Relentless growth transforms Lakes

TRAVERSE CITY -- Drive a few minutes in any direction and the transformation here is obvious. Houses spring up out of old cornfields and orchards; shopping centers materialize next to them. Every year brings more people, more houses, more cars and more roads, changing the landscape relentlessly.

For years, scientists from the United States and Canada who study the Lakes have given them a mixed bill of health; they have neither fully relapsed into nor recovered from the infirmities inflicted over more than two centuries of unchecked growth. Some of the threats to the Lakes' health have subsided. But others, including ceaseless development, continue to put the Great Lakes in peril.

More people than ever, 34 million at last count, live around the Great Lakes. On the United States side of the Lakes alone, another 123,000 people moved into neighborhoods bordering the shore between 1990 and 2000, an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data shows.

Big as that number seems, development still has consumed less than a tenth of the 295,000-square-mile land mass that drains into the Lakes. But that small sliver takes a big toll on the water, one that is multiplying along with houses and roads and shopping malls that swallow more land every year. Studies of the Lakes' health over the past decade repeatedly list development as a leading concern.

"Development is one of the largest threats to the region as a whole and the ongoing health of the Great Lakes," Emily Green, the Sierra Club's Great Lakes program director, said flatly.

• Lawn fertilizers and pesticides roll into the Lakes every time it rains. So do gasoline and even tiny flakes of copper, toxic to fish, that grind off cars' brakes. As more people spread out to more places, everyday pollution comes with them. Rain inevitably pushes it into sewer pipes, streams and the Great Lakes.

• More hard surfaces -- such as parking lots, which don't let rain seep slowly into the ground -- put more pressure on sewer systems that already are struggling to keep untreated waste out of the Lakes. Downpours routinely overwhelm plants, sending sewage into the water and making swimming unsafe.

• Wetlands have been drained or simply bulldozed to make room for development. Those areas play an important role because the plants there can help filter pollution out of the water, as well as provide a spawning area for fish and other wildlife. Studies suggest two-thirds of the region's wetlands have disappeared since 1800.

• Hardened shorelines -- areas reinforced with concrete and stone by cities, marinas and homeowners -- have changed how water flows in the Lakes, increasing erosion in some spots and interfering with natural beach creation in others.

"It's like the death of 1,000 cuts. Add them up over the years and it has an impact," Ken Smith groaned as he steered his car on a winding tour of the gas stations, restaurants and apartments pressing outward from Traverse City, consuming forests and farmland.

He jabbed his finger toward one after another. "Look at this. It looks the same as anywhere else," he said. "It's the sprawling of America, right here in the vacation land of the Midwest."

Smith is the head of a volunteer environmental group in Traverse City that has protested and sued for more than a decade to block some developments and modify others. Sometimes they've won. But even in the corner of the Great Lakes widely credited with having some of the region's toughest development restrictions, growth has been steady and relentless, as have the accompanying battles about balancing the economic boom it provides against environmental concerns.

In the past six years alone, more than $1 billion worth of new homes and shopping centers were erected in the county.

There's little doubt pollution has come with them. "I don't think that anybody seriously needs proof that development hurts water quality," Smith said.

Clouds of it so big they can be seen from space streak out into Lake Erie every year, thick enough that in some areas the water almost looks as if it's been dyed green.

"There are places where the wind blows this stuff in and you'd think there's paint floating on the surface of the water," said David Culver, an Ohio State University zoologist who studies algae in the lake.

Algae feed on phosphorus that's flushed into the water by farms and sewers -- even some dishwasher detergents. Levels in Lake Erie have dropped since the 1970s, Culver said. Now they're increasing again.

"The idea is that the lake is definitely in much better shape than it was in the '70s," he said. "The frustrating thing is that after improving for a long time it seems to be going back in the wrong direction."

That's the way it usually works, said Gail Gruenwald, executive director of the Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council, which monitors water issues in northern Michigan. Science often can't trace problems in the water back to specific sources on land or break down how much is caused by development and how much by other factors.

"Carving out what piece development is of the whole pie is a very hard thing to do," she said.

The effects of sprawl even miles inland can reach down long tributaries to harm the Lakes, and they almost never trace back to any single house, road or strip mall. But multiply that house by the thousands of others built every year, and environmentalists say it amounts to a significant threat.

