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14 Land-Use Planning and Policy in the Highlands Robert Pirani, Thomas A. Gilbert, and Corey Piasecki The use of land—public or private, large or small—is a product of three factors : the larger regional or metropolitan economy, which creates the market for existing or new uses; decisions made by the individual property owner, who can be driven by factors both economic and personal; and public policy , by which elected officials set a planning and regulatory framework that reflects the will of their constituents and various vested interests. Decisions about land use in the Highlands—a regional landscape that is also the aggregate of many individual properties—are no different. This chapter outlines the context and options for land-use planning and open-space conservation in the Highlands, and describes how these policies and practices have been implemented since the late 1980s. Regional Context for Conservation More than 27 million people live in the forty-five counties that comprise the New York, Philadelphia, and Hartford metropolitan regions—the population centers that provide the land use and economic context for the Highlands.1 Approximately two-thirds of those people live either in the urban centers at the core of these regions (New York City, Philadelphia, and Hartford) or in the densely developed “inner-ring” counties such as Bergen, Western Essex , and Union in New Jersey. The remaining one-third reside in “outer-ring” counties, where much of the land remains undeveloped. The Highlands are located within these outer-ring counties (see plate 35). Land-use change in the Highlands continues to be driven by the decadeslong shifts in population to the communities at the edges of these metropolitan areas. For the past sixty years, the population has been consistently moving from the urban core toward first the inner ring (from 1950 to 1980) and now the outer ring of suburban and rural counties. As detailed in chapter 12, the towns that encompass the four-state Highlands region saw their population increase, often at a much higher rate of growth than in the urban core or in the four states as a whole. While growth in New York City, Philadel- Land-Use Planning and Policy 295 phia, Hartford, and other cities and inner-ring suburbs has been driven most recently by new immigrants, growth in the outer ring of suburbs seems to be driven more by intraregional movement of former core and inner-suburb residents. Development in the Highlands consists primarily of low-density one- to five-acre building lots. Because of the sharp increase of these lowdensity land uses, the amount of urbanized land in the four-state Highlands area increased sharply in roughly twenty years, about 27 percent.2 These trends are driven by many interrelated causes: the out-migration of population from urban and inner-suburban communities; the desire for bigger homes and yards; the growing importance of environmental quality to home buyers; and the ability of developers to satisfy these market forces in formerly rural towns with available land and fewer development restrictions . But perhaps the most important driver is the shift of employment and retail centers from the cities and inner suburbs to locations along the various interstate highways throughout the region, especially I-287, I-78, and I-84 among others. This locational shift has allowed employees to increase the spending power of their housing dollars by purchasing larger homes in the outer suburbs. While it satisfies a market demand for large-lot housing, there are many external impacts associated with this pattern of urban sprawl. Locating development far from existing urban areas generally means that it is far from available infrastructure such as mass transit or even road systems with the capacity to handle higher volumes of traffic. Other important issues associated with sprawl include inefficiencies in land and energy use, fiscal inequities, and racial and economic segregation. In the Highlands, sprawling development also has the immediate and visible impact of paving as well as fragmenting wildlife habitat, recreational and scenic resources, and productive agricultural lands. Land-Use Decision Making in the Highlands Managing the use of land and preventing sprawling patterns of growth from disrupting the Highlands’ natural and cultural resources is the responsibility of private landowners and federal, state, and especially local government. Landowners can have very different goals for their property. As Highlands communities have suburbanized, the property characteristics and motivation of landowners have generally changed as well, from farmers and other large landowners actively managing their land, to developers purchasing...

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