LMich
01-25-2007, 09:15 AM
An interesting read...
Promoting smart growth with a new greenbelt
Written by Lawrence Cosentino, Lansing City Pulse
Wednesday, 24 January 2007
Local environmentalists debate merits of surrounding city with forests, prairies and meadows
With a modest gift, nickel-and-dimed together on a bake sale and a prayer, a small knot of local land-huggers has thrown a gigantic challenge to the boldest dreamers and planners in the area: A century from now, they want Lansing to be wrapped in green, open space.
Last month, the East Lansing faith group Fellowship for Today bought 13.6 acres of floodplain on the Looking Glass River and donated the land to a Williamston-based conservation group that will maintain the land in its natural state.
The unexpected, soggy Christmas gift thrilled Michigan Nature Association director Jeremy Emmi to his hip waders.
“There’s this amazing, huge area that floods in the spring and winter,” Emmi said. “In the spring it’s a fantastic habitat for amphibians, dragonflies, damselflies and other aquatic insects.”
If turbid floodwaters, salamanders and bugs don’t thrill, the parcel also has a majestic highland graced with ancient oak and hickory trees. Such uplands, Emmi says, are falling victim to developers fast, in part because they’re often not legally protected, as rivers are. They’re also prime spots to put up a McMansion with a three-car garage and a redwood deck, but that will never happen here. At most, there will be unpaved walking trails with informational stops.
The parcel even has a bit of prairie tossed in for good measure. Emmi says the three distinct habitats, so close together, will make it a perfect spot for wildlife education or a quiet walk.
But something else about the gift thrills Emmi most of all. “It’s not so big in terms of acreage,” Emmi said, “but it’s great in what it stands for: something that can be repeated. We have the opportunity to do this same thing again and again and again in the Lansing area.”
One ring that binds them
If enthusiastic community activist and Fellowship minister Beth Monteith has her way, her group may someday be known as the Fellowship of the Ring. Now that they’ve put their money where their mouth is, the members plan to evangelize all over the area, telling anyone who will listen about their green-belt vision.
For many years, Monteith, who spearheaded the land gift, made the drive from Lansing to Detroit and watched the countryside between Detroit and once-remote Brighton gradually disappear.
“I didn’t want that to happen to Lansing,” Monteith said.
In 1999, while walking in New York’s Central Park, Monteith thought about the city fathers who rescued precious swaths of green space more than 100 years ago, and wondered what legacy today’s citizens could leave behind. The group thought about buying stock for “a little endowment,” but decided the times called for a different kind of bequest.
“The more we thought about it, the better the idea seemed to us,” Monteith said. “If you project yourself 100 years in the future, what if we did have a corridor a half-mile or a mile in width all the way around the city so that every drive into the city would involve driving through a forest, or meadow or set aside land?”
The idea throws a line out to the past as well as the future. In 1959, local historian Brit Darling wrote a textbook-style history of Lansing called “City in the Forest.” In prose that’s also a bit wooden, he describes early settlers “clearing a wilderness, building a city where there should not have been a city at that time, establishing a state capitol in the midst of a forest against the better judgment of many.”
As urban sprawl eats up green space all over Michigan, is it possible to keep the “City in the Forest” in the forest? Or, where the trees are long gone, in the farmland, floodplain, meadow or prairie?
A choice of belts
“I think it’s very possible,” said Mike Garfield, director of the Ann Arbor-based Ecology Center. Garfield is no armchair speculator. He is the chief architect of Ann Arbor’s green-belt initiative, among the most extensive and ambitious in the nation.
“I think the Lansing area is the next most likely place to create a land preservation program like we’ve created in Washtenaw County,” he said.
In the past seven years, Washtenaw County voters have approved six millages that have gathered a total of $100 million for buying and setting aside land to be preserved as agricultural or natural green space. Garfield thinks the Lansing area’s strong agricultural community, environmentally-conscious voters and relative insulation from outside urban encroachment make it the ideal place for the state’s next green belt.
However, Garfield cautions that even in Ann Arbor, the term “green belt” isn’t always be taken as literally as Monteith understands it. “People mean many different things when they talk about a green belt,” Garfield said.
