BY MICHAEL D. CLARK
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Greater Cincinnati is suffering from one of America's worst cases of uncontrolled sprawl, a national environmental group said Tuesday.
Surging population and development are chewing up farmland, destroying natural lands and forcing Tristate commuters to wait longer in traffic, officials from the Sierra Club said in a report.
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SPRAWLING OF AMERICA
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The environmental group Sierra Club on Tuesday issued a list of the top 10 U.S. cities suffering the worst urban sprawl. In order, they were:
Atlanta
St. Louis
Washington, D.C.
Cincinnati
Kansas City, Mo.
Denver
Seattle
Minneapolis-St. Paul
Fort Lauderdale
Chicago |
Add those problems together, and Cincinnati ranks No. 4 among the worst 10 urban - metropolitan areas in dealing with growth.
"Our unique identity and quality of life here in Cincinnati has become a casualty to homogenized growth that destroys both our rural landscape and the urban core," Glen Brand, an organizer with the Sierra Club's Environmental Voter Education Campaign in Cincinnati, said in a statement.
But Larry Crisenbery, president of the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments (OKI), the Tristate agency that deals with transportation and planning issues, challenged the report, questioning its methodology.
"Yes, we are growing fast, and yes, we have some problems. But don't forget that these are due to projects that are only temporary," said Mr. Crisenbery, in reference to Fort Washington Way reconstruction and plans for other large projects.
"I'd suggest they get the full facts," said Mr. Crisenbery, also a commissioner of Warren County, second-fastest-growing county in Ohio.
Greater Cincinnati's population is poised to shatter the 2 million mark by the year 2000.
The Sierra Club based its rankings on census data, land-area growth in urban areas and traffic congestion data from federal departments and professional associations. It included Cincinnati in its largest category -- metropolitan areas of more than 1 million residents.
An estimated 1,950,269 people call the 13-county Tristate metropolitan area home, according to 1997 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. That is a 1.6 percent jump from the previous year, when demographic experts said the region's population stood at 1,919,010.
The Sierra Club report said Greater Cincinnati's land area has spread out steadily over the years -- from 335 square miles in 1970 to 512 square miles in 1990, a 53 percent increase.
The report also said that the amount of time Cincinnati drivers spend waiting in traffic gridlock increased by 200 percent between 1982 and 1994, the second-largest such increase in the nation. Akron garnered a fifth-place ranking among the five most sprawl-threatened medium-sized cities, those with urban area populations of 500,000 to 1 million. No other Ohio city was listed.
Carl Pope, the Sierra Club's executive director, said suburban sprawl is a national problem.
"For decades, local, state and federal governments have directly and indirectly encouraged people to move farther and farther out. Now the costs of sprawling, runaway growth are clear and increasing," he said. "All across our country, cities and towns large and small are rethinking the costs and benefits of poorly planned, poorly managed growth," he said.
