Really interesting article on the returns you can expect for urban properties as opposed to suburban, based on study of Asheville, NC:

 

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2012/03/simple-math-can-save-cities-bankruptcy/1629/

 

Great article, very "strong towns". 

Does anyone know if the parking necessary for the operation of the buildings was included in their footprints for use in the denominator (dollars/acreage)?  Just looking at the numbers, it doesn't look that way because I don't think that the remodeled JC Penney plus its attendant parking would be 0.2 acres.  The small denominators are the real key to the outsized numbers reported by smaller redevelopment projects.  If the 34-acre Wal-Mart parcel included all of its parking while the JC Penney did not (because its parking was in an off-balance-sheet vehicle, so to speak, because it used parking provided by a third party garage nearby, while Wal-Mart owned its own), the comparison would not be particularly fair.

 

That doesn't change the fact that value per land area is absolutely the correct metric to use, but the formulas for calculating it should take into account not just the land of a given parcel, but the land needed to service it as well.  Wal-Mart should not be able to shrink its denominator by selling off its parking lot to a third party operator, but neither should downtown mixed-use developments (nor should it make any difference whether they ever owned their own parking in the first place).

Graymare, I may be misreading your post, but it's not actually a JCPenney.  It used to be back in the day and was remodeled--beauty salon in the basement, retail on the first floor, offices on the second, 19 condos above that.  (I took your post to mean it's an unfair comparison because both JCPenney and Wal Mart would have parking needs, but the site size of the JCPenney doesn't seem to account for that.) 

 

 

By which I mean to say that it's comparing a primarily residential building in a smaller footprint to the Wal Mart.

Graymare, I may be misreading your post, but it's not actually a JCPenney.  It used to be back in the day and was remodeled--beauty salon in the basement, retail on the first floor, offices on the second, 19 condos above that.  (I took your post to mean it's an unfair comparison because both JCPenney and Wal Mart would have parking needs, but the site size of the JCPenney doesn't seem to account for that.)

 

I'm aware that it's a former JC Penney, but even this remodeled building will have some parking needs.  If the parking space is not included, then you're letting the remodeled site artificially shrink its footprint.  Of course the mixed-use building won't have as much parking as the Wal-Mart, probably not even as much as the former JC Penney did when it was a JC Penney, but if it gets to claim that its parking footprint is zero, then it's gaming the formula.

Well, I guess it just depends on where the parking is and how they typically measure it.  If there is a lot of street parking and, for example, they don't count street parking when looking at a suburban residential property, I wouldn't expect them to do so there. 

An interesting metric would be the property taxes per acre for a surface lot versus a garage of say 10 stories, with and without first floor retail. 

 

The overall point though is that having no building on a piece of land is of course the worst rate of return.  A single-story building surrounded by a lot of "open space" whether that's yard or parking lot is little better.  Even a single-story building that covers the whole lot is at least as good if not better than some of the best big box and strip shopping developments.  The key to good return is height and full lot coverage, which requires the least amount of infrastructure. 

 

What I find interesting about the analyses is that while they mention the suburban developments require 42 years or thereabouts to repay their infrastructure investments, they neglect to mention that much of that infrastructure won't last that long.  The roads alone will need resurfacing at least twice if not three times during that period, with replacement curb and gutter and full rehab in the 30-40 year time frame.  The water and sewer lines will need some maintenance too, though they're unlikely to need full replacement by then.  There's also sidewalks, street lights, and other things needing maintenance as well.  Plus, do they even consider the operating budget for this infrastructure?  Roads need plowing in winter, public right-of-ways need mowing, the street lights need electricity, there's fire and police and school and library budgets too.  If you count all those things it pushes the "payback" period more decades out to where it's never recouped at all. 

jdm00: If they do that, though, then they're painting an unrealistically optimistic picture of how much money can be squeezed out of urban, mixed-use development--unless a city really thinks that it can basically have no off-street parking citywide (and not even NYC gets to that level), then some of the land is going to have to be devoted to parking.  Any attempt to avoid factoring that land into the value/area denominator for the urban development while including it in the Wal-Mart is gaming the formula, because parking significantly drives up the denominator in both cases, while not driving up the numerator nearly as much in either case.

 

The urban development will still not have its denominator inflated as much by parking as the Wal-Mart will, so it will still come out significantly ahead.  Letting the urban development claim that it truly has no need for parking at all nevertheless unfairly inflates the disparity.

