10th anniversary post: Blizzards get you thinking

 

That was a blizzard (2015)

Ten years ago the weather was different than it is this week. A big pile of snow--11 inches, says my post--got dumped on Iowa as January 2015 turned into February. This year, we're in a stretch of unseasonably warm weather including a couple record high temperatures and a couple more near-records. 2024-25 been a warm dry winter, which could be random luck, but we should know better than that by now.

I produced my own blizzard, of questions, ten years ago. This anniversary post seemed a good time to revisit them.

1. Why are we still building sprawl?
2. Can downtown develop/be developed by a resilient transportation system?
3. How should I be rooting on the federal transportation bill?
4. How should we consider climate change in planning?
5. Why is the clearing of public sidewalks the responsibility of the homeowner, even though the clearing of public streets is undertaken by the government?

These questions are pretty central to how we design our cities, allowing that #5 was dropped on me by a work colleague while I was working on that post, so it got looped in. City design may strike a person more urgently during a blizzard than it does when the big-box store is a simple 20-minute drive away. My 2015 frustration at the pace of positive change, too, probably reflected fatigue from the hard work of snow removal. 

Never not contemplating urbanism

Surely people were going to grasp that local government finances are driven by the demands we place on it, not by waste, fraud and abuse? That cities won't be able forever to rely on federal and state money to make up whatever funding gaps result? That public transit unlike private vehicles is scalable in a way that supports intensive economic development? That climate change makes new demands on our capacity to be resilient?

However, "There's drudgery in social change, and glory for the few," sang Billy Bragg. Today the urgency of approaching urban design differently is, if possible, less apparent at all levels of government. I've gone from being mildly frustrated to totally appalled. Urbanist design comes recommended for all sorts of reasons related to our common life: environmental sustainability in the face of climate change, place attachment, exercise, inclusion, community-building, and financial resilience. 

Strong Towns has been saying for years that local governments rely too heavily on federal and state financial assistance, which makes big development projects and sprawl seem cost-free. (See Charles L. Marohn, Jr., Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity [Wiley, 2020] for the complete argument.) Twelve erratic years of federal government shutdowns and near-shutdowns haven't apparently changed the towns' short-term thinking. Maybe a freeze on federal grants--one was declared January 27, temporarily blocked by a judge the following day, and then rescinded (see Parker 2025)--would jolt localities into more productive approaches to development?

Ten years ago, Washington infighting was imperiling appropriations for the Department of Transportation, which funds state and local transportation projects. Eventually the bill got passed, but to what end? Though the Joe Biden administration nudged these projects in the direction of transit, transportation funding goes predominantly for roadway construction and expansion, which reinforces our already car-centric development. That's what prompted question #3 on my list. I followed up: If the federal government is the founder of this ridiculous feast, maybe if they cut off the allowance states and localities will be forced to be rational?... It would be at least interesting, because at least local choices would be clearer. 

Nor has an increasing pile of climate disasters catalyzed urbanism. Climate science is a key element of the "woke bullshit" President Trump feels he has a mandate to quash (For the risks inherent in Trump's aggressive climate change denial, see Flavelle 2025). Within 24 hours of Trump's inauguration, acting Environmental Protection Administration head James Payne fired all members of the Science Advisory Board and the Clean Air Advisory Board, and the U.S. withdrew from the international climate talks known as the Paris Accord. Trump is attempting to pause federal grants for clean-energy projects, slash or purge the federal workforce, and has appointed a pro-extraction, climate change-denying permanent EPA administrator who has little environmental experience (Davenport 2025). It's not clear that professional environmental staff will be gagged as health staff have been, but it seems likely they will be strongly discouraged from speaking openly about anything important.

In Iowa, we're not going to talk about the climate, either. Land in Iowa is plentiful and cheap, and we apparently trust the oil lobby to make sure we still have access to gasoline for our (ever larger) vehicles. So new K-12 science standards excise the term "climate change" (in favor of "climate trends"), along with the word "evolution." Reference to human impacts on the climate will also be removed from education (Luu 2025). If we don't talk about it, maybe it will all go away?

