Among the many factors driving
environmentalists to discourage suburban development is the belief
that such growth is consuming America's undeveloped land at a pace
that jeopardizes the availability of open space, wilderness, and
farmland. Although federal data on land use reveal such concerns to
be misplaced--only 5.2 percent of the continental United States is
defined as "developed" --so-called smart growth and
new urbanist advocates remain undeterred in their effort to impose
costly and constraining limits on how individuals may develop and
use their private property.
Efforts in the recent past to turn these
limits into federal policies include former Vice President Al
Gore's "Livable Communities" program, which he introduced in late
1998 but quickly abandoned when it became apparent that there was
little voter interest in having the federal government redesign
suburban neighborhoods. More recently, the Growing Smart
Legislative Guidebook: Model Statutes for Planning and the
Management of Change, funded in part by the U.S.
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), has been
criticized as a federal endorsement of efforts to encourage people
to alter their housing choices away from traditional suburbs. The
guide provoked charges of federal interference with local land use
decisions.
Although HUD maintains that the release of
the proposal does not imply federal encroachment on community
decision-making, legislation now moving through Congress does
appear to take a step in that direction. The Community Character
Act (S. 975/H.R. 1433), which was voted out of the Senate Committee
on Environment and Public Works on April 25, 2002, proposes to fund
state and local efforts to reform their land use planning process
to conform more closely to smart growth policies.
Policymakers who are considering land use
issues should be aware of how such policies will affect prospective
homebuyers and disproportionately burden lower-income families.
They would do well to follow the market-driven principles put forth
by scholars at the Big Sky, Montana, conference on livable
communities in 2000. (See text box, page 12.)
These 10 principles emphasize freedom of choice, market solutions,
property rights, and the right of all Americans to live and work in
accordance with their own hopes and dreams. They should serve as
guidelines or benchmarks by which local officials, citizens, and
others can better judge the effects of proposals that affect
community design and growth.
Jeopardizing Americans' Standard of
Living
As all levels of government enact and promulgate laws and
regulations on land use, homebuilding, and community design
standards, individuals' freedom to live how and where they choose
is becoming increasingly limited. Such growing limits are a
deliberate consequence of the "smart growth" movement, which
attempts to force or encourage households to choose alternative
lifestyles and living arrangements.
Although there is no precise definition
for a "smart growth policy" or for the nuts and bolts of what
related new urbanist strictures entail, such policies generally
seek to preserve land in a natural or agricultural state by
encouraging individuals to live in denser communities that take up
smaller amounts of land per housing unit. Such communities also
encourage residents to rely more on walking or public transit than
on cars for mobility, and they more closely mix retail and other
commercial facilities with residential units to foster easy access
to jobs and shopping. In turn, these revised structural
arrangements, combined with more sensitivity to aesthetic needs,
are said to create a greater sense of "place" among residents.
To
achieve these objectives, many advocates of smart growth solutions
prefer communities of apartment buildings, townhouses, or detached
houses on small lots, and they take flawed images of American
cities and towns of bygone eras as their role models. The recently
constructed new urbanist suburban subdivisions of Seaside in
Florida, Kentlands in Maryland, and Prospect in Colorado illustrate
this nostalgic pattern.
When
defined as any set of policies that limit land used for
development, smart growth goals are broad enough to embody a wide
diversity of views. For example, Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) Administrator Christine Todd Whitman at a recent smart growth
conference favored broad goals, arguing that "Open space...must be
seen as an urban, suburban and rural issue--for preserving park
land within the confines of our cities is as important as saving
farmland from unnecessary development."
The
Sierra Club, by contrast, argues for more stringent goals. On June
18, 2001, the group defined "efficient urban density" as a measure
containing 500 housing units to the acre. Just two days later,
after the club was advised that such densities were more than three
times greater than the highest-density tracts in Manhattan and more
than double the most dense ward of Mumbai (Bombay), India--which
achieves this density with the help of a 55 percent homeless
population--it revised its definition of urban efficiency to 100
units per acre.
Though the Sierra Club's visionaries may
have seen this change in recommendation as a substantial concession
to its critics, reaching even that goal would yield living
arrangements that are 2.4 times as dense as all Manhattan, twice as
dense as central Paris, and more dense than central Mumbai (though
not as dense as Mumbai's densest wards). Obviously, this is not the
sort of lifestyle that would appeal to the average American or, for
that matter, the average European. That lack of appeal is precisely
why the smart growth movement has had problems in gaining serious
converts outside the academic community, a few federal offices, and
environmental chat rooms.
