Preservation Efforts Studied

Reprinted courtesy of the Chicago Tribune

A nightmare vision of a green and inviting world gone gray with concrete and festering with neon lighting is something that haunts every urban planner as he attempts to balance open spaces and places for people to live.

The threat is a real one. Each year, the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission estimates that 33,000 acres — an area larger than Boston, Buffalo, Minneapolis, or San Francisco — is gobbled up for building new structures, roads, and parking lots in the six-county metropolitan area.

This situation is the result of a series of forces acting on society. These represent a complete spectrum of mankind's problems, including such factors as the social, economic, political, and the philosophical.

The latter is one not to be taken lightly. The coming of the 20th century found America having a passionate love affair with technological processes.

The affair had far-reaching implications for this country and the world. Never before in history had there been such natural abundance and such rapidly-advancing technology to exploit it.

These factors and the political, social, and economic upheavals of two world wars resulted in the squandering of treasure and the cutting down of entire generations of young in England and Europe. America thus became the richest and most powerful nation on the face of the earth.

Faced with this awe-inspiring reality, we reacted with pardonable egotism. What was old was despised in the name of progress — fit only to be demolished or thrown away. What was new, regardless of how costly, how ugly, how ultimately damaging to the quality of life, was pursued with an inventive frenzy unparalleled in history.

The results were staggering. We got automobiles, radios and television sets, new homes, high wages, and babies. In so doing, we despoiled our land and polluted our skies and waters. We also got and were hurt by the hateful envy of the rest of the world.

Our problems were dealt with in traditional fashion by simply walking away from them. Like the pioneer abandoning a used-up tract for greener fields, we turned our backs on the things that bothered us most.

Lemming-like, we scurried from cities of well-built housing and lovely parks when confronted by violence and racial change. We fled to shoddily constructed tract houses on poorly drained land accessible only by even more shoddily constructed automobiles and felt ourselves secure.

But instead, the feeling of security was replaced with a sense of uneasiness — as if something was very, very wrong.

A time for rethinking came and much of what was accepted on faith as being good was seen to be less than that. That which had suffered most in our country was the quality of life. Something was gone from it — a sense of closeness and warmth.

A solution is being sought by men and women who see the necessity for creating more open lands for public use. They have concluded that despite the cultural amenities of cities, it is greenery and openness that nourishes the spirit.

One of these groups is the Open Lands Project, a private group which has prepared a report on open space trends in the six-county area.

Their report contains some disturbing information, namely that the increasing cost and shortness of supply of open land makes the creation of public space more and more difficult.

The study, which is based on an examination of trends in open space in northeastern Illinois in the past 10 years, shows that, in terms of open space per capita, the City of Chicago ranks 10th among the 10 largest U.S. cities. The same ration holds true for the six-county area when compared to the 10 largest metropolitan areas in the country.

From the Council on Environmental Quality, Open Lands Project researchers learned that one million acres of prime agricultural lands throughout the country are converted to urban development each year, while here in northeastern Illinois 33,000 acres of agricultural, vacant, and forest lands are similarly lost.

Forest Preserve and Local Park District Inventory
COUNTY	Forest preserve acreage 1977	Local park district acreage 1977	Total acreage of forest preserves & park districts 1977	Population 1976	Acres per 1000 population
Cook	64,863	13,675	78,538	5,344,400	14.70
DuPage	14,047	2,887	16,934	558,000	30.34
Kane	2,812	2,032	4,844	270,300	17.92
Lake	9,025	3,004	12,029	406,000	29.63
McHenry	1,960	753	2,713	128,000	21.06
Will	2,391	2,638	5,029	298,900	16.82
TOTAL	95,098	24,989	120,087	7,006,400	17.14
NOTE: Does not include state parks or private clubs and golf courses estimated at 25% of total open space. Source: Open Lands Protect

Illinois Parks and Recreation 10 September/October, 1979

The purpose of the OLP study was to learn whether preservation efforts were keeping pace with these rates of development.

