How Will the Garden State Grow?

Peter Kasabach is executive director of New Jersey Future, a nonprofit organization that employs original research, analysis, and advocacy to build coalitions and drive land-use policies that help revitalize cities and towns, protect natural lands and farms, provide more transportation choices beyond cars, expand access to safe and affordable neighborhoods, and fuel a prosperous economy.]

In the 25 years that have passed since New Jersey adopted the State Planning Act, which calls for growth and development to be directed toward regions of the state where infrastructure already exists and away from areas that are environmentally sensitive, one fact of life has become abundantly clear:

It is easy to talk about doing the right thing. It is far more difficult to actually do it.

For the most part, New Jersey has grown and developed during the past quarter-century in much the same way as it did during the half-century that preceded it -- ever outward, from established places where infrastructure already exists to sprawling suburbs that encroach on environmentally sensitive areas.

Between 1986 and 2002, New Jersey averaged about 15,000 acres (roughly the size of Manhattan) of new land development each year, or a total of nearly 230,000 acres. Between 1995 and 2002 alone, 36,000 acres of agricultural land and 58,000 acres of forest were given over to development, a total area about equal to the size of Union and Hudson counties combined.

As of 2007, developed land covered 32 percent of New Jersey, surpassing forest land as the dominant land-use type in the state. (We now have more acres of buildings, parking lots, and lawns than we have of upland forests -- including the Pinelands and all the state's parks and reserves.) Another 47 percent of our land has either been set aside for preservation or contains physical and environmental constraints that render it undevelopable.

This means that nearly 80 percent of New Jersey's land area is already spoken for. And we seem increasingly determined to exhaust the remaining supply of land as rapidly as possible. A recent report by Rowan University concludes that the land-use pattern in New Jersey today is substantially more sprawling than it was in 1970, with recent growth using up much more land per capita than older development. This is a luxury that the most developed state in the country simply cannot afford.

How did we get here? And how do we turn things around to get where we need to go?

How we got here is simple enough. We allowed our quintessentially American preoccupation with the next new frontier -- at the expense of what we had already built -- to compromise our long-term sustainability.

It was easier and cheaper to run a new sewer line out to the suburbs than it was to fix the crumbling lines in the cities.

It was easier and cheaper to develop new homes on suburban cul-de-sacs, and build new highways to get to them, than it was to redevelop older properties in the cities and maintain and repair the streets and sidewalks that served them.

And as the first-ring suburbs aged, it was easier to keep extending outward, turning land that once earned New Jersey the title of the Garden State into acre upon acre of housing subdivisions and strip malls.

Much of this outward movement was driven by government incentives and a thriving market for single-family homes on suburban lots, where Baby Boomers who grew up in the cities could acquire green lawns and driveways, trade in their bus and rail passes for an automobile (or two), raise their children, and enjoy a lifestyle that fulfilled the latest version of the American Dream. At the same time, many businesses were relocating from high-rise office buildings in downtown Newark, Elizabeth, and Camden to low-rise corporate campuses in Parsippany, Woodbridge, and Cherry Hill -- with nice big parking lots to accommodate all the cars.

Today, we are experiencing some of the unintended consequences of this unabated sprawl development.

Many of those sewer lines and highways we built to support growth, while we deferred maintenance and repair on older infrastructure, are now in need of maintenance and repair themselves, putting increased pressure on taxpayers.

Deterioration, abandonment, and blight -- the fate that befell many urban factories, commercial sites, and industrial properties in the mid to late 20th century -- has become an all-too-familiar 21st century sight in suburban office parks and strip malls across the state.

And getting to and from many of the jobs that moved out to the suburbs (but not necessarily the same suburbs where the people who filled them live) now requires a daily commute by car that keeps getting longer and more frustrating for drivers and more unproductive for the companies that employ them.

Continue reading this story in NJ Spotlight.

NJ Spotlight is an online news service providing insight and information on issues critical to New Jersey.