Virginia state government organizes its economic development efforts around traditional programs — tourism, trade, small-business assistance and recruitment of corporate investment. These are all worthy parts of any comprehensive economic development strategy, but Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Smarter Growth, is thinking of economic development in broader terms.
In an open letter to Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and his counterparts in Washington, D.C., and Maryland, Schwartz articulated a “smart growth” vision of sustainable economic development in a world characterized by increasing energy prices, global warming and government facing massive structural deficits in Medicare and Social Security.
Writes Schwartz: “In this environment, we simply cannot afford to continue costly patterns of sprawl development, nor can we afford the increasing decentralization of government agencies to exurban locations. It is our cities and other existing communities, combined with transit-oriented development and other policies, which offer the opportunity to deal with these challenges.”
Sustainable economic development policies would include:
Energy Efficient Transportation: “Those regions of the world that are most energy efficient in their buildings and transportation infrastructure will be the most economically competitive. Cities, with their compact grid of streets, and dynamic, close interaction between thousands of business entities, offer huge energy efficiencies. Overspending on new highways simply enables development patterns that over the longer term are neither affordable nor sustainable. Given what we know, these historic practices no longer make sense and ultimately will prove harmful to the efficiency of our metropolitan areas. Instead, expanded transit (bus, bus rapid transit, streetcar, light rail, Metro), freight rail and passenger rail networks tied to transit-oriented development will reduce public and private costs, including transportation, and will reduce future energy consumption.”
Tackling Global Warming: Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., will be among the areas most affected by global warming. “Tens of thousands of acres of coastal land and wetlands will be potentially lost and we will face more severe storms and urban flooding.” The worst effects of global warming can be avoided, Schwartz argues, “if we act aggressively within the next 10 years to implement policies to reduce CO2 emissions.” In the Mid-Atlantic, that means investing in transit, locally interconnected streets that maximize pedestrian and bicycle trips, and “leaving behind forever the practice of throwing money at ever larger highways in a vain attempt to cure congestion.”
Conserving Fiscal Resources: The nation is plagued with chronic budget deficits — and that’s at the peak of the business cycle and before massive expenditures on Medicare and Social Security kick in. In the future, government will face ever greater fiscal constraints than today. “The cost simply to maintain and rehabilitate the infrastructure we have already built is a massive liability which grows in scale every year. … We have to be much more efficient and more judicious with our transportation and other infrastructure investments. … Compact, mixed-use, transit-oriented and pedestrian-oriented development combined with the right pricing signals will be essential to reduce the demand on our roadways and to use our land and infrastructure more efficiently.”
I totally agree with Stewart about the need to emphasize energy efficiency as a way to maintain economic competitiveness and sustain quality of life in an era of rising energy prices. I also concur that we not saddle ourselves with horrendously expensive-to-maintain physical infrastructure as government enters an era of increased fiscal constraints.
I’ve evinced skepticism about global warming hysteria on this blog. Temperatures are rising, but I’m not convinced that CO2 emissions are the main culprit. Further, any actions we take locally will have an infinitesimal impact on global trends. Still, it can’t hurt to reduce CO2 emissions as part of move towards energy conservation and self-sufficiency, goals that are justifiable on other grounds.
More importantly, I think Schwartz does a valuable service by expanding the way we think about economic development. It’s not just something we relegate to the Secretariat of Commerce and Trade. A meaningful definition would encompass our approach to education and the building of human capital. And it would encompass the way we design and build our human habitat.