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Channeling growth and development back toward cities, such as Cleveland, that already have extensive investments in public infrastructure, would benefit Northeast Ohio, suggests a quartet of scenarios development by the Northeast Ohio Sustainable Communities Consortium.

(Thomas Ondrey, Plain Dealer file)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Northeast Ohio faces a grim future if it continues sprawling as usual.

But it has options that could dramatically improve its economy, social equity, and environment if it channels development back toward cities that are hollowing out today.

That's the basic thrust of a quartet of development scenarios being offered by the Northeast Ohio Sustainable Communities Consortium as choices for public debate over the next two weeks in the latest phase of the biggest regional planning effort in a generation.

The consortium, a private, non-profit organization of city, county and regional government organizations, plus private foundations and academic institutions, will launch 10 public forums on the region's future starting today from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the Reinberger Education Center of Cleveland Metroparks Zoo.

Other forums are scheduled at locations including Ashtabula, Willowick, Elyria, Akron and Warren.

The consortium hopes to gather a fresh data through the meetings to devise a “preferred vision” for the future that can guide future policy across the region.

“What do we want and what can we afford?” said Hunter Morrison, director of the sustainability consortium. “We’re taking that kitchen table logic and blowing it up to the scale of the region as a whole.”

Funded by a $4.25 million grant from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, plus $2.4 million in local matching funds, the sustainability group is in the final six months of a three-year effort to help Northeast Ohio fashion a rational vision for the future rather than blindly continue current trends.

The voluntary, non-partisan organization has no power to impose its concepts, but can only use the power of persuasion.

Regional government in the U.S. is largely nonexistent. Power over land use and zoning, which determines development patterns and the shape of communities, belongs almost exclusively to local governments.

A summary page from the Northeast Ohio Sustainable Communities Consortium's latest overview of future scenarios suggests different pathways to the future.

This means that roughly 400 municipal entities across 12 counties including Cuyahoga, Summit, Lake, Geauga, Portage, Warren, Trumbull, Stark, Mahoning, Medina, Wayne and Lorain are steering the future of Northeast Ohio without a coordinated road map.

And many have thousands of acres zoned for residential growth that can only occur if other parts of the region empty out, the scenarios show.

Over the past two-and-a-half years, the consortium has gathered data on the 12 counties, including the first unified, parcel-by-parcel zoning map of the entire region.

In April, it unveiled its first major prediction about the future – the "Building As Usual" or "Trend" scenario, which assumes a continuation of the region's development along major interstate highways between now and 2040.

The scenario shows that the region would build more sprawling, thinly settled suburbs while cities shrink, the overall population remains virtually flat, and municipal and county budgets suffer everywhere.

Under the “Trend” scenario, the region would lose 18 houses a day between now and 2040. Removing only 30 percent of those houses – at $10,000 apiece – would cost a half billion dollars, a cost borne largely by the region’s cities.

In the suburbs, meanwhile, government will have to build more than 3,000 new miles of road, enough to drive in a straight line from New Brunswick, Canada to the Baja Peninsula in Mexico.

The newest stage of the consortium’s work adds greater detail to the “Trend” scenario by showing, for example, that the 12-county region, whose population is 3.8 million, is expected to gain only 98,000 new residents by 2040.

It would add roughly 121,500 acres of new park space, but would also pave 28,320 acres of land with hard surfaces and lose 31,000 acres of agricultural land – a total nearly equivalent to two Cuyahoga Valley National Parks. That means more flooding, and more need for costly sewer systems to capture runoff.

Red ink would also flow. Because of the high cost of paying for new infrastructure to support an outward migration, the region as a whole would face a negative 33.7 percent gap between revenues and expenses.

A slide from a Northeast Ohio Sustainability Consortium presentation shows how open land and agriculture would be affected by various growth scenarios.

A variation on the “Trend” explores what might happen if the region continued with its current development policies, but experienced a modestly higher growth in population of .8 percent a year, or 875,000 people.

Under that scenario, the red ink - the regional gap between revenues and expenses - would be negative 6.4 percent. But 48,400 additional acres of land would be consumed by suburban development – or 1.5 times the area of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. And 60,000 acres of agricultural land would be lost.

A third scenario, labeled “Do Things Differently,” assumes that the region consumes only 4,100 acres of land through additional suburban development, but builds 2.5 times the amount of new urban housing than under the “Trend” or "Business as Usual" scenario.

"Do Things Differently" also assumes that 20 percent more jobs would be located near transit than if current trends are allowed to continue. The result: a 10.4 percent surplus in local government budgets.

The surplus of revenues over expenses would grow to 13.8 percent if the region’s population employed pro-urban growth policies and added 875,000 new residents, as assumed in the higher-growth variation on the “Trend” scenario.

The upshot is that by steering away from automobile-oriented development in the suburbs and concentrating investments where infrastructure already exists in cities, the region could save piles of money and be more economically competitive even if it does not add much population at all by 2040.

“If there’s a way to leverage the investment in the [existing] infrastructure around the region, the fiscal situation improves pretty dramatically,” said Chris Horne of Sasaki Associates of Watertown, Mass., the consulting firm that led development of the scenarios.

Horne said the consultants who devised the scenarios did not put their thumb on the scales, and that their work is politically unbiased.

Nevertheless, previous articles about the project have been criticized strongly by readers who believe the consortium is an effort in Big Brother planning meant to infringe individual liberty.

“We’re not painting a grim scenario because we think its an effective call to action – it’s just a mathematical result of current trends,” Horne said.

He said that data gathered from across the region show that abandoning cities and filling new acres with suburban development is simply not smart public policy.

“The region has already invested a massive amount of capital into its systems of infrastructure and there are huge efficiencies to be gained from that,” he said. “But the tragedy is that is precisely the place where the region is hollowing out. It’s like burning at both ends.”