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Will Sprawl Gobble Up by Ronald D. Utt, Ph.D. |
Among the many factors driving environmentalists
to discourage suburban development is the belief that such growth is consuming
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
But even the NRI estimate may overstate the true
scope of the amount of developed (human-occupied) land in the
In providing a measurement of the amount of
urbanized land in the continental
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
Urbanization and the increase in rural residences
do not threaten the
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
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
Those with a skeptical view of the federal
findings on land use patterns may argue that the inclusion of the vast empty
spaces of
In both
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:
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
Despite the popularity of
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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