The study focused on the activities of the Forest Preserve Districts of Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, and Will counties and the McHenry County Conservation District.

These six counties suffer intense development pressures.

By the same token, the pressures in the metropolitan area create the greatest demand for open space. It is this dilemma that planners and governments have tried to resolve.

The OLP asked officials of the six districts how much land had been acquired in each of the last 10 years, how land costs have changed, and how many individual acquisitions have been made. The study also looked for changes in population and jurisdictions.

These same questions were posted to a sampling of local park districts and then a comparison was made with other cities and metropolitan areas throughout the country.

Although figures obtained by the study contain a margin of error because complete information was not always available, OLP officials feel that they indicate important trends.

The five Forest Preserve Districts and the McHenry County Conservation District have between them acquired 30,074 acres of land in the last 10 years.

DuPage County undertook the greatest amount of acquisition activity, accounting for 35 percent of the region's forest preserve acquisitions, with Cook County close behind at 27 percent.

The costs of land acquired by the Cook County Forest Preserve District rose 438 percent in the 10-year period, with Lake County's rising 371 percent.

Not only have the costs of land risen, but taxpayers are becoming increasingly sensitive to huge budgets by government agencies. This, coupled with a lessening of potential open space in counties such as Cook and DuPage where urbanized land predominates, compounds the problems of open space acquisition.

To buy land, the six districts have paid $130,030,704 during the past 10 years. Much of this money is raised through the issue of general obligation bonds by the districts and paid for through property taxes.

Federal dollars also have an impact on open space acquisition, as the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LAWCON) has provided $41,448,000 to the six counties in the last 10 years. LAWCON is administered through the Illinois Department of Conservation and the fund derives its revenue from off-shore oil leases.

The OLP study says that the potential for acquiring large, contiguous tracts of land diminishes as fragmentary urban development increases. In four cases out of five, the average size of acquisitions by the districts has decreased.

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Illinois Parks and Recreation 11 September/October, 1979

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The information supplied to the OLP by local park districts was very limited. The smaller local districts are usually not as well staffed and organized as the larger Forest Preserve Districts, and they do not have the resources available for maintaining detailed statistics. Available information, however, indicates that land preservation progress has been slow.

The park districts chosen for study were in Cook County — the most developed in the region. Each of the park districts surveyed had to cope with lower bonding capacities than the Forest Preserve Districts, greater land values within their boundaries, and, recently, more political pressure to limit taxing.

As a result of these considerations, the park districts have had more obstacles to overcome.

The OLP study showed that during the past 10 years, the park districts have acquired land more slowly, erratically, and at higher costs than the Forest Preserve Districts.

With fewer financial resources available and greater land costs, the local park districts surveyed have not achieved substantial gains in acquiring public space within their jurisdictions, the study said.

While numbers are useful in describing amounts and quantities of open space, they do not give any impression of the quality of the areas preserved or how each contributes to the region's quality of life.

Open space is needed as breathing space, as space for recreation, and for the preservation of esthetic and scenic values.

The impression of the OLP researchers who conducted the study was that the forest preserve, conservation, and local park districts have improved the quality of open space in the region.

However, the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission has set a goal of preserving at least 33 acres of public open space for each 1,000 residents in the six-county area.

The region is very slowly approaching that figure, but as the population of the region increases, so will developments and hence the need to preserve more open space to keep pace.

The conclusion of the study by OLP is that, although the acquisition of public land over the last 10 years has been significant, as more and more of the region is built up, the opportunities for preservation diminish.

With land costs rising and government budgets shrinking, alternatives must be found to make up the deficit. One of these is the role of the private sector in preservation.

Donations of land will increase in importance, and these gifts, made to private, non-profit organizations, can give the donor significant tax advantages.

The hard facts are that unless the question of land preservation is attacked vigorously by both government and the private sector, there might not be adequate open space for future generations.

The bounty of nature is man's greatest gift to his children, but if squandered, it becomes an empty heritage.

Illinois Parks and Recreation 36 September/October, 1979