Bill Rustem,
Senior Vice President, Public Sector Consultants, Lansing, MI

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Q: How do you define sprawl and how has sprawl entered our social consciousness lately?
A: Sprawl, Chris, as I view it really, is a non-dense spread-out development across the landscape. I think urban sprawl is a misnomer. What we're really concerned about, or ought to be concerned about, is rural sprawl: in other words, the encroachment of buildings, of pavement, of rooftops on rural areas. What it really is, is a pushing out away from the kind of social structures that we used to have early on in this century, the kind of living conditions we used to have where people were closer together, where there were real communities. We've begun to spread out across the landscape. That causes significant concerns in a number of areas. It means there's higher infrastructure costs because you gotta pay for the roads, you gotta pay for the sewer systems, you gotta pay for all the services that are needed among a spread-out population. It means that there is encroachment on industries that rely on significant amounts of land for their livelihood. That means encroachment on agriculture, it means encroachment on forestry, it means encroachment on tourism and encroachment on mining. Those are critical industries to Michigan futures. So sprawl is all of those things. It's a movement of people spreading out across the landscape and eating up rural land at the same time that you carve kind of a hole in the doughnut in the inner cities where you'll leave behind the massive expenditures that have been made to build those cities and leave behind nothing but poor people. That can't work over the long term.
Q: So take that a step further. Tell me what's happened to us in Michigan in the way that we have built ourselves over time both historically and recently in the last couple decades.
A: Okay, historically, of course, Michigan started by building many of its major cities on waters. There was a clear line of demarcation, a clear separation, between urban population, between urban-area cities, and rural areas. Of course, the farms were out in the rural areas and the forests were out in the rural areas. Historically, Michigan went through a number of booms and busts in a variety of industries. We started in Michigan as a major fur-trading locations. There were fur trappers and traders that came here, and then settlements were established like in Detroit and elsewhere to deal with that particular industry, that fur-trading industry.

From there, Michigan moved into a lumbering boom where virtually the entire state was denuded in the expectation that once you got those trees out of there, agriculture could then fill in the gap. Well, what we found in Michigan was that the soils in much of northern Michigan would not support agriculture. So we ended up with a lot of farmers becoming poor, and the forests began to come back. But for most of our history, there were clear lines of separation between cities and rural areas. The rural areas were where the agriculture occurred, where forests reoccurred, where mining occurred, where a lot of the tourism -- the recreation that's been so important in Michigan -- has occurred.

In recent years, really in the last three or four decades, we've begun to encroach on our rural areas with particularly subdivisions, people living out in what were rural areas, single-family homes on large lots out in what were rural areas. With development out in rural areas, there are in fact a significant number of commercial interests who look for those green spaces to build their individual businesses. So we've begun to really sprawl out all across the landscape of Michigan a very different way than we used to be in this state when community meant something, when it meant something to live in Grand Ledge or it meant something to live in a Frankenmuth or a Frankfort, Michigan. Those senses of community are really disappearing across the state. People don't understand where they live, where they are, who they are or what it is that they value anymore.
Q: You talk about the sense of community, and that brings up also the issue of density and how we deal with that. Wasn't density a part of that sense of community? How did that work and how did we lose there?
A: Absolutely. People used to sit on their front porches. Then we began to build houses where we didn't have front porches anymore, and everything was designed to look at the backyard. That meant the backyard had to be bigger, and the interaction between people began to disappear because you didn't go to the corner grocery store anymore. Rather, you got in a car and drove to the mall. It changed. Everything changed. The sense of neighborhood, the sense of community has changed dramatically over the course of time; much of it driven by our love of the automobile. You can't do anything in this state in many communities anymore without getting in a car. Doesn't matter if you gotta get a bottle of milk, you gotta go see a doctor -- doesn't matter what it is. You gotta get in a car to be able to go do it. It didn't used to be that way. People used to be able to walk, say hi to their neighbors, walk down the street, get the bottle of milk and walk back home. So all of that has changed as we've begun to spread out and relied more and more on our cars rather than our feet as a means of transportation.
