Smart Growth
H. William Batt
[A report on a conference held in Albany, New York,
1999]
A major conference was held in Albany last week on smart growth,
the newest buzzword to counter urban sprawl. Since no one is in favor
of dumb growth, it was being called a love fest as early as
the first panel session. Rather than address problems substantively,
bromides and truisms issued in abundance.
Only one panelist even mentioned, and only in passing, the costs
sprawl imposes on society in added infrastructure requirements,
greater automobile dependency, loss of community and destruction of
nature and farmland. There was no mention, for example, that a
byproduct of all the extra driving is highway crashes costing society
an astounding 8 percent of our GDP. No mention either that our love
affair with cars and suburbs means US highway transportation costs are
a full 25 percent of same, resources otherwise available for
education, healthcare and other needs. This is double Europe's with
the same standard of living and almost triple Japan's. No one
mentioned economist Herman Daly's fundamental distinction between
growth and development, a difference between quantity and quality. The
concept of sustainable economics didn't even come up.
Nor was there any attempt to explain the economic dynamics of sprawl;
how, for instance, higher land value in urban cores results because of
society's failure to recapture socially-created economic rent from
what gains otherwise redound to speculators. No explanation even of
what economic rent is! It was as if people should accept, simply as
given, that the centripetal forces of development at work in
sequential concentric rings of ugly suburbs are inevitable and
inexorable. A few planners even put up graphic maps forecasting where
the spread would extend by certain dates! Since this was destined, we
should plan for it! No one pointed out that sprawl is due also to the
fact that drivers pay only 10 percent of the true costs of their
highway use, the rest unjustly passed off to society as if it were
entirely a public good.
Only one panelist, from the metropolitan New York Regional Planning
Association, offered any solutions to curb sprawl at all, and then
admitted they were only nostrums. The reason why there was little
analysis of the phenomena and even fewer solutions is because the one
group that could have shed light on the problem was excluded: those
who understand land economics. The program was completely in the hands
of planners and lawyers, the very ones most responsible for the
problem in the first place. Planners have given us the system of
zoning since 1916, which by general consensus and many official
reports has been a failure. Lawyers profit by the enormous burden of
litigation and negotiation this path necessitates. Both were there now
to call again for more planning and more stringent and comprehensive
law. There was lots of talk of stakeholders, an interesting
metaphor reflecting notions of real property not different from
adherents of the wise use movement.
Command-and-control and fiscal mechanisms, the latter were nowhere
discussed. This despite increasing scholarly discourse about how
pricing methods can foster sound solutions. Yet concepts such as
impact fees, site value taxation, value capture, exactions, benefit
districts, efficient road pricing were unknown to the presenters, and
unrecognized when they were mentioned from the floor.
Love fest indeed! That's not hard to achieve when any who have
different approaches to suggest are excluded from the discussion. The
sponsors and leaders of this conference are bright, able and committed
people. But sadly they failed to shed any new light on the problem; it
was a total bust.
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