Part V: Builders tout benefits

    As planners and environmentalists worry about the costs of growth, economic benefits get overlooked, developers contend. Some 150,000 people are employed in the construction and real estate industries in the four-county region. That’s 8 percent of the total work force.

    “From the framers to the cement guys, about a hundred people are involved in the building of a single house,” said Dan MacLeish, president of the Building Industry Association of Southeastern Michigan.

    “When the carpenters are working and doing well, they’re going to be buying new cars and trucks. We feed the economy.”

    And while Metro Detroit’s long building boom is dramatic, so is the amount of undeveloped land still available.

    Even after steady growth through 2020, SEMCOG projects that 41 percent of the total land area in Wayne, Oakland, Macomb and Livingston counties — some 650,000 acres — will remain undeveloped.

    “That’s why smart growth hasn’t really caught on: People cannot see the urgency,” said Leslie Kettren, a Lansing-based planning consultant.

‘We’re going farther out’

    For Mary Lee Roberts, there is urgency — to get back to the countryside she first sought north of 32 Mile a quarter-century ago.

    “When I moved out here friends would say, ‘Oh, we’ll pack a lunch to come see you.’ Now they’re saying, ‘Hey, what’s for sale out your way?’ ”

    Three new houses went up around her in the last two years. Traffic’s getting bad.

    As a girl growing up in St. Clair Shores, Roberts learned that Detroit would one day stretch all the way to Port Huron.

    A European planner, Constantinos Doxiadis, promoted that theory. Hired by Detroit civic leaders in the 1960s to plan for the region’s expansion, Doxiadis concluded the Metro area would spread all the way north to the bottom of Lake Huron.

    Roberts sees the urban footprint reaching Port Huron in just a few more years.

    “All the sprawl — I don’t like it,” she said. “What I came out here for is disappearing. In five or 10 years, we’re going farther out. Somewhere farther north in St. Clair County. We’re going to get 15 or 20 acres and get some privacy again.”

    As for the rest of the suburbanites? She knows: “They’ll be right behind me.”

You can reach John Bebow at (313)-222-2548 or jbebow@detnews.com.