Most of Europe’s many green belt cities are tucked into patchwork quilts of preserved farmland. London was the first major city to establish a green belt, beginning in the late 1930s, and dozens of cities in the United Kingdom and continental Europe have them.
In the United States, where zoning regulations and land use planning are not as popular as they are in Europe, fewer cities have taken on a full-scale green belt project, and these usually involve natural areas as well as farmland. Garfield cites Boulder, Colo., as a belt built mainly of parkland and protected areas with public access.
Other cities, like Portland, Ore., and Minneapolis have encouraged green belts by adopting urban growth boundaries beyond which development is forbidden or restricted.
There’s also a green belt movement in Africa, led by Wangari Maathai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. Maathai’s movement stands not only for the preservation of green space, but also a wide range of principles centering on sustainable development.
Because of the large variety of initiatives that call themselves “green belts,” Garfield said the term should be used with caution. “The green belt around Ann Arbor isn’t a continuous belt,” he said. “It’s designed to save as many green spaces as possible around the city.
One day, Garfield said, it may become a true belt, but even when it does, it won’t necessarily have public access as a bike trail or a hiking trail. “It’s going to be green infrastructure: farms, riparian areas, many different kinds of natural and undeveloped land,” Garfield said.
Like many green space experts, Garfield prefers the term “green infrastructure,” but added that in the end “it doesn’t matter what you call it.”
“It’s a sprawl-stopping, or sprawl-slowing tool,” he said.
Reality check
One of the nation’s most distinguished land use experts has words of encouragement and caution for dreamers like Beth Monteith. Soji Adelaja is a professor of land use at MSU and director of the Land Policy Institute housed there.
“The vision of a green belt, long-term, would enhance the Lansing area tremendously,” Adelaja said.
While at Rutgers University, Adelaja played a major role in the 1999 passage of New Jersey’s Garden State Preservation Initiative, touted by then-Gov. Christine Todd Whitman as a “national model for open space protection.”
“It’s unthinkable to have a Garden State without a garden,” Adelaja quipped, probably not for the first time.
The sweeping New Jersey law drew upon state money, a special trust fund and a multitude of market-driven mechanisms. Its goal: to preserve 1 million acres of land, or about 40 percent of the state, by 2009.
Adelaja, who has just finished a set of reports on preserving agricultural land in Michigan, said the bones for a greater Lansing green belt are already in place. “There is a lot of greenery around — farms, forestland and things of that nature,” he said.
Adelaja says a green belt would be green “not just from a visual standpoint, but from an economic standpoint.” By creating a buffer between a metropolitan area and rural communities, Adelaja says, green belts “break down the pattern of sprawl which we find to be crippling many areas of the country.”
“There’s evidence from around the world that the green belt enhances property values within the belt,” Adelaja said.
Jeremy Emmi explains the appeal: “One trap people fall into is that if you love nature, you have to live in it. Well, if you build your house out there, it’s sort of contradictory, because if everybody did that, we’d all be living on five or 10 acres and covering up the entire state with houses.”
Emmi invoked his experience while living in Portland, where an urban growth boundary keeps sprawl at bay. “Real estate prices have gone up, the quality of life has gone up,” he said. “Even the real estate agents and home builders have jumped on board, because they realize they’re still going to be building the same number of units, but selling them for more.”
Despite the potential benefits, Adelaja calls the green belt idea “ambitious.”
“Conceptually, it sounds simple, but you’re talking about significant thinking and planning, significant design, cost analysis,” Adelaja said. “It would take a lot of community effort to make that happen.”
Adelaja said land donations like the one made by Fellowship for Today would also be a part of the puzzle, but said it’s unlikely private donations alone could assemble a green belt. “I am not aware of any significant green-belt initiative that has happened without some government involvement, both regulatory and otherwise,” he said.
“It’s a vision every community should have, but our community ought to be serious about putting its money where its mouth is and pursuing a strategy,” Adelaja said.
The microcosm
One local township has done just that. In recent years, fast-growing Meridian Township has faced intense development pressure. In that respect, the township is a microcosm of the larger metropolitan area.