Q: And with this great economy that we've had in the last ten years or more now, have we seen more development in Michigan?
A: Oh, yeah. We are growing -- what's happening in Michigan right now is that we are -- the rate of development of the state, of the land area of the state, is about six times the rate of the growth of our population. In other words, we're using six times as much land as we used to per person we develop in Michigan. We're eating up the landscape at an ever-increasing rate, and some of it -- It's not just individual choices, it's not just the economy, it's not just our reliance on the automobile; some of it is government policy that is driving us in that direction. When a community says, 'You can't live here unless you live on a 5-acre lot,' what they're saying is, 'We're gonna eat up that land at a rate that is far greater than it used to be eaten up at,' and it also is a statement that we don't want certain kind of people living in our community. So it's really both the economy, the fact that we've had a good economy, the fact that we're relying on cars, and the government policies that tend to try to exclude people from certain areas that have led to the sprawl.
Q: I want you to take that same thought one step further, and tell me what happens with that 5-acre lot in terms of our infrastructure. What's happening there?
A: It's incredibly more expensive to serve a spread-out population, whether you're talking about roads -- the more you spread out people, the more roads you gotta have, the more traffic you have, the harder it is to deal with waste water treatment because in a confined area you can build a sewer system at a reasonable cost. The more you spread it out across the landscape, the more expensive it becomes to deal with waste water and with providing services. If you look at what's gonna happen and what is happening with our population demographically, we're becoming older. We're becoming older. Well, what does that mean? That means that there are gonna be new kinds of services that are going to have to be offered. We're gonna have to deal with health, we're gonna have to deal with transportation for an aging population. How do we deal with that when we're spread out over hill and valley across the state of Michigan? It becomes incredibly expensive not only to provide infrastructure, but also to provided services to a population that is spread out all over the place.
Q: I want to ask you a little bit about your time in government and start this way: Myron Orfield says that Michigan was actually on the cutting edge of land control in the Romney and Milliken years; that there was some very innovative things being done in the state, but that we lost our way in the last two administrations and now we are said to be very over-sprawled. Talk a little bit about the Romney and Milliken administrations and the approach to land use of that time, and then as best as you're comfortable doing, talk about what has happened and not happened since then. Where did we go from there?
A: Well, I think both Romney and Milliken clearly recognized that the right kind of decisions about the use of land are good, not only for the environment, but also for the economy of the state; that to have a strong economy you've gotta have a good environment. You're not able to attract businesses to Michigan and development--the right kind of development--to Michigan unless you have those two things working in tandem. Governor Milliken was often fond of saying that the 37 million acres of land that is Michigan is all of the Michigan we'll ever have. That was an interesting way to put it; the understanding that this is not a renewable resource--land is not a renewable resource. There is a limit to what we can do, and we need to make wise choices about the use of that limited land.

There were a number of bills adopted during those years, the Romney/Milliken years, that really made an impact. We began to protect inland lakes and streams, we began to protect sand dunes, we began to protect flood plains, setting constraints on the kinds of development that could occur in those economically sensitive areas. What neither nor Milliken nor Romney was able to accomplish, however, was a change in kind of our planning process, creating a situation where you made choices that your neighbors were comfortable with. One of the big problems that Michigan has got is that we have about 1800 local units of government all engage in making individual decisions about what happens on the surface of the land within their jurisdiction. How the heck do you get 1800 jurisdictions to coordinate their activities and agree that this is where we ought to be headed in the future. It's a huge challenge.

So there was legislation that the Governor Milliken had put together through a commission that was introduced in the Seventies. It never was able to pass. Issues of private property rights got in the way of that. Whatever you think of -- I'll argue property rights is really a gray area. It can mean one thing to one person and another thing to another. That issue got in the way, some concerns about stepping on the toes of some of those 1800 local units of government got in the way-- so it never really happened. Over the course of the last 20 years, Michigan has kinda been in a hiatus about talking about the issue. It's really been only in the last 3, 4, or 5 years that it has become comfortable for political leaders to be able to talk about the issue of land use and sprawl in a way that enables us to begin the discussions about what to do about it.
Q: What has happened to us in terms of our land use?
