AGENDA: Protect Louisville Metro’s livability, centrality, and efficiency that are quality of life assets by balancing growth on a metro-wide basis.

In-Depth: Balance Metropolitan Growth

In one important sense, Louisville Metro’s relatively slow rate of growth in recent decades is now a blessing. The quality of daily life that residents value has been shielded from the extreme fragmentation and costly problems that have accompanied rapid growth elsewhere.

As a result, just as Louisville Metro entered the 21st Century with a new, unified government that other communities envy, so also it enters this era with its enviable levels of compactness, cohesion, and convenience still intact. Those assets are among Louisville’s competitive advantages. Preserving them by ensuring balanced growth and strategic regional planning is one of its chief competitive challenges.

Without a cogent eye to the future, continued outward expansion of low-density development will lead to ever-increasing distances between where residents live, work, shop, and go for fun.

Louisville Metro continues to be home to the lion’s share of the region’s households, families, and jobs. But over the last 20 years, the overall balance in development has shifted, even while population growth was low. In 1980, approximately 60 percent of new building permits issued in the region were for sites in Jefferson County, with adjacent counties accounting for a total of roughly 40 percent. By 2000, the relative proportions had reversed, with surrounding counties now accounting for roughly 60 percent of all new building permits in the region.

Commute times have exploded in the last few years. The 2004 Urban Mobility Study by the Texas Transportation Institute put the experience of Louisville drivers into stark perspective. Over the last 20 years, the average time spent by Louisville commuters in congested traffic increased fourfold.

The struggle to reduce air pollution and improve other measures of environmental quality continues, with the issue of air toxins recently added to the long effort to control ozone to meet national clean-air standards.

The issues those trends crystallize are complex. The growth patterns that underlie them raise red flags. When building permits outpace population growth, for example, the expansion often comes at the expense of older neighborhoods and first-ring suburbs. Eventually, the inner county can begin to take on characteristics of the inner city, as is evident in some areas of Jefferson, Oldham, Floyd, and Clark counties.

But community growth is valued and a mark of success. The new business park out by the interstate, moving into a dream home on five acres in the country, all reflect the cycle of growth and development. The question for the Louisville region is what it can learn from faster-growing communities that have already traversed the path it is following.

Unbalanced growth holds the potential to undermine the quality of life and sense of community that are valued aspects of Louisville’s identity. Inadequate infrastructure – roads, sewers, and schools – burden public systems and taxpayers. Allowing some areas to be “left behind” as jobs and people move out undermines the vitality of the entire community.

Suburban growth and development are altering the shape of the Louisville region day by day. Complementing those forces with robust investment and incentives to level the playing field between urban and suburban areas can help restore healthy markets and counterbalance the outward push.

Beginning to think and act like a region can help Louisville shape its destiny – preserve what it values and avoid undermining its quality of life.

Bottom Line
Balance Growth to Protect Quality of Life