In 2000, Meridian citizens passed a land preservation millage to set aside crucial natural areas. By 2004, a comprehensive green space plan, emphasizing access and connectivity, was in place.
Meridian Township Supervisor Sue McGillicuddy said 500 acres of land have been set aside so far. “Without the millage, we couldn’t have achieved what we have,” she said.
McGillicuddy said a green belt around greater Lansing would be a noble project. “Ours is more integrated into the entire community, not just around the periphery,” she said, “but I think it would be wonderful if we could get a green belt around the entire tri-county area.”
“It’s ambitious, but it would be a great place for hiking and bicycling trails, and it would also serve as a buffer between urban and rural communities,” she said.
Norman Cox is president of Ann Arbor-based Greenway Collaborative Inc., the firm hired by Meridian Township to develop its green space plan. Cox said the plan uses a variety of tools. Outright buying of land is so expensive, he said, it should be the “conservation tool of last resort.”
It’s more feasible, Cox said, to set aside large chunks of land using cluster development, where developers concentrate housing in higher-density units, leaving the rest of a parcel as open space. “This is nothing new or extraordinary,” he said. “The key is to do it systematically. The clustered sites in one development and the open space next to that synchronize and work with the site next to it.” If a developer were working on 100 acres, for example, all the houses would cluster on 50 of those acres, with the rest set aside. Cox said it’s a surprisingly easy sell. “Open-space developments are one of the hottest types,” he said. “Think of it as a golf resort development without the high-maintenance greens. You’ve got the fields and the woods and the streams instead. There’s a strong demand for that in the marketplace right now.”
The alternative, Cox said, is low-density dispersal of homes, retail and business over a wider and wider area. “Now you get people mowing three to five acres of lawn,” he said. “You have the suburbanization of a whole landscape, and when you’re done, do you really have the countryside that people moved out to see?”
Fasten your green belt
It’s one thing for a single township like Meridian to take action against sprawl — it’s quite another to coordinate dozens of jurisdictions over three counties.
“What hasn’t quite happened yet is a multi-county approach that includes mapping and identification of targeted green areas, ordinance models and technical assistance to help fit those models to existing zoning and master plans,” Cox said.
If it did happen, Cox said, “it would be remarkable and put the Lansing area in the forefront of conservation, probably in the Midwest.”
Such a strategy is already beginning to take shape. In September 2005, the Tri-County Regional Planning Commission issued a comprehensive regional growth plan: a web of 29 “wise growth” principles ranging from waste management to environmental protection to strengthening urban cores.
These themes and principles are purely advisory, but they have been adopted or endorsed by a responsible planning agent in 45 of the 78 jurisdictions in the tri-county region. “I find it as a great start,” said Paul Hamilton, chief transportation planner with the commission.
Hamilton invokes Principle 20 of the plan, which fits comfortably under his own bailiwick of transportation. Under this principle, the plan does not call directly for a green belt, but for linkage of parks and other natural areas by greenways in a hub-and-link system.
“I don’t see a green belt in the region’s future,” Hamilton said. “Sure, it’s possible to have a green belt, but it you’ve got a limited budget, where are you going to put the money?”
Other experts agree with Hamilton. “Ecologically, a ring may not always make sense,” said Andy Guy, Great Lakes Project director at the Michigan Land Use Institute. “You may not be protecting linear corridors that are important. The Grand River runs through Lansing, it doesn’t go around the city.”
Hamilton also said there are other problems associated with full-scale green belts, including dense new blobs of “leapfrog” development that tend to pop up just over the green belt. Guy said this has happened in Boulder, and anti-green space blogs there complain of a new band of visible pollution emanating from the far side of the green belt.
“I think the idea of a green belt might be overly simplistic,” Cox said. (A web is Cox’s preferred green space metaphor.) “It’s something that integrates, not just a circle around Lansing but through all the developing areas,” Cox said, “so when you’re done developing you have a character and a natural system that people would actually want to be around.”
Hamilton said even the of linkage of parks and other facilities through greenways will take a lot of difficult planning, not to mention cooperation across dozens of jurisdictions. “We can’t assume we’re going to change 200 years of land use policy in this country in a short period of time with the adoption of principles,” Hamilton said. For green belt dreamers, the first step will be to identify the land that ought to be saved, and that work has barely begun.