Most
Americans, including committed city dwellers, would find these
recommended densities for living space--and even levels much less
dense than these--to be an unpleasant way to live. In comparison to
the Sierra Club's recommended density of 100 housing units per
acre, the city of San Francisco, for example, measures in at 10
housing units to the acre, while Toronto is half that amount. The
typical American suburb, where most people voluntarily choose to
live, has an average density of about two houses per acre, but this
measured acre also includes space set aside for streets, sidewalks,
and other public and commercial space. Thus, the typical suburban
lot size is closer to something between a quarter and a third of an
acre.
Whereas the Sierra Club encourages local
planning officials to adopt land use patterns that would force
Americans to emulate living standards common to parts of the Asian
subcontinent, other environmental groups have become even more
aggressive, and more violent, in this effort. The Earth Liberation
Front (ELF), for example, declares on its Web site that its goal is
"To inflict economic damage on those profitting [sic] from the
destruction and exploitation of the natural environment," and to
that end has engaged in dozens of acts of serious vandalism
resulting in $30 million worth of damage. This vandalism reportedly
has included acts of arson inflicted on suburban housing
development projects, such as four luxury houses under construction
in the Long Island suburb of Mount Sinai, New York, on New Year's
Eve 2000.
HUD Enters the Fray
Adding fuel to the fire brewing over postwar land use patterns is a
series of recommended changes in local zoning practices just
published in the 2002 Growing Smart Legislative Guidebook: Model
Statutes for Planning and the Management of Change. The
Guidebook, released by the American Planning Association (APA), was
funded in part by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban
Development, described as the "lead federal agency" among several
that provided funding. Property rights advocates who have reviewed
the Guidebook contend that
- It is a legislative blueprint for more
restrictive zoning and rigid land use planning;
- It uses federal funding as an incentive to
encourage states to adopt the blueprint, which mandates "an
integrated state-regional-local planning system that is both
vertically and horizontally consistent";
- Its scope moves far beyond the regulation
of land use planning and mandates a broader reach of government
planning that expressly deals with a wide range of social and
economic issues; and
- It suggests model zoning ordinances that,
if adopted, would require development of "traditional
neighborhoods," meaning site designs that mimic higher density
living arrangements and architectural designs characteristic of
pre-automobile, turn-of-the-last century American towns and
cities.
Although HUD disclaims any endorsement of
the recommendations contained in the Guidebook, its formal response
to critics has been viewed as less than reassuring. Of concern
is the observation that HUD officials have been remarkably silent
and wholly uncritical about the book's recommendations and
proposals, which, if implemented as the book encourages, could
greatly limit individual choice and freedom of lifestyles and
undermine basic property rights. Also absent from HUD's
communications on the Guidebook is any endorsement of, or
preference for, property rights, individual choice, or market
principles.
In
an effort to mollify and reassure critics of HUD's neutral pose on
the Guidebook's recommendations, the General Deputy Assistant
Secretary of HUD stated categorically that "The Guidebook does not
provide for any role for the Federal government nor would HUD claim
to assert that it has responsibility regarding either State or
local land use planning." He may very well have been
sincere, but the executive branch is just one of three partners in
the federal system of governance, and earlier actions by some in
Congress undermine his reassurance by proposing to provide not only
that role, but also the funding to fulfill it.
On
May 25, 2001, Senator Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) introduced the
Community Character Act of 2001 (S. 975) to provide to state and
local governments $25 million per year in grants for each of the
next five years. The purpose of the bill would be to carry out,
among other things,
- Development or
revision of land use planning legislation;
- Long-term policy
guideline s for growth and development; and
- Planning
activities with land use planning legislation.
Of
particular concern as it relates to HUD's denial of any land use
planning role for the federal government is Section 4(c)(1)(D) of
the Community Character Act (as amended by Senator Jim Jeffords
(I-VT). That section states that the funds can be used to carry out
"coordination of Federal, State, regional, tribal, and local land
use plans." This language raises a troubling question for HUD:
Exactly what "Federal land use plans" are Senators Chafee and
Jeffords referring to? Is the Guidebook the de facto federal plan?
Having HUD largely funding the plan, and absent any critical or
skeptical comment on the effort by HUD officials, one can see how
there could be confusion over the federal role in the effort and
what it implies by way of a federal endorsement.
