Richard Barber of the Mortgage Foundation decries the impact of smart-growth policies on housing availability:

A zoned-zone is an area that has embraced land-rationing policies, usually under a misleading title of “smart growth.” Policies on development such as Portland, Oregon’s urban growth boundary, and requirements for excessively large lots simply reduce the supply of land for development.

There is little argument among economists that rationing raises prices, and does so with a vengeance.

He also provides examples of less regulated markets have experienced much smaller run-ups in housing prices.

Smart Growth Agenda Seeking Less Home Ownership? View from Australia
Wendell Cox, From the Heartland, Chicago, Illinois
In his excellent blog, Wendell Cox, the author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life, discusses an article by Elizabeth Farelly in Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald. Her column, titled The End of the Great Australian Dream Cannot Come Soon Enough, condemns the suburban style of living (”the Great Australian Dream”) which parallels the lifestyle known as “the American Dream” in the United States. Cox analyzes the dream of home ownership and suburban lifestyle in a response to Farelly’s column, taking a scholarly eye to the situation in both Australia and America. He ultimately concludes that an anti-suburban stance is an elitist one, since it seeks to eliminate the lifestyle by which families can move up the economic ladder:

In Australia, as in the United States, Western Europe, Canada, New Zealand and Japan, the suburbanization for which Ms. Farrelly and those of her ilk have such contempt has been associated with the greatest expansion of broadly distributed wealth in the history of the world. In short, for the first time, prosperity has been democratized. …Ms. Farrelly may have emerged as the “Marie Antoinette” of urban consolidation or smart growth. “Let them eat cake” is her message and it appears to be the message (wittingly or unwittingly) of those who favor urban consolidation (smart growth).

Undevelopment: Is Shrinking Pittsburgh the Answer?
Sam MacDonald, AntiRust, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
This intelligent and often amusing blog, subtitled “In Pursuit of a New American Industrialism,” recently examined a redevelopment plan in Youngstown, Ohio that has been getting a fair amount of publicity. The New York Times article on the piece called the plan Creative Shrinkage, but Macdonald dubbed it “undevelopment.” The city is part of the “Rust Belt”—cities that reached their highest population during the height of America’s Industrial era, and have since shrunk. Youngstown now has less than half of the 170,000 residents it boasted when part of steel production, though the town retains its university, symphony orchestra, art museums, and other attractive features not found in normal towns of its size.

The “undevelopment” plan operates under a number of smart growth principles, chiefly in its attempt to consolidate the city, and in its efforts to renovate older buildings or redevelop brown- or greyfield land rather than create development in new areas. Unoccupied tracts will eventually be cut off from the city until needed, while smaller pockets will be turned into parks. MacDonald quips, “So this guy is saying that a city that has lost half its residents might do something other than encourage the construction of new housing? That it might make sense to rehabilitate existing housing stock? That it might make sense to build on strengths (affordability) rather than try to compete with Manhattan for residents? Go figure.” He suggests that some of the same principles might be applied to Pittsburgh, even though the two cities vary in size.

What’s So Smart About Smart Growth?
Laer, Cheat Seeking Missiles, Orange County, California
The author of this blog drops a self-described “logic bomb” on the concept of smart growth, which he views as an impractical theory. He agrees with Steven Greenhut’s article, Suburbs a Sin to Smart Growthers, and quotes Greenhut’s assertion that smart growth “so obviously stands athwart everything we see all around us. Who you gonna believe, your own eyes or the grandiose statements of ideologues?” (Greenhut, in his turn, quotes Wendell Cox, the author of our first blog this week. It’s a small land-use planning world after all). Laer sums up the situation as follows: “There is a lot of political power and will behind Smart Growth. Its supporters in government are happy to create no-growth zones around cities and forcing people to live downtown. The problem is, when you stifle the free market, the market bites back.”