When a plan comes together
The image of a web also appeals to Nancy Krupiarz, executive director of the Michigan Trails and Greenways Alliance and a longtime advocate of green spaces and non-motorized trails in Michigan. As a member of the Land Use Health Resource Team, Krupiarz is ready to start drawing the precise contours of greater Lansing’s green infrastructure. The team is a partnership among the Ingham County Health Department, the Tri-County Regional Growth Commission and land planners from MSU.
“We’re looking to do much more than just a green belt around the city,” Krupiarz said. “We’re looking to spearhead a green infrastructure planning process for the whole area.”
Krupiarz has already worked on green infrastructure programs in the Saginaw Bay area, the Gennesse-Lapeer-Shiawassee effort, and a tri-county program in west Michigan that’s now going into effect. This summer, the public will have a chance to be directly involved in this process.
“We need to be able to identify those pieces and get the public input on what they feel should be preserved,” Krupiarz said. “It may not be confined to just a green belt around the city. There may be connectivity throughout.”
Krupiarz plans to organize a public event this summer, where organizations and citizens can manipulate interactive maps and single out the areas they want saved, thus helping to build data for a green infrastructure blueprint.
Krupiarz, like Hamilton, emphasized that those findings will be advisory, with the final decisions left to the various governments.
“Decisions are going to be made by township boards, city councils, elected officials, county boards, planning commissions and so forth,” Hamilton said. “So the first step for citizen involvement in stuff like this is to start local.”
Jeremy Emmi agreed that the green belt would have to grow from the grass roots, although he did not have city council meetings or voting booths in mind. “I see the beginnings of a green belt for the Lansing area to be pushed by the private and nonprofit sector first, and then hopefully pull the local governments along,” he said.
Cox said it may take money, but it would pay off in the long run. “Nobody ever regrets preserving a natural area,” he said. “Nobody ever says, ‘Boy, I wish we’d turned that into a parking lot.’”
http://www.lansingcitypulse.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=800&Itemid=29
Promoting smart growth with a new greenbelt
Written by Lawrence Cosentino, Lansing City Pulse
Wednesday, 24 January 2007
Local environmentalists debate merits of surrounding city with forests, prairies and meadows
With a modest gift, nickel-and-dimed together on a bake sale and a prayer, a small knot of local land-huggers has thrown a gigantic challenge to the boldest dreamers and planners in the area: A century from now, they want Lansing to be wrapped in green, open space.
Last month, the East Lansing faith group Fellowship for Today bought 13.6 acres of floodplain on the Looking Glass River and donated the land to a Williamston-based conservation group that will maintain the land in its natural state.
The unexpected, soggy Christmas gift thrilled Michigan Nature Association director Jeremy Emmi to his hip waders.
“There’s this amazing, huge area that floods in the spring and winter,” Emmi said. “In the spring it’s a fantastic habitat for amphibians, dragonflies, damselflies and other aquatic insects.”
If turbid floodwaters, salamanders and bugs don’t thrill, the parcel also has a majestic highland graced with ancient oak and hickory trees. Such uplands, Emmi says, are falling victim to developers fast, in part because they’re often not legally protected, as rivers are. They’re also prime spots to put up a McMansion with a three-car garage and a redwood deck, but that will never happen here. At most, there will be unpaved walking trails with informational stops.
The parcel even has a bit of prairie tossed in for good measure. Emmi says the three distinct habitats, so close together, will make it a perfect spot for wildlife education or a quiet walk.
But something else about the gift thrills Emmi most of all. “It’s not so big in terms of acreage,” Emmi said, “but it’s great in what it stands for: something that can be repeated. We have the opportunity to do this same thing again and again and again in the Lansing area.”
One ring that binds them
If enthusiastic community activist and Fellowship minister Beth Monteith has her way, her group may someday be known as the Fellowship of the Ring. Now that they’ve put their money where their mouth is, the members plan to evangelize all over the area, telling anyone who will listen about their green-belt vision.
