Comment on Beatley and Collins' Smart Growth and Beyond: Transitioning to a Sustainable Society
By Vicki Been
Professors Beatley and Collins have presented a very ambitious and wide-ranging thesis, and I can't do justice to all their many provocative ideas. Let me instead focus on two central issues that their paper raises. First, I want to take issue with the claim that the smart growth movement misses the central issues, and that the real focus should be on sustainable growth. Second, I want to raise a concern about the distributional implications of smart growth.
Professors Beatley and Collins have focused primarily not on what smart growth is, but on what it is not. Although laudatory of smart growth's political savvy and appeal, and its role in making planning more central to land use, they argue that smart growth is not sufficiently ambitious to address the real problems that face our communities. Smart growth, they complain, fails to confront directly the orientation toward consumption that is basic to our capitalistic economy, or to grapple with the fact that there are limits to the carrying capacity of our natural environment. Because it fails or refuses to see these limits, smart growth ignores such crucial issues as population and immigration policies, or the dangers of moving from local to global economies. What is needed, Beatley and Collins maintain, is a broader focus on sustainable development.
Beatley and Collins are right that smart growth has stopped far short of embracing all the principles that might make up the somewhat amorphous notion of sustainable development. Many who now stand under the smart growth umbrella would not advocate lowering fertility rates, restricting population or many of the other policies that might flow from certain understandings of sustainable *324development. But smart growth, stripped to its essential premises, has more to offer to proponents of sustainable development than Beatley and Collins recognize.
The first premise of smart growth is that we need to pay greater attention to the ways in which money talks. We need to understand how the choices we make about whether to finance highways or transit stations, to build new roads or to repair and rebuild the old, in general to subsidize this rather than that, affect our land development and land use patterns. Once we understand the incentives our spending and taxing decisions create, we need to make conscious choices to structure those incentives to encourage the kind of development we want and not to encourage development we don't want.
That emphasis on how money talks contains at least two important assumptions that, if adroitly managed, can lead to the broader, more fundamental change in thinking that Beatley and Collins demand. First, a necessary converse to the idea that money talks is the realization that the absence of money, the refusal to subsidize, also talks, perhaps even louder. The most important element of smart growth is the demand that growth pay its own way and not rely on government subsidies. If we can achieve just that, we will have traveled far toward broader sustainability of our communities.
Many of the fundamental attacks Beatley and Collins level are simply instances of market failure - the failure of the prices we pay to accurately capture the true social costs of our consumption. Currently, the full social costs of a luxury sports utility vehicle (SUV), or a trophy home (to take two of Beatley and Collins' examples) are spread among taxpayers, other drivers and pedestrians, the people whose watershed is destroyed by runoff from the development of luxury vacation homes, and others. Through its emphasis on how money, and the absence of money, talk, smart growth has the potential to force greater internalization of those costs. When consumers are confronted with the true social costs of those SUVs or “McMansions,” their consumption patterns are likely to change.
The change in consumption will occur not because consumers come to agree with the paradigm of sustainability that Beatley and Collins urge upon us, but because the “invisible hand” of the free market will distribute resources more efficiently than it presently does. It does not take a paradigm shift, as Beatley and Collins maintain, to move us toward sustainability. What is instead required*325 is an emphasis on one of the basic tenets of free market ideology: costs must be internalized, borne by those whose consumption causes them.
Beatley and Collins, and perhaps many others, want a paradigm shift that would replace free market ideology with principles of sustainable development, but that is simply not feasible in today's political climate, and may well not be desirable. More progress can be made, at least at this point, by working within the free market model by insisting that asking development to pay its own way is simply ensuring that the market works.
An emphasis on cost internalization, rather than sustainable development, allows the smart growth movement to avoid debates about elitist urban bias or the end of free choice. It allows smart growth advocates to avoid moralistic denouncements of what Beatley and Collins refer to as “mind-numbing” suburban development. By focusing on cost internalization, smart growth doesn't have to take a position on whether people should move to the suburbs, buy SUVs, own trophy homes, or whatever - it simply asks that those who choose to do so to pay their own way. As many observers within both the smart growth and the sustainable development movements have pointed out, there is a difference between the market choices people make as consumers and the values they hold as citizens and parents and neighbors. Principles of internalization bridge that gap by requiring the prices a consumer pays to reflect the negative externalities that the community would otherwise bear. Consumers will therefore confront the true costs (both personal and social) of their consumption choices.