 

jjak: Regarding vertical parking vs. surface parking, definitely.  Also, vertical parking allows more land area to be freed up for more intensive development.

 

The one thing you said that I'd question is actually whether "having no building on a piece of land is of course the worst rate of return."  Consider this: What's the tangible ROI of Central Park?  Well, the park itself is free to use and costs money to maintain.  By that narrow reading (which is the same narrow reading I warn jdm against above), Central Park is 843 worthless acres ($0/843) and should be bulldozed in order to put up real buildings.  The problem is that that's unfairly narrowing the lens and cutting out the neighboring pieces of the urban fabric.  Central Park has incredible value to NYC, and I'm talking real, hard, tangible value, not warm-and-fuzziness like "sense of community."

 

For a more depressing illustration of the same topic: Jim Rokakis (Cuyahoga County Treasurer) openly plans to spend millions demolishing buildings that are in bad enough shape that "having no building on a piece of land" is actually not "the worst rate of return."

Having no building is the worst rate of return when it's private land in anything but a rural environment.  Parks and streets and such are a different animal, and in that case you have to look more at opportunity costs than anything.  That's not to say we don't have too much empty public space too, namely overly-wide streets. 

A book on how suburbia is changing....

 

The Great Inversion.  The author wrote one my favorites on Chicago ("The Lost City"), but this is an OK journalistic summing up of recent trends. 

 

He looks at sprawly places like Gwinnet County but also mentions Cleveland...specifically Cleveland Heights and vicinity....

...and a review by Joel Garreau (of Edge Cities fame) in the Wilson Quarterly, who is a bit sckeptical about the Great Inversion these The Urban Future

 

...I'd add the book "Searching for Whitopia" as another counter-example showing sprawl would be continuing as Middle America flees to the so-called "Modern Mayberrys".

 

But oddly enough one is seeing "loft housing"  popping up in suburbia around Dayton.  There is a nifty new urbanist development out in Beavercreek in the "defense edge city" off Pentagon Blvd/I-675.  And I think another one is planned out in Centerville, in the still-open country south of me...

 

 

For a more depressing illustration of the same topic: Jim Rokakis (Cuyahoga County Treasurer) openly plans to spend millions demolishing buildings that are in bad enough shape that "having no building on a piece of land" is actually not "the worst rate of return."

 

I'll bet most of what he plans to destroy is pedestrian-oriented density, and the chance of replacing it with something similar is negligible. 

For a more depressing illustration of the same topic: Jim Rokakis (Cuyahoga County Treasurer) openly plans to spend millions demolishing buildings that are in bad enough shape that "having no building on a piece of land" is actually not "the worst rate of return."

 

I'll bet most of what he plans to destroy is pedestrian-oriented density, and the chance of replacing it with something similar is negligible. 

 

"Most" (by a very wide margin) of what I've seen are single family homes on residential streets which have been long abandoned and probably so riddled with code violations that no buyer would ever invest in them.  My Dad's old house which he sold in 1997, but the buyers apparently let it deteriorate and there was a major plumbing catastrophe after they moved out, suffered that fate.  Too bad, in a way, because that house was in good shape 15 years ago, but it has sat empty for the past 5 and the paint was chipping all over, nobody was cutting the grass, some sign was posted on the front door for years, and it was just a blight on the rest of the street.

^^He's not destroying any "density", he's destroying completely uninhabitable shells that have zero chance of finding their way back into the market for the foreseeable future, and in the mean time are helping to depress those surrounding properties that are still [structurally] viable.  Consider this "mark to market" for our vacancy problem.  And the land bank also renovates and resell properties, it doesn't demolish them all.

 

For a more depressing illustration of the same topic: Jim Rokakis (Cuyahoga County Treasurer) openly plans to spend millions demolishing buildings that are in bad enough shape that "having no building on a piece of land" is actually not "the worst rate of return."

 

Just to get you current, he's now former treasurer and his baby, the Cuyahoga County Land Bank has long since left the planning stage and has been demolishing houses at a fast clip, with many more on the way.  For a sense of the scale, here is the list properties it currently controls: http://www.cuyahogalandbank.org/properties.php?order=municipality

^^ Mayberry is an all-white town, but from an urban-design perspective, it has a lot in common with nearby Asheville as depicted in the article above. Fictional Mayberry and its real-life counterparts are great illustrations of how even all-American small towns were built at transit-friendly densities of 5, 6, 7 units per acre -- compact places with busy, walkable downtowns, This is something emphasized in MORPC's "Dense by Design: A Compact Guide to Compact Development:"

 

http://www.morpc.org/pdf/morpc_density_brochure_CS3.pdf

 

"Most" (by a very wide margin) of what I've seen are single family homes on residential streets which have been long abandoned and probably so riddled with code violations that no buyer would ever invest in them. 

