Sprawl by Any Other Name
News: Gucci suburbs, dumb Smart Growth, and other lessons from the frontlines of the development wars.
August 20, 2003
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The woman sitting across the aisle from me has a big problem with speed bumps. Also with raised crosswalks. As our tour bus crawls through the suburbs of Washington, D.C., she gives a running commentary on these seemingly innocuous lumps of concrete -- as well as other devices designed to keep drivers from their right to the pursuit of fastness. "Oh, a raised crosswalk," she says, rolling her eyes theatrically. "Oh, a traffic circle, my other favorite! These things give me a pain."
Many on the bus feel her pain. Opponents of "traffic calming" represent the extreme fringe of a group of anti-smart growth activists who gathered last February at a three-day conference in Washington called "Preserving the American Dream of Mobility and Affordable Homeownership." The first morning, a group of the faithful -- libertarians, property-rights activists, home builders, road construction entrepreneurs, and other free-market fans -- and I set off on a tour of the planning horrors of suburban Maryland and Virginia. It's a sort of pep rally on wheels, designed to vindicate their worst suspicions about the public sector's hand in the built environment.
It's true that the suburbs don't look very good today. A mixture of sleet and snow casts an oily gray sheen over archipelagos of boxy superstores floating on seas of asphalt, and we squint out the windows at grim McMansion developments clogged with traffic. Such scenes epitomize the worst of sprawl, and that's the point. The sprawl around the District has occurred despite -- or, if you believe the conference organizers, because of some of the strongest anti-growth policies in the country. According to a survey by the Washington Post, some sort of "open space" regulation protects more than half of the land in the 14 counties that surround Washington, a patchwork of policies more pervasive than in any other region of the country.
Yet anti-smart growth gatherings such as this are hardly unique to D.C. Last March, hundreds of angry builders and developers conventioneering in Atlantic City attacked New Jersey Governor James McGreevey and his goal of stamping out "mindless sprawl" in the Garden State. In a thundering State of the State address three months before, McGreevey cited sprawl as the root of all New Jersey's problems, from ugly landscapes and drinking-water shortages to crowded schools and highways, and blamed "wealthy developers" who "bully unwilling taxpayers into submission." Builders angrily countered that McGreevey and his "enviro-elitists" were engaged in "social engineering" and evinced reckless disregard for their economic livelihood.
As goes New Jersey, so goes the world: The battle lines drawn by McGreevey and developers typify how the story of smart growth has played out in the media. However, the most convincing arguments made at the "Preserving the American Dream" panels didn't come from developers or ideologues who oppose government regulation on principle. They came from conservatives with environmental sympathies who point to D.C.'s suburbs as just one example among many where so-called smart-growth measures have led to anything but. Indeed, as the debate over sprawl heats up, and the language of the debate is intentionally muddled by those on all sides, voters are going to have to be a lot smarter about smart growth.
That's because "smart growth," has come to mean different things to different people. No one knows who coined the term, but it was popularized in the mid 1990s through the gubernatorial campaigns of Roy Romer in Colorado and Parris Glendening in Maryland. For urban planners the appeal of the phrase "smart growth" was that it implied a third way between the pro-growth laissez-faire vision of builders and the no-growth stonewalling of NIMBYite activists. Politicians built support for the idea through the stick of sprawl (Romer warned darkly that it was "bringing a version of Los Angeles to the Rockies" in his 1994 campaign) and the carrot of nostalgia for the "livable communities" of the early 20th Century. As the term became more popular, progressive groups rolled other ideas into their definition of smart growth: Affordable housing, inclusive communities, mass transit, and decreased congestion all became part of the pitch.
But look at what so-called smart growth has accomplished in my D.C. metro area. That we continue to sprawl is evident in the view from the Beltway, where one can see Best Buys and condos built on what was farmland just a decade ago. Traffic? It's the third worst commute in the country, according to the Texas Transportation Institute. As for affordable housing, according to the 2000 census, 25 percent of renters and 17 percent of homeowners in the D.C. metro area spend more than 35 percent of their income on rent and mortgage payments, respectively.
Not surprisingly, Ron Utt of the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation blames government regulation. To an audience of 125 American Dream conference participants, he cites Virginia's Loudoun County as a specific case of smart growth gone awry. "The country charges implicit admission fees into communities," says Utt. "They've regulated mobile homes out of the county, and charge impact fees [on new homes] that are deliberately regressive," making it economically impractical for builders to construct anything but tract mansions. Census data shows that in the Washington area, 19 percent of all homes have nine or more rooms -- only 6.4 percent of the nation's housing stock is that big.
Critics, and they're not all free marketers like Utt, call this phenomenon "Gucci sprawl" -- and it is the smart growth movement's dirty little secret. "Around here, growth regulation measures are mostly exclusionary," says Amy Liu of the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution. It's a month after the American Dream conference, but Liu's still irked by the media attention it gained. She's also annoyed by the attempts of conservatives and libertarians to monopolize criticism of bad smart-growth policy. According to Liu, who's also the Institute's deputy director of the Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, such exclusionary measures shouldn't even be called smart growth. "They keep calling it smart growth; I guess that's easier to sell," she says.