A: In the meantime, our cities have deteriorated, we've lost significant amount of farmland, it's becoming harder and harder to do forestry in Michigan, we've spread out all across the landscape. We've increased the cost of our infrastructure, we've run into traffic jams, created traffic jams across the state. The quality of life, the quality of life that defines Michigan is deteriorating. We've increased the amount of water pollution that's occurring as a result of this spread-out population. All of these things are occurring so that the quality of life is diminishing in Michigan as a result of our inattention to this question of how we develop in the most responsible way that protects that quality of life.
Q: Talk a little bit about the sewer system in Michigan, how old it is, what the status is now, and what's likely to happen.
A: Most of the sewering [sic.] of Michigan occurred during the decades of the Sixties and the Seventies. That's when the massive expenditures of both state and federal dollars were made to deal with a very, very significant pollution problem. That was the time period, of course, when Lake Erie was declared dead when we had major problems in Michigan in terms of bacterial contamination of our beaches, significant toxic substances entering out waterways. So there was a huge program at both the federal and the state level during the Sixties and the Seventies to provide grants to local units of government to build the sewer infrastructure to move that material into a central place, treat it and then discharge it. It was a very successful program. We cleaned up much of Michigan's water, much of the nation's water to a point where the goal at the time was to create fishable, swimmable [sic.] waters. We reached that goal on many of our waters in Michigan and across the country. But just like everything else when you can't see the problem, we tend as a society to neglect it. Once we fixed it, the feeling, I think, among a lot of people was, Well, it's fixed. Those systems were designed to last for 40 years, basically, 40 or 50 years, but we're coming to the end of that 40-50-year period. It's only now that we're beginning to start noticing some of the significant problems as a result of the aging infrastructure, number one; number two, the over-stressed infrastructure as we have to expand it to wider and wider areas of the state. So consequently, we're beginning to see higher bacterial counts on Lake St. Claire. We're seeing higher bacterial counts on many of our inland lakes. We're beginning to go back to the point that we were before that massive expenditure of money in the Sixties and Seventies because we haven't given the attention to upgrading that system, nor have we given the attention to assuring that we're not over-stressing the system by spreading it out too far.
Q: What do you see as the consequences and what do we need to do and what cost is likely to be involved in doing it right?
A: Well, there's a study out there that was paid for by Clean Michigan that looks like the cost is gonna be about 3 billion dollars to fix this and make it right. Now, that assumes that we don't do anything as it relates to land use. We may be able to hold these costs down if we make the right kinds of decision about the use of the land and what we'd do on the landscape. But the costs of dealing with the water pollution problem just grow astronomically as we continue to spread out across the landscape. It becomes harder and harder to deal with the issue of surface and ground water pollution as we spread out across the landscape. Again, the more compact the development, the cheaper it is to provide the infrastructure necessary to service it.
Q: Would you address the necessity, the relationship between city and state governments? I'm thinking of what happened with the city of Detroit. What is (Detroit) at this point, compared to other cities? What's necessary for a healthy city and a healthy economy for the city of Detroit?
A: It seems to me that unfortunately in Michigan we have built a huge rift between the state and Detroit, and we've let that rift widen over the course of the last several years. I think it is a rift that was built in part by race, racial differences. It is a rift that exists in part because of just expenditure differences, tax base differences -- I've got mine, you know; I don't want to give you any more. But it's a rift that's gotta be healed. If Michigan is to be healthy, then Detroit's gotta be healthy. I think Jack Laurie, who is the past president of the Michigan Farm Bureau, probably put it best when he said, 'We can't save our farms unless we save our cities.' It's that kind of a recognition that I think this state has lost over the course of the last 20 years as we become more want to look at just our individual circumstances and not have a sense of what is good for the entire state. I personally believe that Michigan cannot be successful unless Detroit is successful, and that means that every legislator, be he or she from the upper peninsula or Traverse City or Detroit, has to care about what happens in Detroit, has to want to make Detroit healthy because if you don't have that, you don't have a healthy state. It's like cutting the heart out of a human being if your largest city is not able to function in a proper manner.