 

^^He's not destroying any "density", he's destroying completely uninhabitable shells that have zero chance of finding their way back into the market for the foreseeable future, and in the mean time are helping to depress those surrounding properties that are still [structurally] viable.  Consider this "mark to market" for our vacancy problem.  And the land bank also renovates and resell properties, it doesn't demolish them all.

 

Well, good morning to you both.  I'm aware of the land bank and we were talking specifically about demolition.  In general I'm a fan of removing obsolete housing stock.  But taken as a whole, demo programs in Cleveland have already resulted in the near-total removal of larger buildings.  Even if the proportion of this round leans heavily toward houses, the existing situation suggests there should be a moratorium on destroying mixed use structures and/or apartments.  I've seen those things renovated perfectly well after being halfway burnt down (Clark and 25th, if you're curious).  The standard for "too far gone" should be extremely tight because we need those buildings so desparately.  Now if the demo program were limited to duplexes, I'd help push the bulldozer to get it started.

^

however, the Modern Mayberry concept is not that people actually move to these places to live in a "leafy street & front porch" type of place...the move for the percieved values/safety and they move to subdivisions or large lot ribbon development, not to the small town physical environment, which becomes more a symbol than a place of residence.

 

They are buying into "Mayberry" in quotation marks.   

...so are we talking about suburban sprawl or inner city infill? 

^^^Good morning.  I was simply responding to your "most of what he plans" assumption, which is not correct on several fronts.  In fact, it might be totally off-base...... maybe you can point out a few "pedestrian-orientied" properties which have in fact been demolished as a direct result of his program?

327, Jim Rokakis's connection to demolition is through the land bank, so in this case you were talking about its demolitions specifically...

 

Anyway, I share your desire to see more stuff get saved and a lot of folks are really trying.  I'm just not sure if you're really suggesting anything specific here.  Not sure how a "moratorium" would work. Most of the demo in Cleveland is effectively through abandonment and neglect, not because someone wants to replace the building with something else. Unfortunately, the city doesn't have anything close to the resources to make a big dent in the stock of abandoned buildings through renovation.

 

Sorry Jeffery, you're right that this is getting us a little off topic.

^^He's not destroying any "density", he's destroying completely uninhabitable shells that have zero chance of finding their way back into the market for the foreseeable future, and in the mean time are helping to depress those surrounding properties that are still [structurally] viable.  Consider this "mark to market" for our vacancy problem.  And the land bank also renovates and resell properties, it doesn't demolish them all.

 

For a more depressing illustration of the same topic: Jim Rokakis (Cuyahoga County Treasurer) openly plans to spend millions demolishing buildings that are in bad enough shape that "having no building on a piece of land" is actually not "the worst rate of return."

 

Just to get you current, he's now former treasurer and his baby, the Cuyahoga County Land Bank has long since left the planning stage and has been demolishing houses at a fast clip, with many more on the way.  For a sense of the scale, here is the list properties it currently controls: http://www.cuyahogalandbank.org/properties.php?order=municipality

 

Hah, yeah, I did know that, as well as that the land bank was up and running.  He was a keynote luncheon speaker at the O'Neill Bankruptcy Institute last week, and gave a very powerful presentation, with both good visuals and hard data.  The demolitions so far are only the tip of the iceberg--the worst of the worst, so to speak (and the problem is that in the time that it takes to demolish one set, more deteriorate to the same level and become the new worst of the worst).

 

The biggest infusion of cash for demolitions so far was from the robo-signing settlement, and that infusion wasn't all that large in the grander scheme of things.  He was pretty frank about needing federal money to back the effort, and the presentation he gave to us was the near-final version of the one he planned to give to Rep. LaTourette the following week (i.e., this week) regarding the need for it.  He's had success with that pitch before on moderate Republicans, because part of the reason Cuyahoga County got a good piece of that robo-signing settlement was because he convinced AG Mike DeWine that that would be one of the most productive and appropriate uses of part of Ohio's share of that settlement.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we get more.

