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Smart
Growth isn't working;
let buyers decide what fits
By
Samuel R. Staley
for Headwaters News
After sweeping the nation, the Smart Growth movement
seems to be grinding to a crawl.
Its initial popularity was understandable: higher incomes, increased
mobility and flexible work environments were giving families unprecedented
housing opportunities.
More often than not, they were choosing new homes in newly developed
areas. This "sprawl" was transforming local neighborhoods
and communities, and citizens were looking for something to give
them more control. Smart Growth seemed to be the ticket.
Now, many policymakers and citizens aren’t so sure. Smart Growth,
it turns out, has provided cover too easily to the anti-growth crowd.
These are the residents and political activists who are more interested
in preserving their notion of community than facing the challenges
of new residents who might not have the same values or civic goals.
More important, perhaps, Smart Growth has run up against
a few important practical problems. First, no one really knows what
Smart Growth is. For some, Smart Growth is highly prescriptive—
compact, dense, transit-oriented, more traditionally urban. For
others, Smart Growth is simply preserving a regional network of
open space.
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Portland
illustrates benefits,
pitfalls of strict growth management
By
Greg Lakes, editor
Headwaters News
Aug. 21, 2002
Smart Growth concepts are deeply imbedded in the Rocky
Mountain region, including light rail projects in Salt Lake City,
long-range growth management in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, strict
growth limits in Reno, and evolving plans in Denver and Boise.
But the longest-lived example is outside the region, in Portland,
Ore., where a sharp urban boundary reins in sprawl, makes for laudable
city-center amenities and creates ongoing friction on a variety
of fronts.
Portland is in the midst of a five-year review of its urban boundary,
a periodic reassessment required by state law to accommodate new
growth -- the most recent estimates of which predict another million
people by 2030.
The area's ruling body, the Metro, has jurisdiction over two dozen
other cities in three counties. Recent headlines bring chronic conflicts
into sharper focus, and offer a glimpse of life under Smart Growth
for Rocky Mountain cities years behind in the process.
Foremost in the current debate is an Oregon state law that requires
non-farmland be the first to be "urbanized," a concept
Metro is required to follow. But outlying communities are lobbying
hard to create exemptions the Metro board could invoke when it saw
a particular need.
The need, say officials in those outlying areas, is a lack of space
to grow. In
the city's western suburbs, high-tech companies want room to
expand and local officials want to enlarge their industrial parks
as invitations to more clean industry. But much of the undeveloped
area is farmland and off-limits to development that would add jobs
and homes.
Last month, Metro officials proposed adding more
than 17,000 acres to the city's urban boundary, but relatively little
of it on the west side, bringing the expansion plan into sharp conflict
with suburban demands.
"Putting obstacles in the way of expansion of the high-tech
industry is not good for this region or this state's economy,"
Betty
Atteberry, director of the Westside Economic Alliance, said
in an Oregonian story. "Yes, it may mean taking some farmland
to do that expansion. But we think that, overall, that's a positive
thing for the economy."
Many farmers, some of whom occasionally wait 10 minutes to cross
busy highways to reach their fields, oppose any easing of the rules
to foster industry.
"There's an industry here already," Terry Peters, president
of the Washington County Farm Bureau, said in the same Oregonian
piece. "It's called agriculture. We'd like to keep it that
way."
Real estate developers echoed complaints and funded a study that
said Metro's favorite expansion scenario would
require double the infrastructure costs, compared with allowing
development on farmland to the west. They say Metro is wasting money
to bolster an artificial vision, when most people would rather live
near their jobs, even if it meant losing farms and developing open
space.
Other effects run the gamut. Critics say the artificial boundary
drives up housing prices in the urban area, while some landowners
just outside the line hope to be included in the next expansion
because it would mean an
instant multiplication of their property value.
A bigger issue, say critics, is the mindset that fosters strict
regulation. It creates an ideological
stalemate that discourages growth -- not only of subdivisions,
but of the economy in general.
Portland schools will have the shortest academic year in the nation,
the region's colleges attract few research dollars or distinctions,
and city leaders are missing opportunities to capitalize on the
area's strengths to create high-paying jobs, those critics say.
And they attribute what they call acceptance of mediocrity, in part,
to a lack of consensus about what good growth is and how to promote
it.
In the short term, the decision as to whether Metro can make exceptions
to the farmland-last rule isn't expected until October, and the
board likely won't change the urban boundary until December. Regardless,
the ultimate effect will be dramatic changes for thousands of area
residents.
Moving the boundary will make some farmland urban, bring city development
to the edges of other farmers' fields, make some landowners instantly
rich and, no doubt, evoke another barrage of criticism and complaints.
In the long term, the unanswerable question will still be, what
would the city and its surroundings be like without strict growth
management and Smart Growth principles? What would Phoenix be like,
or Denver?
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