Fragmented lands

Sadly, Northeast Ohio has no regional vision for how to live sustainably on the land. Our fragmented structure of local governments — all with their own, individual control of land use and their own, unrelenting need to grow their tax base — makes regional cooperation and planning extremely difficult.

How can we come together and talk about where it's best to develop land and where it's best to conserve land? How can we talk about issues of equity and the fiscal disparities between rich and poor communities? And how can we do this on a regional scale, the only geography that matters?

This section will attempt to describe what a new agenda for regional land use might be like.

Elements of a regional plan for sustainable land use

• Conservation strategy — Start with protection of life-sustaining natural systems, water quality, and biological diversity. We need good science to understand how to do this, and we need an extensive civic discussion about conservation goals. And we will need to make greater investments to protect the most critical areas before it's too late.
• Development/redevelopment strategy — To balance conservation, we need to develop a regional consensus about the best places for development. In a slowly growing region, we need to focus our development efforts where they add the most value, often by redeveloping existing communities (otherwise new development will simply force the abandonment of old). This strategy must include the best places for residential, commercial, and industrial development. And it must include sufficient incentives and policies to influence the real estate market — so that developers can find profitable opportunities in good locations.
• Farmland protection strategy — Farming is a major industry, and prime farmland should be considered a strategic asset. Our region's development strategy, therefore, should include farmland as an essential component.
• Regional affordable housing strategy — Exclusionary zoning in newer suburbs forces a handful of the region's communities to shoulder the burden of providing housing for the poor and people of modest means. This isn't fair, and it contributes to decline and disinvestment in older communities. A "fair-share" system to distribute affordable housing, if applied region-wide, would assure that no single community is disproportionately poor. And it would help link low-income households to better jobs, schools, and the other opportunities of American society.
• Regional tax-base sharing strategy — If the benefits of growth were more equitably shared by communities throughout the region, there would be less cut-throat competition for jobs and tax base. We could focus on growing together — in the best places — rather than competing in a ruinous zero-sum game. Other regions, such as the Twin Cities in Minnesota, offer good models of this kind of cooperation for the regional good.

Northeast Ohio needs a mix of these strategies to have a sustainable land-use future. Who will start the regional discussion? Who will provide leadership?

Resources
Citizens' Bioregional Plan
EcoCity Cleveland smart growth pages
Cleveland: The struggle to grow equitably
Greater Ohio
Maps - Ohio Greenprint Gateway from Trust for Public Land
OSU Exurban Change Project
Ohio's Growing Forests (pdf)
Urban Design Center of Northeast Ohio image gallery of population shifts and land-use maps of Greater Cleveland