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There is no silver bullet to protecting rural communities and the surrounding landscape from unnecessary suburban development. Instead, only a carefully configured set of relatively small, mutually reinforcing actions can get the job done.
Ironically, any comprehensive strategy to protect the countryside must begin with a positive choice about cities and towns: Where do we want them? Over the next thirty years, the population of the Tricounty will grow by about 250,000 people; roughly the current population of Berkeley and Dorchester Counties combined. These newcomers will need to live, work, and play somewhere. Through our local governments and other institutions, we can identify specific areas to receive the bulk of the new growth. Without such direction, suburban sprawl will spread indiscriminately into the countryside. With a framework of growth areas and rural districts, communities in the region could more easily apply the tools outlined below.
Town Zoning
Put simply, conventional zoning requires sprawl: low-density residential subdivisions, strip commercial centers and office parks connected by ribbons of five-lane highways. Building new neighborhoods along traditional lines, such as downtown Summerville, the Charleston peninsula, the Old Village of Mt. Pleasant, and McClellanville, is a promising alternative. Traditional neighborhood developments (TNDs) offer an excellent quality of life at moderately higher residential densities, as demonstrated by Daniel Island in Berkeley County and I’On in Mt. Pleasant. This efficient use of the available land in town helps relieve pressure to develop further out in the country. For this reason alone, local governments should encourage developers to build TNDs within growth areas. Right now, nearly every zoning code in the region bars developers from doing so.
Concentrate Infrastructure Investments
Public investments in sewer lines, roads, regional high schools and other urban infrastructure invite development. By concentrating public spending within the growth areas, a community can discourage newcomers from scattering across the landscape. Because it costs more to deliver urban services to a dispersed population, this can also reduce the per capita cost of government, minimizing the need to raise taxes. Lexington, Kentucky has had such an "urban service boundary" in place since the 1950s. The Tricounty region’s industrial recruitment strategy, spearheaded by the Regional Development Alliance, takes a similar approach by focusing on areas where infrastructure already exists.
Open Space Zoning
Much of the Tricounty’s rural areas are zoned for suburban development: one or two, even three, houses per acre. That kind of density belongs in town, not in the region’s rural reaches. In response, some communities adopt large-lot zoning, which prohibits rural landowners from dividing their property into lots smaller than fifty acres, for example. Some landowners will opt for very low densities, but to force all rural property holders to do so is unwise. Besides the fact that many property owners would object, only rich people could afford the big lots and the landscape would be carved into "farmettes."
A better strategy, open space zoning (or clustering), allows development without eliminating the defining features of the rural landscape: farmland, timberland and open space. Communities taking this approach allow landowners to subdivide into smaller lots, but also require them to permanently protect 50 percent or more of the original parcel from development. As an incentive, some communities give developers the right to build more if they cluster the houses instead of building on large lots. Charleston County is moving in this direction under its new comprehensive plan.
Donation of Conservation Easements
A conservation-minded landowner can permanently protect property by donating a conservation easement to a land trust. To understand how this works, imagine that the rights associated with land ownership are a bundle of sticks. Each stick in the bundle represents a different right: one to farm and grow trees; one to develop; one to prevent trespass, and so on. A rural landowner can separate the "development stick" from the bundle and give it away to a local group, like the Lowcountry Open Land Trust, or a national organization, like The Nature Conservancy or Ducks Unlimited. The landowner retains all other rights to the land, including the ability to sell or bequeath it. The conservation group holds the easement and makes sure subsequent owners don’t develop. The federal and state governments also lend a helping hand by giving the donor a break on income and estate taxes. Local governments can do their part by making sure that its decisions, such as the location of new sewer lines, do not undermine the easement donors’ perpetual commitment to the rural landscape.
Purchase of Development Rights
Sometimes, rural landowners who want to permanently protect their land from development are not in a position to donate a conservation easement. This often is true of farm families who are "land-rich" but "cash-poor." Government can use public funds to protect at-risk parcels of this type. Rather than acquire land outright, local governments often purchase the development rights associated with the rural parcel, essentially buying a conservation easement. Such a purchase of development rights (PDR) program costs less and keeps the land in private hands. PDR programs must be carefully designed to compliment the work of private land trusts, as well as state and federal efforts to acquire important natural areas. Beaufort County, south of Charleston, recently adopted a PDR program and Charleston County is considering the idea.
For more information on the topics discussed above, please call the Greenbelt Education Project at (843) 722-7228 or e-mail greenbelt@charleston.net.
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