Adding to the confusion is language in the
Guidebook's introduction, in which the APA formally thanks dozens
of federal employees, including 10 at HUD, by name for their
assistance in preparing it. One employee is singled out for his
"enthusiastic and stimulating reviews of all work products,"
suggesting that the government's involvement went beyond hosting
meetings and signing checks. Absent any critical or skeptical
comment on the effort by HUD officials, it is easy to see how this
work product could be misrepresented as a federal plan by eager
smart growth advocates and marketed as such in communities
throughout the country.
While the threat of federal encroachment
on land use planning is now as great as it ever has been, advocates
for property rights can draw some solace, albeit probably just
temporarily, from the limited damage to America's freedom of choice
that Senator Chafee's modest funding levels would allow. As
currently written, S. 975 would authorize spending of only $25
million per year, which, if spread evenly among the 39,044 separate
governing jurisdictions in the United States, would provide each with an
annual grant of $640.30--not even enough to fund a fact-finding
mission to Portland, Oregon, the poster-child city for the smart
growth movement.
Also
reassuring to supporters of property rights is that the Bush
Administration, through communications by both HUD and the
Department of Commerce, has made it clear that they oppose Senator
Chafee's Community Character Act. HUD Secretary Mel Martinez wrote
that the Act "would create a Federal program to entice communities
to use prescribed land use planning techniques.... This
Administration could not support Federal efforts that infringe upon
the rights of State and local governments to manage their
growth."
An
even stronger rejection of this and other intrusive land use
proposals before Congress was offered recently in testimony by an
official of the Department of Commerce, who also used the
opportunity to endorse personal freedom, the market process, and
property rights and to express skepticism regarding the value of
more government dictates on planning. In his testimony, Assistant
Secretary for Economic Development David A. Sampson strongly
endorsed market principles and solutions as the proper guides to
community development and land use planning and opposed
congressional efforts, like S. 975, to use federal funds to obtain
"better" planning at the local level.
Is Development Gobbling Up America's
Land?
Despite efforts to impose rigid restrictions on land use in order
to achieve higher levels of population density, even among
proponents of smart growth and the new urbanism there is little
agreement on what the appropriate population density should be.
Nonetheless, there exists among these groups and sympathetic public
officials a general agreement that whatever that desired density
is, it should be higher than what currently exists to reduce the
amount of land used up each year in building new homes for a
growing population.
One
would think, then, that with so much effort devoted to the issue by
high-ranking federal officials, major environmental groups,
eco-terrorists, and U.S. Senators, the problem of runaway land use
would be extreme and self-evident. But it is not. Indeed, as
measured every five years by several different federal land use
surveys, the share of America's land that has been developed is
astonishingly small--just over 5.0 percent, according to one
government survey, and even less as measured
by other federal surveys.
Another way to describe the trivial nature
of the threat that development poses to America's enormous
inventory of open land is to note that after nearly four centuries
of unmanaged and unplanned construction and growth (Jamestown was
developed as a mixed use residential and commercial community in
1607), 94.8 percent of the land in the continental United States is
still comprised of woodlands, meadows, pastures, undeveloped
federal land holdings, and farms; only 5.2 percent is defined as
"developed." Yet this trivial amount is portrayed as a "crisis" and
consumes the time of Cabinet-level officials and some Senators who
want to encourage communities across the nation to update their
land use planning schemes to conserve more land.
According to the most widely available
land use survey/report recently published by the United States
Department of Agriculture (USDA), only 5.2 percent of the
land in the 48 contiguous states is considered developed, and this
figure may overstate the scope of residential and commercial
development, since other federal surveys suggest that the true
amount of such land may be under 4.0 percent. Chart 1 illustrates
the 1997 shares of land by major use contained within the
continental United States as estimated by the USDA's 1997 National
Resource Inventory (NRI).
But
even the NRI estimate may overstate the true scope of the amount of
developed (human-occupied) land in the United States. USDA's
definition of "developed" land also includes the amount of land in
rural areas devoted to highways, roads, railroad right-of-ways,
power transmission lines, pipelines, etc., which represent ribbons
of developed land use traversing otherwise undeveloped and
unoccupied rural areas to connect one urbanized area to another, or
a farm house with a major road. In and of themselves, such uses do
not represent "development" as the term has come to be defined, as
denoting areas of permanent human habitation and occupation. When
such uninhabited forms of public infrastructure are removed from
the USDA's tally of "developed" land, whatever land remains is
technically referred to as "urbanized."
