Help us preserve and protect...

Conservation Easements or Purchase of Development Rights (PDR), Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) on a County-wide or regional scale.

I am really encouraged by and impressed with Mark Poloncarz, and think that he might step up to the plate and realize that protecting our natural resources/putting the clamp down on sprawl is a major regional issue. Look at what the LEADERS in cities like Portland have done.

Come on. What's wrong with a giant Walmart parking lot here?

I have spent a lot of time hiking, canoeing, and camping in various parts of WNY, Pennsylvania, and beyond. In the past 20 or 30 years I have seen the steady creep of sprawl spoil so many once natural areas. It is not just suburban sprawl but 2nd home sprawl, many rivers and mountain vista's are now visually polluted by McMansion summer homes. Years ago most were content with a small cottage or cabin nestled into the landscape in a unintrusive fashion. Today we see huge ostentatious structures built to stand out from the landscape, built to impress and display wealth, not as a quiet retreat in the country. I think in part these McMansion summer homes are just another result of the concentration of wealth and attitude of entitlement that now pervades our society.

I would say it should be a 4 prongued strategy:
1) Preserve Wilderness and Wetlands
2) Preserve Farm and Agricultural Lands
3) A moratorium on new roads, sewars, water mains, gas & electric. Without this...its wasted effort. The money for new needs to be put into existing.

Then by putting more money into existing infrastructure...we are upgrading already developed lands (urban and suburban) for more valuable purposes.

Lastly, in other cities/states the public and retail can donate to a preservation fund. Its a Wilderness Fund not owned or managed by politicians for politically connected purposes.

If this doenst happen soon...Erie County is going to sprawl into Niagara and Geneessee Counties which will require a regional approach.

The Connecticut River project many years ago actually accomplished this feat. Sprawl was threatening to overwhelm the natural beauty. Additionally, there were many farmers who were concerned that rising land values would mean higher taxes and that they would have to sell their farms to development, even when they didn't want to.

They came up with a plan that instead of forcing homes to a half acre plot like they are now, they would actually have the houses on very small lots, tightly nestled next to each other. The trade off, however, would be that the surrounding land would remain forever either farmland or wild. It became enforceable through covenants in the deeds.

This way, each house had a cluster of maybe 15 other houses, but were separated by wide swaths of rural looking areas. They looked out over all that wildness, so they actually felt like they were out in the country rather than the suburbs. Plus, they never had to worry about a developer coming in and squeezing out the farmers and putting up more houses. Tax rates remained high, so that the actual amount of tax paid was about the same as a traditional half acre suburban house.

It was highly successful and I have no idea why it isn't used more often. It doesn't require the purchase any land, and the town doesn't have to buy land, or designate it as wild, which can always be reversed at some point.

Establish a regional water and sewer district boundary and dont extend such infrastructure past that point. Review and update as needed over time like a Comprehensive Plan. All else will be on well and septic. Lack of public water and sewer inhibits "sprawl". This takes regional thinking though and requires towns and cities to work together instead of fiercely competing with one another trying to attract business from town x to town y within the same region at all costs including the extension of water and sewer to the new "hot" industrial park and commercial strip of the next 5 years even farther out than the last.

I have been tooting this horn on BRO for a while now.
Sprawl is not just wasteful and destructive to the city; it is equally destructive to rural areas, eroding the culture and adversely affecting the people who have lived and worked there for generations. When I was young my father told me he remembered when most of the area around the airport was farmland. He usually ended that observation by noting that when I was grown I would probably be telling my children the same thing about the Town of Aurora.

I did not believe him.

The City of Buffalo is the heart of the region and, just like the heart to the body – its health affects the health of the region, and if it dies so will the region. This works in the opposite direction as well. If the body is allowed to succumb to the cancer of sprawl the City will eventually collapse under the strain of maintaining the bloated and unnecessary weight of the additional infrastructure. The ripple of poverty and abandonment will push its way from the East side, to Cheektowaga, to Depew, to Lancaster, to . . .

