What Does 'Smart Growth' Really Mean?

by Anthony Downs
As It Appeared in American Planning Associations Planning Magazine


Can groups as different as homebuilders and transit advocates be using the term in the same way? The answer is no - prompting one expert to offer advice about how to resolve deep conflicts.

Table:
Aspects of 14 Potential Elements of Smart Growth (pdf)

Throughout the U.S., the term "smart growth" is being adopted by groups trying to change what they regard as the undesirable impacts of "suburban sprawl." Under the umbrella of this appealing term, groups with very different goals are trying to create the appearance of a united front. But in reality, that umbrella is being pulled apart-to the detriment of public policy and the public itself.

Still, there is always cause for optimism. Even with different goals, the different groups may be able to reach a middle ground, especially if they keep in mind that each region of the country has unique needs and wide choices.
Consider these four groups:

  • Anti- or slow-growth advocates and environmentalists are upset by the impacts of suburban sprawl. They want to slow down outward expansion and cut dependence on private automobiles.
  • Pro-growth advocates, including home builders, developers, chambers of commerce, and landowners who aren't much upset by sprawl want to expedite outward expansion to accommodate future growth fully.
  • Inner-city advocates such as central city mayors, downtown business leaders, community-based organizations, and city planners are upset about resources being drained from the inner city by our outward growth process. They want more redevelopment in core areas.
  • Better-growth advocates-those who want to accommodate reasonable growth but want to reduce some of its negative impacts-include many citizens who are not passionate members of the other three groups. Major employers often fall into this category.
Who can oppose smart growth-since its opposite is "dumb growth"? But in fact, across the nation, this term refers to many different bundles of specific policies. A survey of how different groups define smart growth reveals that this term involves 14 basic elements. No group advocates all 14, but each element is advocated by someone and is worth noting.

Bones of contention

Three elements provoke wide disagreement:
  • Placing limits on the outward extension of further growth. Many anti-sprawl advocates support urban growth boundaries, utility service districts, or local growth boundaries. They think such limits will reduce infrastructure costs, shorten distances between new suburban jobs and unemployed city workers, shorten future commuting times, preserve vacant land and open space, and create higher densities. Pro-growth advocates oppose spatial limits because they want to build new subdivisions on the cheapest possible land.

    In reality, no specific approach to creating limits fits all regions. In Florida, limiting growth into the Everglades seems prudent. But in Albuquerque, where the best open space is in the region's center, limiting outward growth is not sensible.

    Also, limiting outward growth would not accomplish all the goals its advocates want. It would not cut average commuting times much, since the shortest times are between suburban housing and suburban jobs. It might protect farmland from urban uses, but there is no national shortage of farmland. It might shorten commuting distances for inner-city workers, but they need cars or better transit more. Growth limits also would prevent building low-cost new housing units on cheap land.

    To work well, outward growth limits must involve the entire region, not just individual localities acting separately. Separate limits adopted by individual localities will just spread sprawl farther. And state laws must prohibit most new development outside the growth boundary or developers will leapfrog over it.

  • Financing the additional infrastructure needed to deal with growth and maintain existing systems properly. Most anti- or slow-growth and inner-city advocates propose loading the infrastructure costs of growth almost entirely onto new developments via user fees and exactions. Pro-growth advocates propose sharing these costs with existing residents, who benefit from better facilities. Inner-city advocates want most public infrastructure funds to be spent on repairing and maintaining existing systems rather than building new ones.

    If the guiding principle should be "those who benefit should also pay," then at least some cost-sharing with existing residents seems fairest because those residents use new infrastructure, too.

    Reducing dependency on private automotive vehicles, especially one-person cars. The usual tactics advocated are requiring higher density future development, clustering high density around transit stops, raising gas taxes, shifting money from road building to more transit, creating pedestrian-friendly communities, and building light-rail systems. Anti- or slow-growth advocates strongly promote these tactics, while many pro-growth advocates support added emphasis on public transit while also arguing that existing roads should be upgraded and new ones built.