In
providing a measurement of the amount of urbanized land in the
continental United States, the federal government offers a choice
of two estimates derived from two separate federal surveys of land
use patterns.
Using the land use estimates reported by
the NRI survey for 1997, urbanized areas accounted for just 4.0
percent of the land in the continental United States (3.2 percent
if Alaska is included). Moreover, that 4.0 percent
of the land was home to approximately 75 percent of the population.
Adding to this total the amount of rural areas identified as
containing residential housing (which the USDA defines as one
housing unit per 10 acres or more) brings these loosely inhabited
areas of the continental United States to 7.3 percent. After
presenting the data, and notwithstanding EPA Administrator
Whitman's concern about lost farmland, the authors of the USDA
report note that
Urbanization and the increase in rural
residences do not threaten the U.S. cropland base or the level of
agriculture production at present or in the near term. Urbanization
rates of increase are relatively small...and other land can be
shifted into crop production.
Other federal land use estimates suggest
that urbanized areas account for an even smaller amount of land
than found in the NRI survey. The USDA conducts another land use
survey, called the Census of Agriculture, every five years. Unlike
the NRI survey, which is based on a national sample of land use
patterns (and therefore potentially more prone to error), the Census
of Agriculture is conducted as an enumeration, and the use to which
every bit of land is put is measured, tabulated, and reported.
According to the USDA Economic Research Service, in 1997 this
survey found that "urbanized" land accounted for no more than 3.4
percent of all of the land in the continental United States. Table
1 summarizes the various federal estimates of developed and
urbanized land by definition and by survey.
Thus, after nearly 400 years of unmanaged
development and rabbit-like population growth, somewhere between
3.4 percent and 5.2 percent of land in the continental United
States has been consumed, according to the several federal surveys
measuring the use of that land.
Those with a skeptical view of the federal
findings on land use patterns may argue that the inclusion of the
vast empty spaces of America's mountainous West and the sparsely
populated farmland in the Midwest tend to make the national average
look better than it is. In their view, the older and heavily
urbanized states on the East and West Coasts would show
unacceptably high levels of developed land and fast-disappearing
woods and meadows. But that perception is largely untrue. Many of
the states whose settlement goes back for most of the four
centuries of the American experience still maintain very large
shares of undeveloped land, as Table 2 reveals for several of the
original 13 colonies.
In
both New York and Virginia, which were settled in the early 1600s,
nearly 90 percent of the land is still undeveloped, while in
Pennsylvania the share is over 85 percent, and in Maryland it is
over 80 percent. In contrast, both New Jersey and Rhode Island's
developed shares hover at around one-third of the available
land--some of the highest shares in the nation but still leaving
both states with about two-thirds of their land undeveloped or in
agricultural use.
So What Is the Problem?
Despite the evidence on land use, and for reasons hard to explain,
the contrived crisis in land use has become an object of worry for
some federal Cabinet-level departments. It has also become a high
policy priority for environmental groups and academics, a concern
of journalists, a reason for Senators to encourage a federal land
planning program, a justification for local officials to violate
property rights and discourage homeownership, and a rationale for
terrorism on the part of a lunatic fringe obsessed with trees and
dirt--all of this because just 5.2 percent of America's land has
been developed.
However trivial the pace of development
thus far, as revealed by the data, the aggressive promotion of
smart growth policies by some in the media and a gross
misrepresentation of the facts by many environmentalists threaten
the freedom of ordinary Americans to choose living arrangements
that best suit their needs. In a growing number of counties and
states, Americans' preferences are being pre-empted as restrictive
land use practices are imposed in order to redirect lifestyle
choices. Their decisions are confined by rules promulgated by
environmental and artistic elites eager to save American families
from their pedestrian tastes and philistine choices.
A
prominent new urbanist advocate, James Howard Kunstler, spoke for
many of the elites eager to save ordinary Americans from their
graceless state of fashion-impaired lifestyles when he
complained:
When we drive
around and look at all this cartoon architecture and other junk
that we've smeared all over the landscape, we register it as
ugliness. This ugliness is the surface expression of deeper
problems--problems that relate to the issue of our national
character. The highway strip is not just a sequence of eyesores.
