Allen County is dealing with suburban sprawl.
Communities traditionally take shape slowly and naturally, according to Cody Doyle, Senior Planner with the Lima/Allen County Regional Planning Commission. He told us that as needs arise, homes and commercial properties are fleshed out contiguously one by one. A traditional neighborhood is one in which people live, work, shop and dine. But Allen County is suffering from overexpansion, "Lima was a mature city. Then we over expanded to Bath, Shawnee, American Township, etc. Those areas were developed with single-use zoning pods." People only live in these suburban communities but have to travel elsewhere for work, shopping and dining. Doyle told us that this becomes a problem because taxpayers are subsidizing more and more infrastructure in areas where fewer people live. "We build infrastructure that we'll never afford to maintain. Government is paying people to live here. We have to take some steps back to find a middle ground because we can't continue to do the types of things we've been doing for the past fifty or sixty years. Eventually something is going to have to give." Doyle says that RPC is not anti-development, "We see it as a step further in the wrong direction and down the road it's going to cost us more money to correct. What we want to do is develop in the right way."