    Achieving the goals of anti- or slow-growth advocates will be extremely difficult. Future residential development density would have to be well over 5,000 persons per square mile and perhaps more than 10,000 to make heavier transit use feasible, but that will not be easy. The average 1990 density of the 161 largest central cities in the U.S. was 3,924 persons per square mile. Only 32 had densities more than 5,000 persons per square mile, and only six had densities more than 10,000. In the fringe areas around the same cities, the average 1990 density (the most recent figures available) was 1,840 persons per square mile, and only one (the Los Angeles fringe) had a density above 5,000.

    Clustering higher density around transit stops is often blocked by neighborhood opposition. Raising gas taxes to drive people out of their cars is a political non-starter. Moving more funds to transit is questionable since transit now gets 25 percent of all public transport spending while providing under two percent of all person trips-though higher fractions in regions with large-scale transit systems such as New York, Washington, Chicago, and San Francisco.
Partial disagreements

Seven elements attract less-than-total agreement, especially in how they are implemented:

  • Promoting compact, mixed-used development in the form of higher-than-prevailing residential densities and permission to mix nonresidential uses-especially retail and services-in primarily residential neighborhoods. Compact development seems good because it reduces infrastructure costs, shortens trip lengths, encourages walking and bicycling, may make more use of public transit feasible, and increases the choice of housing types and lifestyles available in new-growth areas.

    Environmentalists and urban planners strongly support this element, whereas many home builders and developers support it to some extent, as long as they are permitted to create low-density developments in other parts of the region. Anti- and slow-growth advocates support higher residential densities in theory, but often reject them when they are proposed for their own neighborhoods.

  • Creating significant financial incentives for local governments to adopt "smart growth" planning within ground rules laid out by the state government. These incentives consist of state aids for infrastructure construction and other benefits accruing to localities that designate some areas for future development, and other parts for open space.

    This element is the cornerstone of Maryland's decentralized Smart Growth program. It uses such incentives to motivate individual localities within a framework set by state law, rather than having any overarching regional or state agency coordinate local government plans.

  • Adopting fiscal resource sharing among localities to equalize the financial situation of individual governments within the region and to discourage their pursuing land uses solely to build tax base.

    Only one major metropolitan area-the Twin Cities-has adopted this arrangement at any scale. So this element does not appear to have much support, partly because its adoption creates strong conflicts of interest between wealthy suburbs and poorer ones.

  • Deciding who should control land-use decisions. In most regions, all four advocacy groups support leaving full control over land uses in the hands of local governments. In some regions, anti- or slow-growth advocates support some form of regional coordination of local government plans, but most pro-growth advocates oppose such arrangements.

    I believe regional coordinating mechanisms are necessary. But that view is not widely held except in regions that have had growth crises, such as Atlanta and South Florida.

  • Adopting faster project application approval processes, providing developers with greater certainty and lower project carrying costs. Pro-growth advocates strongly support this strategy. In fact, they may agree to other strategies if they can win on this one.

  • Creating more affordable housing in outlying new-growth areas. To do this, suburban communities must reduce regulatory barriers to both multifamily housing and lower cost single-family housing, and allow higher densities in new-growth and infill areas. One inexpensive tactic is permitting owners of single-family homes to create auxiliary rental units.

    Anti- or slow-growth advocates theoretically support higher densities, and developers want to reduce regulatory barriers in order to lower building cost, so environmentalists and developers may have a middle ground on this element. However, many suburban anti- or slow-growth advocates oppose any affordable housing within their communities.

    Further, most residents of new-growth areas want low densities in order to raise home values, and residents of existing areas often fight higher densities on infill sites. The bottom line: Because affordable housing is not high on the priority lists of any of the advocate groups, it is often omitted from their smart growth goals.

  • Developing a public-private consensus-building process in order to build support for a single, clear definition of the specific elements of smart growth within each region. There is often considerable disagreement about the proper way to carry out this element.
Saying Yes

Finally, there are four concepts on which most of the advocacy groups agree.

  • Preserving large amounts of open space and protecting the quality of the environment. Environmentalists want to set aside large fringe areas where development is prohibited. The real estate community supports preserving open space as long as plenty of other fringe land is available for development.

    This is a critically important element for many environmental and anti- or slow-growth groups, and few people openly oppose such policies.