Maybe the answers will come, not by restoring urbanism, but some wholly new design concept. Geographer Stephanie Wakefield raises that possibility in a piece for Next City that promotes her forthcoming book about the future of Miami:

Rather than an endless expanse of cities and urbanization processes with seemingly no terminus — the latter destined to be but fodder for ever greater resilience of the former — might the Anthropocene’s human and nonhuman dislocations produce other spaces, processes and imaginaries entirely? (quoted at Ionescu 2025)

I'm definitely curious about what these spaces and imaginaries might be, although I don't know how well I'll do with an entire book written in the manner of the sentence quoted above. Wakefield suggests localities will have additional design/form considerations beyond the urban-or-suburban dichotomy I'm used to. 

As it happens, later this month I'll be in St. Petersburg on the opposite side of the State of Florida. I'm looking forward to seeing what people are calling the large body of water between Florida and Texas, but also how they are dealing with likely climate threats. Here is a map of future sea level contingencies from Advantage Pinellas, the long-range transportation plan produced by Forward Pinellas, which is the St. Petersburg-area Metropolitan Planning Organization.

from Advantage Pinellas (2024, p. 41)

The first thing to notice is that's a fair chunk of land that's theoretically going to be under water. The second thing to notice is Metropolitan Planning Organizations, like Forward Pinellas and our own Corridor MPO, are funded by the U.S. government. That means our tax dollars are paying for this "woke bullshit!" How much longer will Advantage Pinellas remain online? I've downloaded it, just in case. For now, it's encouraging that people--at least those who staff MPOs--are thinking about resilient, inclusive, livable, prosperous futures. Bless them for it. Whether they will be allowed to keep doing so is at this point unanswerable. 

Strong Towns has always maintained a local focus, treating national politics as not-my-circus-not-my-monkeys. I'm not sure how valid this is anymore. At the state and national levels, powerful industry interests and Project 2025 ideologues are making the rules now, and if there's information that threatens them, they'll do their best to suppress it. Localities could try to figure things out on their own, but constitutionally they're limited by state action, and anyhow it's just easier to keep doing what we've been doing.

So, my answers to the questions I posed ten years ago: 

1. Why are we still building sprawl? Because it's the policy path of least resistance, residential and commercial developments can be large enough to be highly profitable, and localities get the property taxes without immediate needs for service.
2. Can downtown develop/be developed by a resilient transportation system? Probably not, because most cities don't have the political or financial independence for this to happen.
   
3. How should I be rooting on the federal transportation bill? Doesn't matter. Streets and highways will always get taken care of, however imperfectly they are maintained once their built.
4. How should we consider climate change in planning? Consider a range of possible outcomes for which we need to be prepared, and support rather than suppressing research.
5. Why is the clearing of public sidewalks the responsibility of the homeowner, even though the clearing of public streets is undertaken by the government? Street maintenance sucks up a lot of resources, so we get mandates on property owners instead.

I hope I'm still around in 2035 to admit how wrong I was back in 2025!

ORIGINAL POST: "Blizzards Get You Thinking," 1 February 2015

SEE ALSO: C40 Global Cities website: international intracity climate action networ. Hearing Helene Chartier from this organization speak on the Cities for Everyone webinar the morning after my post made me feel somewhat more hopeful.

Black Friday Parking 2022

Strip mall, Edgewood Rd SW, 9:45 a.m.

On the southwest side of Cedar Rapids, there is a triangle formed by three stroads: Edgewood Road, Wiley Boulevard, and Williams Boulevard. Average daily traffic counts are roughly 19000 for Edgewood, 9000 for Williams, and (from 2017) 14000 for Wiley. Until about ten years ago, they surrounded Westdale Mall; since that was demolished, they serve a large Wal-Mart, a large Target, and numerous shopping plazas and stand-alone stores.

The area made for an irresistible subject for my 2022 #BlackFridayParking survey, part of the annual Strong Towns event. The area is clearly meant to be driven to; it is served by three bus routes (8,10,12) but the system runs only during the day, and today was running a reduced version of that due to the holiday weekend. Walking between stores is extremely difficult, I can attest. There's a lot of traffic, moving quickly, from various directions. I relied on my remaining agility and the kindness of strangers to get places and return safely to you.

It was a lovely day, sunny and unseasonably warm. I got to Target about 10:00 a.m., too late for the doorbuster sales, but still in time to see a sizeable crowd of cars and shoppers.

