Hurricane Debby Reveals Hazards of the Suburban Development Pattern
National Guard rescuing people in Live Oak, Florida, after Hurricane Debby. (Source: The National Guard on Wikimedia.)
Sarasota County, Florida, was hit hard by Hurricane Debby, which dumped more than a foot of rain as it passed through the Gulf of Mexico as a tropical storm. The resulting flooding made national news, as people were seen being rescued by boat from homes inundated by several feet of water.
But there’s something that makes this different from a typical hurricane-hits-coastal-city story: Most of the flooded areas were nowhere near the ocean. Instead, their flooding was the result of a pattern of land use that clones the economically perilous suburban experiment and ignores local geography and ecology.
Check out this map shared by the county as it alerted residents to the floodplain of the Myakka River, which was slated to crest from the record rainfall in its basin:
The yellow rectangle indicates the floodplain of the Myakka River.
While the map helpfully illustrates which areas may be vulnerable to river flooding, it reveals so much more. The only difference between the land to the east of the river and the west is development pressure, as the city of Venice swells east from the ocean and the fast-growing county expands southward.
This land used to house low-intensity agriculture and horse farms, which provided a natural buffer from flooding cycles and Florida’s tropical rainfalls. Housing developments — most of them built in the last 30 years — covered those areas with impermeable surfaces interspersed with artificial retaining ponds. Instead of absorbing water from intense storms, each new development increases runoff and imperils the next one (there was even a case of residents suing a developer over the flood threat an adjacent development posed to their neighborhood).
The map also reveals serious flaws in transportation planning. The red line at the top is Interstate 75. The black line at the bottom is U.S. 41, a local stroad. The patchwork of private roads between them funnels traffic into arterials, resulting in more friction points and more congested intersections. And because almost all of the housing shown on this map is in developments zoned only for residential, every resident has to use those roads for every errand. Local bicyclists also complain that all east-west travel is perilous because you can’t escape the unprotected bike lanes to ride on neighborhood streets.
Just to the left of the river on the map (partly covered by the yellow line indicating the flood basin) is River Road. It was once a rural road adjacent to riverside parks and scattered homesites. Now it’s a vital north-south route serving as the terminus for several surface streets from adjacent housing developments. It’s also a hurricane evacuation route that connects communities to the south with the interstate. And it’s prone to localized flooding.
So what does the county plan to do? Expand River Road and approve more housing developments. At the current rate, everything you see on the west side of the river will be cut and pasted on the east side within the next 20 years, and the number of residents affected by these flood warnings will double.
The saddest part is that the county has great examples of the traditional development pattern in the cities of Sarasota and Venice. Both were laid out in a grid in the 1920s and have compact, walkable downtowns with commercial and residential development. As a result, both have higher land values than the surrounding developments and strong, diverse tax bases able to support the services they require (such as the lift stations needed to divert the ever-increasing rainfall).
Sarasota County and almost all of its neighboring counties have gone all in on a suburban pattern that’s tantamount to a Ponzi scheme. They could use the stress test Hurricane Debby provided as an opportunity to change course.
Ben Abramson is a Staff Writer at Strong Towns. In his career as a travel journalist with The Washington Post and USA TODAY, Ben has visited many destinations that show how Americans were once world-class at building appealing, prosperous places at a human scale. He has also seen the worst of the suburban development pattern, and joined Strong Towns because of its unique way of framing the problems we can all see and intuit, and focusing on local, achievable solutions. A native of Washington, DC, Ben lives in Venice, Florida; summers in Atlantic Canada; and loves hiking, biking, kayaking, and beachcombing.