Costs to our Community

Wealthy developers continue their efforts to Double Dixon, adding 10,000 new homes, destroying prime farmland and our small town charm.

Suburban sprawl will cost our community.  

Studies have documented the true costs of poor land use decisions by local officials. Dixon residents should be aware of how suburban sprawl could change our community forever. 

While wealthy developers line their pockets, the public pays for bad land use decisions. When local governments annex land to build housing that is not needed, natural resources like prime agricultural land are degraded.

• Per capita infrastructure costs can increase significantly when suburban sprawl expands, ultimately pulling public funds away from existing neighborhoods, harming communities and endangering our future.
• Adding 10,000 new homes will increase the amount of truck and car traffic, resulting in more climate-disrupting carbon pollution in Dixon and making our roads less safe.
• Sprawl developments increase the area of impervious surface, meaning rainwater and moisture is unable to soak into the soil. This will also decrease retention time for rain water and diminish rainwater’s infiltration into the soil. It also leads to rapid erosion and structural degradation of streams and rivers. All of these set-up our community for a potential catastrophe when we have unseasonably high amounts of rainfall. 
• Studies and the outcomes from other developments show that suburban sprawl can hurt existing communities, putting a burden on the local government and taxpayers to potentially cover additional costs, and creating a vicious cycle of inefficient and inequitable public investment that significantly weakens existing services.

Local governments need to shift toward investing in existing communities and better account for the public cost when approving new sprawl development.

To learn more about the costs of suburban sprawl on communities like Dixon please visit: https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/urban/pdfs/The-True-Cost-of-Sprawl-report.pdf