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.