Buffalo Rising Online

This all sounds great But it is my understanding that Denver has one of the highest rates of sprawl development in the US and covers and extremely high amount of land per person. Getting sprawl under controll should be the biggest priority for this country.

Would be nice. but politicians and most people in general around here could care less about the environment. Sad truth, and something I don't see changing until we change the education pattern for our kids. Most people today will only consider the environment something worth saving when saving directly reflects on the wallet.

But steel isn't our god given right to chop of the land for person use even at the detriment of our future generations? Try telling someone they are not allowed to own a chunk of the planet and they will laugh at you. Tell them that decision is going to reduce everyone's children's ability to live a as good as we have and they laugh even harder. American's assume an unending supply of natural resources and land. Say something counter to that and you might as well put heretic across your forehead.

Sprawl is our biggest enviromental issue. Think about how sprawl effects our oil consumtion.

what pisses me off about the subdivisions in clarence or orchard park or wherever. is that most of the roads and utilities are really funded by ERIE county tax payers. Not just the people living in those subdivisions. You want to live in a forth ring subdivision....thats perfectly fine with me....it's your right. But don't waste my tax dollars on building more and more....particullarly when we can't afford to maintain what we allready have. East side, lackawanna, west seneca, cheektowaga, tonawanda, ect, ect, ect

Sprawl benefits no one.

how about the widening and improvemnts to all the roads and utilities around the subdivisions to account for all the new traffic?

often the developed constructs the roads with the intension that the county maintain them. Also garbage, water, and electricity are all other services that the larger community subsidizes for subdivisions to exist. Normally it isn't a problem but when streets go unplowed in Buffalo or Lackawanna that have been there for over 100 years because they are busy plowing the newest million dollar McMansion heaven it is a little disheartening.

Same with electricity. It costs both money to maintain and energy lost in the increased amount of infrastructure needed to support a larger sprawled region. Couple that with a shrinking base of people paying into all of these systems and it is no wonder why our bills continue to go up and up and up.

If we want our taxes and cost of living to decrease we need to stop allowing people to get subsidized land outside of currently urbanized areas. Go out and live there fine.. jsut don't expect everyone else to chip in and help you pay for it.

I haven't spotted a mention on BRO of Richard Floridia's Buffalo News article. Did i miss it? anyways heres a link if...

The Buffalo Mega-Region: Bigger Than We Know

As a resident of the Denver area for 15 years, the superficial linkage of "sprawl" with "metropolitan Denver" is premature at best. Have any of the posters been here lately? There's a wealth of TOD taking place around the expanded Light Rail lines with more to come. Yes, we have Highlands Ranch but we also have the Highlands neighborhood. If it's so awful, why weren't other municipalities condsidered by the DNC? Simply, they lack the facilties and depth to adequateloy service such a function. Let's match up our sales tax receipts at the end of August. Let's let the best city win.

Miles

It is not a competition. The facts are that Denver uses a very high amount of land per person and has more miles of highway than most cities in the nation due to its massive sprawl infrastructure. Buffalo is no saint. Buffalo continues to sprawl even in the face of population decline.

I couldn't agree more that sprawl is part of the problem in Denver however, the story is about the POSITIVE aspects of Denver's efforts at their airport. All of you people who have turned a positive story into a negative may be better suited for the Buffalo News blog section!

I couldn't agree more that sprawl is part of the problem in Denver however, the story is about the POSITIVE aspects of Denver's efforts at their airport. All of you people who have turned a positive story into a negative may be better suited for the Buffalo News blog section!

Well stated, Steel. I think there are positive developments taking place here which will ultimately offset the admittedly adverse impacts of prior development. The city has a very progressive leadership structure [Mayor John Hickenlopper] which I think will retain its attractiveness as a place to live and to do business.

steel> This all sounds great But it is my understanding that Denver has one of the highest rates of sprawl development in the US and covers and extremely high amount of land per person. Getting sprawl under controll should be the biggest priority for this country.

Yeah, Denver sprawls. However ...

1) It's sprawl with population growth, unlike Buffalo's sprawl with population decline.

2) New residential development in suburban Denver is usually at 6 to 10 units per acre; even the high-end projects. In Buffalo, it's usually 2 to 4 units per acre. My old house two miles from downtown Denver had a bigger lot (5,000 square feet) than much of the single-family development in suburban Aurora, Highlands Ranch, Westminster, Broomfield, and so on.

