It is a great challenge to speak to you about the future of Broward County, since you clearly know more about this area than I do. However, my task is to relate your future to Smart Growth, and describe Smart Growth's implications for your development policies. I will NOT try to prescribe specific solutions, but to illuminate the choices likely to face you.

I will begin by discussing the basic ideas involved in the idea of Smart Growth. You have already been provided with some material on this, so I will not repeat it in detail.

Smart Growth is a reaction to the perceived negative impacts of what has been the dominant form of metropolitan development in the U.S. for 50 years, namely suburban sprawl. Everyone agrees sprawl has major drawbacks, but not all agree about what those drawbacks are, which ones are most important, or what to do about them. But they all say they like Smart Growth because it is clearly superior to Dumb Growth.

There four basic perspectives on Smart Growth, each advocated by people with specific interests. These are the slow-or-no-growth view, espoused by many environmentalists and people who dislike congestion and other ills related to growth, the pro-growth view espoused by real estate brokers and developers, many business leaders and chambers of commerce, the central-city-advocacy view espoused by big city mayors and leaders, and the let's compromise view espoused by people who dislike sprawl but have no particular axe to grind in changing it.

Dozens of different strategies have been proposed under the name Smart Growth. Viewed together, these strategies contain 14 elements which I have already described in materials sent to you, and which are set forth in the handout you have received. Each advocacy group supports different sets of these elements. I will discuss them in more detail when I analyze how they apply to Broward County.

Now let us examine some key traits of Broward County as related to Smart Growth ideas

The first is the fact that Broward County has long been a fast-growth area in terms of population. It grew 367,530 in the 1990s - up 29%, and more than ever before in absolute numbers except in the 1970s. The attraction of your region is clearly strong because of its warm climate, oceanfront location, proximity to Latin America, and relatively low density. So rapid growth is likely to continue if it can be accommodated.

Immigration from outside this area is the key factor in your growth, not natural increase. Therefore, rapid future growth is not inevitable; it could slow down. That is especially likely if you run out of sites for business and industrial activity.

So the first key issue facing you about Smart Growth is: How fast do you want to grow in the future? The answer is not entirely up to you, because no region can fully control its own growth. A region's growth is mainly determined by its basic nature, such as climate, position in the nation, demographic content, past investments in schools and industries, topography, and the state of the economy.

Even so, you can create policies that will encourage slower growth and more stability on one hand, or continued fast growth on the other Stability makes life easier and less hectic but generates less economic prosperity.

Your policies will have more influence over growth of the middle-class than of the poor, because poor immigrants - unlike the middle class -- are not discouraged by lack of good housing if there are economic opportunities.

The second key factor is that you are running out of vacant land, so future growth will have to shift from mainly horizontal to more vertical or intensified. In fact, your own County government forecasts show considerably less growth in the next two decades, with the CAGR falling from 2.6% in the 1990s to 0.9% in the 2010s. True, your 2000 forecast was way too low. But a future slowdown is certainly possible.

Now almost all your growth is along the Western edge - 65% in districts 3, 5, & 8. These are also the lowest density districts. Yet even the older, slower-growing districts on the coast have relatively low gross densities in spite of high percentages of multi-family units. The overall County density is only 3,836 persons per sq. mi., and the highest densities are 5,292 in District 9 and 6,038 in District 1. In contrast, the City of Miami has a gross density over 10,000 persons per square mile.

Continuing to grow at high absolute rates will require redevelopment at higher densities. This is politically controversial; most Americans resist higher densities in their own neighborhoods. So a key policy issue is: Do you want to adopt public policies that encourage higher density and more intensive redevelopment?

The next key factor consists of demographic aspects of your population.

You have a high percentage of elderly residents compared to the entire nation, but not to the rest of Florida. This probably imparts a fiscally conservative bias to your voters, even though they are predominantly democrats. Florida as a state has historically failed to tax itself enough to provide full infrastructure to accommodate its growth. Hence there are limits to how much public spending you can do.

A second demographic factor is the rising importance of minority groups, which is true throughout the nation. About 20% of your population is African-American, and another 17% is Hispanic, and those proportions are much higher in your public school system. Because the incomes of these groups are notably lower than those of whites, on the average, and their educational attainments also lower, you will be challenged to maintain the skill levels and economic prosperity of your residents.

This is related to the rapid growth of your school-aged population. The quality of your future labor force will have a lot to do with whether businesses are attracted to locate here or remain here. Improving the quality of your public schools should be a high priority, as it should throughout the nation. But doing so is not easy, especially if elderly voters do not support more spending on schools.

The next key factor concerns your housing markets. Broward County has a much higher than average percentage of multi-family housing (55%), even though most new housing in the 1990s has been single-family units along the Western edge.

