Many Smart Growth advocates are motivated by a sincere desire to emulate the best of urban environments: vibrant downtowns with strong civic ties that minimize car use. However, it must be acknowledged that some proponents may have less noble motivations. Among them are some who already live in the suburbs and are eager to restrict development around them. “Smart Growth” is a handy and politically-correct way to raise the drawbridge. John K. Carlisle writes about this for The National Center for Public Policy Research:
See also:
New York Times: “Vibrant Cities Find One Thing Missing: Children”
After interviewing 300 parents who had left the city, researchers at Portland State found that high housing costs and a desire for space were the top reasons…
Metro Portland’s Long Experience with Smart Growth: A Cautionary Tale
Small cities surrounded by developable land, like Eugene and Salem, now have housing prices that rival those in San Francisco Bay Area communities, when the purchasing power of local incomes is considered…
Oregon actually has a tremendous amount of available land… Oregon has apparently successfully engineered a shortage of sites in a state with plentiful land…
The New Draft Sustainable Northampton Plan: Balancing Compact Growth Against Taxes, Urban Greenspace, Homeowner Preferences
The plan has the potential to transform the look and feel of the most built-up 15% of Northampton, roughly the same area affected by the newly implemented 10-foot wetlands buffer zones. It prioritizes compact growth. Homebuilders are to be encouraged to build within walking distance of existing urban centers, where substantial infrastructure already exists. This sounds reasonable, but it must be carefully managed to avoid harming the interests of existing residents…
The best plans will fail if they don’t appeal to the people. A 1993 Fannie Mae poll showed that “86 percent of American households believed that owning a home was better than renting…and 73 percent preferred a single-family detached home with a yard” (cited in J. Terrence Farris, “The Barriers to Using Urban Infill Development to Achieve Smart Growth”, 2001, PDF). The Sustainable Northampton Plan acknowledges this could be an issue (p.14), but provides no examples of where American citizens have been persuaded to embrace the denser housing modes it calls for.
Letter to Gazette: “Increased housing density will hurt Northampton”
…The Northampton we all wish to sustain is the Northampton that we have now…
Increasing the population density of our residential neighborhoods is the very opposite of what is needed to sustain the quality of life here in our beautiful city. It is the very thing that destroyed Springfield, a city that had been a lovely residential city, the remnants of which are still visible behind the rubble.
Pictures of Northampton Streets at Various Densities
Berkeley, California: Cautions on Infill
In 1990, 60 percent of New Yorkers said they would live somewhere else if they could, and in 2000, 70 percent of urbanites in Britain felt the same way. Many suburbanites commute hours every day just to have “a home, a bit of private space, and fresh air.”
Large Lots Gobble Up Land in Massachusetts
…a relatively slow growth rate for single-family houses has been outweighed by a trend toward bigger home sizes and lots…
While infill will continue in selected submarkets, smart growth advocates should aggressively pursue higher-density, quality development at the periphery rather than the typical low-density suburban sprawl of the past 50 years (Danielsen, Lang, and Fulton 1999). (p.26-27)
[S]mart growth is often nothing more than a thinly-disguised attempt by well-heeled suburbanites to keep undesirable newcomers from their neighborhoods…An opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal explores the Lower Richland situation in more detail:
Wherever anti-sprawl policies have been aggressively implemented, the cost of housing has soared and diminished low- to moderate-income families’ access to affordable housing. Probably the most significant anti-sprawl policy engendering this housing inflation is the use of urban growth boundaries…
After Napa, California implemented an urban growth boundary that resulted in a 74% reduction in residential building permits, the average value of a single-family home in Napa County skyrocketed by 158% to over $373,000…
In 1998, the Prince William County Supervisors approved the region’s first major slow growth plan. The Prince William plan set aside nearly half of the county land in a “rural crescent” in which future new home construction and other development will only be allowed on ten-acre plots. The result, predictably, is a major increase in land prices… [S]ix-figure income homebuyers – attracted by the large, secluded lots and gated developments – are moving to the county in droves. Many of these affluent new residents first sought assurances from the county that the land-use restrictions would continue to be enforced once they purchased their homes… Prince William newcomer Greg Gorham, a software developer, moved from another Virginia suburb because a builder constructed 20 townhouses on land next to him. “That was the thing I really didn’t want to have happen to me again,” said Gorham…
Writing about the Lower Richland [South Carolina] case in The Nation, William Steif, a self-described liberal, warns Americans should beware when they hear the urban sprawl term leveled by smart growth advocates. “It is an excuse to do all sorts of things that may not be very nice,” wrote Steif. “The vagueness of the term really allows you to do damn near anything.”
