Land Use Land Mines

Madison - Wisconsin communities have grown as they darned please, when they darned pleased. Now, that tradition is colliding with the state's 1999 Smart Growth law.

The Smart Growth land-use directive didn't cause much of a stir when it became law on the coattails of a 1999 state budget vote. But tempers are flaring as communities realize the degree to which they must tailor every land-use decision by Jan. 1, 2010.

The Law

Requires communities larger than 12,500 to adopt, by last Jan. 1, a traditional neighborhood design ordinance.
Requires that local land use decisions on or after Jan. 1, 2010, must be based on a publicly reviewed, formally adopted comprehensive plan.
Helps finance the local plans.
Financially rewards communities for housing on less than quarter-acre lots and at prices affordable to people below 80% of the county's median income.

For starters, communities with 12,500 or more residents must pass an ordinance to authorize traditional neighborhood development - placing homes, businesses and civic buildings in close proximity to each other - somewhere within their borders.

Within eight years, communities must have a publicly reviewed comprehensive land use plan that addresses demographic trends, transportation, community facilities, agricultural, natural and cultural resources, economic development, as well as intergovernmental ties and conflicts.

More than 150 state, local and development industry officials discussed the fomentation at the 2002 Wisconsin Housing Conference, a May 22 University of Wisconsin-sponsored meeting at the Fluno Center for Executive Education.

"In rural areas, where there has been no planning or zoning, this is highly objectionable," said Tom Harnisch, legal counsel to the Wisconsin Towns Association.

"Local officials ask, 'Do I have to do this?' And I have to say, 'The law is unclear.' You go to Rusk County one evening where 250 people are yelling and screaming when you can't explain whether they have to follow this law. It looks like you don't know what you're doing," Harnisch said. "And maybe we don't know what we're doing."

Even orderly growth sponsors admit they're an unlikely mix - environmentalists and developers, local and state government leaders. "If you saw the names, you'd think it was a fight card for a World Wrestling Federation meet," said Tom Larson, director of land use and environmental affairs for the Wisconsin Realtors Association.

The law they hammered out "is not perfect," Larson said. "It's the best we could come up with - a compromise effort."

Protracted, cantankerous battles between developers and development neighbors plague local decision-makers these days.

"You get damn tired at 12 at night, when the public is going stark raving mad, and the developer is pleading with you for approval," said Fritz Ruf, plancommission member in the City of Pewaukee in Waukesha County.

Such battles have put many communities behind schedule in implementing Smart Growth directives. The first deadline passed with only 20% compliance, and even that didn't happen without a fight.

"I've been to some of those meetings where people were yelling and screaming - and they were our own members!" Larson said.

The pressures can be intense for those like Ruf, who works in an organization - the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority - that supports Smart Growth and lives in a community that doesn't.

"I'm schizo on this," Ruf acknowledged. With powerful forces both for and against the law, "hopefully, this won't result in gridlock."

Small-town Wisconsin may not like Smart Growth, but it has recognized the dangers of laissez-faire growth.

"Towns where there's no zoning, no planning, is where you have a $400,000 house with a charcoal factory right behind it. That's what happens," Harnisch said. "Many of my communities would be destroyed if they were opened to the free market."

Smart Growth strives to give rhyme and reason to Wisconsin's hodgepodge of town, city, village, county and state land-use rules through a single document. Before the law, only 29% of communities in Wisconsin had land use plans, and some were scant on detail, said Mike Blaska, director of the Wisconsin Office of Land Information Services.

"Realtors were concerned that (developers) had to rely on the whims of communities," Blaska said.

The Madison suburb of Middleton Hills recently authorized narrower streets and smaller lots for a Smart Growth-styled neighborhood center, though only after considerable opposition, said Brian Ohm, associate professor in the UW-Madison Department of Urban and Regional Planning.

Metro Milwaukee's best recent example of Smart Growth concepts may be Norhardt Crossing, a 72-condo, 145-apartment sidewalk development in Brookfield, said Matt Moroney, executive director of the Metropolitan Builders Association of Greater Milwaukee. The development is compact, and residents can walk to public and commercial services, he noted.

Ohm called the new law "a wonderful opportunity for innovation."

From the failed 1960s and 1970s regional malls, for instance, can spring healthier residential-commercial enclaves, like those envisioned for Milwaukee's Northridge and Capitol Court areas, Ohm said.

He cited the Village of Greendale in Milwaukee County, developed in the 1930s, as proof it can be done. Buyers vie, sometimes fiercely, for the small, sturdy, close-to-the-street houses arranged for pedestrian-oriented activities in what Ohm said "remains a very attractive community."


By MICHELE DERUS
of the Journal Sentinel staff

Appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on June 2, 2002.