Even so, much of the parking lot was unused.

Target, 3400 Edgewood Rd SW, lot 2/3 full at 9:45 a.m.

Down the street at Wal-Mart, the situation was even more pronounced: Many, many shoppers and cars...

View from the front door

...but much unused parking.

Wal-Mart Supercenter, 3601 29th Av SW, lot 1/2 full at 10:00 a.m.

Away from the two retail giants, crowds were thinner and parking lots were emptier.

Strip mall across from Wal-Mart

Kohl's had some traffic near the entrance to their lot...

...but away from the entrance ir was empty.

Kohl's, 3030 Wiley Blvd SW, lot 1/3 full at 10:00 a.m.

The parking lots on the grounds of the former Westdale Mall were glaringly empty.

On the other hand, from a distance it looked like the parking lot of Menards (home improvement store) at Wiley and Williams was very full.

As I forded these lots, I also forded a number of access roads--some, as I said, busy with fast-moving traffic, and some seeing no cars at all. This leads from the Kohl's to Wiley Boulevard, but can only be accessed by southbound traffic.

It made me think that, as much of this event is designed to complain about parking craters, big-box stores and strip malls also generate an excess of infrastructure. Maybe next year we could do Black Friday Access Roads?

Meanwhile, the Westdale area is beginning to see a little of the development promised when the city sunk a fortune into its redevelopment. There is a mixed-use development with apartments.

Parkway West, 3998 Westdale Parkway

These apartments are within walking distance of a lot of shops. I wonder if anyone ever does walk? And what might be the attraction of living here, as opposed to a more human-scaled locale? Price? Highway access? 

The apartments are flanked by a hotel (Tru, a Hilton brand) and a construction project that will become a hotel.

Will these projects generate any foot traffic at all? And given the inherent risks of crossing acres of auto infrastructure, would it be a good idea if they did?

And then there's this guy, across from the Westdale bus stop.

Car wash? Oil change? Tire store? It's auto-oriented, in any case, consistent with its surroundings.

The main purpose of Strong Towns' annual #BlackFridayParking event is to highlight to #EndParkingMinimums, provisions of zoning codes that require large stores to have even larger parking lots. Cedar Rapids' zoning code has those provisions, but the parking lots I surveyed seem to be substantially larger than required, albeit I haven't counted spaces.

Even if zoning requirements do not fully account for this appalling design, public policy has a hand in it. Property tax policy allows property owners to pay low rates on large swaths of unproductive land. City officials everywhere have a preference for big "wins," including attracting and accommodating a large franchise operation, over the economic gardening that nurtures local businesses. (See Alter 2022 on the many benefits of small locally-owned businesses over the big-box franchises.)

The result is a car-chocked landscape, full of expensive infrastructure that the widely dispersed businesses ultimately can't support, stressing drivers and practically prohibiting pedestrians. For financial, environmental, and community reasons, we need to do better. We have what we have in unholy triangles like the one I haunted today, but we need to start thinking differently and designing our cities better. As they say at Strong Towns, "Having 'enough' parking is always going to be less important than creating a place people want to be."

SEE ALSO

"Black Friday 2021," 26 November 2021 [Blairs Ferry Road NE from Fleet Farm to Wal-Mart]

"Black Friday 2016," 25 November 2016 [same area that I visited today]

Lauren Fisher, "14 Photos That Prove We Have Too Much Parking--Even on Black Friday," Strong Towns, 25 November 2022

Daniel Herriges, "The #BlackFridayParking Exception That Proves the Rule," Strong Towns, 25 November 2022

Addison del Maestro, "Unplanned Vacancies," Deleted Scenes, 12 May 2022 [paywall] [which I haven't crossed so it might not be any good] [but he's brilliant so it probably is]

Jaclyn Peiser, "Black Friday Isn't What It Used to Be. Here's Why," Washington Post, 25 November 2022 [another annual tradition is declaring Black Friday "over"] [and indeed it may have run its course, or nearly so] [in the meantime we have all this parking]

Black Friday Parking 2021

 

The day after Thanksgiving again found me prowling the parking lots of the Cedar Rapids metropolitan area, on my annual mission for Strong Towns, the urbanist organization of which I am a member. (I just got the recurring donation thing figured out, and now I am feeling rather Strong myself!) Strong Towns has been running this event nationwide since 2013, mainly to point out the negative impacts of minimum parking requirements in city zoning codes. Their crowdsourced map started in 2015, a cooperative venture with the Parking Reform Network, includes Cedar Rapids as an example of a city that has removed parking maxima for its downtown (Jordan and Wilberding 2021).

