Smart Growth and Beyond: Transitioning to a Sustainable Society
By Timothy Beatley and Richard Collins
INTRODUCTION
Few terms have become so quickly incorporated into the mainstream language of planners, developers, designers, and increasingly the general public, as “smart growth” has. Groups advocating smart growth and smart growth initiatives have sprouted up around the country, from San Francisco to Minneapolis to Chicago, and new alliances have formed to battle the sprawl between groups such as the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the American Farmland Trust. Groups as divergent in their outlooks as the American Planning Association and the National Home Builders Association (NHBA) have come together under the banner of smart growth.
To be sure, there is a mood of frustration in many communities around the country; a sense that a different way of building and growing is needed. Communities are concerned about the loss of open spaces, growing traffic congestion, and the diminishing livability of our home and working environments. These concerns seem to be fueling support for smart growth ideas around the country.
The trends and patterns of growth are alarming. Low-density, car-dependent sprawl increasingly consumes farmland and environmentally-sensitive lands at a high rate. These growth patterns involve tremendous public cost and generally result in a mind-numbing, disconnected, community-less landscape. Sprawl is a serious national problem, we believe, worthy of serious efforts and strategies to combat it.
That community growth has risen to the fore in many parts of the country is undeniable. November 1999 saw an amazing number of local ballot measures - some 240 - with some seventy percent of them passing. Sprawl has become, as one recent opinion piece noted “a political hot-button issue virtually throughout the United States.“ Neil Pierce says it is “becoming a formidable force in American Life.”
Smart growth has been elevated to the level of a national issue, clearly evidenced in the advocacy and support of Vice President Al Gore and the Clinton administration. Gore has put forth an impressive $10 billion livability agenda and has made planning and community growth issues front and center in his presidential campaign.
Initially we ought to make some effort at defining smart growth. Looking at the literature, newspapers and news accounts of community discussions around the country, there is some degree of confusion about what it actually means. Specifically, smart growth refers to the use of financial and other incentives, and public investment decisions, to encourage less-sprawling land use patterns and more compact urban form. Over time the smart growth label has been applied to any manner of growth management. Indeed, any community or state strategy for reducing sprawl, such as urban growth boundaries, transfer of development rights, and regional tax-base sharing, is now included in a more expansive definition of smart growth.
Today, smart growth is generally defined in relation to sprawl, as the alternative or antidote to sprawl. Smart growth is to many simply viewed as the opposite of ill-planned, ill-coordinated development. Indeed, there has been a kind of verbal imperialism at work here. Suddenly, Portland's growth management system, in place for more than twenty years, is modernly labeled smart growth. This seems odd, but perhaps it is strategically wise. Smart growth initiatives, at local and state levels, are in many respects simply the latest incarnations of growth management, a trend dating back at least to the 1960s and early 1970s. It is interesting to us, as an aside, that many of the leaders in the early growth management movement - in places like Ramapo, Petaluma, and Boulder - receive much less attention today, even though many of these efforts at controlling and guiding growth were (and are) much more stringent and far-reaching than more recent smart growth initiatives.
For this reason, the precise form smart growth initiatives have taken varies, but in general they aim to guide new growth into somewhat denser, more compact areas, where existing public services and facilities are already located, and where open spaces and green spaces are reserved and protected. Smart growth seems especially to reflect two policy and planning streams: (1) programs for funneling future public investments in to desired growth areas; and, (2) programs for purchasing or otherwise preserving open space. But supporters of smart growth will likely throw into the mix a much greater variety of tools, techniques and strategies.
While we have some critical remarks about smart growth as a national campaign or movement, there are a number of very positive things that can be said or noted about how this idea or package of ideas has so far been played out. We believe the smart growth movement, if it can be called such, represents a very positive development for several reasons. First, it has the potential to bring about more sustainable patterns of community land use and to champion a more efficient and sagacious consumption of limited public resources. Many new smart growth programs evince this potential.
