The Highlands
The regional significance of the New Jersey Highlands - and the threats that it faces - are now apparent. In accordance with the Food, Agriculture, Conservation and Trade Act of 1990, the USDA Forest Service documented its analysis in the 1992 New York-New Jersey Highlands Regional Study. With more than 800,000 acres in seven counties, the New Jersey Highlands provides drinking water for nearly four million New York and New Jersey residents. It contains critical contiguous forests which improve air quality and serve as habitat for a great diversity of species. The Highlands additionally offers farmland, historic sites and open space which attract more than eight million recreation visits per year. Yet the region faces extraordinary development pressure. With an expected 14% growth rate, an additional 32,000 acres of the Highlands will be developed in the next ten years alone. Such development can mean denigrated air and water quality, fragmented habitat, increased traffic congestion and corruption of the very character which draws so many people to the Highlands.

While the state, non-profit organizations, and the counties and municipalities of the Highlands have acquired tens of thousands of acres of land for preservation purposes, they and the Forest Service have noted that hundreds of thousands of acres more must be protected to preserve unfragmented forests, watersheds, species habitats and other critical ecosystems. However, many of these acres are owned by individuals, corporations or municipalities, and presently have no long-term legal protection. The Garden State Preservation Trust may be able to provide funds adequate to acquire and preserve much of this land. But this may be unrealistic. It therefore makes sense to look at how Highlands municipalities are planning for the future of these acres through their zoning, and how municipal land use plans compare with the land preservation goals of the Forest Service, the state and conservation organizations. In addition, it is useful to draw attention to the kind of buildout development forecasted for the region based on current municipal plans, as well as the impacts this development might have on the Highlands and the quality of life therein.

The Project
For the past nine months, the author has been working with the Environmental Defense Fund in an effort to encourage improved analysis in land use planning, focusing on the Highlands. Using GIS mapping and analysis, he has been able to provide planners and policy makers with a better means to judge development implications for the Highlands. By examining and comparing visual representations of critical parameters and buildout projections, threatened areas are highlighted and prioritized to better judge the future of the region. The author underscores, as a supplement to acquisition, the clustering of development in centers, as well as other “smart growth” actions municipalities and agencies can consider to protect the resources, benefits and character of the Highlands.

Planning begins at the local level with municipal zoning. Therefore, the zoning maps of every Highlands municipality were digitized to create a composite picture of municipal zoning throughout the Highlands. A municipality’s land use plan and zoning map are supposed to reflect its view of what its future land use is to be; in theory, the resulting composite zoning map reflects the cumulative vision for the future of the New Jersey Highlands. Much of the land in the Highlands is zoned for residential or commercial development, and much of the undeveloped residential land is zoned for low-density residential use, i.e., one unit per one, two, three, five or more acres. While this kind of zoning can reduce impacts on developed land, such low-density development necessarily uses more land and therefore has the potential to fragment larger tracts to accommodate the same number of households and people, resulting in sprawl.

But is the land use future shown in the composite zoning map in fact reflective of what these municipalities and their citizens really want? How does this zoned future of the Highlands compare to what the Forest Service, the State or conservation groups are seeking in terms of preservation of critical, large tracts of land? To answer these questions, the zoning maps were overlayed with a number of other geographic data sets: current land use/land cover, existing open space, federal and state conservation priority areas, and identified centers of development.

Future development scenarios
Based on the land use plans and zoning maps of all of the individual municipalities in the Highlands, it is possible to prepare potential development, or buildout scenarios for the region. This enables us to graphically look at the future as planned. The project has projected a range of future development scenarios based on municipal zoning, information about legally protected lands and current development. The purpose of these development scenarios is not to suggest what the pace of development might be based on various economic forecasts. Rather, it is to present a picture of what the Highlands could look like in the future, perhaps by 2020 or 2030, based on current zoning and other factors.

One could comment that the maximum buildout scenario overstates the maximum potential development because various environmental regulations, such as steep slope ordinances or wetland and wetland buffer regulations, will limit development. However, these regulations do not necessarily prohibit development; they are often challenged, and, in the case of municipal steep slope ordinances, they have in fact been successfully challenged. Still, our project offers development scenarios which project what various steep slope ordinances or wetland prohibitions, if universally applied throughout the Highlands, could achieve in terms of limiting potential development.

We also incorporate another factor that will affect the development potential of the Highlands: the pace of acquisition. Governor Whitman of New Jersey has proposed saving half of the remaining open space in New Jersey through the Garden State Preservation Trust. Whether the Trust will achieve this laudable goal is unclear; or, more specifically, whether it can be achieved in the Highlands is uncertain. However, some acquisition will undoubtedly take place. We use GIS to project what different levels of acquisition would look like in terms of changing the land use future of the Highlands.

In fact, using GIS, different plausible assumptions can be made and applied. Different assumptions regarding environmental constraints, acquisition rates and other factors can be overlayed to project different futures for the region. For example, the development of the Highlands with 25% acquisition of remaining unprotected open space, and excluding wetlands and areas with slopes greater than or equal to 25 degrees, or a 50% acquisition, and exclusion of wetlands and areas with 15 degree or greater slope, or any combination of such factors, can be shown. This technology has the potential to revolutionize land use planning by literally presenting any number of development visions. Current work includes projection-specific impact assessments, as well as the incorporation of our model in an interactive format which may soon be available online.