Housing prices in Broward were historically lower than in the rest of the U.S., but have recently increased faster. In the 1980s, the median price of single-family units here rose 39%, vs. 54% for the entire nation. But in the 1990s, prices here rose 66% vs. 45% in the entire nation. The latest median prices are $157,400 in Broward County and $139,000 for the entire U.S.

One reason is that you have not been building new housing as fast as your number of households has been growing. From 1991 through 2000, you built 117,500 new units (not counting manufactured homes), but the number of households increased by 160,000. Even adjusting for manufactured homes, there has been more over- crowding and strong upward pressure on housing prices.

Average household incomes did not rise as fast here in the 1990s (9.2%) as they did in the entire nation (10.6%) or the entire Southeast (14.3%). But your incomes are nevertheless 3.5% higher than the U.S. average and 16% over the Southeast.

The last key factor I will mention is the heavy reliance on automotive vehicles for transportation in Broward, as in most of the U.S. From 1980 -1998, Florida's human population rose by 5.2 million, but the vehicle population rose 3.7 million. That is 71 more vehicles for every 100 more people - a much lower ratio of vehicles to people than in the nation as a whole: 127 more vehicles per 100 more people.

Nevertheless, most Broward residents still rely on automotive vehicles for travel of all kinds. And the total area in which your travel occurs is fixed by the Everglades and the ocean, so you cannot relieve congestion by expanding outward as in most other metropolitan areas. This means traffic congestion will get worse along with future population growth, no matter what policies you adopt concerning it.

Now let us examine the relationship of Broward to the 14 elements of Smart Growth, and the resulting implications for policy. I will use the 14 elements but not in the same order.

Limiting outward growth is not a key policy factor for you because the Everglades and the ocean have already established your outer growth limits. Also, creating financial incentives for local governments to establish new-growth areas is not very relevant because they already have established such areas, and have limited scope for more.

Preserving open space is something you have recently passed a bond issue to do; so you are already engaged in as much of that as you probably can. Removing barriers to urban design innovation should not be difficult or controversial. The New Urbanists have suggested many specific changes in zoning and other rules to accomplish this.

Promoting compact development, redeveloping inner-core areas, and developing in-fill sites are the elements you will have to stress if you wish to continue accommodating rapid future growth. I will assume you do wish to accommodate a lot more growth even after you run out of vacant land. Therefore, the following issues are crucial:

Where should intensified redevelopment be concentrated? Clustering such efforts in a few locations rather than scattering them will help use more public transit for movement. However, it violates the "iron law of political dispersion" that tends to spread any benefits among all districts, regardless of the need to concentrate them.


• Locating redevelopment along existing transit corridors will also help use transit, especially raising densities around major stations or stops or present destinations that get a lot of traffic already. That means raising housing densities around existing business centers, major health and other institutions, and large-scale employment centers. Improving housing around job centers many also encourage firms there to remain or expand in Broward County.
  
  
• Using redevelopment to up-grade deteriorating areas is desirable, but only if you offset displacement of low-income households from the units there with some form of alternative housing elsewhere and not far away. An exception is converting failed shopping centers to mixed-use projects including housing, since they are not now occupied by any residents who would have to move.
  
  
• Clustering higher-density housing around open-space amenities such as parks or beaches permits more intensive use of those facilities and offsets feelings of congestion because of higher density with proximity to open space.


What publicly-financed incentives should be used to encourage redevelopment or in-fill construction? Among the possibilities are public assistance in land assembly, including condemnation for renewal; property tax abatements; tax-increment financing; and financing infrastructures like streets and parking. Since these incentives all cost money, there are limits on how much they can be used.


• However, one aid would not be very costly: it is creating a fast-track process of giving development permission for appropriate redevelopment projects, both at the platting and zoning levels. This could be very effective, if the County could get all the local governments to create fast-track processes too.


How can the County government influence land-use decisions of the local governments within the County to meet overall planning goals? Since you have so many localities who control land-use zoning within their boundaries, how do you get them to adopt actions that fit into some overall approach to redevelopment? I will discuss this further under governance issues.

A major Smart Growth goal is reducing dependence upon automotive vehicles for land travel. One approach is conducting redevelopment in ways that will support more public transit use, as I mentioned. However, most added future residents will rely on private vehicles for movement, as they do everywhere in the U.S. except New York City. So if you encourage more population growth, you will get more traffic congestion, especially since your land territory cannot be expanded.

It is my belief that increasing traffic congestion is an inescapable aspect of living in a large and growing metropolitan area anywhere in the world. There are no effective "remedies" or "cures" for worsening congestion. Why not? Because people want to pursue certain highly-valued goals that involve widespread movement. Business wants most workers at work during the same hours so they can interact efficiently. That means going to and from work at about the same times. Many firms also want to enjoy low-density sites scattered over the region.