A number of specific smart growth initiatives and proposals can be cited and described to further elaborate on what smart growth is all about. Maryland's smart growth initiative dates to 1997, and represents one of the earliest efforts to implement these ideas at a state level. The Smart Growth Areas Act mandates that after a certain date, future state funding for growth-related projects will occur in designated Priority Funding Areas (PFAs). PFAs include existing cities and urban areas, as well as areas designated by counties if minimum land use criteria are met, including a permitted minimum density of 3.5 units per acre. A second major prong of Maryland's effort is the Rural Lands Legacy program, which provides state grants to localities on a competitive basis for the purchase of open lands, in either fee simple or some lesser estate.
Other states have recently adopted tough growth management policies under the smart growth banner. In the spring of 1998, Tennessee enacted a state growth policy law that requires preparation of joint city-county growth plans. Among other provisions in these plans, municipalities must designate urban growth areas (essentially urban growth boundaries) which, like Oregon's Senate Bill 100, includes sufficient land to accommodate twenty years' of future growth. Localities have until July 2001 to submit their plans to the State's Local Government Planning Advisory Committee, under threat of substantial penalty (e.g., loss of state and federal grants or the imposition of annexation authorities). Financial incentives for having an approved growth plan are also significant: such localities are given an additional five percent score in the evaluation formulas through which funds from programs like Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) and Tennessee Infrastructure Grants are allocated.
Individual municipal governments have also begun to adopt new planning initiatives under the smart growth banner. Austin, Texas, is a notable example, launching its Smart Growth Initiative in February 1998. Among other elements of this initiative, the City has designated smart growth zones and corridors and now offers developers incentives, such as expedited permit review and reductions or exemptions in development fees for new projects located within these preferred areas. The city is also taking steps to guide public investments into these preferred growth areas. For instance there is a planned light rail system for which substantial funds have already been set aside and transit corridors delineated on the smart growth map.
Second, smart growth has brought community planning into the mainstream, and has broadened substantially the political base and constituency for planning. This broadening seems, in part, the result of an undeniable ability to capture the linguistic high ground. In the powerful symmetry in which sprawl connotes the negative, smart growth sounds like one of those things that you simply cannot oppose. It has the sound of something we ought to support. Roy Barnes, the governor of Georgia, was reported to have exclaimed, “I love this term smart growth .... Who can be against it?” The smart growth tag neatly creates a rhetorical advantage by contrasting it with what can only be considered “dumb” growth. The use of the word smart is simply smart.
That smart growth has garnered considerable political and popular support is undeniable, with support emerging from both sides of the political aisle. At least thirty governors have come out in support of some form of smart growth. Prominent supporters of the smart growth movement include Governor Jesse Ventura, who calls himself “the new sheriff in town” on matters of land use and sprawl, and Hugh McColl, Bank of America President. McColl, speaking before the International Council of Shopping Centers (a traditionally unlikely source of support for community planning), is reported to have said, “Smart growth is ‘pro-growth,’ because growth fuels the economy” and that it is especially appropriate to “American's ‘free market society’ because it favors incentives over controls.”
Arguably, smart growth strategies better match the broad political-philosophical landscape of this country; they have the promise of acceptability and are as likely to fare well in Montana as well as in Minnesota, and in Idaho as well as Oregon. This exists in large part because these strategies emphasize on incentives and incentive-based planning, factors that distinguish them from many earlier growth management initiatives. As one recent newspaper report describes the Maryland approach, “Smart growth eschews bureaucratic dictates and growth boundaries, relying instead on budgeting incentives.” Perhaps these types of programs are the most appropriate given the special context in which American planning occurs (i.e., the heavy historical reliance on free market workings, takings issues, personal freedom, and property values generally).
