my land was not developed so I cannot blame an architect. Bought through bank loan where lawyer was issued by the bank. I also cannot blame them coz i feel they did due diligence. The seller seems clean too.. The rot at kajiado lands office is what i squarely blame

my land was not developed so I cannot blame an architect. Bought through bank loan where lawyer was issued by the bank. I also cannot blame them coz i feel they did due diligence. The seller seems clean too.. The rot at kajiado lands office is what i squarely blame

In the 1970s, Portland, Oregon, was the first major city in the United States to establish smart-growth urban planning by limiting urban growth to an area around the inner city.11 Since the 1990s, many other urban areas have encouraged the development of planned communities in which people can live, shop, work, go to school, worship, and recreate without having to travel great distances by automobile. An example of one of these planned communities is Southern Village, situated on 300 acres south of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Launched in 1996, Southern Village features apartments, townhouses, single-family homes, and a conveniently located town center with a grocery store, restaurants, shops, a movie theater, a dry cleaner, common areas, offices, health care services, a farmer's market, a day-care center, an elementary school, and a church. Southern Village is a walkable community with sidewalks on both sides of the streets and a 1.3-mile greenway running through the middle of town. Southern Village residents have access to mass transit via Chapel Hill's bus system and can enjoy free outdoor concerts in the common areas. More than 3000 people live in Southern Village.25

Urban sprawl has occurred largely because land owners and developers have made choices that promote their own economic and personal interests, which do not necessarily coincide with the public good.18.25 Many community leaders have found it necessary to engage in centralized urban planning to promote smart growth.11 Various laws and regulations can help to control land use and development. One of the most useful land-use policy tools is to change zoning laws to promote mixed-use development.18 Zoning laws that forbid commercial development in residential areas promote sprawl because they require residents to travel greater distances to buy groceries, shop for clothes, and so on. Zoning laws can also be written to encourage high-density development and to require sidewalks and bike lanes.

Urban sprawl is loosely defined as low-density residential, and sometimes commercial, development that is outside the borders of higher density urban centers. Urban sprawl communities are typically automobile-oriented as opposed to pedestrian-friendly. Planners, scholars, community activists and public officials all offer numerous possibilities as to the causes of urban sprawl.
Lack of Comprehensive Planning
The Planners Web Sprawl Guide suggests that little to no regional planning is one of the major causes of urban sprawl. If officials in densely populated urban centers plan in isolation without consulting nearby communities, the result is sometimes poorly planned developments on the outskirts of urban centers. Instead of bridging the existing infrastructure and amenities of surrounding communities, these less densely populated areas often incur new public expenses for infrastructure improvements without regard to a regional plan or pooled resources. A regional plan would anticipate the growth of new areas and gradually execute the necessary planning initiatives to create a cohesive community.

In its path, sprawl consumes thousands of acres of forests and farmland, woodlands and wetlands. It requires government to spend millions extra to build new schools, streets and water and sewer lines. In its wake, sprawl leaves boarded up houses, vacant storefronts, closed businesses, abandoned and often contaminated industrial sites, and traffic congestion stretching miles from urban centers. There are over 700,000 kilometers of roads connecting urban areas within the Mid-Atlantic region! As a result, we suffer from increased traffic congestion, longer commutes, increased dependence on fossil fuels, crowded schools, worsening air and water pollution, threatened surface and ground water supplies, lost open space and wetlands, increased flooding, destroyed wildlife habitat, higher taxes, and dying city centers.

Moreover, sprawl is creating a hidden debt of unfunded infrastructure and services, social dysfunction, urban decay and environmental degradation. Despite the fact that Prince William County, Va., in metropolitan Washington, DC, has the highest property tax rate in the state of Virginia, the cost of providing services to new developments is so high, the county is experiencing a $1,688 shortfall for every new house built.

Perhaps more important is the loss of community: People visiting with one another on front porches; neighbors helping neighbors; everyone keeping an eye on each other's children. This simply cannot happen on 5 acre lots where people live for years without ever knowing their neighbors!

Now we are running out of greener pastures and many Americans consider urban sprawl to be the fastest growing threat to their local environment and quality of life. They are starting to question the wisdom of growing faster than infrastructures can support or service. They are starting to recognize that decades of road building have yet to and may never alleviate traffic congestion. Some communities that once welcomed development with open arms now consider the cost of lost farm land not worth the benefits of a new strip mall.

The biggest problem, though, is that any ideas for coping with sprawl have always run up against local politics, racial tensions, history and, not least, geography. Georgia is made up of a large number of tiny counties: the Atlanta metro area contains 13 of them, and the extended metro area no fewer than 20. These cling to their political autonomy, which, as they see it, includes total control over local transport. Race complicates the picture. Because the metro area's population is 26% black, the whiter counties have long avoided anything that might bring them any closer to the black core. That is the real reason why links to MARTA (which was said in its early days to stand for “Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta”) have been resisted and why, even in a much more tolerant city, people in the outlying suburbs stick doggedly to their cars.

Furthermore, on a visit to New York City, he was struck by the apparent paradox that the poor in that long-established city were much worse off than the poor in less developed California. These observations supplied the theme and title for his 1879 book Progress and Poverty, which was a great success, selling over 3 million copies. In it George made the argument that a sizeable portion of the wealth created by social and technological advances in a free market economy is possessed by land owners and monopolists via economic rents, and that this concentration of unearned wealth is the main cause of poverty. George considered it a great injustice that private profit was being earned from restricting access to natural resources while productive activity was burdened with heavy taxes, and indicated that such a system was equivalent to slavery – a concept somewhat similar to wage slavery. This is also the work in which he made the case for a "land tax" in which governments would tax the value of the land itself, thus preventing private interests from profiting upon its mere possession, but allowing the value of all improvements made to that land to remain with investors.[16][17]


Henry George later in life
George was in a position to discover this pattern, having experienced poverty himself, knowing many different societies from his travels, and living in California at a time of rapid growth. In particular he had noticed that the construction of railroads in California was increasing land values and rents as fast as or faster than wages were rising.[13][18]