The other advantage of focusing on cost internalization rather than sustainable development is that it allows change to take place within our existing federalist structure. Lurking underneath the debate about smart growth are some very real concerns about the appropriate role of national and state governments versus local governments. Cost internalization can be achieved in many cases by local governments, and therefore is much less threatening to “our localism” (to use Professor Briffault's term) than is an emphasis on sustainable development. Some of the issues, such as population growth and immigration policies, that Beatley and Collins believe should be of concern to sustainable development proponents are issues that can only be addressed at a national level.
Once the premise that costs should be internalized is firmly entrenched under the smart growth banner, the debate will then shift to how to account for the true social costs of land use and consumption. That debate will and should include many of the points Beatley and Collins make. It will have to grapple, for example, with whether impact fees should be tied to the ecological footprint of a development, whether development should be asked to pay for the preservation of agricultural land needed to sustain the development, or whether suburban residents should be asked to contribute to the cost of the center city infrastructure that supports the industries that directly or indirectly give these suburban residents their jobs.
The premise that development should pay its own way will not always stretch as far as Beatley and Collins would want, at least not for many years. But debates about whether, or when and where, to develop are much more likely to grapple with the full range of social costs the development may impose if the smart growth movement insists upon the principle of cost internalization rather than invoking the more threatening language of sustainable development.
Focusing on cost internalization rather than sustainable development also has the advantage of moving the debate from the abstract to the concrete. Governments and their planners and lawyers know that courts will accept an impact fee or carbon tax or other internalization forcing device only if the government can provide hard evidence that the development imposes the cost at issue, and is being asked to pay no more than its fair share of that cost. Governments (and smart growth advocates) will therefore focus on the concrete, specific task of gathering the data needed to justify cost internalization. Government planners and lawyers are much less knowledgeable, not to mention comfortable, with the less immediately tangible principles of sustainable development.
The second implicit premise of the smart growth tenet that money talks is a recognition that subsidies are gifts, and a gift-giver can stop or change the flow of gifts without running afoul of the Fifth Amendment's Taking Clause. Government subsidies that have made certain kinds of development profitable are not property rights. By emphasizing how and whether government expenditures subsidize development, smart growth can provide a powerful counter to claims of unfairness by pro-development forces. Again, the emphasis is particularly salient politically because it comes from within the free market, property rights-oriented paradigm, rather than as a challenge to that paradigm.
The recognition that subsidies are gifts, not property rights, is not a full answer to the objections that pro-development forces will have to the increased impact fees and other exactions and taxes that full cost internalization will demand. Another objection arises from basic notions of fairness: developers will quite rightly ask why they should pay for roads or schools or watershed protection when developers who built ten years ago were not asked to provide these services.
Planners and lawyers must work harder on the answer to that question. It may not be enough to say that times have changed or to point to our increased understanding of the costs of development. We need to rise to the challenge of providing better theoretical frameworks, and concrete cost assessment models, to ensure that development is asked to pay its own way, but is not forced to subsidize those who got there first - the existing home-owners who, not without coincidence, are the major constituencies of smart growth.
These issues of historical equity raise important questions about the distributional implications of smart growth. To be successful advocates of smart growth, we have to be more sensitive to these implications. Several years ago, U.S. News and World Reportpublished a cartoon by Toles that showed wealthy whites, living in the center city, near their jobs. In the next panel, people of color and the poor start to move into the cities, and the whites move to the first ring of suburbs. When the poor and people of color move to the first ring of suburbs, the wealthy whites move to the second ring. When the poor and people of color move to the second ring of suburbs, the rich whites move back into the city, saying, “It worked.” That cartoon contains a stinging assessment of how smart growth may be perceived by people of color and poor whites, who just when a suburban lifestyle is finally within their reach, find it denied because of new found principles of cost internalization. Smart growth advocates have to come to terms with that distributional problem. Redirecting government subsidies to infill development in urban areas may be efficient, but it leads to gentrification that displaces existing residents, which may not accord with some conceptions of fairness. We have to find ways to develop more efficiently, but also more fairly.
We do not yet have the answers to those problems, but my claim is that we are more likely to find politically feasible answers by avoiding debates about vague calls for sustainable development, and concentrating instead on finding ways to ensure that smart growth is seen as a call for cost internalization. If we, subsequently, define cost internalization as broadly and as concretely as possible, and self consciously try to find ways to make the transition to greater cost internalization fair to those who have not yet achieved the American Dream of home ownership, we truly will have grown smarter. We also will have traveled considerable distance toward the ideals of sustainable development that Beatley and Collins advocate.