Smart growth may represent an especially viable planning approach in the face of shrill objections to government interference with private property: witness takings legislation enacted in a number of states and proposed takings bills at the federal level. Smart growth strategies that rely upon targeted public expenditures that encourage growth in areas that possess community facilities, and that do not proscribe development by growth control regulations, will make it difficult for property owners to object. If public purchase of easements or acquisition of public land to protect open space or to conserve farmland are also adopted, the strategy may be assailed for its wisdom but not for failing to compensate the owners.
Third, the smart growth movement has certainly helped stimulate an important public debate about land use and community growth in the U.S. While not always a very comfortable debate, it is an important and necessary one, and smart growth advocates are to be commended in this regard. Smart growth initiatives highlight and clarify a clash of values and the resulting series of ethical dilemmas and quandaries, many of them quite familiar to those of us in the planning field, and this is clearly a good thing. While we are certainly not able to provide here a comprehensive discussion or chronicle of this debate, a review of newspaper coverage and national media attention gives some indication of the main issues involved.
Perhaps most fundamentally to those on the conservative end, smart growers espouse an unfair and somewhat elitist view of suburban, exurban American lifestyles. As one conservative headline this summer labeled Vice President Gore's livability agenda, “It's a utopian vision for federal commissars who hate free will.” Another described smart growth as “merely the latest repackaging of liberal disdain for the suburban way of life.” Conservative cynics also point to the political benefits of anti-sprawl positions - the emphasis on re-invigorating and repopulating central cities shores up important traditional constituencies, as does support from environmentalists.
Some critics of smart growth question its ability to produce the more desirable communities and living environments it promises, and raise questions about the perceived negative consequences of more compact living. Randal O'Toole, for example, has been one of the harshest critics of the Portland model, arguing that, in the pursuit of compactness, quality of life is actually diminished as corner open spaces are lost through infill development, traffic congestion increases, and air quality worsens.10 While these factual assumptions can be questioned, these critics argue that the cure, more compact communities, is often worse than the illness which is sprawl.
Much of the anti-smart growth commentary has originated from Heritage Foundation scholars and aired in venues such as the conservative magazine Reason. It is easy perhaps to dismiss much of this reaction, but it does suggest that there are substantial issues and objections that must be dealt with. One of the most interesting critiques of anti-sprawl from the political right is the belief that we are laying too much blame on suburbia for the vast list of environmental and social ills. Virginia Postrel, editor ofReason, frames the attacks on sprawl as:
a way of blaming an impersonal force for the tradeoffs individuals have made in their lives, notably the decisions to work long hours and buy elbow room. The anti-sprawl campaign simultaneously indulges baby boomers' guilt and excuses their life choices, treating them as victims rather than actors. It tells voters that they're bad parents who are destroying the Earth, but then says it's not their fault.
Michael Pollan, in a thoughtful essay in the New York Times, rightly observed that the whole smart growth debate has drawn us, whether we are aware of it or not, into a “conversation about capitalism.” Pollan asserts, “Implicit here is the notion that the free market need not have the last word on the state of the American landscape or public health or even popular culture.” While conservative critics of smart growth argue that it represents an elitist effort to cancel out what the free market indicates Americans want, there is a legitimate new awareness that Americans are more than consumer machines.
We agree with this view, though we are often conflicted about community growth. As Pollan astutely notes, we typically both deplore the “arrival of a new Home Depot ... and also ... shop there.” At least in part, the smart growth movement represents a rebuff of the apparent view from the right that we are essentially and primarily consumers. Pollan calls it a “complicated truth” that “we are not only consumers, but parents and neighbors and citizens too. The sort of world we bring into being with our dollars does not necessarily match the world we would vote for with our hearts” The latter is more in the realm of politics than the marketplace.
Despite these many positive aspects, as planners and environmentalists there are several significant issues we would like to take up with the current smart growth movement. We make these complaints in a friendly spirit, as planners who generally support a strong public planning function. We begin below by expressing some concerns about the likely success and effectiveness of smart growth measures, then proceed to question more fundamentally some of the key underlying assumptions of the smart growth movement.
