Why Should Delaware Care?
Sussex County’s booming growth is at odds with state planning officials, because it places an undue burden on state resources, including for schools, transportation and water. Affordable housing is also virtually zoned-out with single-family homes on large half-acre lots the norm.
Amid escalating population growth in Sussex County on the back of expansive housing development approvals, the top state planner told county leaders last week that the growth was “unsustainable” and would have adverse consequences.
More than 13,000 homes have been built in the southernmost county over the past five years, including many in large-scale communities that include 1,000 or more homes.
That has led to an increase of more than 32,000 residents in Sussex County, with 20,000 arriving during the COVID years of 2021 and 2022 when remote work proliferated and many sought a tax-friendly, beach-adjacent lifestyle.
About a quarter of that growth has come in areas that state planners have targeted in recent years for open space and farmland preservation, known as Level 4 lands.
The planning tiers, which were developed in 2008 to guide state resources toward development in areas that were prepared to serve residents with utilities, schools, roads and public safety, are only advisory though.
For more than a decade they helped to steer more development toward Levers 1, 2 and 3 – or urban, suburban and exurban areas with existing infrastructure and public services – with the percentage of building occurring in those tiers rising from about 75% to 82% between 2001 and 2015.
In the last five years, however, Sussex County has steadily ignored the preferences of state planners and approved thousands of new homes in Level 4 areas. It has issued 5,558 building permits in Level 4, compared to just 984 in Kent County and 344 in New Castle County.
“Sussex County is a large geographic area and there are insufficient funds to cover you if we are going to have development everywhere,” David Edgell, the director of the state’s Office of State Planning Coordination, told the Sussex County Council and Planning and Zoning Commission at a Feb. 25 meeting in Georgetown. “We provide a great deal of the resources, and we don’t want waste or inefficiency … We are not in agreement with this council’s plans.”
Development sprawls from towns
Sussex County has long been home to Delaware’s popular beach communities like Rehoboth Beach, Lewes and Bethany Beach, among others. But new enthusiasm around a Delaware lifestyle, particularly from retirees in areas like New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., where taxes are higher, has led to a rush on housing and new development sprawl.
Areas between the beaches and Georgetown that were long expanses of farm land for generations are now home to communities with hundreds or even thousands of newly built homes.
That trend has emerged in part because so much of Sussex County is zoned agricultural residential (AR-1), which allows for only two dwelling units per acre. Such a low density limit encourages homebuilders to construct as many single-family homes as possible on large plots of land.
“Level 4 suburban and coastal development means that sprawl is crowding out industry and farming here,” Edgell said. “These two-homes-per-acre lots are unsustainable.”
Some Sussex County officials pushed back on that assertion though.
“This seems like a ‘sky-is-falling’ scenario,” said Vince Robertson, the legal liaison for the planning and zoning team, who noted that the state projections don’t match the county’s numbers. “You just shared with us the large land mass [of Sussex County]. It seems like 6,500 acres of development over 15 years is a small number.”
Sussex County has nearly 600,000 acres in total.
Robertson also argued that the time for the state to offer guidance is during the development of Sussex County’s Comprehensive Plan, a decennial growth plan that is next due to be completed in 2028.
The newest members of the Sussex County Council believe in a more balanced approach. But one member pushed back on the notion that the county is taxing state resources.
“Many areas here in Sussex County are still ripe for development and that (land) should be obvious to the state. As state planners, you seem to have a real conflict with our needs for state highway planning and traffic engineering as you think about our local growth,” Councilman Steve McCarron (R2-Bridgeville) said.
County forms working group
Despite asserting their independence on land use decisions, the Sussex County Council also recognized that the public conservation on growth has shifted. Three new members were elected amid a wave of opposition to the pace of growth, and one publicly called for a year-long building moratorium in his first meeting on council.
Instead, the council agreed to form a 10-member working group comprised of homebuilders, land use advocates, farmers, and state and county officials to study the issue and propose reforms.
On Wednesday, the county announced that the members are:
- Jill Hicks, president of the Sussex Preservation Coalition,
- Mike Reimann with Becker Morgan and the American Council of Engineering Companies,
- Jon Horner with Schell Brothers and the Home Builders Association of Delaware
- Christophe Tulou, executive director of the Center for Inland Bays
- Jay Baxter, owner of Baxter Farms
- Caitlin Del Collo, chief strategy advisor for the Delaware State Housing Authority
- Matthew Padron, managing director of Völker, an affordable housing developer
- Doug Motley, of real estate firm Jack Lingo
- Mark Luszcz, chief engineer of the Delaware Department of Transportation
- and Edgell, of the Office of State Planning Coordination.
Advocates, towns press for constraint
Hicks, president of the Sussex Preservation Coalition, a recently formed group of local land use advocates, said that she hoped county leaders heard the concerns of planners and constituents.
“It is not that the sky is falling, it’s that people want change,” she said following Tuesday’s meeting. “The reason we have three new members of the county council is that over-development is affecting our quality of life here. People have had enough.”
Many of the county’s more than 25 local governments believe the state should do more to curb growth. Because the county does not have its own police or fire departments, the officers and crews from town departments often work outside of their jurisdictions to serve those in unincorporated areas.
South Bethany Mayor Edie Dondero believes curbing the growth is overdue and supported the creation of the work group.
“The rapid and relentless conversion of farmland and open space into housing developments, particularly in the southeastern portion of the county, has stressed our roads, schools, and services,” she said. “The explosion of new homes, many built on or near wetlands and floodplains, has had a detrimental impact on our inland bays. Developers have run roughshod over this county and residents have finally had enough.”
Tulou, of the Delaware Center for the Inland Bays, which advocates for ecosystem health of the Rehoboth Bay, Indian River Bay, and Little Assawoman Bay, was encouraged by state officials like Edgell speaking out. But Tulou, a former Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control under the Carper administration, said he wanted them to bring more to the table.
“It seems the state has pushed back on planning and we wonder what our state government has to offer for solutions. We are fighting for our lives down here,” he said. “We have to save our bays, wetlands and watershed in Sussex County.”
At Tuesday’s meeting, Edgell clearly sent that message that Sussex County must plan better, become more self-sufficient and curtail some development to allow state and local resources to catch up. He noted that Sussex is the only county in the state without a metropolitan planning organization, or nonprofit organizations that help to plan for future transportation needs and upgrades, and that puts additional strain on the Department of Transportation to cover that role too.
“This is just a truth that has to be out there,” Edgell said.
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