3) An increasing amount of suburban Denver development is New Urbanism-based. NU is unknown in suburban Buffalo.

4) RTD lines in suburban Denver have a much higher frequency of service than the relatively few NFTA lines that extend past the old streetcar loops at the city line. Light rail is also being expanded in Denver; contrast that to Buffalo's "subway to nowhere".

5) lnfill development in Denver and its inner ring suburban areas is built at a fairly high density. In the city of Buffalo, until recently inner-city infill was built at low suburban densities. William Price Court, anyone?

6) The frontage development that lines arterial roads in exurban and rural Erie and Niagara counties is practically nonexistent in the Denver area. Go beyond the 'burbs, and it's mostly open land; not houses on large lots lining rural roads for miles.

sony> If Buffalo had the same wretched sprawl as Denver, it would reach Rochester

Density. Think density. If Buffalo had the "same wretched sprawl as Denver", in reality it would tap out a mile or two before Transit Road.

A few more points:

7) Denver's suburbs have very strict architectural design regulations, landscaping regulations, access management requirements, and so on. Utility lines are mostly underground. Contrast that to Buffalo, where not even Amherst has architectural design review.

8) Denver's suburbs almost universally have planning departments, some of them much larger than the City of Buffalo's planning agency.

9) Aurora, one of Denver's megaburbs (with a population larger than that of the City of Buffalo), is considered by the US Census bureau to be the most racially and ethnically integrated community in the United States. Can you say the same thing about any suburb or Buffalo?

> Downtown Denver to DIA is also 27 miles. No train to get there, so everybody drives. It's even further from most of the sprawl. Denver is up there with LA in terms of embracing car culture.

There are airport park-and-ride lots everywhere in the region, and the frequency of RTD bus service to the airport is very high.

Did I mention that RTD light rail is EXPANDING, unlike Buffalo's Metro Rail?

Yeah, Denverites can be smug and pretentious, I'll admit. It wasn't the sprawl that bothered me when I was living there; it was the many, many people constantly self-validate their "upscale" lifestyle and tastes. In that respect, it's the opposite extreme of Buffalo.

Sony>"Transit Rd"? So you're saying that that's the reach of Denver's sprawl? That the distance from Castle Rock to Lafayette CO is about 9 miles?

The Buffalo metro area has a population of about 1,000,000 and it's shrinking. Denver's metro population is about 2.5 million, and it's growing.

New residential development in Buffalo's 'burbs is mostly low-density; 2-3 du/av. In suburban Denver, it's 6-10 du/ac.

If the Buffalo area. with its current population, sprawled in the fashion of Denver, with its higher density residential development ... yes, Transit Road, Southwestern Boulevard and North Tonawanda would still be "out in the country."

Denver sprawls out because it has a large, growing population, and those new residents have to live somewhere. Denver's real estate dynamics are the exact opposite of Buffalo's; the city is expensive, and the 'burbs less so. Not everybody wants to pay $500K for an 800 square foot bungalow in Wash Park, so they pick up a 3/2 on a 4,000 square foot lot in Thornton or Aurora for $250K, or something in Commerce City or Castle Rock for a bit less. Imagine what it would be like if if Denver sprawled out like Buffalo, with half-acre lots being the norm?

> And all that planning and "architectural review" only means that Denver's suburbs all look alike with cookie-cutter faux-upscale homes.

As opposed to Buffalo's burbs, which have obsolete shopping centers, visual clutter (signs, utility lines, etc), commercial districts with no landscaping, no access management, increasingly obsolete "doll house" housing in inner ring areas, poorly distributed open space, poor accommodation for bikes or pedestrians, no planning except for ED pros trying to entice each other's businesses to jump across their town lines ...

> mind-numbingly dull and vapid.

Gotta' love the old "Everything about Buffalo is more honest, real, genuine and authentic, and the world outside of it is plastic, dull, fake and dull" argument.

I'll take Aurora and it's tree over Amherst anyday. I'll take Buffalo over both of them. Denver above 'em all, which is why I lived in West Highlands/Berkeley, near downtown and out-commuted to Saudi.

It never took me more than 40 to 45 minutes to drive from one extremity of suburban Denver to the other. You want to see sprawl? Come to Cleveland, where a drive between the far eastern and far western suburbs on uncongested Interstates takes longer than a run from Buffalo to Toronto. Cleveland's suburbs are pretty, but they're built at suburban Buffalo-style densities, and to use the word "sprawl" to describe the effect would be an understatement.