The challenges to fighting sprawl in Chester

The challenges to fighting sprawl in Chester County, Pennsylvania, are analyzed in “Visions of Landscapes,” a report sponsored by the Chester County Community Foundation and the Chester County 2020 Trust. Three projects that attempted to incorporate new urbanist principles have been defeated in the past twelve years in the 447,000-population county southeast of Philadelphia, say the authors, John C. Keene of the University of Pennsylvania and Nancy Mohr, executive director of Chester County 2020. An award-winning plan to extend the old village of Unionville was defeated by not-in-my-backyard forces. The township ended up taking the site — a farm — by eminent domain and converting it to recreational use. In an adjacent township, a group proposed a mixed-use village at the intersection of five roads, but residents of relatively new housing developments “argued that safety was a serious issue, that the traffic would be horrendous, that the density was inappropriate in an area of one and two acre properties and that the quality of life for which they moved to the ‘country’ would be destroyed,” Keene and Mohr recount. The opponents defeated the project, and the site ended up being developed with big houses — not a farsighted use of the land. The third project, near the Maryland border, was mushroom grower Mike Pia’s attempt to create a village-like settlement of small lots with affordable houses. After encountering resistance, he ended up enlarging the 229 lots to a minimum of 10,000 square feet and using cul-de-sacs instead of a more connected street network. “New Urbanism is struggling but far from deceased,” Mohr told New Urban News. “A few visionary developers still attempt to capture the public’s imagination and good will, one of the most persistent being Joe Duckworth of Arcadia [Land Company].”