Few terms have become so quickly incorporated into the mainstream language of planners, developers, designers, and increasingly the general public, as “smart growth” has. Groups advocating smart growth and smart growth initiatives have sprouted up around the country, from San Francisco to Minneapolis to Chicago, and new alliances have formed to battle the sprawl between groups such as the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the American Farmland Trust. Groups as divergent in their outlooks as the American Planning Association and the National Home Builders Association (NHBA) have come together under the banner of smart growth.
To be sure, there is a mood of frustration in many communities around the country; a sense that a different way of building and growing is needed. Communities are concerned about the loss of open spaces, growing traffic congestion, and the diminishing livability of our home and working environments. These concerns seem to be fueling support for smart growth ideas around the country.
The trends and patterns of growth are alarming. Low-density, car-dependent sprawl increasingly consumes farmland and environmentally-sensitive lands at a high rate. These growth patterns involve tremendous public cost and generally result in a mind-numbing, disconnected, community-less landscape. Sprawl is a serious national problem, we believe, worthy of serious efforts and strategies to combat it.
That community growth has risen to the fore in many parts of the country is undeniable. November 1999 saw an amazing number of local ballot measures - some 240 - with some seventy percent of them passing. Sprawl has become, as one recent opinion piece noted “a political hot-button issue virtually throughout the United States.“ Neil Pierce says it is “becoming a formidable force in American Life.”
Smart growth has been elevated to the level of a national issue, clearly evidenced in the advocacy and support of Vice President Al Gore and the Clinton administration. Gore has put forth an impressive $10 billion livability agenda and has made planning and community growth issues front and center in his presidential campaign.
Initially we ought to make some effort at defining smart growth. Looking at the literature, newspapers and news accounts of community discussions around the country, there is some degree of confusion about what it actually means. Specifically, smart growth refers to the use of financial and other incentives, and public investment decisions, to encourage less-sprawling land use patterns and more compact urban form. Over time the smart growth label has been applied to any manner of growth management. Indeed, any community or state strategy for reducing sprawl, such as urban growth boundaries, transfer of development rights, and regional tax-base sharing, is now included in a more expansive definition of smart growth.
Today, smart growth is generally defined in relation to sprawl, as the alternative or antidote to sprawl. Smart growth is to many simply viewed as the opposite of ill-planned, ill-coordinated development. Indeed, there has been a kind of verbal imperialism at work here. Suddenly, Portland's growth management system, in place for more than twenty years, is modernly labeled smart growth. This seems odd, but perhaps it is strategically wise. Smart growth initiatives, at local and state levels, are in many respects simply the latest incarnations of growth management, a trend dating back at least to the 1960s and early 1970s. It is interesting to us, as an aside, that many of the leaders in the early growth management movement - in places like Ramapo, Petaluma, and Boulder - receive much less attention today, even though many of these efforts at controlling and guiding growth were (and are) much more stringent and far-reaching than more recent smart growth initiatives.
For this reason, the precise form smart growth initiatives have taken varies, but in general they aim to guide new growth into somewhat denser, more compact areas, where existing public services and facilities are already located, and where open spaces and green spaces are reserved and protected. Smart growth seems especially to reflect two policy and planning streams: (1) programs for funneling future public investments in to desired growth areas; and, (2) programs for purchasing or otherwise preserving open space. But supporters of smart growth will likely throw into the mix a much greater variety of tools, techniques and strategies.
While we have some critical remarks about smart growth as a national campaign or movement, there are a number of very positive things that can be said or noted about how this idea or package of ideas has so far been played out. We believe the smart growth movement, if it can be called such, represents a very positive development for several reasons. First, it has the potential to bring about more sustainable patterns of community land use and to champion a more efficient and sagacious consumption of limited public resources. Many new smart growth programs evince this potential.
