Cities 07

I like that Wheeler mentions the compact and efficient land use as a means to sustainability. This is, in my mind, an important issue especially for the Twin Cities metro area. I have noticed that some people believe cities to be bad for the environment. They look at the infrastructures of cities, much of which is absent of ‘nature’ and assume that cities are the enemy of nature. Instead a city, they opt to live in open countryside thinking that by not partaking in city life they are doing something good for the environment. In reality, suburban and rural sprawl contribute to some of the worst effects on ecological systems. As Wheeler mentions, places such as Portland and parts of San Francisco have instituted UGBs or urban growth boundaries. This says, in effect, that the city ends at such and such line and cannot be used by developers or anything else for whatever reason. Our metro area is one of the most sprawled in the United states. While Minneapolis and Saint Paul have a combined population of about 650,000, the entire metro area has a population of 3,000,000. This means that about 80% of those living in the Twin Cities metro area live in a suburb and most likely in a single family home with a comparatively huge lot and a huge footprint per capita. Furthermore, the majority of these people are depending on cars to get from A to B. This is also an important issue for our metro area because the Twin Cites are expected to bring in an additional million residents by the year 2020. Many of these new residents will choose to move into new developments on the peripheries with 50 foot driveways if something like an UGB is not instituted which keeps the developers from building there in the first place. Another problem that results from building further and further out is the destruction of good agricultural land. Once the topsoil has been torn up, it can never be used again for agricultural purposes.
In addition to taking up valuable land and obliging habitants to drive further and further, low density housing also contributes to environmental problems concerning water. Water is, of course, something that many Minnesotans take for granted since we have an incredible surplus of it, but it is also important to remember that we reside very close to the headwaters of the Mississippi along which many other cites are situated and from which many people get their drinking water. Taking up large amounts of land for houses and other impermeable surfaces (e.g. parking lots, highways) has several negative impacts. Because these surfaces are impermeable, they are unable to soak water and thus underground aquifers are drained. In addition, a lot of the rain fall is not permitted to soak back into the ground because it simply runs off people’s gargantuan yards into the street and then into the sewer system. Once in the sewer system it is processed at one of the waste water treatment plants. Chances are it goes to the waste water treatment plant in Saint Paul, which is the largest in the Midwest and processes about one million habitants water or anywhere from 200,000,000 to 600,000,000 gallons of water per day. Treatment plants are only able to process so much water at any given moment and because so much rain water gets into sewers instead of being replenished in the ground, they are forced to process the water faster which means that when they dump it back out into the Mississippi it is not as clean. In fact, there are quite a few hormones in the water that the treatment plant puts into the river which is primarily due to the pill addiction that we have as Americans. Medication is filled with toxins that we excrete into the sewers which the treatment plant is unable to fully process. This is why there are fish being found down stream that are both female and male. Who knows what other consequences will come from pumping the Mississippi with hormones. Grass contributes to this problem as well. What the attraction to grass is by suburbanites I will never understand, but it is of the most horribly inefficient plants to grow. It not only requires mowing which burns petrol but it also requires more water than many other aesthetically pleasing native plants which can survive with just the water that they receive from rainfall. In effect, people keep water from soaking into the ground with huge footprints, driveways, wide roads, and the highways that they use to get to work, and on top of it they water their %*#@^$ ugly turf. And so, there are many benefits to increased density in urban areas that are found social and environmental areas.