 

The video he showed us included clips from an episode of 60 Minutes from a ways back as they were getting the program going.  It included interviews with the neighbors of some of the homes to be demolished.  Maybe 60 Minutes deliberately picked an unrepresentative sample--I don't know--but every neighbor that they showed was fully supportive of the demolition of any property on the chopping block that they showed.  Rokakis and the interviewer went into one and Rokakis showed that vandals had taken everything--quite literally including the proverbial kitchen sink.

What's wrong with duplexes?  Those and fourplexes (both of which there's a ton in Cincinnati) are some of the best affordable housing there is.  They look like regular single family houses (usually anyway, the many art deco examples are exceptions), so they are a perfect fit for those neighborhoods that want to maintain a certain character.  They allow more density and a choice in unit sizes that would otherwise be lacking in such areas. 

I think Dayton  could use more demo money.  They have a plan but cant execute....

^The City of Dayton got $30M in funds as part of the second round of Neighborhood Stabilization Program funding, at least some of which they planned to use on demo: http://www.cityofdayton.org/departments/pcd/Pages/NSP2.aspx

 

Jeffery, do you know if Dayton/Montgomery county have launched a modern land bank?

 

To bring this back more on topic, I'm really curious how much of pull from city neighborhoods to burbs is driven purely by the preferences for certain structure types/acreage vs. fleeing social issues and urban dismenities.  There's an interesting collective action-type problem going on here, where even those people whose tastes are in line with city neighborhoods can't find ones that meet their other demands.

What's wrong with duplexes? 

 

How many get built nowadays?  Ask Lakewood how marketable duplexes are.  They're trying to convert theirs to singles.  As a renter I avoid them due to high energy bills and the relative lack of privacy.  While apartment blocks and single homes can be scaled to almost any price range, duplexes are limited in that regard.  I believe their prevalence in Ohio's inner cities has been a major contributor to sprawl.  Shortly after taking office, Mayor Jackson released a report finding that duplexes were a key impediment to reviving many of the city's neighborhoods.

Jeffery, do you know if Dayton/Montgomery county have launched a modern land bank?

 

 

Yes

 

....but I havnt heard much about it since that news article back in the Fall. 

 

 

 

What's wrong with duplexes? 

 

How many get built nowadays?  Ask Lakewood how marketable duplexes are.  They're trying to convert theirs to singles.  As a renter I avoid them due to high energy bills and the relative lack of privacy.  While apartment blocks and single homes can be scaled to almost any price range, duplexes are limited in that regard.  I believe their prevalence in Ohio's inner cities has been a major contributor to sprawl.  Shortly after taking office, Mayor Jackson released a report finding that duplexes were a key impediment to reviving many of the city's neighborhoods.

 

That's interesting. We're talking side by side duplexes?

 

I would think people would love them. I do.

Few duplexes get built nowadays because they're excluded from the zoning code, just like most other urban building forms.  Same for garage apartments, granny flats, etc.  I don't see how high energy bills or lack of privacy are any different than you'd find in any apartment situation.  The real advantage to them is you can own a duplex and use the rent from the other half to help pay down the purchase of the building.  You can do that without having to be a full-time landlord like you would with a larger building. 

^^I think Jackson (and 327) was referring to up-down duplexes

Still, how is that any different than an apartment with more units?

^

however, the Modern Mayberry concept is not that people actually move to these places to live in a "leafy street & front porch" type of place...the move for the percieved values/safety and they move to subdivisions or large lot ribbon development, not to the small town physical environment, which becomes more a symbol than a place of residence.

 

They are buying into "Mayberry" in quotation marks.   

 

Yes, they're doing it wrong. Pay attention to how "the suburbs as the place to live" are portrayed in TV and movies, especially ones form the '90s and before. They almost always look like Mayberry, Bexley, streetcar suburbs of San Francisco or Chicago (think of "Full House" and Urkel) or some walkable beachfront location. Functional places. Only when it's time to make fun of the suburbs did TV and movies show the kind of post-'60s sprawl development which makes up the majority of suburban/exurban development that exists today. So, for some reason people have associated cul-de-sac hell as equivalent to Hyde Park and Grandview despite their massive differences.

^

however, the Modern Mayberry concept is not that people actually move to these places to live in a "leafy street & front porch" type of place...the move for the percieved values/safety and they move to subdivisions or large lot ribbon development, not to the small town physical environment, which becomes more a symbol than a place of residence.

 

They are buying into "Mayberry" in quotation marks.   