A number of specific smart growth initiatives and proposals can be cited and described to further elaborate on what smart growth is all about. Maryland's smart growth initiative dates to 1997, and represents one of the earliest efforts to implement these ideas at a state level. The Smart Growth Areas Act mandates that after a certain date, future state funding for growth-related projects will occur in designated Priority Funding Areas (PFAs). PFAs include existing cities and urban areas, as well as areas designated by counties if minimum land use criteria are met, including a permitted minimum density of 3.5 units per acre. A second major prong of Maryland's effort is the Rural Lands Legacy program, which provides state grants to localities on a competitive basis for the purchase of open lands, in either fee simple or some lesser estate.
Other states have recently adopted tough growth management policies under the smart growth banner. In the spring of 1998, Tennessee enacted a state growth policy law that requires preparation of joint city-county growth plans. Among other provisions in these plans, municipalities must designate urban growth areas (essentially urban growth boundaries) which, like Oregon's Senate Bill 100, includes sufficient land to accommodate twenty years' of future growth. Localities have until July 2001 to submit their plans to the State's Local Government Planning Advisory Committee, under threat of substantial penalty (e.g., loss of state and federal grants or the imposition of annexation authorities). Financial incentives for having an approved growth plan are also significant: such localities are given an additional five percent score in the evaluation formulas through which funds from programs like Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) and Tennessee Infrastructure Grants are allocated.
Individual municipal governments have also begun to adopt new planning initiatives under the smart growth banner. Austin, Texas, is a notable example, launching its Smart Growth Initiative in February 1998. Among other elements of this initiative, the City has designated smart growth zones and corridors and now offers developers incentives, such as expedited permit review and reductions or exemptions in development fees for new projects located within these preferred areas. The city is also taking steps to guide public investments into these preferred growth areas. For instance there is a planned light rail system for which substantial funds have already been set aside and transit corridors delineated on the smart growth map.
Second, smart growth has brought community planning into the mainstream, and has broadened substantially the political base and constituency for planning. This broadening seems, in part, the result of an undeniable ability to capture the linguistic high ground. In the powerful symmetry in which sprawl connotes the negative, smart growth sounds like one of those things that you simply cannot oppose. It has the sound of something we ought to support. Roy Barnes, the governor of Georgia, was reported to have exclaimed, “I love this term smart growth .... Who can be against it?” The smart growth tag neatly creates a rhetorical advantage by contrasting it with what can only be considered “dumb” growth. The use of the word smart is simply smart.
That smart growth has garnered considerable political and popular support is undeniable, with support emerging from both sides of the political aisle. At least thirty governors have come out in support of some form of smart growth. Prominent supporters of the smart growth movement include Governor Jesse Ventura, who calls himself “the new sheriff in town” on matters of land use and sprawl, and Hugh McColl, Bank of America President. McColl, speaking before the International Council of Shopping Centers (a traditionally unlikely source of support for community planning), is reported to have said, “Smart growth is ‘pro-growth,’ because growth fuels the economy” and that it is especially appropriate to “American's ‘free market society’ because it favors incentives over controls.”
Arguably, smart growth strategies better match the broad political-philosophical landscape of this country; they have the promise of acceptability and are as likely to fare well in Montana as well as in Minnesota, and in Idaho as well as Oregon. This exists in large part because these strategies emphasize on incentives and incentive-based planning, factors that distinguish them from many earlier growth management initiatives. As one recent newspaper report describes the Maryland approach, “Smart growth eschews bureaucratic dictates and growth boundaries, relying instead on budgeting incentives.” Perhaps these types of programs are the most appropriate given the special context in which American planning occurs (i.e., the heavy historical reliance on free market workings, takings issues, personal freedom, and property values generally).