Q: John Logie, mayor of Grand Rapids, is operating there with at least something that approaches a metropolitan council system. How effective do you think that is in what you've observed elsewhere, and is that a model that could be tried under the right circumstances in, say, like Detroit?
A: I think that what Grand Rapids has done is just fantastic. It's the first step toward cooperation on a regional basis between the number of local units of government that you have there. I wish it could be replicated in Detroit, but I think the racial divisions in southeast Michigan are so great that you simply can't do it there. A large part of this problem of land use and of cooperation between cities is really racially driven, and we've got to get over that in this state. We are far too concerned about race. I mean, we're separating ourselves racially, and it's not right. We ought not be doing that. We've got to find ways that people can come together economically, racially, rather than separate, and we've encouraged that separation, I believe.
Q: Let's talk about cheap gas a little bit. Do you think that cheap gas has sort of abetted sprawl?
A: Oh, there's no question that cheap gas has abetted sprawl. Our gas prices in this -- you can argue that our gas prices are really subsidized. We're really not paying the true cost of gasoline, so that if you enable people to escape from wherever it is they think they want to escape from or move out further and have that long commute, they're certainly able to do so on an affordable basis. So gas prices have contributed to sprawl. But at the same time, it's not just the gas prices. Again, it's the government policies, I think, that are probably more important. It's the government policies that have said, Let's move the malls out away from people because people are gonna drive and because gas is cheap. So it's not just the pure price of gas; it's the government policies that have resulted form that cheap gas that has helped to drive sprawl. We've adopted zoning ordinances all across the state in communities that say, 'All the wealthy people live here. The middle income live here. Poor people live here.' We're gonna have all the commercial buildings over here, all the industry over here -- not taking a look at how we integrate back into a society, the kind that used to exist, where people, again, walked to work, talked to their neighbors, walked to the grocery store to get what they needed.
Q: Cheap land is the other question I had. I'm talking about farm land where the farmer's land's worth $2500 an acre while it's under the plow, but if it's development land it goes up to $35,000. Has that been driving sprawl also?
A: Sure, it has. Yeah, and the relatively high cost in the past in particular of cleaning out brown fields in cities as an alternative to building on green fields. I think Michigan has taken some good steps in terms of trying to equalize those costs, so that we at least create the opportunity for redevelopment of city land as opposed to moving to green fields.
Q: A hundred-some years ago, Horace Greeley sent everybody westward with the 'Go West, Young Man' attitude that still dominates how we look at land in this state and in this country. What do we do about it? How do we convince people to do something different?
A: Yeah, I think that kind of pioneering mentality is still a predominant trait among people in Michigan and across the country. We still think that somehow out there there's a wilderness that one day we're going to conquer. Well, in truth man has conquered the wilderness. There is no more wilderness in this country. Our activities touch every part of this globe, whether you're talking about global warming as it relates to Antarctica or wildlife habitat in the remote jungles of South America. Our human activities are encroaching and affecting everything that goes on in this planet. That means, to a large extent, that human beings, I think, have to accept responsibility for a new kind of stewardship for the planet, and that includes the land. That new kind of stewardship says that, Look; if we're able to affect things in such a way that we can pollute, we can eliminate species from the face of this globe, then we've got to understand that we've got to take the responsibility to protect those kinds of areas. That applies to the land as well.

We can make choices. We can make the choices that say, we want Michigan to continue to have agriculture. We want Michigan to continue to have forestry. We want Michigan to continue to be an important recreational state. We can make those choices, but if we don't make those conscious choices, we're gonna lose it all. We're gonna be back to days when we're spread out all across the landscape and we haven't got a tax base to be able to support the kind of services that are needed. When we're back to polluting our surface waters, our surface waters define Michigan in the Great Lakes. We'll be back to polluting those because we can't afford to provide the infrastructure necessary to protect them because we're spread out so far across the landscape. So we have the opportunity right now, I think, to make those kinds of choices, understanding that we have that stewardship responsibility, and making choices that say that this is the kind of Michigan we want to give to our kids and their kids. Those are chooses we've got to make today, otherwise they're not gonna have those choices in the future.