For many years, Monteith, who spearheaded the land gift, made the drive from Lansing to Detroit and watched the countryside between Detroit and once-remote Brighton gradually disappear.
“I didn’t want that to happen to Lansing,” Monteith said.
In 1999, while walking in New York’s Central Park, Monteith thought about the city fathers who rescued precious swaths of green space more than 100 years ago, and wondered what legacy today’s citizens could leave behind. The group thought about buying stock for “a little endowment,” but decided the times called for a different kind of bequest.
“The more we thought about it, the better the idea seemed to us,” Monteith said. “If you project yourself 100 years in the future, what if we did have a corridor a half-mile or a mile in width all the way around the city so that every drive into the city would involve driving through a forest, or meadow or set aside land?”
The idea throws a line out to the past as well as the future. In 1959, local historian Brit Darling wrote a textbook-style history of Lansing called “City in the Forest.” In prose that’s also a bit wooden, he describes early settlers “clearing a wilderness, building a city where there should not have been a city at that time, establishing a state capitol in the midst of a forest against the better judgment of many.”
As urban sprawl eats up green space all over Michigan, is it possible to keep the “City in the Forest” in the forest? Or, where the trees are long gone, in the farmland, floodplain, meadow or prairie?
A choice of belts
“I think it’s very possible,” said Mike Garfield, director of the Ann Arbor-based Ecology Center. Garfield is no armchair speculator. He is the chief architect of Ann Arbor’s green-belt initiative, among the most extensive and ambitious in the nation.
“I think the Lansing area is the next most likely place to create a land preservation program like we’ve created in Washtenaw County,” he said.
In the past seven years, Washtenaw County voters have approved six millages that have gathered a total of $100 million for buying and setting aside land to be preserved as agricultural or natural green space. Garfield thinks the Lansing area’s strong agricultural community, environmentally-conscious voters and relative insulation from outside urban encroachment make it the ideal place for the state’s next green belt.
However, Garfield cautions that even in Ann Arbor, the term “green belt” isn’t always be taken as literally as Monteith understands it. “People mean many different things when they talk about a green belt,” Garfield said.
Most of Europe’s many green belt cities are tucked into patchwork quilts of preserved farmland. London was the first major city to establish a green belt, beginning in the late 1930s, and dozens of cities in the United Kingdom and continental Europe have them.
In the United States, where zoning regulations and land use planning are not as popular as they are in Europe, fewer cities have taken on a full-scale green belt project, and these usually involve natural areas as well as farmland. Garfield cites Boulder, Colo., as a belt built mainly of parkland and protected areas with public access.
Other cities, like Portland, Ore., and Minneapolis have encouraged green belts by adopting urban growth boundaries beyond which development is forbidden or restricted.
There’s also a green belt movement in Africa, led by Wangari Maathai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. Maathai’s movement stands not only for the preservation of green space, but also a wide range of principles centering on sustainable development.
Because of the large variety of initiatives that call themselves “green belts,” Garfield said the term should be used with caution. “The green belt around Ann Arbor isn’t a continuous belt,” he said. “It’s designed to save as many green spaces as possible around the city.
One day, Garfield said, it may become a true belt, but even when it does, it won’t necessarily have public access as a bike trail or a hiking trail. “It’s going to be green infrastructure: farms, riparian areas, many different kinds of natural and undeveloped land,” Garfield said.
Like many green space experts, Garfield prefers the term “green infrastructure,” but added that in the end “it doesn’t matter what you call it.”
“It’s a sprawl-stopping, or sprawl-slowing tool,” he said.
Reality check
One of the nation’s most distinguished land use experts has words of encouragement and caution for dreamers like Beth Monteith. Soji Adelaja is a professor of land use at MSU and director of the Land Policy Institute housed there.
“The vision of a green belt, long-term, would enhance the Lansing area tremendously,” Adelaja said.
While at Rutgers University, Adelaja played a major role in the 1999 passage of New Jersey’s Garden State Preservation Initiative, touted by then-Gov. Christine Todd Whitman as a “national model for open space protection.”
“It’s unthinkable to have a Garden State without a garden,” Adelaja quipped, probably not for the first time.