Smart growth may represent an especially viable planning approach in the face of shrill objections to government interference with private property: witness takings legislation enacted in a number of states and proposed takings bills at the federal level. Smart growth strategies that rely upon targeted public expenditures that encourage growth in areas that possess community facilities, and that do not proscribe development by growth control regulations, will make it difficult for property owners to object. If public purchase of easements or acquisition of public land to protect open space or to conserve farmland are also adopted, the strategy may be assailed for its wisdom but not for failing to compensate the owners.
Third, the smart growth movement has certainly helped stimulate an important public debate about land use and community growth in the U.S. While not always a very comfortable debate, it is an important and necessary one, and smart growth advocates are to be commended in this regard. Smart growth initiatives highlight and clarify a clash of values and the resulting series of ethical dilemmas and quandaries, many of them quite familiar to those of us in the planning field, and this is clearly a good thing. While we are certainly not able to provide here a comprehensive discussion or chronicle of this debate, a review of newspaper coverage and national media attention gives some indication of the main issues involved.
Perhaps most fundamentally to those on the conservative end, smart growers espouse an unfair and somewhat elitist view of suburban, exurban American lifestyles. As one conservative headline this summer labeled Vice President Gore's livability agenda, “It's a utopian vision for federal commissars who hate free will.” Another described smart growth as “merely the latest repackaging of liberal disdain for the suburban way of life.” Conservative cynics also point to the political benefits of anti-sprawl positions - the emphasis on re-invigorating and repopulating central cities shores up important traditional constituencies, as does support from environmentalists.
Some critics of smart growth question its ability to produce the more desirable communities and living environments it promises, and raise questions about the perceived negative consequences of more compact living. Randal O'Toole, for example, has been one of the harshest critics of the Portland model, arguing that, in the pursuit of compactness, quality of life is actually diminished as corner open spaces are lost through infill development, traffic congestion increases, and air quality worsens.10 While these factual assumptions can be questioned, these critics argue that the cure, more compact communities, is often worse than the illness which is sprawl.
Much of the anti-smart growth commentary has originated from Heritage Foundation scholars and aired in venues such as the conservative magazine Reason. It is easy perhaps to dismiss much of this reaction, but it does suggest that there are substantial issues and objections that must be dealt with. One of the most interesting critiques of anti-sprawl from the political right is the belief that we are laying too much blame on suburbia for the vast list of environmental and social ills. Virginia Postrel, editor ofReason, frames the attacks on sprawl as:
a way of blaming an impersonal force for the tradeoffs individuals have made in their lives, notably the decisions to work long hours and buy elbow room. The anti-sprawl campaign simultaneously indulges baby boomers' guilt and excuses their life choices, treating them as victims rather than actors. It tells voters that they're bad parents who are destroying the Earth, but then says it's not their fault.
Michael Pollan, in a thoughtful essay in the New York Times, rightly observed that the whole smart growth debate has drawn us, whether we are aware of it or not, into a “conversation about capitalism.” Pollan asserts, “Implicit here is the notion that the free market need not have the last word on the state of the American landscape or public health or even popular culture.” While conservative critics of smart growth argue that it represents an elitist effort to cancel out what the free market indicates Americans want, there is a legitimate new awareness that Americans are more than consumer machines.
We agree with this view, though we are often conflicted about community growth. As Pollan astutely notes, we typically both deplore the “arrival of a new Home Depot ... and also ... shop there.” At least in part, the smart growth movement represents a rebuff of the apparent view from the right that we are essentially and primarily consumers. Pollan calls it a “complicated truth” that “we are not only consumers, but parents and neighbors and citizens too. The sort of world we bring into being with our dollars does not necessarily match the world we would vote for with our hearts” The latter is more in the realm of politics than the marketplace.
Despite these many positive aspects, as planners and environmentalists there are several significant issues we would like to take up with the current smart growth movement. We make these complaints in a friendly spirit, as planners who generally support a strong public planning function. We begin below by expressing some concerns about the likely success and effectiveness of smart growth measures, then proceed to question more fundamentally some of the key underlying assumptions of the smart growth movement.