  • Redeveloping inner-core areas and developing infill sites with new and renovated structures to make them more attractive to middle- and upper-income households, and to improve the quality of life for existing low-income residents. This includes shifting a lot of new development from fringe areas to infill sites, cleaning up and redeveloping polluted brownfield sites, and locating most new public offices and other facilities in developed areas rather than on urban fringes.

    This element is crucial to inner-city advocates and supported somewhat less avidly by the other three groups. It means encouraging more downtown housing, dismantling obsolete high-rise public housing projects, and preserving historic structures and districts.

  • Removing barriers to urban design innovation in both cities and new suburban areas by encouraging pedestrian-friendly communities, mixed land uses, town centers, and other design elements that make communities more interesting. This element would permit New Urbanist developers to use grid street patterns, alleys, porches, etc., and would make creation of affordable housing much easier.

    This element is important because existing zoning and subdivision rules often prevent mixed-use developments, block new multifamily housing, raise the costs of new single-family dwellings, make clustering high-density development around transit stops impossible, and impede creation of pedestrian-friendly subdivisions.

  • Creating a greater sense of community within individual localities and neighborhoods and a greater recognition of regional interdependence and solidarity throughout the entire metropolitan area.

    This is the most abstract and difficult to measure element in smart growth strategies, so it is often omitted as an explicit ingredient. Yet many advocates in all four groups believe achieving this element is vital to making all the other elements work effectively. Without some greater recognition by citizens in individual localities of their crucial economic, social, and even physical linkages with the rest of their region, continued parochialism in land-use decisions will make effective solutions to growth-related problems impossible.

Why we should care

When a region's population rises sharply, as in Phoenix, Denver, Seattle, Atlanta, South Florida, and Las Vegas, existing residents often become upset by resulting negative conditions, and so smart growth has become a matter of widespread concern. These conditions include rising traffic congestion, greater air pollution, higher taxes, rising housing prices, shortages of affordable housing, disappearance of open space, and decay in inner-core areas. A natural reaction is to try to slow future growth, or to change its nature, to prevent these problems from getting worse.

In addition, almost 10 years of continuous economic prosperity have allowed many citizens to disregard their needs for the jobs and income produced by growth, and to concentrate their attention on quality-of-life issues.

Two other factors encourage adoption of anti- or slow-growth policies. One is the desire of homeowners, who politically dominate suburban governments, to keep the prices of their homes rising. They try to keep out low-cost housing and low-income households through exclusionary zoning. The second factor is the desire of local officials to avoid land uses they regard as fiscal losers-such as multifamily housing-and to attract those they regard as fiscal winners, such as office parks and shopping centers.

Not all local governments discourage development. Many central cities and older suburbs want more development in order to gain larger tax bases and more jobs. And some suburban governments get much of their revenue from development fees. But more and more prosperous suburban governments are being pressured by their residents to adopt anti- or slow-growth policies.

Regional perspective

In reality, the governments within a region cannot control its rate of growth, which is basically determined by the region's climate, location, topography, size, population, and past investments as well as the nation's general economic climate. None of these traits can be influenced much by local or even state government policies.

Most fast-growing regions such as Denver and Seattle "suffer" from being very attractive to newcomers, both from other regions of the U.S. and from abroad. Slowing their growth would require making them less attractive, which would injure their existing residents even more than repelling newcomers.

True, individual localities can reduce growth rates within their own borders by passing laws slowing or halting new development. But that merely shifts the region's growth to other communities less hostile to growth, often farther into the countryside. Hence efforts by local governments to halt sprawl actually tend to aggravate it.

Further, our fragmented local governments are motivated to act parochially. Each pays attention only to the welfare of its own residents, not to that of the region as a whole, because only local residents elect local officials.

Still, some elected officials currently support a handful of strategies-such as promoting downtown development, preserving open space, reducing regulatory barriers to lower cost housing and to inner-city development-that can be useful parts of an effective growth-influencing strategy.

The case for regional growth

In most American regions at least some population growth and new development are necessary for economic stability and desirable for local prosperity. In the nation as a whole, natural increase (the excess of births over deaths) is about 0.6 percent of the population each year. Net immigration from abroad has recently equaled about 0.62 percent of the nation's population annually, according to the 2000 census.

The growth is spread unevenly. Fast-growth regions, especially in the West and South, may see increases of more than two percent a year in net in-migration.

