If you saw the movie Gangs of New York, you might recall scenes in which the volunteer firefighters were systemically destroying a place of business as part of the process of attempting to save it. That was during the early days of the fire service. New York was a heavily concentrated city with everything from tenements and ghettos to the extremely rich living in a very, very narrow spit of land that the Dutch had initially colonized.

For about 300 years, the vast majority of American cities were snuggled up next to the Eastern coastline with very little concentration of the public on the road in those areas. The theory of Jacksonian Democracy and the Manifest Destiny resulted in many abandoning those dense communities to become the pioneers who explored the rest of this country in the 1800s.

One reason that our original communities were dense was for defense. One had to protect the community by concentrating human and physical resources into an area that could be barricaded and protected. That's a cozy explanation, but it's why some of our first cities became over crowded and subsequently created lifestyles that caused people to want more space.

And if it is space that society wanted, they got it by expanding all across the breadth and depth of the North American continent. Today the problem is not so much density as it distribution. While we still have concentration of population in some of our larger metropolitan cities, it seems that within almost every square mile in this country somebody has staked out a home or place of business. This is beginning to create a planning problem for many fire departments. The problem is providing the same level of service with fewer resources to pay for that service because the community is spread across a wider landscape.

Most older communities began with the idea that fire protection was not a serious issue. Going back to the early days of many cities and towns, there was a point in which key roads that came together and three people decided to settle there. There was neither a fire department nor any government to speak of. However, as people settled near that intersection, homes were built, businesses were started and eventually someone said, “We need to have a fire department.” The vast majority of fire departments in this country started off as volunteer organizations because there was no money to pay for fire trucks, fire stations or fire personnel. Most of the initial decisions to start volunteer departments were incited by a catastrophic event that occurred.

The modern phenomenon of urban sprawl, however, is the antithesis of concentration. Having all of this vacant land in the United States tempted our society to spread out over larger and larger areas. This resulted in a somewhat complicated way in which we developed levels of fire protection. The number of people per square mile, in many cases, has a very significant impact on a local community's ability to provide the fire and life-safety services.

It takes a minimum number of people to be able to generate a sufficient amount of tax revenue to pay for a fire department. It takes 10,000 households paying a minimum of $100 every year to raise $1 million. That begins to get in the ballpark of what kind of fire protection a community should have.

However, if you take those 10,000 households and spread them over 50 square miles, what the community can afford and what they are going to get are two different things. That is because the other benchmark of fire protection is response time. A community with highly concentrated households can be served in a minimum amount of response time. Communities with a widely distributed population that cannot achieve the baseline of funding area are going to have to be satisfied with slower response times.

In examining fire departments all across this country, this phenomenon plays itself out in two arenas that have absolutely nothing to do with fire protection. The first of these is in land-use policies. The second is in community-tax structures. Neither of these is under the purview of the fire chief, yet both result in a set of circumstances that affect the level of service.

For example, if a community's taxes are very low, it takes more households to afford the minimum level of service. Conversely, if the taxes are very high, a smaller number of households can afford a specific level of protection. It gets really awkward when looking at fire protection across a broad landscape in which there are areas of minimum density and areas of maximum density. They both have the moral right to demand the same level of service. However, they may generate totally different amounts of tax revenue to pay for what they want.

This dilemma is common, especially in areas with rapid growth over the last 15 to 20 years. That is because urban sprawl has encouraged a much lower density population by creating a housing market that is all single-story. Residences are sort of squashed out across the environment like a thin paste of potential problems.

Our older city's were populated by a wide variety of housing stock, and a single-family dwelling at one time was relatively rare. Most people lived in multiple-story buildings and the density per square mile was much higher. That was then. For about the last 50 years or so, the opposite has been occurring. If there was land to develop, it got developed whether it could be served by the fire department or not, as was often the case. That era may be ending.

Today, land-use policies regarding densities are undergoing another renaissance. It has been proven to some land-use planners that urban sprawl has been counterproductive for a variety of purposes. It has encouraged a very large problem with transportation, and in the case of the fire service, it has created gaps between the community's wealthy and poor.

A recent backlash to this is the idea of the sustainable community. The concept of the sustainable community violates almost all of the assumptions that have lead to urban sprawl. One of the first of these is separating occupancies such as dwelling from commercial businesses. This new model encourages placing these different uses one on top of the other.

The concept of sustainable community often includes a walkable community. The idea is that residents who have grocery and day-to-day commodities within walking distance to their homes would not have to use an automobile, which would have a positive impact on the community. One consequence would be a reduction in road widths. And while the U.S. fire service keeps building bigger fire trucks, the sustainable community wants to make for smaller and smaller access facilities. It's a gap that could someday result in rather significant problems.

The sustainable community gives some hope in that it may results in more sprinkler technology being used to protect these denser areas. On the other hand, it creates another set of problems as more departments are relying on their fire apparatus to serve dual purposes of being both fire engines and first responders to provide medical aid.

Here are five points to consider when assessing a community and anticipating how it will change with growth:

• What is the community's overall population density per square mile or acre?
• What are the different land densities in different neighborhoods on a daytime and nighttime basis?
• Is it possible that the community will be part of an annexation? And if the community is doing the annexing, what does the general plan say about the density of the new areas?
• What is your department's per capita expenditure for life-safety and fire services?
• What is the population protected by each fire stations? Are they protecting the same amount of people or is there any disparity based on land use?

After reviewing these points, look at your emergency response workload and compare population densities and frequency by types of calls. There is often a very strong correlation between these two factors. It may well also be representative of where you would expect your concentration of calls to be in the future depending upon the land-use patterns that are built into your long-range community plan.

Here are a few land-use terms should become part of our vocabulary as we begin to articulate what level of service needs to be provided.

• Floor-area ratio The ratio of the gross building square footage permitted on a lot to the net square footage of the lot. For example, on a lot with 10,000 net square feet of land area, a FAR of 1.00 will allow 10,000 square feet of gross square feet of building floor area to be built, regardless of the number of stories in the building (5,000 square feet per floor on two floors or 10,000 square feet on one floor).
• Green building Environmentally sensitive design and construction practices, which conserve natural resources such as energy, building materials, water, soil and air quality.
• Gross and Net Density Gross density is the number of dwelling units per acre before the acreage dedicated for roads, open space, and other public uses has been subtracted. Net density is the number of dwelling units per acre after all the dedicated areas have been subtracted.
• Leapfrog Development Development that occurs beyond the limits of existing development thus creating pockets of vacant land.
• Major Development Project A residential project with 100 or more dwelling units or a commercial, professional office, or industrial development on 10 or more acres of land.

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With more than 40 years in the fire service, Ronny J. Coleman has served as fire chief in Fullerton and San Clemente, Calif., and was the fire marshal of the State of California from 1992 to 1999. He is a certified fire chief and a master instructor in the California Fire Service Training and Education System. A Fellow of the Institution of Fire Engineers, he has an associate's degree in fire science, a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's degree in vocational education.