 

Yes, they're doing it wrong. Pay attention to how "the suburbs as the place to live" are portrayed in TV and movies, especially ones form the '90s and before. They almost always look like Mayberry, Bexley, streetcar suburbs of San Francisco or Chicago (think of "Full House" and Urkel) or some walkable beachfront location. Functional places. Only when it's time to make fun of the suburbs did TV and movies show the kind of post-'60s sprawl development which makes up the majority of suburban/exurban development that exists today. So, for some reason people have associated cul-de-sac hell as equivalent to Hyde Park and Grandview despite their massive differences.

 

Sorry, but Family Matters and Full House families both lived in the city not the 'burbs.

 

To me, "the suburbs as the place to live" started in the 1950s and run thru the late '80s.  In the early 90's cities started to rebound and wanted to be more than just places to work.

...so are we talking about suburban sprawl or inner city infill? 

Two sides of the same coin.

Few duplexes get built nowadays because they're excluded from the zoning code, just like most other urban building forms.  Same for garage apartments, granny flats, etc.  I don't see how high energy bills or lack of privacy are any different than you'd find in any apartment situation.  The real advantage to them is you can own a duplex and use the rent from the other half to help pay down the purchase of the building.  You can do that without having to be a full-time landlord like you would with a larger building. 

Put them all back in the zoning code, and let the market decide. We need to change the zoning codes because they are what institutionalized sprawl.

Right about Urkel an Full House MTS, but they still aren't living above a bakery or bank like the urban TV of the '90s and later. They lived in city neighborhoods, but in more residential areas. But, that still meant suburban to a lot of people when they saw it on TV, even if we on this site don't look at it quite the same way. Most scenes still took place in the home rather than on the street. And there was still a fair amount of "suburban" TV in the '90s. We're kinda splitting hairs, MTS. We all know what went on with a renewed interest in cities.

I don't get why urban living always has to be multi-unit housing, anything else being suburban. A single family house with a yard is a typical set up in lots of urban areas across this country not named San Franciso or Manhattan.

 

Of course I'm not talking acre lots, but there are plenty of walkable urban neighborhoods that have single family housing, they just don't have 60' street set backs.

I don't get why urban living always has to be multi-unit housing, anything else being suburban. A single family house with a yard is a typical set up in lots of urban areas across this country not named San Franciso or Manhattan.

 

Of course I'm not talking acre lots, but there are plenty of walkable urban neighborhoods that have single family housing, they just don't have 60' street set backs.

 

Agreed.  Cleveland examples.  Ohio City, Shaker Square, Glenville, Glendale, Collinwood, Edgewater, Little Italy, Tremont.  Those are all urban neighborhoods which have single family homes yet I do not find suburban.

Yeah, lot sizes and lot shapes matter a great deal, and many Ohio cities have "near-downtown" neighborhoods with single-family homes with a solid urban feel.

 

I'll also add that the reverse exists as well: There are lots of multifamily, multistory apartment complexes in the burbs that feel very suburban regardless of their ostensible density (which itself may not be all that high).  Most have a fairly consistent look: three stories, surrounded by parking, separated from primary through streets (often by dead greenspace such as landscaped mounds), naming syntax of "The [Plural Noun] at [Nondescript Geographic Reference]," etc.

^ Yep. The worst of both worlds. My first apartment out of high school was like that. It was outside of Lancaster and it turned me off to that arrangement very quickly. I was cut off from everything. The only thing there was to do was screen stuff.

I don't get why urban living always has to be multi-unit housing, anything else being suburban. A single family house with a yard is a typical set up in lots of urban areas across this country not named San Franciso or Manhattan.

 

Of course I'm not talking acre lots, but there are plenty of walkable urban neighborhoods that have single family housing, they just don't have 60' street set backs.

 

Agreed.  Cleveland examples.  Ohio City, Shaker Square, Glenville, Glendale, Collinwood, Edgewater, Little Italy, Tremont.  Those are all urban neighborhoods which have single family homes yet I do not find suburban.

