02-24-1997 Council Packet - Laserfiche WebLink

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Continued From Page J pose putdown. Community leaders vowed to build a new kind of American city here in the desert and in places like Seattle, Salt Lake City and Denver, cities close to nature. livable and sustainable. But as the urban West goes through the third maior growth boom in four decades, some of the shiny Western cities are becom ing tneir worst nightmare. Los Angeles symptoms — bad-air alerts, traffic gridlock, loss of open space, huge gulfs between the rich and the poor — are becoming impossi ble to Ignore For all their open space, the 13 states ot the West maka up the most urban region in America. Sixty years ago, little more than half of all Westerners lived in cities. Today. 86 percent reside in urban areas. Utah, at 87 percent, has a higher percentage of city dwellers than New York, at 80 percent, according to a Census Bureau ranking of people who live in places with at least 2,500 people or a density of 1,000 per square mile. The new urban West has 6 of the 15 fastest growing metropolitan areas in the nation. They are the magaiine-cover cities, the trendv. high-tech centers of Seattle and Porland. Ore., flourishing in a climate with eight months of driizle; the nature-defying desert cities of Phoenix and Las Vegas, pArddisc for devolopcrs, and the Roclcy Mountain kingdoms of Denver and Salt Lake City, thriving on their proximity to vertical playgrounds. On average, these metropolitan areas are growing by 50.000 people a year. Their new lobs come from the kind of Industries that are made for a world economy; tourism, telecommunications, trade and computer technology. These cities consider them selves blessed by nature and circumstance. "There's a pride people take once they move here, people pinching themselvM as they say. God. Tm glad Tm here.* ** said Dr. Ray Sluder, director of the Urban and Re gional Planning Program at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “That s sometimes followed by. ‘Now let's close the door.’ ” But as healthy as these ciUes are in jobs and scenery, they, like California, are dis covering that luck, benign climate and opti mism are not enough. Indirectly, some of these cities have pul the full force of their taxpayer-financed Infrastructure behind urban sprawl. Twes paid for roads that quickly brought fourfold Increases in congestion and dirty air. And the very tax structure that attracted new industries and home builders with promises of rock-boitom property-tax rates is now crippling schools and fostering a shortage of parks and community space. •My rule of thumb is that the faster the rate of sprawl, the faster the rate of aban donment." said David Rusk, the former Mavor of Albuquerque. N.M.. who has stud ied urban-patterns in more than 300 cities. "You look at Detroit, which has lost a mil lion or so people. It consumed land at 13 times the rate of population growth.” Some people blame ihe bloated urban areas on a political climate that holds pri- vale property concerns up as a sacred right and IS opposed to taxes intened to finance the uiiimate cost of growth. Under the flag of property rights, developers have been •.hiP »o resist efforts to curb excess, or set "It’s an old Western ethic: don't tell me what to do on my property." said Gov. Roy Romer of Colorado. But others say the pav ing of paradise is happening at an incremen tal enough rate that few people see the big picture. "We are repeating the mistakes of L.A..” said Steven Boand. the former Mayor of Castle Rock, a city of 16.000 people just south of Denver. "But it’s happening slowly, so that the average Joe only secs pan it. like the traffic congestion, and doesn't connect it to everything else.” Onlv Portland, which long ago decided to defy the boom mentality and consciously design a future city, seems situated to enter the new century without having to spend billions of dollars to fix problems brought by excesses at the end of the old century. •These cities all think they're special, because they're set in such special places," said Robert Liberty, the director of 1,000 Friends of Oregon, a group that monitors urban growth issues. "But they are delu sional." The Symptoms Sprawl, Congestion And Polluted Air In Phoenix, where the sound of air- powered nail guns is almost a civic anthem, there is a group called “Not reflecting the general sentiment of people trying to avoid past urban mistakes. But the city of Phoenix, with just over a million people, now surpasses Los Angel^, which has three limes as many people, in sprawl, its city limits