Don’t misunderstand me. Growth and expansion are vital and good things, but only when done in a sensible and sustainable way. Unless there is an explosion in jobs and an influx of money to the area we should, as a region, be figuring out a way to evolve in a way that makes the most of the limited resources we have, not at the expense of it.

That mill road view is a rare one in an area that is basically flat. Looks similar to the views from the summit at scheriff in Orchard Park. One mansion in particular has the best view in the area. Of which I am jealous ; )

I guess my point is that if you are going to protect an area from being developed, buying up parcels either individually or as a group like this is the best way to keep a pristine landscape while possibly encouraging slightly denser development. One point of the article which I completely feel you on but is rather arbitrary is the phrase 'over-developed.' who is to say at what point we are over developed? Some who have a different view of ours might say differently. That said, yes I am aware of the implications of 'overdevelopment' however I also believe humans take precedence over nature. Sorry if I was meandering a bit.

i'm all for limiting sewer expansion, but i was just reading duany's "suburban nation," and in a footnote he mentions septic system sprawl where sewer systems are not permitted.

I always get frustrated on this topic when it comes to sprawl. Folks try to turn it around on me and say that I am just a city person, and not everyone likes to live crowded together.

I do love cities there is no doubt about that, I'm facinated by the infrastructures and engineering acheivements, but i also love nature. Camping, hiking, skiing are some of my favorite activities. The more and more sprawl though the less and less area there is to experience true nature. More and more people are cramming into the parks and recreation areas we have. Light pollution is cronic over much of both coast in this country.

I can see it in peoples faces that they don't really believe or get what i'm saying. They can't connect the dots to see that efficient dense infrastructure is the most efficient way to preserve nature. They want to "Live" in nature, which very few people do these days.

It would be a shame to see this land bought and broken up into a couple huge parcels for someone to mow for hours on end every weekend.

If you've ever been to the Adirondacks or Maine and seen the sky at night you know what conservation means.

If you start getting to the point where septic system sprawl becomes an issue I think you complement with a zoning code with subdivision regulations that place subdivision caps on parcels. Say Zoning X has minimum lot size of 5 acres and a 100 acre parcel is limited to no more than 10 lots at 5 acre mins. Or perhaps you allow for cluster subdivision giving the 100 acre lot owner the ability to get a few more lots at reduced lot size at say 3 acres if 40%, 50% of the acreage preserved as open space. Yes you offer the ability for some growth but it limits total proliferation.

to my knowledge only Portland has been able to draw a "circle" around itself and discourage development beyond that line. No other city has been able to do that. We will need a "Construction Watch" at the intersection of Main and N. Forest in (gasp) Amherst.

I love the sprawl debate, arguments about its inefficiencies, subsidies, inequity, lost of farmland, etc… all a normative pro-city, anti-suburban argument thinly veiled to support your own pro-city lifestyles. That’s all well and good but there are soooo many misinformed people chiming in on this argument that it’s hard to tell right from wrong. But I will add a few…

1. STEEL…. You have cherry picked a handful of shoddy pieces of work that would never pass a single academic litmus test p[roving any statistically significant relationship between sprawl and costs, nor have you ever shown a decent piece of locally research supporting your continual drivel on subsidies. Subsidies, suck, all of them. But there are just as many in the suburbs as there are in the city…. how about that 6 mile subway from nowhere to nowhere? How about the City of Buffalo pub lic schools, the most highly subsided by state and federal agencies than any in WNY? How about ECHDC? How about historic tax credits? You can’t win an argument sprawl when you take the subsidy approach because it comes back tenfold.

2. Tim… mortgage tax deductions help put people in the Avant, that’s OK right? You’re anti suburban mortgage tax deductions but pro-city? Hypocrisy is a bad trait.

3. Strap on a backpack and walk the wilderness of the southern tier, the Adirondacks, etc. The myopic idea that somehow we’re destroying all this rural and forest land is a joke. There is so much land we’ll never touch, never build on and never destroy with roads is laughable and ignorant to suggest otherwise. Not my quote but I use it for just such myopic arguments to again disprove this argument against sprawl (can’t recall the source but it’s out there”: The alleged loss of prime farmlands is, in the words of the late Julian Simon, "the most conclusively discredited environmental-political fraud of recent times." U.S. cropland use peaked in 1930. Each year American farmers grow more crops using less land and labor.

