James Rowen: Sprawlville for the rich is Waukesha County's future

James Rowen's recent op-ed piece for the Capital Times:

Sprawlville for the rich is Waukesha County's future

James Rowen
July 6, 2007

A friend whom we hadn't seen in a while suggested we come to Fort Atkinson for a visit, so we decided to drive the "back way," using Highway 18 from Milwaukee, to both enjoy the scenery and avoid the demoralizing sprawl corridor that runs west from Milwaukee on Interstate 94 to Johnson Creek.

So we picked up Highway 18 at Brookfield, worked our way through the city of Waukesha, and headed west toward Jefferson County.

It's my duty to report that like its interstate big sister a few miles north, the two-lane blacktop of Highway 18 through Waukesha County is now just another road to Sprawlville.

What you can't miss upon leaving the Waukesha city limits are subdivisions, some incomplete, but changing the landscape nonetheless.

In "Oakmont," houses are in various stages of construction, as are some homes in "Woodland Hills" across the road on the north side of Highway 18.

The houses in Woodland Hills are indeed near some woods and hills, but many of the subdivision trees, lined up along the edge of some of the lots, were yet to be planted, their root balls wrapped in burlap.

Farther to the west, it wasn't uncommon to see a new, lone house atop a ridge, suggesting that there might be more down the back slope, tucked into the hilly Kettle Moraine.

There were still barns and cornfields along Highway 18, but these vestiges of Waukesha's rural past are getting more difficult to successfully farm, I'm told by county residents, because the once-contiguous farmland has been bisected and chopped by subdivision streets and big-lot driveways.

A billboard on one available parcel north of the highway on the way to Jefferson County offers 209 acres for sale.

That's a hefty parcel. With lots and houses routinely in the $500,000-and-up range, 209 acres is worth more than $100 million when built up.

And build they will.

Nearer to the Jefferson County line, and offering a bookend to the subdivisions closer to the Waukesha city limits to the east, there's an 81-house development, part of a larger project called "The Settlement," which is partially completed in a field just south of Highway 18.

A few months ago, Dan Vrakas, the Waukesha County executive, said in a Milwaukee radio interview (and confirmed in an e-mail he sent me) that he expects the population of Waukesha County to hit 520,000 "someday."

In 2000, the Waukesha County population was 361,000, according to the Census Bureau.

And even with all those subdivisions popping up on roads that run north, south, east and west across Waukesha County, you wonder: Where are they going to put all those people?

Multifamily housing might make sense, don't you think? Multi-units, with fewer acres of lawn watering and fertilizing per resident, could take some pressure off the land and the water table, too.

That's not in the cards for Waukesha County.

Many suburbs prohibit apartment buildings, and communities have used their zoning powers to discourage people with low to moderate incomes from putting down roots altogether by mandating that houses of the single-family variety be built on large (read: expensive) lots.

And don't look to regional planners to bring housing sanity or diversity to Sprawlville.

The Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission, of which Waukesha County is a member, and which bought an office in the heart of western Waukesha County's sprawl zone, hasn't written a housing plan for its seven-county region since 1975.

Which leaves action to the locals, a not altogether bad outcome in a democracy.

The good folks in Fort Atkinson, aware of approaching, encroaching sprawl, fought to block a Wal-Mart in their community and another in the neighboring city of Jefferson to give both cities walkable, traditional downtowns a better chance to survive.
Which helped us enjoy our day in Fort Atkinson.

After dinner, we walked from our friend's house near the downtown to get dessert at the Cafe Carpe, an eclectic, welcoming tavern, restaurant and music club on the Rock River.

That's where co-owner Kitty Welch still makes the world's best chocolate cake, and her husband, Bill Camplin, when not booking bands, is known to sing and play the guitar.

Sated, relaxed, we returned to Milwaukee, getting on I-94 far enough west to take a look at Pabst Farms, where a small city is being built on 1,600 acres of former Waukesha County farmland that will have nothing in common with its former identity except a name.

James Rowen is a Milwaukee writer and consultant who blogs at http://thepoliticalenvironment.blogspot.com/.