Housing, Transportation, and Regional Success
Paul Mattessich, The Executive Summary, Saint Paul, Minnesota
Meanwhile, Paul Mattessich, the Executive Director of Wilder Research, passes on some fascinating hard facts in support of smart growth, which provide some substantiation for the purported benefits that detractors like to claim are mere ideology. For example:

• Half of Americans do not drive a car, for reasons of age, disability, or income; consequently, “the notion of the automobile as a “democratizer” [is] erroneous.”
• Car costs are part of housing costs; a person can afford to pay more for housing if they don’t need a car. For example, “if you pay $5,000 - $10,000 in expenses for your car each year, that costs you as much as adding another $100,000 or so to your home mortgage.”
• Cities can have much higher energy efficiencies than other types of land-use. “New York City, by any objective standards, may be the “greenest” (that is, most energy efficient) city in the country.”
• Preserving open space requires smart growth.

Mr. Mattessich, himself, remains objective about the facts, and makes himself neither proponent or opponent of smart growth; the facts were presented to him by Douglas Foy, former head of the Office for Commonwealth Development, a Massachusetts office created to promote smart growth. For more information, you can also take a look at the Office for Commonwealth Development’s Website, in addition to the full article on The Executive Summary.

Development Through Smart Growth
Corey Sipe, Deep River, Connecticut
The author of this piece values the configuration of Deep River’s downtown, whose many independently-owned businesses are within walking distance, enabling residents to check errands off of their lists without driving from location to location. But upcoming development has made residents nervous by plans for new chain-businesses with footprints between 3,700 and 10,000 square feet. In an effort to avoid what Sipe describes as “sprawl characterized by large shopping centers filled with chain restaurants and stores surrounded by seas of macadam with little or no landscaping,” the Citizens for Deep River group created a workshop, featuring Jim Gibbons, Land Use and Natural Resource Program Coordinator for the University of Connecticut. Gibbons spoke at length about how smart growth principles could be implemented and enforced in their community, which are catalogued in detail in Sipe’s full article.

As the city of Oakland prepares for the change in mayor, ushering in Ron Dellums while former mayor Jerry Brown takes his place as California’s new Attorney General, the various developments under Brown’s reign and the current condition of the city are being reviewed. For the past couple of years, battles have been waged over individual developments, with members of affected communities raising complaints; however, as even those who are pro-development are beginning to question the city’s structure, a broader problem in Oakland’s city planning is becoming evident.

In order to examine this very problem, the San Francisco Business Times ran a 20-page supplement on Oakland’s development under Mayor Brown. Ryan Tate, in a larger article about Oakland developer Hal Ellis, summed up with this revelation:

“Though downtown has added 4,000 housing units in the last eight years, filled up its office towers, including seven at City Center … retail has lagged. Instead of a regional mall, City Center has 60,000 square feet of mostly fast-service restaurants and small shops … A more recent mixed-use development from Forest City … also drastically scaled back its retail ambitions. In 2000, at the height of the dot-com boom, the project was to include 100,000 square feet of retail. Plans now under way call for 9,000 square feet of retail … That sort of organic retail growth can add character and bring excitement to a neighborhood. But it does not bring the kind of sales tax revenue that big-box retail … can bring the city. Nor does it meet many of the retail needs of new and soon-to-come residents. The resulting retail vacuum is the greatest failing of the development boom under Brown, [Hal] Ellis said, a boom he otherwise praises in no uncertain terms.”

The current situation roots in the longer and even more complicated history of Brown’s redevelopment plan. When originally running for Mayor in 1998, Brown proposed a plan to revitalize Oakland by bringing residential development to the city’s downtown. The theory was that once the downtown area held a critical mass of residents, retail would be drawn in, creating a natural, rather than forced, mixed-use neighborhood. Brown was seeking to end the pleading and subsidizing that had formerly marked efforts to bring retail establishments into the city center.

So, in an effort to rejuvenate the city and “put Oakland on the map,” the Brown Administration fixed upon an objective of bringing 10,000 residents into the city center, which became regionally famous as “the 10K plan.” But eventually, the endeavor attracting residents took over the Administration’s attention, and original aim of bringing in retail dissapeared. It seemed that Brown had completely forgotten about the rationale behind the plan.