Regulations concerning parking comprise 25 pages of the Cedar Rapids municipal code. They are "intended to ensure that adequate parking is provided to meet the needs of individual site designs and the community at-large" (32.04.02.A.1); later the same section refers to "appropriate" amounts of parking. These terms represent value judgments, in spite of the calculations suggested in 32.04.02.B and other attempts at objectivity. They seem to say "You be you, and we'll figure out the parking," but that assumes everyone makes free choices, and those free choices result in the best possible city design. I'd argue both of those assumptions.

The section contains numerous tables defining minimum parking requirements for a given development. General parking requirements (Table 32.04.02-3, pp. 132-134) include two per residential dwelling unit, with less for buildings with small apartments and accessory dwelling units; live-work units are required to have an additional parking space for every 333 square feet of office space. Cemeteries are required to have one parking space for every 50 square feet of the chapel. Elementary and middle schools are required to have two parking spaces per classroom, while high schools are required to have six per classroom plus one per 300 square feet of non-classroom floor space. Want to teach ballet? Studios and instructional spaces are required to have one per 333 square feet. Financial institutions are required to have one per 200 square feet used by the general public, plus one per 600 square feet not used by the general public. This is a fascinatingly granular table, and the effort to compile it must have been impressive.

More importantly, Cedar Rapids now--and I'm pretty sure this is a recent development--has maximum parking rules, as well as exemptions and exceptions to parking minima. Maxima are determined as a percentage of minima (Table 32.04.02-5, p. 135): if 0-49 spaces are required based on Table 32.04.02-3, for example, developments can have no more than the greater of 6 spaces or 150 percent of the minimum number required. Section 32.04.02.F allows exceptions for downtown, and reduced minima for shared parking spaces, residences for the elderly or handicapped, closeness to a bus stop, and connection by sidewalk to trails.

At the very least, this shows sensitivity to the way parking lots waste urban space, and a willingness to develop at least the core part of the city in a way that can serve multiple functions besides car storage. I do not, however, think that Cedar Rapids parking craters are caused by municipal regulation. I think they're caused by the way we do things, at least most of us most of the time, with the ability to ignore people who must or want to do things in a different way. For example, the Blairs Ferry Road Target, in whose parking lot I took three pictures the very first year I did #BlackFridayParking, has 173,941 square feet of retail space, which indicates a minimum of 523 spaces. Maybe I'll count them next year? I'm pretty sure they have a lot more, and were never sweating that zoning regulation back in 2002.

There may be, somewhere in the Cedar Rapids municipal code, an ordinance requiring me to have a second helping of stuffing at Thanksgiving dinner. All that stuffing has analogous negative effects on my physical health to the effects of all that parking on our towns' civic, environmental, and financial health. (Also, by discouraging walking and cycling, too much parking makes us less healthy, just like too much stuffing!) But I'm not stuffing in the stuffing because I'm concerned about an ordinance. I'm doing it because it's what I do on Thanksgiving. Similarly, we build commercial property with gigantic parking lots because that's just what's done.

You be you, drive to Target or Wal-Mart or Fleet Farm, and we'll make sure there's a space for you to park your car. But all this parking is not a neutral engineering/planning response to what people happen to do. It is part of a chain of fateful choices by powerful people that cause the town to develop in a way that driving is what everyone must do.

Fleet Farm, 4650 Cross Pointe Blvd built 2019 189,595 sqft store on 832,867 sq ft lot required parking spaces 570 actual ??

NE edge of the lot

SE edge of the lot

Fleet Farm is a new big-box kid in town. I remember when Chuck Marohn referenced them in his 2015 speech at Iowa City, and multiple people including me corrected him to "Farm and Fleet." We are all aware of Fleet Farm now! There were a lot of shoppers at Fleet Farm this morning, in search of deals like these...

...and they came in a lot of cars, but there was room for plenty more!