Professors Beatley and Collins have focused primarily not on what smart growth is, but on what it is not. Although laudatory of smart growth's political savvy and appeal, and its role in making planning more central to land use, they argue that smart growth is not sufficiently ambitious to address the real problems that face our communities. Smart growth, they complain, fails to confront directly the orientation toward consumption that is basic to our capitalistic economy, or to grapple with the fact that there are limits to the carrying capacity of our natural environment. Because it fails or refuses to see these limits, smart growth ignores such crucial issues as population and immigration policies, or the dangers of moving from local to global economies. What is needed, Beatley and Collins maintain, is a broader focus on sustainable development.
Beatley and Collins are right that smart growth has stopped far short of embracing all the principles that might make up the somewhat amorphous notion of sustainable development. Many who now stand under the smart growth umbrella would not advocate lowering fertility rates, restricting population or many of the other policies that might flow from certain understandings of sustainable *324development. But smart growth, stripped to its essential premises, has more to offer to proponents of sustainable development than Beatley and Collins recognize.
The first premise of smart growth is that we need to pay greater attention to the ways in which money talks. We need to understand how the choices we make about whether to finance highways or transit stations, to build new roads or to repair and rebuild the old, in general to subsidize this rather than that, affect our land development and land use patterns. Once we understand the incentives our spending and taxing decisions create, we need to make conscious choices to structure those incentives to encourage the kind of development we want and not to encourage development we don't want.
That emphasis on how money talks contains at least two important assumptions that, if adroitly managed, can lead to the broader, more fundamental change in thinking that Beatley and Collins demand. First, a necessary converse to the idea that money talks is the realization that the absence of money, the refusal to subsidize, also talks, perhaps even louder. The most important element of smart growth is the demand that growth pay its own way and not rely on government subsidies. If we can achieve just that, we will have traveled far toward broader sustainability of our communities.
Many of the fundamental attacks Beatley and Collins level are simply instances of market failure - the failure of the prices we pay to accurately capture the true social costs of our consumption. Currently, the full social costs of a luxury sports utility vehicle (SUV), or a trophy home (to take two of Beatley and Collins' examples) are spread among taxpayers, other drivers and pedestrians, the people whose watershed is destroyed by runoff from the development of luxury vacation homes, and others. Through its emphasis on how money, and the absence of money, talk, smart growth has the potential to force greater internalization of those costs. When consumers are confronted with the true social costs of those SUVs or “McMansions,” their consumption patterns are likely to change.
The change in consumption will occur not because consumers come to agree with the paradigm of sustainability that Beatley and Collins urge upon us, but because the “invisible hand” of the free market will distribute resources more efficiently than it presently does. It does not take a paradigm shift, as Beatley and Collins maintain, to move us toward sustainability. What is instead required*325 is an emphasis on one of the basic tenets of free market ideology: costs must be internalized, borne by those whose consumption causes them.
Beatley and Collins, and perhaps many others, want a paradigm shift that would replace free market ideology with principles of sustainable development, but that is simply not feasible in today's political climate, and may well not be desirable. More progress can be made, at least at this point, by working within the free market model by insisting that asking development to pay its own way is simply ensuring that the market works.
An emphasis on cost internalization, rather than sustainable development, allows the smart growth movement to avoid debates about elitist urban bias or the end of free choice. It allows smart growth advocates to avoid moralistic denouncements of what Beatley and Collins refer to as “mind-numbing” suburban development. By focusing on cost internalization, smart growth doesn't have to take a position on whether people should move to the suburbs, buy SUVs, own trophy homes, or whatever - it simply asks that those who choose to do so to pay their own way. As many observers within both the smart growth and the sustainable development movements have pointed out, there is a difference between the market choices people make as consumers and the values they hold as citizens and parents and neighbors. Principles of internalization bridge that gap by requiring the prices a consumer pays to reflect the negative externalities that the community would otherwise bear. Consumers will therefore confront the true costs (both personal and social) of their consumption choices.