Abandoning the effort to obtain the retail half of the mixed-use downtown neighborhoods has left Oakland in economic and developmental disarray. First of all, California’s economy and taxation plans are such that cities tend to lose money on residential neighborhoods, becuase city services cost more than the tax revenue received. This money is generally made back via commercial districts and their additional sales tax revenues. But without the added retail to balance the residential boom, Oakland is actually taking a financial blow.

And even in those areas that have been revitalized with a mixture of residential and commercial buildings are facing serious problems through poor mixed-use planning. A foresighted plan would have set aside a certain area for entertainment, bars, nightclubs, and other commercial establishments that might create noise problems for nearby residents. But under the come-one-come-all attitude adopted by the Brown Administration, with few provisions for these kinds of problems, developments have sprung up haphazardly, and the clashes between residents and entertainment establishments can only ensure that both will suffer, and one or the other may eventually leave.

This would have been a relatively easy situation to solve with some forethought, as Oakland does, in fact, have a General Plan. But the Brown Administration failed to take the necessary steps to ensure that the city’s plan could be followed by new development—in short, the overarching plan for the city was not met with the appropriate updates. The General Plan was updated at the beginning of Brown’s years in office, highlighting the basic types of development for areas of the city, but the zoning map was never updated to coincide with the General Plan. Consequently, the mandates of the General Plan and the zoning map are often at odds. Legally, the General Plan supersedes the zoning laws, but it leaves developers very unsure of what is allowed in a certain neighborhood. This creates poor development in some areas, and grinds development to a halt in other neighborhoods.

Though many of Oakland’s residents may find themselves going into a stupor contemplating the causes of the current city planning quagmire, the results are clear. J. Douglas Allen-Taylo, the author the piece for the Berkeley Daily Planet, writes that residents see the impact “when you try to go down to the neighborhood shopping center, and you can’t find any parking. Or you can’t get down to the shopping center when you need to—just after five—because the streets and freeways are hopelessly clogged, and public transit is either inconvenient or nonexistent along the line you need to travel. Or, worse yet, there is no shopping center in your neighborhood at all.”

The conundrum is an interesting one, insofar as it highlights the difficulties proponents of smart growth and new urbanism must be aware of as they try to bring mixed-use neighborhoods to cities. Mixed-use neighborhoods, themselves, are not the cause of Oakland’s current mess; a poorly-planned and poorly-implemented plan to create mixed-use neighborhoods is the cause. Euclidean zoning laws are simple, and ensure the preservation of residents’ peace, developers’ comprehension of their duties and regulations, and the city’s economic budget. Much more effort is required to maintain the balance while creating the high-density communities that are best for the environment and social health.

Smart Growth community in Northwest Atlanta

Brad Nix at Atlanta 575 Real Estate makes a pitch for smart growth development:

If Cherokee County must grow, and projections have the county gaining 200,000 more people by 2030 (more than double the current population of 141,903), then we better start growing smart.

Nix brings acurrent smart growth project to attention and asks his readers to support it.

A smart-growth deficit in Washington, D.C.

Sprawl and its many symptoms are well-documented issues in the area surrounding our nation’s capital. Ryan Avent has a lengthy take on regional congestion and development solutions in The DCist, as well as a companion post on his own web site. He notes that while there are smart growth initiatives, the prevailing trend remains “sprawl that shows no signs of abating.” A major problem is competition between jurisdictions over money and control.

Are restrictive land-use regulations contributing to declining homeownership among young in Great Britain?

Wendell Cox at From the Heartland writes that restrictions on land-use and development have created housing markets that are out of whack with the overall economy:

England’s Department for Communities and Local Government reports that a strong downward trend in home ownership by younger households. In its Survey of English Housing Provisional Results: 2005/2006, the Department found that in only five years, there was a 15 percent drop in households under 30 years of age buying homes (from 40 percent to 34 percent). Given the importance of home ownership to middle-income wealth creation, this is an ominous development.