OFFICIALS: LIMIT STEEP SLOPES DEVELOPMENT
Growth is hard. Especially in our Chattanooga-area geography.
We’re surrounded by natural beauty that we seem determined to despoil for a buck.
The slopes of our blue-hazed mountains and ridges are often steep. The valleys, carved by the meandering Tennessee River and its many tributaries, are pastoral — and flood-prone.
The smart way to deal with our twofold blessings and challenges is to have thoughtful land-use policies and common-sense stormwater regulations.
Developers don’t like those words — land-use policies (like slope rules) and stormwater regulations, inseparably intertwined issues — because, together and separately, they limit building options. What’s more, they can often make building more expensive.
Builders say slope rules could kill housing growth.
Barry Bennett, a spokesman for builders, told Chattanooga City Council members last week that a proposed temporary slope zoning rule which would allow grading or clearing on no more than 20 percent of any property where the slope is 33 degrees or greater “could possibly result in a de facto moratorium on development in the Chattanooga area.”
A year ago, developers persuaded the council to ease a standard for stormwater runoff retention put in place four years before along the extremely flood-prone South Chickamauga Creek that drains some 400 square miles of land and empties into the Tennessee River. Builders and business owners who were hit with higher mitigation fees argued that infrastructure to hold 1.6 inches of runoff on site rather the 1 inch required by the state wouldn’t solve sedimentation problems but did drive up development costs and put the entire responsibility for a regional problem on a small group of builders.
Residents don’t like more expensive, either — whether we’re talking about home costs or stormwater fees.
But neither developers nor residents will like the Chattanooga of tomorrow if we don’t plan better today.
Already, we know that our region, especially in the city of Chattanooga, has a shortage of affordable housing.
Already we know that Chattanooga apartment rental rates in 2017 rose five times faster than work wages — despite also having the sixth-highest wage growth in the nation last year and the fastest rate of population growth among Tennessee’s largest cities.
Already we know that the Tennessee Housing Development Agency reported last year that only 30 percent of median wage-earners in Chattanooga could afford to buy a home, and almost a quarter of Chattanooga’s renters are paying more than 50 percent of their income on housing.
Already, we know Chattanooga is under a federal EPA ruling to halt combined sewer and stormwater runoff overflows that is costing about $400 million. And the county, looking to be able to add homes and businesses to tax rolls, is looking for a place to build a new sewer plant. And guess what: no community wants that in their back yard.
The city’s stormwater violations have more than doubled over the past six years, according to the city’s land development office. And more than 83 percent of the 597 rezoning cases reviewed by the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Regional Planning Agency were for steep slopes, flood plains or both.
But close your eyes and imagine all the ridges in the city covered with homes and apartment complexes — housing that few in Chattanooga could afford and housing that would change the view and feel of Chattanooga.
Close your eyes again and try to imagine the torrents of new rainfall runoff paths off those ridges. Even now, fully forested, those ridges cannot fully absorb the rains here. Where will that water go when even a minimum of 20 percent of trees are gone and covered with rooftops?
Who knew growth was so hard, right?
But it is. And Chattanooga needs to fully think this through.
As we mentioned, the “temporary” slopes rule now under consideration is for hillsides of 33 degrees or higher. For context, the stretch of I-24 coming down to Chattanooga from Monteagle Mountain — the side with truck runaway ramps — is an 6 degree grade. The nearly vertical stretch of the Incline Railway near the top of Lookout Mountain is a 72.7 percent grade.
We need to limit — strongly limit — development on our ridges and slopes.