The other advantage of focusing on cost internalization rather than sustainable development is that it allows change to take place within our existing federalist structure. Lurking underneath the debate about smart growth are some very real concerns about the appropriate role of national and state governments versus local governments. Cost internalization can be achieved in many cases by local governments, and therefore is much less threatening to “our localism” (to use Professor Briffault's term) than is an emphasis on sustainable development. Some of the issues, such as population growth and immigration policies, that Beatley and Collins believe should be of concern to sustainable development proponents are issues that can only be addressed at a national level.
Once the premise that costs should be internalized is firmly entrenched under the smart growth banner, the debate will then shift to how to account for the true social costs of land use and consumption. That debate will and should include many of the points Beatley and Collins make. It will have to grapple, for example, with whether impact fees should be tied to the ecological footprint of a development, whether development should be asked to pay for the preservation of agricultural land needed to sustain the development, or whether suburban residents should be asked to contribute to the cost of the center city infrastructure that supports the industries that directly or indirectly give these suburban residents their jobs.
The premise that development should pay its own way will not always stretch as far as Beatley and Collins would want, at least not for many years. But debates about whether, or when and where, to develop are much more likely to grapple with the full range of social costs the development may impose if the smart growth movement insists upon the principle of cost internalization rather than invoking the more threatening language of sustainable development.
Focusing on cost internalization rather than sustainable development also has the advantage of moving the debate from the abstract to the concrete. Governments and their planners and lawyers know that courts will accept an impact fee or carbon tax or other internalization forcing device only if the government can provide hard evidence that the development imposes the cost at issue, and is being asked to pay no more than its fair share of that cost. Governments (and smart growth advocates) will therefore focus on the concrete, specific task of gathering the data needed to justify cost internalization. Government planners and lawyers are much less knowledgeable, not to mention comfortable, with the less immediately tangible principles of sustainable development.
The second implicit premise of the smart growth tenet that money talks is a recognition that subsidies are gifts, and a gift-giver can stop or change the flow of gifts without running afoul of the Fifth Amendment's Taking Clause. Government subsidies that have made certain kinds of development profitable are not property rights. By emphasizing how and whether government expenditures subsidize development, smart growth can provide a powerful counter to claims of unfairness by pro-development forces. Again, the emphasis is particularly salient politically because it comes from within the free market, property rights-oriented paradigm, rather than as a challenge to that paradigm.
The recognition that subsidies are gifts, not property rights, is not a full answer to the objections that pro-development forces will have to the increased impact fees and other exactions and taxes that full cost internalization will demand. Another objection arises from basic notions of fairness: developers will quite rightly ask why they should pay for roads or schools or watershed protection when developers who built ten years ago were not asked to provide these services.
Planners and lawyers must work harder on the answer to that question. It may not be enough to say that times have changed or to point to our increased understanding of the costs of development. We need to rise to the challenge of providing better theoretical frameworks, and concrete cost assessment models, to ensure that development is asked to pay its own way, but is not forced to subsidize those who got there first - the existing home-owners who, not without coincidence, are the major constituencies of smart growth.
These issues of historical equity raise important questions about the distributional implications of smart growth. To be successful advocates of smart growth, we have to be more sensitive to these implications. Several years ago, U.S. News and World Reportpublished a cartoon by Toles that showed wealthy whites, living in the center city, near their jobs. In the next panel, people of color and the poor start to move into the cities, and the whites move to the first ring of suburbs. When the poor and people of color move to the first ring of suburbs, the wealthy whites move to the second ring. When the poor and people of color move to the second ring of suburbs, the rich whites move back into the city, saying, “It worked.” That cartoon contains a stinging assessment of how smart growth may be perceived by people of color and poor whites, who just when a suburban lifestyle is finally within their reach, find it denied because of new found principles of cost internalization. Smart growth advocates have to come to terms with that distributional problem. Redirecting government subsidies to infill development in urban areas may be efficient, but it leads to gentrification that displaces existing residents, which may not accord with some conceptions of fairness. We have to find ways to develop more efficiently, but also more fairly.
We do not yet have the answers to those problems, but my claim is that we are more likely to find politically feasible answers by avoiding debates about vague calls for sustainable development, and concentrating instead on finding ways to ensure that smart growth is seen as a call for cost internalization. If we, subsequently, define cost internalization as broadly and as concretely as possible, and self consciously try to find ways to make the transition to greater cost internalization fair to those who have not yet achieved the American Dream of home ownership, we truly will have grown smarter. We also will have traveled considerable distance toward the ideals of sustainable development that Beatley and Collins advocate.
