OOS 67-6
If Raleigh bumps into Atlanta: Factors in 400 miles of vanishing open space
In 2014, the U.S. Geological Survey generated headlines with projections that current development trends will, by 2060, fill the 400 miles between the downtowns of Raleigh, N.C. and Atlanta, Ga. with continuous urban and suburban development. Our study looks for answers in the near past for what might still be done in the future to avoid destroying the ecosystems currently lying in the still-large rural spaces between Raleigh, Winston-Salem, Salisbury, Charlotte, Greenville and Atlanta. The study answers the question of what has been the relative roles of population growth and of per capita land consumption growth in the loss of open space in the previous decade and in the previous three decades in the urbanized areas that would be subsumed if Raleigh and Atlanta merge. And the study uses the Raleigh-to-Atlanta corridor as a localized case study on the validity of the 1996 finding of the President's Council on Sustainable Development that the United States can't meet its environmental goals without stabilizing its population, and that it can't do that without reducing annual immigration inflow. The study uses methodology developed by physicist John Holdren to quantify the respective contributions of population and per capita consumption in total change of resource use.
Results/Conclusions
Of the 497 Urbanized Areas in the country, three of the top 10 in destroying natural habitat and farmland in the last decade were in the Raleigh-to-Atlanta corridor. A positive trend along the corridor is that per capita land consumption growth is declining and now quite small, with Raleigh in the last decade achieving a 1% reduction in the amount of developed land required for each resident. But Raleigh still eliminated 198.5 square miles of open space as it accommodated 343,000 more residents. All smart growth efforts at limiting sprawl were overwhelmed by a large continuing flow of new residents moving to the corridor. Apportioning the role in sprawl of population versus per capita consumption for the last decade, the study found the ratio to be Raleigh (100% vs. 0%), Winston-Salem (100% vs. 0%), Charlotte (93% vs. 7%), Greenville, S.C. (81% vs. 19%) and Atlanta (85% vs. 15%). Analysis of Census and other federal data suggested that the survival of ecosystems along the corridor will depend on continuing vigilance in land use patterns but mainly on limiting population growth through local disincentives for re-location and on the federal government reducing annual immigration, as President Clinton's sustainability commission indicated in 1996.