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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Down To Earth

Friday Quote: “How far will we sprawl? In Washington, no one knows.”



This article hits home for me. A few months ago, Robert McClure, the environmental correspondent for InvestigativeWest, wrote an excellent two-part series about counties where developers have been able to build many houses outside urban growth areas. One of the worst offenders is Kitsap County, where I grew up and each time I return to visit, I rub my eyes in disbelief at the sight of rural land getting cul-de-sacked.

It's not my imagination. According to McClure, "Kitsap appears to be the most problematic, with one-third of the homes approved in 2008 outside areas designated for urban development. And 2008 actually represented an improvement; half the new homes approved in Kitsap in the decade before that were outside the urban areas."  Spokane County certainly isn't immune to this issue, where one-quarter of growth in the last decade happened outside our cities and towns, resulting in poor infrastructure investments and sprawl. McClure's series helps explain the struggles we're up against to meet population increases - and this unsustainable method of growth is proving to be more costly than you think.

In addition to letting modern-day developers skirt the Growth Management Act and other laws, Washington’s provisions for vesting development rights over years and even decades pose a potentially ruinous development problem: thousands of building lots established before the growth law was passed in 1990.

For those lots, the vested building rights never expire. The same goes for small subdivisions — up to nine homes in areas designated for urban growth, and four houses otherwise.

Add courts' reading of the U.S. Constitution as prohibiting government from taking private property without just compensation, and you have a recipe, growth planners fear, for suburban sprawl that overtaxes roads and water supplies and other services in what are supposed to be rural areas.

Vesting protects thousands of building lots subdivided decades ago, many far too small to support a house under current codes. Statewide, there could be tens of thousands. But no one knows how many there are, or where. Generally, county governments allow a single house to be built on any lot, no matter how small. (The exception comes when it would be unhealthy, such as a lot so small that drinking water would have to be drawn from near a septic tank. Some builders, though, try to find ways to use even these tiny lots. One in Kitsap County proposed to serve 78 homes on 12 acres with a small sewage treatment plant.)

In 2008 alone in just two counties — Pierce and Snohomish — building permits for more than 800 homes were issued for old lots established before the state Growth Management Act took effect, research by the Puget Sound Regional Council indicates. The vast majority of homes constructed recently in the rural stretches of Kitsap, Pierce, and Snohomish counties were built on lots where modern-day development rules don’t all apply, according to research council, a government growth-planning agency.

Tracking of building permits suggests that development is occurring in those counties’ rural areas at rates far higher than what the counties set as their growth targets under the Growth Management Act.

Read the full post HERE.



Down To Earth

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