Running downhill

Infill just another way of consuming the land

Not all ideas we incorporate into our lives work out as grandly as we thought they would at first blush. But, we generally try to progress toward a better quality of life as we change the way things were once done. Therefore, it is probably in innocence that cities nationwide have begun to chant a mantra called, “infill,” which by definition is the utilization of under-used or vacant land within already-built urban areas.

Infill is nothing new, of course, since for centuries cities around the globe have crowded housing together, sometimes even wrapping their citizens within fortified walls. But large swaths of tight residential development are relatively new to small and mid-sized American towns like Fayetteville. It seems high-rise student housing towering over surrounding structures continues to be built unabated. Once upon a time city planning policies advocated that structures should make transition and be compatible to each other. Is that history?

Development of close or adjoining townhouses, duplexes, etc., on what was once forested or open pieces of raw land is incorrectly being called infill. In reality, it is new development. As structures fill in valleys and crawl up hillsides that previously were growing grass and trees, they create something as impactful as that dreaded demon, “urban sprawl,” because they too consume land, just in a different way.

These squeezed, cheek-to-jowl edifices cover soil with the hard impervious surfaces of rooftops, driveways and roads leaving little or no ground space for growing shade trees or for water absorption. Oftentimes, all or most of the land’s trees are cut, leaving only tiny spaces in which some poor decorator sapling is expected to make a living. This contrast can be clearly seen in reality or at the online streetscape of Fayetteville’s Nettleship Street, where duplexes line up on a denuded slope across the street from a wooded single-family home neighborhood.

Yes, four houses per acre take up more area in comparison to rows of townhouses, but their yards generally are places where rain falls and stays, growing the trees that cool streets and filter air pollutants.

The people who have lived on Markham Hill and invested in their homes for decades face a requested change to the zoning of a large property next to theirs. If they approve this rezoning request for mixed commercial and compact residential use, our City Council will change everything about the homes, yards, streets, neighborhood and quality of life (noise, traffic, constant activity, etc.) belonging to the people who live there now. And the council is tempted.

The developer sounds environmentally sensitive, when he proposes to tightly cluster some 476 houses together in order to leave acres of green space nearby, but the impact will be similar to what urban wall-to-wall infill does to land.

Perhaps worse, the zone change is wanted to load commercial development on top of this hill, which will be akin to dropping a small town on this neighborhood, breaking it into fragments. Concentrating this impact on a largely forested hillside is not a healthy or appropriate land use and nothing even remotely close to a real environmental design. If an analysis had been done of what plants and animals are living there, of how water interacts with the geology and of how it will behave once impervious surfaces are built, and how the percentage of tree canopy loss will affect the town, then a truly informed judgment of how this land is functioning could be made.

But we continue to blunder along using land as if it is just a platform for us to put things on — “land use,” we call it. And indeed, we just keep on using it to death because we do not behave as if we comprehend what land function is all about.

Also, our society has the notion that if someone owns something, they ought to be able to do with it as they please. But that logic flies directly in the face of what zones are all about, and as long as our town uses zones, then zones need to be honored. Unfortunately people feel intimidated by big money and big plans and whimper, “They’re going to do it anyway.” Well, “they” surely will if people do not show the powersthat-be what is unacceptable. To help aldermen decide, they need to pull out a copy of the Golden Rule to review how they would like to be done unto in their own neighborhoods.

Fran Alexander is a Fayetteville resident with a longstanding interest in the environment and an opinion on almost anything else. Email her at fran@deane-alexander.com.