The Citistates Group

The barons of Brentwood, Tennessee find the prospect of people walking to work in nearby offices about as attractive as second-hand smoke in a doctor’s office. Last week, accompanied by assorted explanations ranging from unknown costs to maintaining traditions, the city council cancelled a carefully developed community consensus for a town center. Brentwood’s a suburb of Nashville, green, rolling, and governed by zoning rules that dictate one house per acre. It’s been that way for 33 years.

For a while the formula worked. But in recent years the city’s tax revenue has slipped and the inevitable road congestion this development pattern produces has matured to the point of serious irritation.

Cal Turner, who’s the chairman of Dollar General, owns the best of what land is left. His 579-acre horse farm, including a restored antebellum home, sits in the heart of Brentwood. Hoping to see his property become something more than another pasture processed for one-acre lots, he hired South Florida-based Victor Dover and Joseph Kohl, one of America’s best urban design teams. Dover’s instinct, as usual, was to ask the community what they wanted.

The answers came consistently and clearly: no more one-acre-lot subdivisions; instead, people asked for a real town center, where small offices and shops and restaurants could mix with residences of varying sizes and prices. And since there was so much land, how about a great park for the community to use? “We held a �blank-sheet-of-paper’ meeting,” Dover told me. “And all these citizens suggested the very things that would create a heart for the community. It was inspiring.”

Not to the city council though, which last week turned thumbs down on the whole project. Dover says he’s never seen a council deep-six something this big that the community worked on for months.

Mayor Joe Reagan drew the bottom line with this multiple metaphor: “Putting office buildings, and retail and overloading residential is not thinking outside the box. It’s the other side of the coin — overloading the system.” The unforgivable sin, it seems, was the notion of people actually living close enough to their offices to walk to them.

Meanwhile, Turner is, as he puts it, “throwing in the towel.” He says he’s sad that his community is not looking out of the box but “going to stick with the same old box.”

Since he’s said to be in no hurry to dispose of his property, Turner should not give up. Had he witnessed a meeting in Chicago, also last week, he might have even felt a bit encouraged. Assembled by the Brookings Institution and the American Planning Association, a group of public-sector planners, architects, developers, and land-use academics converged to plot the demise of dinosaur zoning codes that spell separation for every use and require all of us to use vehicles to go from place to place.

Former Congress for the New Urbanism director Peter Katz and and codes expert Geoffrey Ferrell laid out the case: replace these bloated catalogs of prohibited practices with simple and clear statements of what the community wants to look like. Architect Andres Duany, one of the founders of the New Urbanism, explained the newly resurrected notion of the Transect, which slices the land map into six sectors — from wilderness to intensely urban. Form-based coding, each speaker explained, describes the building types eligible for each sector. No need for variances or long negotiations with city council members. Bruce Katz of Brookings, co-host of the meeting with Paul Farmer of APA, said they will produce a compact disk of these presentations for distribution.

What was first dubbed “smart growth” is now catching fire as zoning reform. “It’s the rules, stupid,” the mantra might be. The Municipal Code Corporation is soon to distribute a Smart Code developed by Duany’s firm, DPZ. The Sacramento-based Local Government Commission has compiled new codes already enacted and is sponsoring seminars for local government officials.

Ironically, one of the nation’s planning gurus long in the forefront of zoning reform is Rick Bernhardt, planning director for Nashville. Bernhardt told the Nashville Tennessean that he would have supported the Brentwood development for his city. “It provided just the type of environment we want with different housing types for different income levels, with well thought-out design.”

Meanwhile, the gentle hills of Brentwood will yield to even more large lot subdivisions, throwing away a rare chance for a real town center with a variety of housing, offices, and gathering place for the community. City council members think they are preserving a perfect house to acre ratio. Bye-Bye Brentwood.

How often do the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times push a story the same day with the same point of view? It’s rare.

But it happened this week — on January 8 — with a banner WSJ headline saying “SUVs May Be Losing Their Cool,” while the NYT asserted “TV Ads Say SUV Owners Support Terrorism.” The market for oversized SUVs is shifting, improving prospects for safer roads and cleaner air in American metro regions. Not from any great environmental victory, but from market forces. And not a year too soon, as more and more metropolitan regions fall out of compliance with clean-air standards.

Both January 8 stories pointed to cutting-edge consumers growing sour on monster SUVs. Daimler-Chrysler admits its market research reveals consumers unhappy with the gas-guzzling nature of the larger SUVs; D-C is actually running ads promoting minivans as an alternative even as its Dodge division seems to have given Viagra to its latest Durango model.

While Detroit’s in full fret over possible meltdown of its profit center, civic eyebrows arch over ads just released by religious organizations, asking “What would Jesus Drive?” And whole heads turn as conservative columnist Arianna Huffington announces the “Detroit Project,” with ads to run next Sunday through Thursday in New York, Washington, Detroit, and Los Angeles. These audacious ads will rollout on this coming Sunday news programs watched by the chattering classes. They say that owners of large SUVs are, in effect, supporting terrorism; they guzzle gas bought from nations that fund our enemies.

Just last fall Keith Bradsher, who’s covered the auto industry for the past six years, published High and Mighty, a socioeconomic appraisal of the SUV craze. Bradsher sees a correlation between the size of the SUV and the likelihood that its driver is a self-absorbed jerk. Sure to scowl would be former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, who just relinquished his state-provided Navigator, and immediately hopped into his own Hummer.

So put the champagne on hold. Denial isn’t dead. General Motors vice chairman and product development chief Robert Lutz dismisses the commotion as “fringe elements” and “much ado about nothing.” But as both the WSJ and the NYT attest, most market analysts point to the numbers, showing that buyers are moving rapidly to “crossover” vehicles — four-wheel drive vehicles yielding better fuel efficiency, built on the underpinnings of a car rather than a truck. Like the station wagons our parents drove, but with better gas mileage.

Righteous protest, as usual, profits from the helping hand of market forces.

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.

(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?