DYSPEPSIANA | James Krohe Jr.

A seven-member team of urban paramedics known as a Sustainable Design Assessment Team recently spent three days touring Springfield’s city center, greater downtown Springfield. They were charged to recommend steps to enliven that district that will not require the city to make drastic changes. Of course, drastic changes are exactly what the city’s development practices need, but as I always strive to be helpful, I here make a non-drastic recommendation to city hall that will help downtown even though it isn’t specifically about downtown: Make fiscal fairness the basis of future development decisions in all parts of the city.

For decades, urbanist critics have asked whether converting perfectly good cornfields into perfectly awful strip malls and subdivisions enjoys unfair cost advantages over building and rehabbing in the already built-up parts of a city. Those averse to wonkery should keep in mind that this is not a question only of economics. Privileging development in certain parts of the city, or certain kinds of development anywhere in the city, privileges the people who live in or profit from such development.

Do fringe-area developments enjoy unfair cost advantages in Springfield? To answer that question, the public needs city hall to answer many other questions first. What are the perunit public costs to provide off-site infrastructure such as electrical lines or sewer and water mains in low-density and high-density residential developments? To developments on the fringe of the urbanized area and in-town sites? Most water and sewer agencies, for example, price their services by averaging the costs to supply them to various classes of customer. It costs more money to pump water to new properties built four miles from the treatment plants than it does a house that is only a half-mile away. However, the owners of both properties usually pay the same rate, so that customers in

older, built-up areas in effect subsidize their new neighbors on the fringe of town. Is that the case in greater Springfield?

Neighborhood parks or fire stations benefit only those who use them. A few other cities levy a special fee to cover the cost of building new fire stations on properties intended to be served by them, for a set number of years after construction. Many Illinois cities have for years been demanding exactions or fees from local developers to pay for new neighborhood parks