The pattern it represents is also economically catastrophic, an
environmental calamity, socially devastating, and spiritually
degrading.
How Smart Growth Burdens Modest Income
Families
The chief response of environmentalists, planners, and public
officials troubled by growth, home building, and the trivial loss
of raw land has been to encourage the adoption of land use
strategies for development that lead to greater densification,
meaning more housing units (and human inhabitants) per acre of
land. While it is likely that such policies would slow the already
less than glacier-like development of unused land, very few
Americans find this type of crowded living acceptable. With few
families or individuals willing to embrace the environmentalist
vision of more densely packed urban communities, smart growth
advocates have sought to impose their goals on these uncooperative
households by limiting tenancy choices with policies that raise the
cost of housing options environmentalists oppose.
Among the cost-raising, growth-limiting
mechanisms currently popular in many communities attempting to
control suburbanization are:
- Charging homebuyers of detached homes on
large lots higher building and impact fees and/or taxes--often as
much as $20,000 to $40,000 per unit;
- Adding more regulations and restrictive
zoning ordinances on how undeveloped land can be used; and
- Implementing growth boundaries,
downzoning, and re-zoning for non-housing use.
All
of these practices are becoming common cost-raising regulations in
a number of suburbs, the purpose of which is to make it too costly
for most families to live any other way than in the densities
prescribed by the Sierra Club and other environmentalists.
Growth
Boundaries
Oregon pioneered this coercive approach in the 1970s by
requiring all cities to surround themselves with a growth boundary,
which prohibits any development outside it. Although much admired
by smart growth advocates and new urbanists, no other state or
metropolitan area in the nation has adopted this approach in the 30
years since Oregon took that step, and recent referenda to impose
such boundaries in Arizona and Colorado were crushed at the polls
by 2 to 1 margins.
Despite the popularity of Portland's
growth boundary among environmentalists and planners, evidence from
the 1990s suggests that this boundary has had the effect of making
homes in Portland relatively expensive to buy. Consequently, the
area's homeownership rate has fallen from above the national
average to below it. By raising living costs in
most Oregon towns and cities, these growth boundaries may be
undermining the health of the state's economy, which currently has
the nation's highest unemployment rate.
Regulations and
Mandates
Instead of growth boundaries, many communities are using
zoning regulations, costly design mandates, and a variety of
so-called impact fees to discourage suburban growth by making it
increasingly costly for average Americans to buy a new, detached
house in the suburbs, where most new housing is built. With the
purchase of a detached house on the lot size of choice effectively
limited to higher-income households, those with moderate incomes
will have no choice but to rent or economize on costs, buying a
smaller townhouse on a tiny lot or renting an apartment. Popular
mechanisms to force such decisions on households include impact
fees, downzoning, and mandated amenities.
Ostensibly imposed to cover a new
resident's share of the community's public infrastructure, such as
schools, sewage treatment, and roads, impact fees of $20,000 or
more are now increasingly common and exceed by several multiples
the real cost burden they impose. But raising the new home price by
$20,000 or more cuts households of moderate means out of the market
and forces them into higher-density housing by virtue of
affordability.
Another popular tool of growth control
occurring in some faster-growing suburbs today is downzoning, the
process whereby land already zoned for higher densities--say four
houses to the acre--is rezoned to one house per acre, or 10 acres,
or 25 acres. While such an exercise appears counterproductive to
the goal of achieving higher densities, in fact it perversely
succeeds in doing so by requiring prospective homeowners to buy
more land than they can afford. Thus, all but the financially
well-off are forced into less costly and more dense housing, such
as apartments and townhouses, elsewhere.
Likewise, mandated amenities--typically
including such requirements as brick construction or veneer,
concrete sidewalks, sodded lawns, and minimum interior square
footage for the structure--can add dramatically to the cost of a
new house and limit its purchase to those with higher incomes.
Again, these costly requirements force those with more modest
incomes into smaller housing in dense communities that keep costs
down by economizing on the amount of land used per unit.
It
is obvious from the way in which these types of growth-control
measures work that those with high incomes would be able to buy
their way out of the Sierra Club's vision of higher-density
communities, leaving the less financially well-off with the burden
of neighborhood crowding. As costly restrictions to save land and
fulfill the aesthetic aspirations of planning professionals become
more common, America runs the risk of reversing a 50-year pattern
of increasing homeownership rates among families--from little more
than 40 percent on the eve of World War II to a record-breaking
67.8 percent in 2001.