Wall Street Journal: Review & Outlook, 11/28/03Steven Greenhut, a columnist for the Orange County Register, says that Smart Growth policies that ignore people’s living preferences will fail and make things worse (11/23/04):
“Not So Smart Growth”
…Richland’s smart-growth agenda includes a land-use plan that raises minimum lot sizes, prevents clustering homes on rurally zoned land… County regulations would also steer new development into three categories of “villages” to be built at rural crossroads. Many of these are zoned for high-density, low-income housing but not for manufacturers or other high-paying employers. Critics call them nonemployment villages.
Richland’s biggest smart-growth proponents live in the wealthier northern part of the county, where residents tend to make their living in the state capital of Columbia. Lower Richland, however, is rural and predominantly African-American. Smart growth hits these landowners particularly hard because they are often only a few steps away from poverty. They depend on farming, harvesting trees and opening small businesses on their land. Sometimes they sell off several acres to developers or borrow money using their land as collateral. Parents typically set aside land for their children to build homes nearby, but now such family compounds will be prohibited…
Bozeman is an interesting case study because it is small and because the Smart Growthers have strong control of the city…
…the real problem is that city and county officials are trying to stop suburban growth around the city by imposing Portland-style growth controls. Officials insist that new developments are far more densely packed than the market demands…
On a practical level, these Smart Growth policies are counterproductive. Restricting growth in the city, or creating unattractive high-density projects in a place awash in open space, only pushes people farther out into the countryside. In Belgrade, eight miles away, one finds market-driven suburban-style subdivisions. That city does not have many restrictions, and those who cannot afford Bozeman or who want a bigger place simply move away, thus promoting the sprawl that Smart Growthers are trying to stop…
Most appalling in Bozeman: The newcomers who sold their houses in the Silicon Valley and Seattle have plenty of money to buy the fancy log houses on 20 acres with views of the mountain ranges. Now that they are here they are doing everything they can to a) stop newcomers from coming; b) force anyone without their income levels to live in drab high-density housing. They get their piece of the Montana Dream, and everyone else can take a hike…
Bozeman’s anti-growth fixation is bizarre to me. Here we have a vast valley with only a handful of people and those here believe it is being ruined by sprawl.
See also:
New York Times: “Vibrant Cities Find One Thing Missing: Children”
After interviewing 300 parents who had left the city, researchers at Portland State found that high housing costs and a desire for space were the top reasons…
Metro Portland’s Long Experience with Smart Growth: A Cautionary Tale
Small cities surrounded by developable land, like Eugene and Salem, now have housing prices that rival those in San Francisco Bay Area communities, when the purchasing power of local incomes is considered…
Oregon actually has a tremendous amount of available land… Oregon has apparently successfully engineered a shortage of sites in a state with plentiful land…
The New Draft Sustainable Northampton Plan: Balancing Compact Growth Against Taxes, Urban Greenspace, Homeowner Preferences
The plan has the potential to transform the look and feel of the most built-up 15% of Northampton, roughly the same area affected by the newly implemented 10-foot wetlands buffer zones. It prioritizes compact growth. Homebuilders are to be encouraged to build within walking distance of existing urban centers, where substantial infrastructure already exists. This sounds reasonable, but it must be carefully managed to avoid harming the interests of existing residents…
The best plans will fail if they don’t appeal to the people. A 1993 Fannie Mae poll showed that “86 percent of American households believed that owning a home was better than renting…and 73 percent preferred a single-family detached home with a yard” (cited in J. Terrence Farris, “The Barriers to Using Urban Infill Development to Achieve Smart Growth”, 2001, PDF). The Sustainable Northampton Plan acknowledges this could be an issue (p.14), but provides no examples of where American citizens have been persuaded to embrace the denser housing modes it calls for.
Letter to Gazette: “Increased housing density will hurt Northampton”
…The Northampton we all wish to sustain is the Northampton that we have now…
Increasing the population density of our residential neighborhoods is the very opposite of what is needed to sustain the quality of life here in our beautiful city. It is the very thing that destroyed Springfield, a city that had been a lovely residential city, the remnants of which are still visible behind the rubble.
Pictures of Northampton Streets at Various Densities
Berkeley, California: Cautions on Infill
In 1990, 60 percent of New Yorkers said they would live somewhere else if they could, and in 2000, 70 percent of urbanites in Britain felt the same way. Many suburbanites commute hours every day just to have “a home, a bit of private space, and fresh air.”
Large Lots Gobble Up Land in Massachusetts
…a relatively slow growth rate for single-family houses has been outweighed by a trend toward bigger home sizes and lots…
While infill will continue in selected submarkets, smart growth advocates should aggressively pursue higher-density, quality development at the periphery rather than the typical low-density suburban sprawl of the past 50 years (Danielsen, Lang, and Fulton 1999). (p.26-27)