Trends in the Washington area reflect those nationwide. In a Brookings' study of the 553 state and local ballot measures relating to growth restrictions initiated in 2000, more than half were exclusionary -- that is, devoted to keeping new housing out and protecting open space. What's wrong with protecting open space, you might ask? Nothing, except that "open space" is often defined to allow the construction of "low-density housing," making it exactly the kind of regulation that tends to produce Gucci sprawl. More than 78 percent of those 553 open space measures passed.
In Virginia's Loudoun County, for example, where builders have been limited to just one house per 10 acres in most areas, county planners fully intend for new homes to be expensive, big, and spread far apart. The chairman of the board of supervisors recently told the Washington Post that a homeowner buying a single-family home valued at less than $439,000 doesn't pay enough in property taxes to pay for services rendered: "We are somewhat tired of having to build a classroom every week to keep up with growth in the county," Chairman Scott K. York complained. "People cannot afford to have their taxes go up to build school after school." Yet Loudoun is the third richest county in the country -- if its residents can't afford more schools, who can?
The American Enterprise Institute's Steven Hayward has an explanation for how "smart growth" has come to mean, as he puts it, "growth of a certain class." "People move to the suburbs looking for stability and find nothing but change," he says, and they react against that upheaval by instituting the tract mansion-generating policies found in Fairfax and Loudoun counties. Hayward believes that the demographic muscle behind such measures is the true secret to smart growth's success: "We're an upper-middle class country -- or that's where the action is. Smart growth is going to serve most of those people well, so it's not going to get turned back."
Hayward claims that his own criticism of smart growth regulation -- he would prefer a market-based approach -- is not entirely an ideological position. "To the extent that [smart growth] makes it harder to build affordable housing, that bothers me. Occasionally you do hear people say, 'I want no growth because it makes my house more valuable.'" But generally, "smart growth people tend to avoid that issue."
This is not precisely true. Brookings' Liu and her colleague Robert Puentes are all but obsessed with it. While they stress that the exponential increase in growth regulation ballot measures doesn't stem solely from "high church NIMBYism," to use Hayward's turn of phrase, they're fully cognizant that Gucci sprawl has given smart growth a bad name. "We need to make a distinction between 'smart growth' and 'growth control,' which is totally different than anything we're talking about, policy-wise or ideologically," says Puentes. Liu laments that many "smart growth" policies in California are simply "a bunch of white people trying to keep immigrants from moving into their county. For something to really be smart growth, it has to have a comprehensive agenda. It has to be sustainable both environmentally and economically, it has to be economically competitive, and it has to be economically and socially inclusive." Liu says this ideal is rarely met because so much smart-growth legislation happens at the county level, and truly smart growth -- such as Washington State's decade-old growth management program, vaunted by urban planners -- has to be regional in scope if advocates want to avoid McMansion proliferation.
But when it comes to co-opting the language of growth, Liu quickly proves that turnabout is fair play. As the recession and the Bush budget combine to put the squeeze on state finances, progressive ideas about urban planning are spreading across party boundaries -- just don't call it "smart growth." Republican governors -- including Utah's Mike Leavitt and Massachusetts' Mitt Romney -- are now championing "managed growth" plans that emphasize development in regions with existing infrastructure. Liu, who has consulted with Republican officials on these issues, says "it's easy for them to see that a lot of sprawl is just dumb stuff. All the new stuff gets built on the edge and taxpayer money has to chase that development."
Recently, Liu went to Missouri to talk to officials about instituting the state's first-ever growth plan. Missourians are not, she says, people who will be swayed by talk of preserving open space. "It's Fox News country, it's Jean Carnahan carrying a gun country. They are anti-government, anti-tax. They love their property and they hate the word 'planning,'" says Liu. Last year, when governor Bob Holden, a Democrat, tried to create a smart-growth commission, it was quickly killed by suburban Republicans. But thanks to Liu's savvy, the commission was recently revived, in part by co-opting the language of the right and refusing to mention "smart growth" at all. Instead, it's now "a growth agenda for the state that controls costs and grows the economy," Liu deadpans.
No matter what it is called, the Missouri plan strikes a hopeful note for those who want their growth to be both smart and inclusive, as building where infrastructure already exists makes it much easier to keep housing prices down. Stripped of loaded terms, even homebuilders are getting behind smart growth, er, "cost-controlling" policies. "People in homebuilder associations are tired of the wingers, they know the future of the American consumer is under the smart-growth principle: Walkable communities with integration among people," says Liu. "They know they can make money off of that."
As for the American Dream conference, its organizer, Randal O'Toole of the Oregon-based Thoreau Institute, admits that the anti-smart-growth community had been at odds over what to call their own program of market-based growth, and, consequently, great thought went into what to call the event. "Should we go with 'Smart Growth'? That's what the realtors do," O'Toole recollects. "They're just trying to appropriate the term. We also wondered if we should call it something similar but not the same: Quality growth? That's what some road builders are trying."
I congratulate him on "American Dream."
"Well, I felt like the American Dream is something that people understand," he says.
In the war of the words, however, O'Toole believes that the anti-smart growth cohort -- now going by "the American Dream Coalition (www.americandreamcoaltion.com) -- are at a disadvantage, propaganda-wise. He grudgingly admires the term "smart growth," however debased it may have become. "It's a great term. It's one thing those people are really good at," he says. But then again, he adds, "They've got a 10-year head start on us."
Image: Josh Dick and AP/Wide World Photos
