Is smart growth smart enough to deal with the complex realities, and competing demands, of metro area development and population expansion?
Steve Levy (a distinguished California economist) raises those questions in a comment to these weblogs:
On a personal basis, my wife and I are looking forward to selling our large single-family house and move downtown in Palo Alto to what Citistates would describe as a “smart growth”, walkable communities living situation. Our only obstacle might be the NIMBY attitude of our community regarding almost any new housing.
Professionally, I work with regional planning councils doing long-term projections of job and housing trends. At this level, it is always the case in California that what is called “smart-growth” cannot possibly fill more than a fraction of overall regional housing needs. Moreover, there are profound ethical and equity issues which I never find adequately addressed by “smart-growth” advocates. One question is “what if I don’t want to live in an urban infill, walkable community setting?” Does my family lose its right to new housing? Is my family “less important” than a family who wants to live in an urban setting? What if my family cannot afford to live in the urban part of the region and the only housing we can afford is in a greenfield setting because the land is cheaper there? And, what if the greenfield communities offer the best schools and the best community infrastructure?
Is your position “live as we want or fend for yourself”? Regions are large, multi-ethnic, multi-income collections of people, hopefully trying to find connection and common ground in a difficult world. What does regionalism offer to people who don’t want to or can’t afford to live the “proper smart growth” way.
My research finds that, at least in California, the problem is not enough housing including not enough urban infill housing and not enough single-family housing. I am interested in approaches that helps all families find the housing they want and can afford.
(Signed) Stephen Levy
So how is one to respond to Levy?
Actually some, but not all, of his points were treated by Ben Starrett of the Funders Network for Smart Growth in comments squeezed out of my column last week. Starrett’s relevant comments:
+ The critical issue for the smart growth movement (says Starrett) is choice in the residential communities that will available for the projected 60 million new Americans by 2020. He cites USC research, funded by his Network, predicting the demand for more dense housing will double, with close to half the population, by 2015, preferring more urbane, diverse housing choices. But the market, he notes, is only providing a tiny percentage that way right now — even as “housing prices fly through the roof” in higher quality neighborhoods across the country. The smart growth movement can’t and won’t, Starrett suggests, curb future demand from the half of Americans who’ll likely still want a large lot and not mind a long commute. (Let them have their choice “as long as government money doesn’t subsidize them,” he suggests). The smart growth movement, he believes, needs to focus its efforts on expanding future choices for the other half — people who’ll be searching for quality, pedestrian-oriented urban neighborhoods with varieties of housing and transportation choices (either in retrofitted older neighborhoods or new developments planned with more compact, New Urbanist-like principles).
I’d add some other points.
First, NIMBYism is a big problem restraining smart growth housing expansion in existing urban areas, a problem the smart growth movement seems now to grasp — and be anxious to address.
Second, there’s legitimate reason to debate, as Steve Levy does, the issues of choice that Starrett and other smart growth advocates espouse. Even granting lots of folks will want spread-out suburban settings, where prices generally seem lower, are they paying a fair share in infrastructure costs, air pollution burdens (and asthma rates) created by longer commutes, and the like? Does spread (oftentimes leapfrog) development, occupying more and more land further and further out, imply there are no limits to the ecological carrying capacity of metro regions? Is there legitimate public concern about the loss of accessible vistas and open spaces, maintaining the vestiges of regional agriculture, etc.? What about spread development that moves existing and new jobs miles beyond the reach of lower-income people in inner cities and older suburbs? Isn’t there a strong case to be made for contiguous development that wastes as little land as possible?
My conclusion: The smart growth movement contributes to quality life in America by opening — but not, on its own, fully answering — those questions. There’s no doubt it’s begun to expand choices for Americans — the kind of housing and communities they want. It is popularizing a walkable, mixed-use, lively lifestyle that the development industry, the big highway builders, zoning etc. had practically outlawed in new areas. Plus issues of social equity in metro development, which had been swept under the table for decades. The next questions will be whether we develop and expand just a little more smartly, or radically better, than the last 50 years.
Your thoughts?