Can smart growth strategies — more compact development patterns — really save money for public treasuries? The debate’s been going on since the early ‘70s, with analysts from Robert Burchell to Robert Cervero, Tony Downs to Manuel Pastor (photo), weighing in.
Now Mark Muro and Robert Puentes, in a research paper published by the Brooking Institution’s Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, bring it all together. They depend a lot on Burchell for the bottom line conclusion — that rational use of modestly more compact development patterns over the 2000-to-2025 period can cut nationwide highway building costs by $110 billion, or 11.8 percent, and water and sewer infrastructure costs $4 billion, or 3.7 percent.
Against 25 years of total national spending on the road, water and sewer infrastructure, those figures really aren’t large. The critical new question is whether today’s immense squeeze on state and local public budgets, likely to last well beyond any current economic recovery, will of itself force more conserving and rational forms of development.
What may be even more exciting, Muro and Puentes suggest, is a new wave of research starting to suggest that smart growth can enhance the performance of whole economies, as well as incomes across whole regions, including the suburbs. Their report reviews several studies pointing in that direction.
Maybe the question should be turned another way: What if a region tapped its full talent pools rather than relying on haphazard development thrusts? What if it mobilized its economic and civic players, devised regional futures that fuse land and water conservation with urban revitalization, strong center cities, tapping university resources, developing workforce skills, focusing business and trade strategies?
That’s the regional vision Curt Johnson and I have entertained ever since our Citistates book in the early ‘90s. Compact development, as sensible as it seems, would then be part of a coherent, more encompassing strategy.