The sweeping New Jersey law drew upon state money, a special trust fund and a multitude of market-driven mechanisms. Its goal: to preserve 1 million acres of land, or about 40 percent of the state, by 2009.
Adelaja, who has just finished a set of reports on preserving agricultural land in Michigan, said the bones for a greater Lansing green belt are already in place. “There is a lot of greenery around — farms, forestland and things of that nature,” he said.
Adelaja says a green belt would be green “not just from a visual standpoint, but from an economic standpoint.” By creating a buffer between a metropolitan area and rural communities, Adelaja says, green belts “break down the pattern of sprawl which we find to be crippling many areas of the country.”
“There’s evidence from around the world that the green belt enhances property values within the belt,” Adelaja said.
Jeremy Emmi explains the appeal: “One trap people fall into is that if you love nature, you have to live in it. Well, if you build your house out there, it’s sort of contradictory, because if everybody did that, we’d all be living on five or 10 acres and covering up the entire state with houses.”
Emmi invoked his experience while living in Portland, where an urban growth boundary keeps sprawl at bay. “Real estate prices have gone up, the quality of life has gone up,” he said. “Even the real estate agents and home builders have jumped on board, because they realize they’re still going to be building the same number of units, but selling them for more.”
Despite the potential benefits, Adelaja calls the green belt idea “ambitious.”
“Conceptually, it sounds simple, but you’re talking about significant thinking and planning, significant design, cost analysis,” Adelaja said. “It would take a lot of community effort to make that happen.”
Adelaja said land donations like the one made by Fellowship for Today would also be a part of the puzzle, but said it’s unlikely private donations alone could assemble a green belt. “I am not aware of any significant green-belt initiative that has happened without some government involvement, both regulatory and otherwise,” he said.
“It’s a vision every community should have, but our community ought to be serious about putting its money where its mouth is and pursuing a strategy,” Adelaja said.
The microcosm
One local township has done just that. In recent years, fast-growing Meridian Township has faced intense development pressure. In that respect, the township is a microcosm of the larger metropolitan area.
In 2000, Meridian citizens passed a land preservation millage to set aside crucial natural areas. By 2004, a comprehensive green space plan, emphasizing access and connectivity, was in place.
Meridian Township Supervisor Sue McGillicuddy said 500 acres of land have been set aside so far. “Without the millage, we couldn’t have achieved what we have,” she said.
McGillicuddy said a green belt around greater Lansing would be a noble project. “Ours is more integrated into the entire community, not just around the periphery,” she said, “but I think it would be wonderful if we could get a green belt around the entire tri-county area.”
“It’s ambitious, but it would be a great place for hiking and bicycling trails, and it would also serve as a buffer between urban and rural communities,” she said.
Norman Cox is president of Ann Arbor-based Greenway Collaborative Inc., the firm hired by Meridian Township to develop its green space plan. Cox said the plan uses a variety of tools. Outright buying of land is so expensive, he said, it should be the “conservation tool of last resort.”
It’s more feasible, Cox said, to set aside large chunks of land using cluster development, where developers concentrate housing in higher-density units, leaving the rest of a parcel as open space. “This is nothing new or extraordinary,” he said. “The key is to do it systematically. The clustered sites in one development and the open space next to that synchronize and work with the site next to it.” If a developer were working on 100 acres, for example, all the houses would cluster on 50 of those acres, with the rest set aside. Cox said it’s a surprisingly easy sell. “Open-space developments are one of the hottest types,” he said. “Think of it as a golf resort development without the high-maintenance greens. You’ve got the fields and the woods and the streams instead. There’s a strong demand for that in the marketplace right now.”
The alternative, Cox said, is low-density dispersal of homes, retail and business over a wider and wider area. “Now you get people mowing three to five acres of lawn,” he said. “You have the suburbanization of a whole landscape, and when you’re done, do you really have the countryside that people moved out to see?”
Fasten your green belt
It’s one thing for a single township like Meridian to take action against sprawl — it’s quite another to coordinate dozens of jurisdictions over three counties.
“What hasn’t quite happened yet is a multi-county approach that includes mapping and identification of targeted green areas, ordinance models and technical assistance to help fit those models to existing zoning and master plans,” Cox said.