"It can be pollution that runs off properties, or if you've got a lawn and you fertilize it and you get fertilizers and pesticides moving into local tributaries. It's the loss of vegetation. It's the energy demand. It's the water needed to support that house. There are lots of things," said Cameron Davis, executive director of the Alliance for the Great Lakes.

"It's not just a matter of any one house. It's that times 10,000 in any given year."

A changed landscape
Development and industry have imperiled a great ecosystem.

Development's effects
Where are the lakes, where do people live, and where are the pollution hot-spots?

Then & Now
Compare aerial photos from past and present

Bulldozers and backhoes began tearing three years ago at a muddy patch of ground behind Vern Wolfgram's house in Elk Rapids, a postcard vacation town pinned to a narrow strip of land up the coast from Traverse City, between Elk Lake and Grand Traverse Bay. The plan was to build two dozen houses. The problem, regulators said later, was the developer wanted to put them in the middle of a protected wetland.

"They're going to come and make a buck and leave the village with 30 acres of pristine land that's going to be duplexes," Wolfgram grumbled. "It's going to be trash."

For now, it's just an empty stretch of dirt and weeds. It's been that way since 2002, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers halted work on the development. Before it can resume, the agency said, at least some of the wetlands that were filled in will have to be restored.

The developer, Bill Clous, is one of the biggest home builders in Traverse City. He's also been something of a magnet for complaints about development's environmental toll. Last year, he paid the state a $140,000 penalty to settle allegations of wetland and soil erosion violations on another piece of land he owns in a town outside Traverse City. He settled another case over erosion on the same piece of land for $75,000.

Clous said he did not want to be interviewed. "The misconception that he went in and slashed the earth is folly," said his lawyer, Matthew Vermetten. "We want to impact the least amount of wetlands possible. That was our focus in putting this development together."

They're still battling over what to do next. Still, Wolfgram sighed, the writing's on the wall. "It's going to get built ... and all the pollution from it's going to get forced into the bay," he said. "In 30 years, you're not going to be swimming in the bay."

Development around the Great Lakes is hardly new. If anything, it's ubiquitous, from the cottages perched on sandy bluffs that look down on Lake Michigan to the vast gray expanses of concrete and steel around Detroit, Chicago, Toronto and the other factory towns that grew up along the shore. But now it's getting much, much bigger.

The area covered by buildings and roads in Michigan is on pace to nearly triple between 1980 and 2040, a recent study by the policy research firm Public Sector Consultants concluded. Much of the growth will be near the Great Lakes' shores, in areas that are now largely undeveloped.

The transformation is already apparent in coastal towns from Minnesota to northern New York, and even in places like Eagle Harbor, a remote outpost on Michigan's Lake Superior shoreline, three hours from Marquette. The town's population more than tripled in the 1990s, to 281. Its first subdivision went in a few years ago.

Few communities can stop development. Most wouldn't, even if they could. In a region battered by a changing economy, building things has remained a consistent economic bright spot. But as more houses and stores follow more people to the shoreline, some towns are starting to put up limits, afraid that subdivisions will overtake the open spaces that drew people there in the first place. If it has an environmental benefit, they say, so much the better.

In Peninsula Township, an 18-mile finger poked into Grand Traverse Bay, taxpayers recently agreed to spend nearly $30 million buying up development rights to thousands of acres of cherry orchards and vineyards that roll over the peninsula's low hills. The pace of home building on the peninsula hasn't changed much since the 1970s.

"If we hadn't done this, it would be a line of subdivisions, just coming north up the road," Rob Manigold, the town's supervisor, said, standing in a shaded corner of his farm one morning next to his shaker, a big yellow contraption he uses to grip his cherry trees and jostle their fruit loose into a sort of upturned umbrella.

Then he swung his arm around in a wide arc. Aside from the house and the barn, the view is mostly of rows of cherry trees and grapevines, sweltering in the July sun. He sold the development rights to most of the land to the town; most of his neighbors did, too.

"You should be able to come back in 100 years and it's going to look the same," he said, aiming his finger past the fields, ticking off the few patches of land where new homes will still be allowed.

He counts room for five, maybe six, more. That means the rest will go up somewhere else.

John L. Russell / Special to The Detroit News

Peninsula Township supervisor Rob Manigold and his neighbors sold land development rights to the township, which is limiting the amount of growth.