Households want broad choices of where to live and work. Many want low-density living, and most want to separate themselves from poorer households. Americans want to use private cars because they are faster, more secure, more comfortable, more flexible in handling trips with several purposes, and often cheaper than public transit. People do not want to pay high peak-hour tolls on expressways because they think that is an unnecessary tax that discriminates against low-income drivers.

Pursuing all those goals inevitably overcrowds major roads during peak hours. Building more roads may be desirable, but it will not end congestion. Getting more people to use transit also cannot be done at a big enough scale to end congestion, since only 2-3 percent of all workers outside New York City commute by transit. So get used to worsening traffic congestion; there is nothing you can do to stop it.

A major impact of increasing densities and more growth within the same space will be rising land prices, which could lead to rising housing prices - as here in the 1990s. If densities rise enough, per-unit housing prices need not increase, but exactly offsetting higher land prices will be difficult, especially if neighborhoods resist higher densities.

In fact, I believe there is an inherent tension between Smart Growth and making affordable housing more available. Most localities are politically dominated by home-owners who want rising home prices to increase their major assets' values. As a result, an unspoken goal of Smart Growth policies - and of most local governments - is maintaining or increasing the market values of local homes. So they do not want lower-cost housing anywhere near them. But rising home prices make housing less affordable to renters and poor households.

Also, the pressure of greater population in a confined area, plus the high costs of major redevelopments, will increase housing prices where redevelopment occurs. This may displace many poor households. Where will they go? This problem will be intensified by further immigration of poor people from abroad, who are needed to perform the low-wage jobs our economy requires. Many such newcomers cannot afford decent housing unless they accept overcrowding, which they will do.

Housing affordability for the poor will be a major issue, and there is no easy answer that does not cost a lot of money. Few cities or counties can afford to pay the subsidies needed to make "decent" housing units available to poor residents. So the most likely outcome will be an increase in overcrowded units, in short, more "slum" housing. We don't like to admit it, but "slums" have always been a necessary ingredient in America's housing its poor, especially new immigrants.

Some policies can be tried, such as inclusionary zoning, which requires developers to build low-cost units as a fraction - 10 to 15% - of any new projects. They are compensated through density bonuses that raise the number of units they can build. But even such "affordable" units are too costly for many poor residents to occupy.

Up to now, most Smart Growth supporters with the slow-growth perspective have focused on protecting open space by limiting outward growth, without taking into account the impacts upon housing affordability. I believe that is a serious error.

The last major cluster of Smart Growth elements concerns governance issues.

Should you have fiscal resource sharing among local governments? The answer depends upon the size of fiscal disparities among such governments. If some localities have very high tax bases and low tax rates, and others have low tax bases and high rates, then public services may be grossly unequal. Then some type of resource sharing - such as property tax or sales tax sharing - may be sensible.

However, the most important disparity - quality of public schools - will not be affected because you have a single county-wide school district. The quality of public schools is most affected by the type of homes from which the students come. If most students are from very poor and distressed homes, test scores and achievement levels will be low in most cases. This problem arises from the spatial isolation of the poor from the middle-class, not from fiscal causes.

Should County government have more power over the whole region to coordinate land-use decisions made by individual localities? With 31 localities, it is hard to develop a single coordinated land-use and redevelopment strategy. Each locality will be focused on aiding its own residents, not on the welfare of the whole County.

But the new District election system you have adopted will make it hard for the County government to adopt a truly regional perspective too. The "iron law of political dispersion" means each District representative will focus on capturing benefits for her or his District more than on the welfare of the entire County.

These conditions make concentrating redevelopment in a few locations very difficult. Moreover, the powers of the County are determined by Florida state laws, not County laws. So I cannot give you much guidance on governance.

Moreover, some of the issues in other regions that most strongly require an overall regional approach - such as drawing urban growth boundaries and fiscal resource sharing to improve equity in education - are not terribly pressing in Broward County, because it has inherent boundaries and a unified school district. So the pressure to use regional governance is much lower here.

The only elements of Smart Growth I have not mentioned are creating a stronger sense of community and developing a consensus-building process. I do not know how much the residents of this area identify with the entire County vs. individual localities. However, the need for a strong regional authority is weaker here than in many other parts of the nation.

Even so, you do need a County-wide consensus-building process to approach the fundamental issues that will determine your future: do you want to remain a fast-growth area or become much more stable, and in either case, what policies should you adopt to encourage your desired outcome - even though you cannot fully control how fast you will grow?

I do not have time today to describe how your leaders, both public and private, might set up and carry out such a consensus-building process, but I urge you to consider doing so. Such a process will greatly improve your chances of attaining the kind of future you want, whatever that is. Having done it will make it more likely that you can look back with pleasure and satisfaction on your situation both 10 and 20 years from now.