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Cleanups planned for Coastweeks
The News-Messenger (9/2)
Ohio's 2008 Coastweeks observance will again focus on the preservation and protection of Lake Erie and its watershed through a variety of cleanup events along the shoreline and throughout its watershed.
Maritime Academy may hike maritime tuition up to 57%
Traverse City Record-Eagle (8/27)
Some of next year's students at the Great Lakes Maritime Academy could face tuition rate hikes of 50 percent or more.
Students build wind turbines
WTVG-TV Toledo (8/27)
Science students at Clay high school will soon have a way to measure the wind and how much power it can produce. This grant-funded project will provide data on how well turbines produce power in the changeable wind environment near the lake.
What's going on in your neighborhood this month? Meet other people and learn together at recreational and educational events! Our new dynamic calendar is updated daily with current educational events.
2 | What are the causes of urban sprawl?
After World War II, people started moving from the cities into the countryside. The GI Bill, road building projects, and increased car manufacturing all contributed greatly to this shift, and living in "suburbia" signified a better quality of life. Land was cheap and there was plenty of it, and government incentives and subsidies helped families realize their dream. Today, subsidies from the federal and state governments, such as for highway construction and commercial development, continue to promote sprawl and its effects.
The lack of effective land use planning allowed this move to the countryside to occur virtually uncontrolled. All Great Lakes states allow local governments to create comprehesnsive plans to guide growth and to create local laws (called zoning ordinances) to decide what types of development can happen where. However, none of the Great Lakes states actually require local land use planning.
In all of the Great Lakes states, land use planning happens at the smallest level of government (e.g., town, township, city), so the state has very little say in how land gets developed, except when it involves spending state tax dollars, such as for major highway projects. When local land use plans are developed, often they are inconsistent with the zoning ordinances and do not consider the impacts on surrounding areas and nearby communities. In practice, zoning ordinances and building codes, not land use plans, govern most land development decisions. The problem with this is that zoning tells "where" and "what type" of development can take place, but it does not consider questions of "how" and "when" development should take place. Most zoning ordinances separate different types of land uses, establish minimum distances between houses, minimum setbacks from roads, minimum parking space requirements, minimum road widths, and so on so that the only type of development that can occur is sprawl. In this way, the lack of land use planning and the reliance on zoning ordinances has promoted sprawl.
With little or no land use planning to protect greenfields, farm fields and rural countrysides and ecologically important habitats such as wetlands have been carved up. More roads were needed to connect the new development to downtown, which invited more development on the outskirts and the cycle continues today. As more people and businesses move out to former greenfields, fewer taxpayers are supporting older towns and cities, leaving them to deteriorate.
See also: Land Use in the Great Lakes Region
Graphic: New housing subvision
