Comments on development in Sussex

I’ve been watching development proceed in the Sussex shore area for 30 years and have been following recent public conversation about it. I have a few comments:

Property rights are not absolute. Our properties coexist in shared space, and use shared natural resources. These include water supply, sewage and runoff capacity, and space for human resources like housing, transportation, businesses and public services, agriculture, recreation and wild (undeveloped) land.

These resources are finite. Sussex County now wants to purchase the unused capacity of Rehoboth’s ocean discharge pipe for treated sewage, because of the county’s increasing sewage production. The Route 1 traffic corridor is a place to avoid throughout much of the year, and now that same congestion is spreading inland. New DelDOT roundabouts are the tail on the dog, and don’t address the larger question of how much traffic is too much. What is the carrying capacity of the land here, and when will continuing population growth and housing development exceed it?

Behind all this is the reality of sea-level rise. This has been measured for decades; simulators like the one at ss2.climatecentral.org show what land in the shore area is at risk from sea-level rise of even 1 or 2 feet. Across the East Coast, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of real estate will become worthless as sea-level rise continues, and Delaware has its piece of that.

We can learn from the Dutch, who have worked to keep the ocean from drowning them and their land for hundreds of years. After spending the second half of the 20th century building barriers to stop tidal flooding, they’ve realized that you can’t stop tidal floodwaters, you can only divert them from a place you care about, to one you don’t. This strategy includes a notion of “managed retreat” from some areas which we will have to follow here too, as storm surges inundate land and roadways with increasing frequency. Making strategic choices now about where to develop or not, and how to shape the landscape to reduce the impact of tidal surge, will pay off in the long term.

Beyond the physical limits that the land imposes on development, there’s a qualitative choice confronting all Sussex residents, new and old: Together we need to build a shared vision of how we want our community to look. We often hear proclamations that further development is inevitable, and demands from metropolitan transplants that a progressive community is one where the latest and finest amenities are conveniently available. But the northeast metroplex of endless suburban housing developments and strip malls is a congested sterile zone and should not be extended anywhere, least of all to an ecologically fragile ocean shore area. Continuing development directly degrades the very qualities that attract residents and also vacationers to this area.

The forces of nature will inform us with increasing frequency, what is actually inevitable. The outdated notion that progress consists of an ever-growing human footprint, was discarded 50 years ago as a failure because it obviously ruined the environment we all depend on. Rather, progress and progressive communities are about understanding that resources are finite and that we are stewards and stakeholders of them, and need to understand their limits before exploiting them. We hope that local government will help implement this modern standard here via regulation, legislation and enforcement.