Sussex County Council will review Cool Spring Crossing Tuesday, Nov. 4. If approved, the proposed development would add 1,922 homes, multiple businesses, more than 5,600 new residents and 33,359 more daily car trips to rural Sussex County on Route 9 at Hudson and Cool Spring roads. State and county records show at least 22 other new developments, bringing another 6,200 homes and 14,800 residents, that are also proposed within five miles of Cool Spring. That’s more than 8,000 new homes and 20,000 new residents added to that area.
The factual problem we confront has not changed: Population growth in Sussex County brought by unregulated and poorly planned property development is exceeding limits on natural and municipal resources.
That includes emergency response, medical providers, traffic capacity and emergency evacuation routes, school classrooms and places to put treated sewage. Not to mention paving of fields and forests, which provide farmland, control runoff and tidal flooding, clean and cool the air, and underpin the environment humans also depend on.
Developers have lately acquired some bad habits in justifying these unsupportable plans: One is to assert that they’re championing affordable housing by claiming their projects provide it. Yet at Northstar, three miles east of Cool Spring, only about 11% of the 852 planned residences are affordable housing.
At Cool Spring, 175 of 700 rental residences will be part of the government-supported Sussex County Rental Program. The other 75% are described as market-rate workforce housing. That sounds funny, since workers who need affordable housing can’t afford local market-rate rents (or the 1,222 single-family homes which constitute the rest of the project).
Their other bad habit is to embrace planned communities, but to threaten that if those aren’t approved, they can always build sprawl at two homes to the acre instead. The developers of the Atlantic Fields shopping center proposed for Route 24 recently said as much. The developers of Cool Spring have a backup plan to build 1,200 single-family homes if their current 1,922-home proposal isn’t approved. Both are sprawl.
For some, overdevelopment signifies growth and progress, and shows that we're affluent. But they’re a vocal minority: feeling good doesn’t change facts, and we’re all supposed to pay for it with increased taxes and demolition of our coveted coastal lifestyle. Attend the Sussex County Council meeting on Cool Spring and tell your elected representatives “no sale.”
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