If it did happen, Cox said, “it would be remarkable and put the Lansing area in the forefront of conservation, probably in the Midwest.”
Such a strategy is already beginning to take shape. In September 2005, the Tri-County Regional Planning Commission issued a comprehensive regional growth plan: a web of 29 “wise growth” principles ranging from waste management to environmental protection to strengthening urban cores.
These themes and principles are purely advisory, but they have been adopted or endorsed by a responsible planning agent in 45 of the 78 jurisdictions in the tri-county region. “I find it as a great start,” said Paul Hamilton, chief transportation planner with the commission.
Hamilton invokes Principle 20 of the plan, which fits comfortably under his own bailiwick of transportation. Under this principle, the plan does not call directly for a green belt, but for linkage of parks and other natural areas by greenways in a hub-and-link system.
“I don’t see a green belt in the region’s future,” Hamilton said. “Sure, it’s possible to have a green belt, but it you’ve got a limited budget, where are you going to put the money?”
Other experts agree with Hamilton. “Ecologically, a ring may not always make sense,” said Andy Guy, Great Lakes Project director at the Michigan Land Use Institute. “You may not be protecting linear corridors that are important. The Grand River runs through Lansing, it doesn’t go around the city.”
Hamilton also said there are other problems associated with full-scale green belts, including dense new blobs of “leapfrog” development that tend to pop up just over the green belt. Guy said this has happened in Boulder, and anti-green space blogs there complain of a new band of visible pollution emanating from the far side of the green belt.
“I think the idea of a green belt might be overly simplistic,” Cox said. (A web is Cox’s preferred green space metaphor.) “It’s something that integrates, not just a circle around Lansing but through all the developing areas,” Cox said, “so when you’re done developing you have a character and a natural system that people would actually want to be around.”
Hamilton said even the of linkage of parks and other facilities through greenways will take a lot of difficult planning, not to mention cooperation across dozens of jurisdictions. “We can’t assume we’re going to change 200 years of land use policy in this country in a short period of time with the adoption of principles,” Hamilton said. For green belt dreamers, the first step will be to identify the land that ought to be saved, and that work has barely begun.
When a plan comes together
The image of a web also appeals to Nancy Krupiarz, executive director of the Michigan Trails and Greenways Alliance and a longtime advocate of green spaces and non-motorized trails in Michigan. As a member of the Land Use Health Resource Team, Krupiarz is ready to start drawing the precise contours of greater Lansing’s green infrastructure. The team is a partnership among the Ingham County Health Department, the Tri-County Regional Growth Commission and land planners from MSU.
“We’re looking to do much more than just a green belt around the city,” Krupiarz said. “We’re looking to spearhead a green infrastructure planning process for the whole area.”
Krupiarz has already worked on green infrastructure programs in the Saginaw Bay area, the Gennesse-Lapeer-Shiawassee effort, and a tri-county program in west Michigan that’s now going into effect. This summer, the public will have a chance to be directly involved in this process.
“We need to be able to identify those pieces and get the public input on what they feel should be preserved,” Krupiarz said. “It may not be confined to just a green belt around the city. There may be connectivity throughout.”
Krupiarz plans to organize a public event this summer, where organizations and citizens can manipulate interactive maps and single out the areas they want saved, thus helping to build data for a green infrastructure blueprint.
Krupiarz, like Hamilton, emphasized that those findings will be advisory, with the final decisions left to the various governments.
“Decisions are going to be made by township boards, city councils, elected officials, county boards, planning commissions and so forth,” Hamilton said. “So the first step for citizen involvement in stuff like this is to start local.”
Jeremy Emmi agreed that the green belt would have to grow from the grass roots, although he did not have city council meetings or voting booths in mind. “I see the beginnings of a green belt for the Lansing area to be pushed by the private and nonprofit sector first, and then hopefully pull the local governments along,” he said.
Cox said it may take money, but it would pay off in the long run. “Nobody ever regrets preserving a natural area,” he said. “Nobody ever says, ‘Boy, I wish we’d turned that into a parking lot.’”
http://www.lansingcitypulse.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=800&Itemid=29
