We applaud and support the state’s efforts to get a handle on Rhode Island’s land use with its just-released draft of “Land Use 2025.” But as with any plan with designs on controlling the state’s development, we must caution those in the Division of Planning to be sensitive to the interests of its citizens.
Planners have a well-deserved reputation for arrogance, and oftentimes wonder after yet another scheme has not worked, what went wrong. A successful plan demands not just powerful analysis and inventive solutions, but effective persuasion of all the community stakeholders. The leaders of Land Use 2025 must remember that the plan is only the first step in making something happen.
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That said, there can be no question that a plan is needed. The last effort to guide statewide development was published in 1989, 14 years after the first comprehensive plan. But it isn’t just that it’s time for Land Use 2025. Rhode Island stands at a crossroads.
As Scott Wolf, executive director of Grow Smart Rhode Island, told PBN’s Ryan McBride, “One of the selling points of living in Rhode Island is you can have urban sophistication and rural charm at the same time.” The choices made now could set in motion changes to that character that cannot be undone.
This is not an idle threat by some tree-huggers. The changes have been happening already. Since 1980, Rhode Island’s population has grown 9 percent, but the amount of developed land has grown 47 percent. Sprawl is upon us, and with the home construction business being one of the few bright spots in the nation’s economy, the pressure to develop new housing will not decrease any time soon.
The future as envisioned by the state is one that maintains Rhode Island’s character. “People and their endeavors will continue to be largely concentrated in traditional locations – along the shore-fronting communities and in major river valleys,” says the document, while “a thinly settled, predominantly forested band in the western third of the state will conserve essential resources.”
This kind of vision is appealing, but in focusing on the natural environment, it is missing a key element. No land-use plan can avoid the issue of jobs. It is no secret that suburban sprawl owes a large part of its existence to the movement of jobs out of urban centers, where rising costs and crumbling infrastructure make the cost of doing business unattractive.
And so it has been in Rhode Island, where in the last two-and-a-half decades 56,000 jobs have been created in the state’s suburban communities, versus a net loss of 10,000 jobs in its cities. An explicit part of any land-use plan should be specific ideas for how to entice business to create jobs in those urban and suburban areas that are being targeted for development, including when necessary, incentives that underscore the state’s commitment to growth.
We look forward to a future of collaboration between the disparate camps in the state for the purpose of a vibrant and economically healthy state. Land Use 2025 is a good start in that direction.
