by James A. Bacon
Last week I attended the annual meeting of the American Dream Coalition in Washington, D.C., which hosted some of the leading conservative and free-market thinkers in the fields of transportation, land use and urbanism. These are people with whom I normally feel a philosophical affinity. But there was one thing I couldn’t understand. Why is conservatism’s intellectual elite so hostile to the idea of smart growth? I hoped to find out why.
The answer, I discovered, is pretty simple: Conservatives equate smart growth with intrusive government intervention in the economy, with regulations, subsidies and boondoggles. They look at out-of-control spending on mass transit projects that will never pay their own way, and they see smart growth. They look at urban growth boundaries in Portland, and they see smart growth. They look at California land use plans designed to substitute single-family houses with apartment complexes, and they see smart growth. They listen to environmentalists who want to re-engineer the economy to stave off global warming, and they hear smart growth. They listen to “social justice” advocates who want to use urban planning to redistribute wealth, and they hear smart growth.
If spending big bucks on environmental and social engineering is bad, then the opposite must be good. Conservatives find themselves defending auto-oriented development patterns in suburbia. What other people refer to derisively as “sprawl” they see as the American dream.
One of the most forceful advocates for this way of thinking is Wendell Cox, a tall man with a physically commanding presence and a booming voice. He describes “cities” (or metropolitan regions) as labor markets to which people migrate to better their codition. In his study of the 450 cities around the world with populations of one million or more, he finds that “sprawl” is a universal phenomenon. “It happens everywhere,” he said. “Addis Ababa. Djakarta. Mumbai. You find the same trend in every city. It’s the natural way cities grow.”
Cox criticized growth-management policies that restrict the supply of developable land, create housing shortages and drive up the cost of renting or buying a home. Housing, he notes, is the largest single item of household consumption and high costs are especially punishing to the poor and working classes. In that paragon of smart growth, Portland, housing prices in high-poverty areas climbed between 1999 and 2009 at almost double the rate (65%) of the overall market (35%), he says. A similar pattern prevails in other cities with restrictive policies.
Cox also applies a withering eye to mass transit. “Trains are great for serving downtown,” but a majority of jobs have moved outside the urban core, and people need cars to get around. Building roads in the suburbs has served Americans well, he says. “The U.S. has the best work-trip travel times in the world.” The average U.S. commute, predominantly by car, is 25 minutes. Compare that to 34 minutes in Australia, 40 minutes for many East Asian cities, and 46 minutes for super-dense, mass transit-oriented Hong Kong.
These and other points made during the American Dream Conference largely square with my observations. But I part ways in two important regards. First, while conservative intellectuals are spot-on in their critique of mass transit subsidies, they are blind to subsidies for roads and highways. While they hit the bulls-eye in their critique of land use restrictions, they ignore the systemic subsidies for green-field development. Their critique runs only one way. Second, I take issue with the way they identify intrusive government policy with smart growth, rather than calling it what it is — intrusive government policy.
To my mind, smart growth can be broken down into four broad propositions: (1) the pattern and density of development has a tremendous impact on the prosperity, livability and fiscal sustainability of our metropolitan regions; (2) the post-World War II pattern of disconnected, low-density, suburban-oriented development was largely the result of government interventions in the marketplace at the federal, state and local levels, (3) that pattern is increasingly dysfunctional, creating congestion and driving up the costs and liabilities of government; and (4) while many people prefer auto-oriented communities, there is a pent-up demand for walkable urbanism with access to mass transit.
There is no denying that many leftists and liberals have hitched their agendas — from saving the planet from Global Warming to redistributing wealth from affluent suburban jurisdictions to poverty-stricken inner cities — to the smart growth wagon. But smart growth covers a wide spectrum of views. Take, for example, the New Urbanists who espouse compact, walkable human-scale development reminiscent of the early 20th century. New Urbanists have suffused the broader smart growth movement with much of their thinking. Yet they are agnostic about where to build — the suburbs, exurbs, inner city, wherever. As architects, builders and developers, they’re all in favor of growth and development. Building stuff is how they make their money and how they see their visions fulfilled. Their prescriptions apply to inner cities, aging suburbs and green-field development alike.
Andres Duany, one of the leading lights in the movement, is perfectly comfortable with the idea that a third or so of all Americans have no interest in New Urbanism communities. He is happy to let them live their lives in peace. What he asks for is a roll-back of zoning codes and other restrictions that prevent him from building the kinds of communities that other people want. Sometimes, he sounds remarkably like a conservative complaining about intrusive, regulatory government.
Conservatives make a strategic error by conflating the smart growth movement with leftist social engineers. They arbitrarily classify potential friends as their enemies. Instead of attacking the smart growth movement, which includes many like-minded people, conservatives should direct their scorn to wasteful subsidies and counter-productive regulations, wherever they may be found.
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