covenng 469 square miles. Most days, its air is among the dirtiest in the nation, outside of Southern Callfoi^a. *Tve been driving from one meeting about sprawl to the other for the last 15 years, and the only thing that’s changed is that now it takes a lot longer to get there.” said Rob Melnick, director of the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State Universi ty. Las Vegas, the fastest growing city in the United States throughout the 1990 ’s. now ranks among the five metropolitan areM with the worst air. The region will reart the limit of its current water supply within the next 10 years or so. Just a five-hour drive across the desen from Southern Callfomli Las Vegas has become, in some respects, th e ultimate extension of Los Angeles. In keeping with its founding character, the city Is Jazzy and electric, with 9 of the 10 largest hotels in the world. The construction crane is the most com mon city bird. There is a labor short^e. Nw residents come for the climate and for the hyperactive job market in construction rtd gambling. Thousands of stucco-walled, red- roof-tiled homes on artificial lakes are so d for nearly half the price they would fetch in metropolitan Los Angeles. But pulling a city that may soon be bigger than Detroit in an area that receives only four inches of ram a year has forced a reckoning.Unlike Arizona, which requires proof of a 100-year water supply before development can go forward. Las Vegas promises water to virtually all new developments — regard less of the prospect of shortages. The city's initial reaction to its water deficit in the early 1990 ’s. was to put a moratonum on new development But after coming under heavy pressure from home builders and hotels. Las Vegas again opened the gates to unrestricted growth in 1992. Following a path taken by Los Angeles when It tripled in size near the turn of the century. Las Vegas is going after distant water supplies in the fragile desert, and It has threatened to sue if It does not get a change in how water in the West Is allocated. Some new Denver suburbs are projected to run out of water within a decade. But what people living along the Front Range in Colo- rado complain about most is the loss of open space. From Fort Collins in the north to Colorado Springs in the south, a swath of beige-colored, two-story homes and boxy noegastores has been planted along a 110- mlle stnp. with Denver in the middle. "I can't believe that you all want to be come one big city,” Governor Romer said at a growth summit this year, where he warned of Los Angeles-style problems. The last Denver boom, nearly 20 years ago. came from big oil. mining and coal companies, ripping open the Rockies to meet energy needs. This time, it Is non-polIutlng industries, and Denver has become the cable television capital of the world. On the other side of the Rockies, in Salt I yit» City, is a mirror image of greater Denver's problems. Nearly 80 percent of Utah’s two million people live along an 80- mile urban strip abutting the Wasatch Moun tain Front. There Is fuU employmenL with thousands of new jobs In high-tech firms. But it has come at a price. The New York- New Jersey metropolitan area has better air quality than the Salt Lake Valley when meas ured for carbon monoxide, one of the main components of unhealthy air. City officials say that unless Salt Lake acts to limit sprawl and curb auto emissions, the face it will present to the world during the 2002 Winter Olympics could be obscured by a soup of pollutants. Seattle, often rated the most livable city In America, now ranks among the top five Cities for traffic congestion. Residents In a 60-mile-long metropolitan area, hemmed in by Puget Sound on one side and the Cascade Mountains on the other, have Just voted to build a M billion mass transit sys tem and have adopted strict laws to end ***Bu't'many fear that Seattle, as It goes through yet another enormous populaUon surge prompted by Job growth at the Boeing Company and the Microsoft Corporation, will become a city where only the upper middle class can afford to own home The Microsoft millionaires, about 3.000 past or present employees of the software Mmpany who made it big on stock apprecia tion, are a dominant obsession in the area as they build waterfront techno<astles on Lake Washington. ,«««« But with the slate projecting that 300.000 more people will move into the Seattle met ropolitan area m just the next four years - the bii^cst growth spurt since the monumen- lal hiring binge at Boeing during World War II - political leaders say there will be a severe shortage of moderate-priced housing in the area.