Not All Have Achieved the American
Dream
Despite this impressive national record, more progress needs to be
made in creating better opportunities because homeownership rates
among African-American and Hispanic families are still below 50
percent, in contrast to the nearly 75 percent ownership rate among
white households. Any smart growth strategies that raise home
prices and deter homeownership will impose a disproportionate
burden on those households just now coming within reach of the
American dream.
Critics of these costly and coercive
growth-management schemes have been aware of the problems these
regulations create for potential homebuyers with modest incomes,
especially minorities, and such concerns have begun to influence
the smart growth debate in recent years. Scholars at The Heritage
Foundation were among the first to raise alarm in early 2001 in a
study titled "Smart Growth, Housing Costs, and Homeownership,"
which connected high costs to diminished opportunity. The study
concluded that
By raising home prices, such policies
force households of modest means into smaller units, or out of the
community altogether. In either case, the burden is borne largely
by entry-level homebuyers and other households with low to moderate
incomes. To the extent that such policies become more commonplace
in American communities, the rate of homeownership will fall as
more and more moderate-income households are forced into the rental
market.... Those who are harmed by escalating prices are those who
are not yet owners, and this group consists largely of those with
household incomes below the median, especially racial minorities.
Shortly after this study was published,
the Fannie Mae Foundation (affiliated with the Federal National
Mortgage Association) published a homeownership study by a
professor at Tufts University who approached the smart growth issue
from the opposite direction but came to similar conclusions
regarding race and opportunity. Whereas the Heritage analysts had
asked whether smart growth strategies would be harmful to minority
homebuyers, the Tufts University study asked whether sprawl was
helpful to minority homebuyers, and concluded that it was:
This article uses 1997 American Housing
Survey data to measure housing consumption for blacks and whites in
metropolitan areas characterized by more and less sprawl. In
sprawled areas, black households consume larger units and are more
likely to own their own homes than black households living in less
sprawled areas.
Specifically, the Tufts study found
that
Relative to the average black household
living in a low sprawl area, the average black household in a
sprawled metropolitan area consumes a larger housing unit (by 0.4
more rooms), is more likely to live in the suburbs (by 11
percentage points), more likely to own a home (by 6 percentage
points), and more likely to be a suburban homeowner (by 4
percentage points).
A
similar pattern of demographic change can be seen in the shifting
racial patterns between the fast-growing Washington, D.C., suburbs
of Northern Virginia and the older D.C. suburbs and the District
itself, as revealed by newly released data from the 2000 decennial
census. As Table 3 demonstrates, in the fast-growing sprawling
Virginia suburbs in Prince William, Stafford, and Spotsylvania
Counties, an unprecedented--and largely unheralded--degree of
voluntary racial integration is taking place as African-American
families reaching middle-class income levels find more affordable
homeownership opportunities in these distant suburbs than in the
District or in older, more expensive, but close-in suburbs. For
somewhat different reasons, the very fashionable ex-urb of Fauquier
County, Virginia, which has imposed severe growth restrictions and
limits on homebuilding, has seen its African-American population
fall both relatively and absolutely over the decade of the
1990s.
As
the evidence mounts that some of the more common growth-control
restrictions may have a negative effect on homeownership
opportunities, even early and active advocates of smart growth
policies are beginning to acknowledge the potential for harm and to
express concern about the impact such policies may have on families
with more limited housing options. Recently, several academic
authors prepared a study for the Brookings Institution on smart
growth and homeownership that echoed some of the concerns raised by
Heritage Foundation scholars 10 months earlier. In the executive
summary of the paper done for Brookings, the authors
acknowledge:
Evidence shows
that certain growth control and land use policies actually reduce
jurisdictions' housing supply and the affordability of their
housing. Such policies, already widespread in the U.S., include
requirements for low density only, minimum housing size, or bans
against attached or cluster homes. Such policies are, in fact,
specifically intended to make housing more expensive and thereby
exclude lower income families, who are often people of color.