Hy-Vee, 5050 Edgewood Rd built 2005 87,524 sqft store on 494,842 sqft lot required parking spaces 263 actual ??

west edge of the lot

Groceries aren't your stereotypical Black Friday purchase, but the lot at this suburban Hy-Vee was nearly full. Elsewhere in this gargantuan plaza, many stores were not open...

It's quite the strip

Another lot of parking

People in this subdivision could walk to Jimmy John's,
or Hy-Vee!

Wal-Mart, 2645 Blairs Ferry Rd built 1990 204,266 sqft store on 772,783 sqft lot required parking spaces 614 actual ??

Lowe's is west of Wal-Mart

NW look at Wal-Mart

Sam's Club is east of Wal-Mart

"You could build a small town in that parking lot"--
awed Twitter comment

I did not take pictures of the closer-in sections of the parking lots, so it behooves me to tell you there were a lot of shoppers at all of these stores... just not nearly enough to fill the parking lots. Gigantism of stores and parking lots are a bill of goods sold on convenience and ease of access. It's time to pay attention to what they do to our town's social fabric, fiscal health, &c. 

Dunkin' Donuts: I don't understand my fellow humans
(Similar scenes at McDonald's and Starbucks)

SEE ALSO

"I Wish This Parking Was...," 27 November 2020 [last year's COVID lockdown-appropriate alternative]

"Black Friday Parking," 27 November 2015 [my first venture]

Associated Press, "Holiday Shopping Moves Into High Gear But Challenges Remain," KTLA, 25 November 2021

City of Cedar Rapids, Zoning Ordinance, 14 March 2021 [Section 32.04.02, "Parking," is on pp. 129-154]

Charles Marohn,"Where Parking Reform Ideas Go to Die... or Not," Strong Towns, 24 November 2021 [a story with a happy ending!]

Strong Towns, "Where Will You Be on #BlackFridayParking Day?" 22 November 2021 [this year's invitation]

Black Friday shopping can be a real battle?

I'm enjoying this way too much

Black Friday Parking 2019

It's that time of year again! when Strong Towns members near and far prowl shopping areas on the biggest shopping day of the year to find unnecessary parking spaces. It's time for... #BlackFridayParking!

Black Friday may be only a shadow of its former self. Indications are businesses weren't getting the returns they had anticipated on the big discounts, and more bargain-hungry customers are satiating their appetites online (Selyukh 2019). The driver on the #20 bus reported scant crowds at the big box stores before 8 or 8:30 Friday morning.

Nevertheless, after a year's hiatus, your humble blogger is back on the case! This year the trail led east, out to the edge of Marion, Iowa, where sits our area's newest Wal-Mart store. At 10:00 a.m., there were a lot of cars in the lot, but a lot of unclaimed spaces as well. I'd say it was 50 percent full.

The view from the southwest corner:

From the northwest corner:

 From the northeast corner:

The (small) parking lot at the adjacent McDonald's restaurant was well-filled, although when I went inside there weren't that many people--customers or staff--inside.

The strip mall across the stroad (10th Street a.k.a. Business Route 151):

Doing a brisk business at the convenience store:

Not so much at the Culver's up Route 13. Too early?

Unlike other Cedar Rapids area big box stores, there's not a lot of development around this Wal-Mart. B.R. 151 goes southwest-northeast through Cedar Rapids and Marion, a stroad with mostly serious auto-oriented commercial development. Unlike other stroads in the area, this one doesn't even try to be walkable... there are no sidewalks, and bicycling would be dangerous. There's no safe way to access these stores without a car, unless you take (as I did) the #20 bus which winds its way there once an hour. This is true even for the residents of Eagle Ridge, the prefab home park across 10th Avenue from Wal-Mart.

In contrast to outer Marion, things seemed pretty hot along Collins Road in Cedar Rapids. The Collins Road Square lot was nearly full.

The lots at Lindale Mall were maybe 80 percent full...

...which meant there were still a lot of empty spaces...

The lot at the Town and Country Mall, which dates from the first wave of sprawl, was nearly empty.

... as was the Walgreen's on 1st Avenue.