4. Lastly and most important, every single idea of how we can stop sprawl in WNY (I’d like to see it happen, I just hate the uninformed, flimsy, normative, pro-city arguments that have no merit) fails to recognize the most important issue facing this state and region on the issue of land use… home rule. I’ll say it again, and again, and once again. No true regional planning can EVER take place so long as we have 44 municipalities in WNY with the authority under the state constitution to control and use land as it sees fit. Until that issue is resolves, sprawl will ALWAYS happen despite your pleases and ideas. That’s the reality no one wants to face. Some towns want to grow (Lancaster, OP, Wheatfield) because they see tax benefits to growth rather than decline. The can allow new subdivisions is sewer and water are available from ECWA or by an Erie County Sewer District. Of, they can promote growth of large lot subdivisions once the sewer and water lines no longer offered needed capacity by allowing wells and septic systems. And, making matters worse, there are literally hundreds of square miles of available land that current has sewer and/or water capacity. The County has no authority whatsoever in controlling anything. They might be able to deny an extension of a sewer to service a proposed subdivision, but the invisible hand will merely seek out properties that have capacity and build there. All these “smart growth” things going on in WNY are thinly veiled growth plans that are being put forth by the same power brokers (BNP, BNE, REDC) intent on continuing to grow and build new. Smart growth is still growth. The people controlling the planning have a purely growth oriented mindset predicated on “smart growth” and “sustainability” but that’s nothing more than permission to continue to grow, just in a fashion palatable to John Q. Public.

Face it, sprawl is NEVER going away. It might slow down, but it won’t ever stop in WNY. As I’ve said here for years… stopping sprawl can’t happen until home rule authority is abolished, which will never happen.

Comparatively speaking, sprawl isn't a serious problem in Western New York. Lots of places are really struggling with traffic issues, literal evaporation of their water supply, and terrible air quality. Without these issues, there isn't as much of a need to implement radical growth controls here.

That said, I applaud efforts by the Friends of Mill Road to conserve a valued piece of property for open space. Green space is always an asset in urban, suburban, or rural communities.

Thats truly gorgeous..good for them for taking the initiative. I see this picture..and I can't help but think of a quote by a Lancaster offical talking about the housing developments on William Street (Bob Giza..not sure name escapes me) basically saying that the only way to prevent this land from being developed is to buy it yourself?? Where is the balance between places like Orchard Park and Aurora here that seem take SOME effort to fight sprawl and others like Lancaster and even Amherst that just step up to the devleopment trough and really don't seem to have a plan.

I wouldn't say I'm anti-sprawl or anti suburb..I'm "anti anti-planning". You don't have to drive much further than Transit road to see what a lot of development out there was not given much thought as far as effect on surrounding property, longevity and conservation of resources. Take a drive down William Street or Walden past Transit and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Friends and family all over the area..who consistenly complain about the price of gas. I live near downtown and work in the suburbs..everything I need is within a few minutes walk or drive; excluding my daily commute. (12 minutes..I'm spoiled) You bought a house in East Bumville and have to drive 17 minutes get a gallon of milk..you're commute is an hour an a half daily. People are making these choices in the age of dwindling resources..I don't feel sorry for you.

Interesting comments..talk to anyone who grew up in a rural environment and their comments about sprawl will be the same.rives up costs...destroyed what was there..pushed the people who have been here out..rising assessments..etc.

Ideally..hopefully..we'll eventually see region specific towns team up together for managed appropriate levels of growth. I'd love to see some collaboration in the Southtowns, the East Suburbs, an effort by Amherst to stear development towards the lake, (Eventually its going to leave the county), and another effort by the WWII suburbs and the city to regenerate, landbank, and decontaminate the oldest parts of Erie County. So we all can live in a cleaner, healthier,and cared for environment.