A Better Alternative: Principles for Livable
Cities
Notwithstanding the significant evidence on the trivial
extent to which suburbanization and housing construction have
affected America's vast inventory of undeveloped land, as well as
the adverse effects that many growth-control policies have on
homeownership opportunities for those with modest incomes,
particularly racial minorities, efforts to deter growth and housing
choices grow in popularity. From a few academics and
environmentalists to the media, state and local officials, and
high-level federal officials of all ideologies and party
affiliations, this misguided vision has spread despite ongoing
consumer behavior that demonstrates a continued preference for
detached houses on ample lots in uncrowded communities. The
persistence of these beliefs despite all facts to the contrary is a
tribute to the power of a fashionable idea favoring federal
intervention, however illogical it may seem in practice and
experience.
Professor Robert A. Beauregard of the New
School University in New York probably comes the closest to
explaining such academic belief systems in an article about
urban/suburban dynamics. According to Beauregard, "the allure of
the federal government is related to the existence in the United
States of what seems to be a federal urban policy cargo cult."
In
spring 2000, a group of scholars and writers on sprawl--who
recognized that policy options rooted in deeply held belief
systems, however irrational, pose a challenging hurdle to those who
promote greater reliance on market principles, property rights,
individual choice, and personal freedom--met at Lone Mountain Ranch
in Big Sky, Montana to discuss alternative ways of helping
communities shape growth patterns. The conference was an
opportunity for them to debate the issue and to distill their
thoughts on the subject of suburban growth into a concise set of
principles consistent with American ideals of freedom and liberty.
In turn, the principles put forth in the "Lone Mountain Compact"
(see text box) were designed to serve as guidelines or benchmarks
by which local officials, builders, citizens, journalists, and
academics could make better judgments about the benefits and
appropriateness of competing visions and policies affecting
community growth and design.
It
never occurred to the conference participants that the principles
they developed would need to be shared with federal officials eager
to redesign the tens of thousands of communities in America. Yet
today, the U.S. federal government is more inclined to get involved
in local land use planning. Within several Cabinet departments and
Congress, federal officials are seeking ways to influence local
decisionmakers on how land is to be used and the designs to which
communities are built.
Instead, the Bush Administration and
Congress should confirm long-standing American principles of free
choice and market solutions, including the right of people to live
and work how and where they like, rather than policies that limit
opportunity. Federal leaders should reject centralized planning by
any level of government, encourage diversity in neighborhood
design, and foster decentralized decision-making on land use.
Conclusion
Despite the insistence of artistic elites,
environmental activists, professional planners, and some in
Congress that ordinary Americans hanker after a new style of denser
living arrangements accessorized with tasteful architectural
appointments, most Americans continue to exhibit a decided
preference for single-family, detached, suburban-style housing on
lots large enough to ensure some measure of privacy and easy access
to green grass and nature's blessings. Efforts to force Americans
into environmentalist-approved, densely packed housing arrangements
consistently fail to attract the necessary political support. For
the most part, many of those who choose to live in denser
multi-family housing and townhouses do so for of reasons of limited
income and often forgo such arrangements once other, more expansive
options become affordable.
Policymakers should seek to limit attempts
to coerce families into alternative lifestyles subject to
growth-management and growth-control policies, which often
degenerate into forms of exclusion that isolate from the community
lower-income households and racial minorities. Critics have
described these policies as "greenlining," after the notorious
redlining practices that existed in many communities in the decades
before the enactment of civil rights laws.
Having failed to achieve their objectives
in most communities, environmentalists and urban planners have
turned to the federal government for political and financial help
in encouraging communities to adopt such smart growth plans. As an
incentive, they are attempting to have legislation enacted that
would provide federal taxpayer funding to those communities. The
Bush Administration is correct in openly opposing that effort.
Members of Congress who have not made up
their minds on these issues should carefully review the potentially
adverse affects of such legislation, including the Community
Character Act, on homeownership opportunities for lower-income and
minority families who are just now gaining access to the American
dream. The 10 principles for livable communities put forth by
scholars and writers at the Big Sky conference in 2000 offer a good
guide for ensuring that the policies enacted do not
disproportionately affect these Americans.
They
should also keep in mind the question that Democratic Party
candidate Adlai E. Stevenson posed during the 1952 presidential
campaign:
Our people have had more happiness and
prosperity, over a wider area, for a longer time than men have ever
had since they began to live in ordered societies 4,000 years ago.
Since we have come so far, who shall be rash enough to set limits
on our future progress? Who shall say that since we have gone so
far, we can go no farther? Who shall say that the American dream is
ended?
Ronald D. Utt,
Ph.D., is Herbert and Joyce Morgan Senior Research Fellow
in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The
Heritage Foundation.