Bottom line is there's a lot of acreage out there devoted to surface parking, way more than we can use even on one of the busiest shopping days of the year. Is this due to city ordinances requiring parking minima, the particular bete noire of Strong Towns? Cedar Rapids planner Seth Gunnerson told Strong Towns: "City of CR has a couple of policies aimed at reducing parking," including parking maxima, credits for things like nearby on-street parking and bicycle parking. Parking minima have been eliminated in downtown, and in those areas covered by the form-based code (Strong Towns 2019, cited below). Maybe businesses are assuming that they're going to need all this space, either to assure every customer on the busiest day that there will be a space for them, or because they hope some day to need them all?

Whether government or businesses themselves are causing this situation doesn't matter to me, because either way, the amount of land devoted to parking cars in a typical city like Cedar Rapids is several degrees beyond excessive. As Daniel Herriges (cited below) points out, parking "has eaten our cities" with negative effects on the environment, city finances, and walkability (not to mention any alternative form of transportation). All those parking lots add to the distance between our destinations, which makes more driving more necessary, which requires more parking lots--not to mention worsening traffic congestion, and so probably contributing to the perceived need to widen the interstate.

Being a spectator on Black Friday--even today's diminished version--means being a spectator of spectacular consumption (not to mention that the increasing proportion of consumption done online is done out of sight of parking scolds like me). Maybe the root problem is not how we choose to design our places, or how we choose to get around them, but how we choose to live. Buy Nothing Day has been around since the 1990s, but is getting increased attention this year (Cain 2019). Would changing our perceptions of how much stuff we need improve the places we live?

SEE ALSO
Daniel Herriges, "Parking Dominates Our Cities. But Do We Really See It?" Strong Towns, 27 November 2019
Strong Towns, "Every City Should Abolish Its Minimum Parking Requirements. Has Yours?" Strong Towns, 25 November 2019
"Black Friday Parking 2017: After the Ball is Over," 24 November 2017
"Black Friday Parking 2016," 25 November 2016
"Black Friday Parking," 27 November 2015

Bypasses and suburban development

(Video: US 30 construction from Cedar Rapids Gazette)

Two substantial highway projects are underway in Linn County: extension of Iowa 100 around the northwestern side of Cedar Rapids, and diversion of U.S. 30 to the south of Mount Vernon and Lisbon. With total federal and state commitment in the mid-nine figures, it’s worth asking what impact these projects will have on our towns? With widening Interstate 380 between Cedar Rapids and Iowa City also still a live option, what does all this rural concrete say about the vision for our future?

These bypasses will have different effects than the bypasses around small towns I surveyed in my last post. Those moved through traffic out of the center of town, but besides that had no immediate effect, either positive or negative, on the towns themselves. In Linn County we’re dealing with one entirely new road, and one replacement for an existing two-lane bypass. Moreover, we’re dealing with them in Iowa’s second-largest county, one that has seen 17 percent population growth since the 2000 census (average for the U.S., but much faster than the whole State of Iowa). The Cedar Rapids metro area presents a more dynamic context than do the towns in the last post; so, given that change is already happening and ongoing, what will the bypasses contribute to it?

Commercial strip on Bus US approaching 151/13 bypass (Google Earth)

Officials in each town anticipate the bypasses will accommodate, indeed will facilitate, future growth. (The population density of the city of Cedar Rapids is a modest 1,189/sqmi, but we do like our personal space.) Cedar Rapids projects a 2035 population of 161,073, assuming 1 percent annual growth, a gain of 29,000 from the current estimate of 132,228 (EnvisionCR 54). Cedar Rapids's future land-use map anticipates the area around the new highway to be a mix of commercial and "urban medium-intensity" characterized by 4-12 units per acre, a "high-connectivity grid pattern" and "transportation, housing and shopping choices in close proximity to each other" (EnvisionCR 69). 

Future land use map including areas to be annexed (Envision CR 67)

Mount Vernon's map shows a mix of "suburban residential," "general commercial," and "business park."

Future land use map including areas to be annexed (cityofmtvernon-ia.gov)

Lisbon is still working on their map, but they too are bullish on the town’s expansion. City Administrator Connie Meier told the Gazette: We’re hoping to grow the community by having developments up to the bypass, hopefully on the east side of town and south of town, and also incorporate some commercial business along the bypass (Payne 2018: 11A).