 

You can feel whehter a neighborhood is urban vs. suburban largely by lot space, general house age, orientation to the street and a mix of some multi-unit buildings.  In medium-size, upper Midwestern cities like Cleveland, Milwaukee, Detroit and Buffalo, where frame single-family homes dominate, there are other factors that give areas a more urban than suburban feel...  It really comes down to age, with World War II really being the dividing line, generally, between suburban vs. urban oriented.  WWII is a general dividing line between (prior) streetcar/public transit orientatoin and (subsequent) individual auto domination.  In Greater Cleveland, this dividing line often/usually trumps whether the neighborhood is in the City or the suburb.  There areas of West Park, Lee-Harvard, Lee-Seville and Puritas that feel far more suburban than much of Cleveland Heights (Coventry, Cedar-Fairmount, Cedar, Shaker Heights (large apt. buildings along Van Aken)  and Lakewood (Gold Coast, Madison Ave.)

What's wrong with duplexes?

 

I dunno, there's something that feels kind of weird about them, especially when they are symmetrical.  I acknowledge that this is totally irrational, since living in an apartment with an upstairs and downstairs apartment doesn't seem so odd.

 

Cincinnati has a lot of duplexes from the 1880's/90's, including Eden Ave. in Corryville, which is nothing but Victorian duplexes.  A lot of those are designed to hide the fact that they are duplexes. 

I don't get why urban living always has to be multi-unit housing, anything else being suburban. A single family house with a yard is a typical set up in lots of urban areas across this country not named San Franciso or Manhattan.

 

Of course I'm not talking acre lots, but there are plenty of walkable urban neighborhoods that have single family housing, they just don't have 60' street set backs.

 

Agreed.  Cleveland examples.  Ohio City, Shaker Square, Glenville, Glendale, Collinwood, Edgewater, Little Italy, Tremont.  Those are all urban neighborhoods which have single family homes yet I do not find suburban.

 

You can feel whehter a neighborhood is urban vs. suburban largely by lot space, general house age, orientation to the street and a mix of some multi-unit buildings.  In medium-size, upper Midwestern cities like Cleveland, Milwaukee, Detroit and Buffalo, where frame single-family homes dominate, there are other factors that give areas a more urban than suburban feel...  It really comes down to age, with World War II really being the dividing line, generally, between suburban vs. urban oriented.  WWII is a general dividing line between (prior) streetcar/public transit orientatoin and (subsequent) individual auto domination.  In Greater Cleveland, this dividing line often/usually trumps whether the neighborhood is in the City or the suburb.  There areas of West Park, Lee-Harvard, Lee-Seville and Puritas that feel far more suburban than much of Cleveland Heights (Coventry, Cedar-Fairmount, Cedar, Shaker Heights (large apt. buildings along Van Aken)  and Lakewood (Gold Coast, Madison Ave.)

Agreed with the Pre War statement and that some areas of Lee-Harvard & Lee-Miles look like they belong in Solon or Bedford

The post-WWII period also marks the change from highly connected and essentially gridded street layouts to an excessively hierarchical dendritic system of cul-de-sacs feeding into collectors that feed into minor arterials that feed into major arterials that feed into interstates.  So while a gridded street pattern doesn't necessarily denote an urban neighborhood, a dendritic layout almost certainly denotes a suburban or exurban one. 

I hadn't seen the word "dendritic" used for that street layout pattern before.  I'd always said "rabbit warren.

 

Dendritic is cooler.  I'll have to start using that one.

UrbanOhio:  educational and fun. 

High court rules against impact fees

"Ohio Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Warren County’s growing Hamilton Township cannot impose so-called “impact fees” on developers to force them to pay for public services such as roads and police."

http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20120531/NEWS/305310027/High-court-rules-against-impact-fees?odyssey=nav|head

 

Any thoughts on how that would encourage continued sprawl?  Seems to me that townships will be forced to continue to subsidize the infrastructure of sprawl.

I think that this is extremely unfortunate and will obviously subsidize sprawl (and prevent the proper internalization of costs to the parties imposing them on government resources) if the law is not changed.  However, I think that in this case, there's a decent case that the law will get changed.  While the Ohio legislature is largely dominated by Republican legislators who don't necessarily view sprawl as a bad thing and are hardly urbanist in their outlook, the Ohio Townships Association is powerful (including among Republicans--in fact, especially among Republicans) and will obviously not like this ruling.  As I read that excerpt, the violation was a statutory violation, not a constitutional one, so the legislature can change the relevant statute.

 

I was actually surprised to see that only twenty-six townships in the entire state are limited home rule.

I think cities/townships can decline to take over roads built by developers (can anyone confirm?), and if they can't assess developers for the incurred costs, then maybe they should do so more often.

If you can't recoup the costs of sprawling development, then townships may become less likely to facilitate sprawl-friendly zoning.