"Smart Growth" -- a name given
to public efforts to contain the outward spread of
metropolitan development by focusing spending on public
infrastructure in locally designated growth areas -- has
emerged as a rallying point for traditional
environmentalists, anti-sprawl activists and conservationists
anxious to preserve farmland and open spaces. Smart Growth
has been praised as " the most promising new tool for
managing growth in a generation." Vice President Al
Gore, calls Smart Growth "a set of ideas whose time has
come." But enthusiasm for the concept of smart growth is
by no means universal. Critics charge that Smart Growth is
merely a clever slogan, of little practical effect.
Metropolitan expansion, these critics contend, is subject to
forces that are way beyond the power of government policies
to influence. The debate about smart growth, until recently
confined to planning professionals and environmentalists, is
about to spill over into the national arena as sprawl becomes
a hot political issue and a major theme of Al Gore's
presidential campaign.
Vice President Gore, in a
public announcement on January 11, proposed a
"liveability agenda," -- an array of new federal
initiatives meant to appeal to suburban voters concerned
about vanishing open space, rising traffic congestion and
deteriorating quality of life in metropolitan areas. The
centerpiece of the agenda is a plan for $700 million in
federal tax credits to generate close to $10 billion in state
and local bonds that could be used to preserve farmland,
protect wetlands, create or restore urban parks and acquire
permanent easements on suburban open space. In addition, the
plan calls for allowing a greater proportion of highway trust
funds to be used to improve mass transit, ease traffic
congestion, encourage alternative transportation and promote
regional land use planning.
The announcement was hailed by environmentalists as an
opening salvo in the Administration's commitment to fight
urban sprawl. It's a commitment that is expected to be a
major theme in Gore's run for the presidency. "Sprawl is
a national problem and it needs a national debate," says
Richard Moe, President of the National Trust for Historic
Preservation. But, he adds, land use issues are best handled
at the state and local levels, "and that, in the end, is
where the fight against sprawl will be won or lost." The
environmental movement pins its hopes on creating a
grassroots rebellion that will lead to legislation and
governmental action against unfettered low-density
devellopment. But the likelihood of mobilizing an army of
aroused citizens to march against sprawl strikes many people
as wishful thinking."The issue of sprawl does not
energize the electorate," a suburban county councilman
told us. "Quite the contrary, it's the prospect of
higher densities that brings out citizen opposition in
my district. If people conclude that "smart growth"
means infill development, more crowding and more traffic, the
public will lose interest." Echoed a California planning
official: "Any effort to create a political constituency
in favor of Smart Growth will fail if growth controls are
perceived as leading to higher densities, more traffic
congestion and higher housing prices."
Demographic Trends
Smart Growth advocates also tend to underestimate the
powerful decentralizing effect of demographic trends. The
demand for land on the suburban fringes has never been
higher. Thanks to a strong economy and easily available
mortgage money, sales of new suburban homes have set a new
record in 1998 of 880,00 units. Immigration plus a continuing
high household formation rate, (averaging 1.3 million a year
in the late 1990s), promise to sustain a robust housing
market in the years ahead. In the next ten years, the
offspring of the baby boomers, the so-called "baby
boomlet," will begin to move out into the world -- and
purchase affordable starter homes on the suburban fringe,
just as their parents did a generation earlier.
In the final analysis, metropolitan expansion is driven
by the public's strong preference for the safety and
amenities of suburban living. " Americans live in low
density suburbs because they like it that way, and no amount
of preaching by Gore and the political elites about the
virtues of high density living will change their minds"
a housing official told us. He cites the experience of
Portland, Oregon and the state of Maryland whose smart growth
initiatives, he claims, have had no observable impact on
local development patterns. In Portland, long admired by
environmentalists as a model of enlightened growth
management, voters have had second thoughts about maintaining
rigid urban boundaries when they realized that a shrinking
supply of available land within the boundaries is causing
housing prices to soar. In Maryland, Governor Glendening's
vaunted policy of "Smart Growth" is seen by many
people as having been largely emasculated by local counties
taking advantage of a legislative loophole to designate
essentially all of their land as growth areas. "The idea
that the state can tell a county where and how it can grow is
simply anathema to local officials," a Maryland county
official confided.
"Eurosprawl"
How about the cities of Western Europe -- aren't they
living proof that urban growth can be contained? Not really,
contends Prof. Genevieve Giuliano of the University of
Southern California, who has been tracking urban demographic
trends on both sides of the Atlantic. The forces of urban
dispersal are as relentless in Europe as they are in America.
Between 1970 and 1990, the share of metropolitan population
living in the central city has declined in virtually every
European city. It went down from 31.6 to 23.1 percent in
Paris, from 40.7 to 38.1 percent in London, from 38.2 to 29.7
percent in Zurich and from 80 to 66.5 percent in Amsterdam,
This, despite the fact that local governments in Europe have
more control over land use, that public transit service is
far more extensive, and suburban home ownership is not
subsidized by the tax code.
The European city as a compact settlement with clearly
delineated boundaries is an illusion, says Alex Marshall, a
journalist who has been studying contemporary trends in
European cities. "Once you veer from the official
tourist zones, you will find in European cities many of the
hallmarks of American-style sprawl." The old style
center cities we see on postcards and from sightseeing buses,
says Marshall, are isolated pockets of urbanity inhabited by
students, young professionals and the very rich. Europe's
middle class has moved to the suburbs -- where they shop in
malls, live in auto-oriented subdivisions and drive on
traffic-clogged arteries. Most tourists are not aware of this
because they tend to stay in the historic city centers where
the hotels, restaurants, museums, and other tourist
attractions are located. But anyone who has traveled in
Europe by train or auto through miles upon miles of dreary
suburbs suffers no illusion that urban sprawl is confined to
America.
To be sure, Smart Growth has claimed some converts -- as
for example in California's Contra Costa County where the
Board of Supervisors has recently recommended a county-wide
plan that would channel new residential growth into existing
urban areas. But most observers believe that Smart Growth and
the campaign for liveability will remain largely symbolic
gestures. As one local elected official remarked, "the
broad public does not regard scattered development as
undesirable. Vice President Gore's rhetoric notwithstanding,
the average American associates quality of life and
liveability with low rather than high residential
density."
C. Kenneth Orski may be contacted by phone at:
202/338.9550; fax: 202/338.9555 Another essay by Orski on
urban sprawl is also available on-line. Innovation
Briefs are published by URBAN MOBILITY CORPORATION, C.
Kenneth Orski, Editor; 1634 I Street NW · Suite 500
· Washington, DC 20006-4003
http://www.itsonline.com/innobriefs/