The most likely outcome of federal-state highway spending and local growth ambitions is suburban sprawl, by which I mean low-density, car-dependent, loosely-controlled expansion into unsettled areas. Here’s why:

((1)) The new and expanded highways will induce demand, but even so the areas available for expansion would accommodate growth beyond the most optimistic projections. Eyeballing, the area around Highway 100 adds about 20 percent to the Cedar Rapids current area; at current density that would add over 26,000 residents. Mt. Vernon expects to spread not only to the new U.S. 30, but southward along S.R. 1, and as new U.S. 30 swings south it provides Lisbon with plenty of room to grow. So I'll say to fill up all three areas even at low suburban densities would take at least 30,000. That's nearly double the three towns' combined growth between 2000 and 2016, and equals the optimistic growth projection for Cedar Rapids alone. Development is going to be low-density here, and unless economic development and demand for labor ramps up in a hurry, the newly-opened areas will add residents by competing for existing residents with other parts of the county. 

((2)) Because development will occur before annexation, the future land use maps are merely suggestive. This limits their influence on the nature of development, for all that Mt. Vernon city administrator Chris Nosbisch tells the Gazette "it's imperative" for the new commercial area by the bypass to fit with what the town already has (Payne 2018: 11A; see also Kalk 2018). Town leaders ravenous for “game-changers” will accept whatever’s done.

Newer suburban development south of U.S. 30, Lisbon (Google Earth)

((3)) Previous bypasses, like Iowa 13 east of Cedar Rapids or U.S. 30 to the south, have produced exactly this kind of development. Exits off U.S. 30 in Cedar Rapids lead to the miles of big-box stores and commercial strips along Edgewood Road, Williams Boulevard and other "stroads" in that area, with characteristic swaths of pavement and low tax yield per acre. Entering Marion off Highways 13/151? Same. Residential developments around these highways are either large-lot subdivisions or mobile-home complexes, and never both. (The latter are, admittedly, densely-populated, but in a way that's more efficient for the owner than walkable for the residents). Public transit out here is scanty where it exists at all. The current two-lane, non-limited access U.S. 30 south of Mount Vernon and Lisbon mostly features a typical highway commercial strip of gas stations, fast food and car dealers.

((4)) While the last decade has shown some impressive appetite for walkable urbanism living, particularly among younger consumers and empty-nesters, gasoline is too cheap, commutes too short, and the environmental consequences too remote for this preference to expand enough to reshape our development pattern.

((5)) It’s what developers want to build anyway (Samuels 2015).

Edgewood Road SW, looking towards U.S. 30

The negative consequences of the suburban development pattern have been thoroughly catalogued (for example, in these older essays, "Urbanism Review" and “The Urbanism CLEF”). Inducing more driving stresses the environment, the school system and the local economy. The arterial stroads typically used to funnel traffic through populated areas to the highways have seen the greatest increase in pedestrian deaths ("On Foot, At Risk" 2018). An increasing pile of studies have shown negative health impacts of sprawl (Jackson and Kochtitzky 2009). Sure, Cedar Rapids, Lisbon and Mt. Vernon can use the property tax revenue, generated by anticipated new development around the highways, to fund existing services and older parts of their towns. However, like the energy from a sugar buzz, this can’t last forever, and in the meantime will largely be spreading out the metro area population. Given the proclivity of all three towns to expand in low-density, auto-centric ways, this is not good news; in the long run suburban development over-extends the cities' financial capacity (Marohn 2011). Annexations rarely pay for themselves after the initial infusion of property tax revenue (Nielsen 2018).

The solution to ongoing suburban development probably needs to be cultural change, and depending on who you read and how alarmed they are, the impetus for that may be closer than we now think. In the meantime, we could use a regional governmental entity for Linn and Johnson Counties that has the resources to do long-term planning, make the public case for policies designed for resilience, manage and possibly even limit urban growth, and which shares revenues among all the local governments so that they don’t feel the need to pursue separate sugar buzzes to the detriment of the whole (see also Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton, The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl [Island, 2001]).

A resilient city is prepared when current conditions--cheap gasoline, new infrastructure that can go maintenance-free for a while, ready access to federal money, a booming economy--change. Suburban commuting is the opposite of resilient, draws resources away from the city particularly poorer residents, and draws open land and resources away from the natural environment. Sprawling our way into the future is not the way to go.