private organizations can purchase parts of it for natural habitat.

A green belt around Fayetteville would by itself ensure the first two goals of City Plan 2025, and go a long way toward goals 4 and 5. It would make goal 6, affordable housing, more difficult, but some way must be found to subsidize lower-cost housing other than sprawling all over Washington County. To achieve the goals of City Plan 2025, we must stop sprawl in its tracks.

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