Regions need new housing and other structures to replace deteriorated and obsolete units. If such units have a 100-year lifetime, they must replace one percent of their structures per year. Adding that to the new units required for new residents means that fast-growing regions must build new housing equal to as much as three percent of their existing inventories each year.

Such growth produces significant benefits for a region, especially a dynamic economy. More people expand the labor force and increase job choices for workers, as well as attracting firms looking for workers. Growing areas tend to have higher wages than stagnant ones, and eventually attract clusters of firms in the same industries. Thus, the most effective attitude towards rapid growth is "How can our region accommodate growth without suffering so much from the problems that come along with it?"

A problem without a solution

The most aggravating and widely resented of all growth-related problems is rising peak-hour traffic congestion. Unfortunately, there is no feasible remedy for it that most American citizens will accept. Some policies may slow or ameliorate rising congestion, but none will fully prevent it-at least in large metropolitan areas.

Despite the urging of many urban planners, not enough Americans will shift into public transit, no matter how much transit services are improved or expanded. In 1995, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation's Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey, 90 percent of all commuting was done in private vehicles, and only five percent by public transit-under three percent in many states. Private cars are almost always faster, more comfortable, more convenient, more flexible, and often cheaper than transit.

From 1980 to 1997, according to 1999 Statistical Abstract of the U.S., the nation added 1.2 more cars, trucks, and buses to the vehicle population for every added human being. This trend will undoubtedly continue, unless the U.S. adopts policies deliberately designed to make driving more costly, such as much higher gasoline taxes. Such policies have often been proposed, but generate almost no political support.

Building more roads or adding lanes to existing ones is often a good policy, but it will not relieve peak-hour traffic congestion in a region once traffic jams have appeared there. It is well known that expanded roads simply attract more travelers who converge during peak periods from other routes and times, and that population growth soon fills up new roads.

This does not mean that new roads produce no benefits, or that nothing can be done to ameliorate congestion. If employment is clustered, improved transit may serve more commuters. As more jobs move out to the suburbs, suburban commuters may spend less time getting to and from work. Deregulated small-scale transit furnished by entrepreneurs may provide more flexible service to scattered residents. Even so, future population growth is almost sure to cause intensified peak-hour congestion in most large metropolitan areas throughout the world.

In reality, traffic congestion is the result of conflicting goals. These include having a wide range of choices about where to live and work, combining many purposes on each trip, having multiple workers per household, working during the same hours so firms can interact efficiently, and separating homes from households poorer than they are.

So get a comfortable air-conditioned car with a radio, a tape deck and CD player, a hands-free telephone, a fax machine, even a microwave oven, and commute with someone you really like!

Creating smart growth coalitions

In view of the wide divergences of opinion about the key elements of smart growth, how can all the groups in a region reach agreement on a consistent set of growth-related policies? That is a crucial question now being debated around the nation.

To achieve such consensus, these groups must agree first to discuss what the best smart growth policies for that region should be. Each group must be willing to compromise. The participants should include people from key growth-related organizations in both the public and private sectors, and they should participate not as official representatives but as individuals.

Such a dialogue should probably begin with discussions of the key goals of smart growth policies. Oregon's statewide planning goals could serve as an example of how such broad goals might be formulated, although each region (or state) should develop its own goals. Then the participants in this dialogue should go over the 14 elements of smart growth listed above and debate the nature and merits of each for their own region.

Once some tentative compromise agreements are reached, the participants should convey the results to their organizations and to the general public. Opportunities for further input should be provided. Eventually, a single set of consistent smart growth policies may emerge.

A basic principle of smart growth should be to accommodate future growth, not choke it off. In particular, smart growth should not cut off all the benefits of sprawl for those who enjoy them. Those benefits include housing on cheaper land, more space, good schools, and shorter commutes.

However, each region must develop an areawide approach to coordinating purely local plans and integrating them with transportation planning. This will require a major change of perspective in many regional cultures, especially in the West. On the other hand, smart growth should not mean the same thing everywhere. What is "smart" in New York City may be "dumb" in Phoenix.

No one group should dominate all others. That means each region should create a decision-making process that has strong participation from all four advocacy groups.

One of the biggest conflicts among the various advocacy groups is how to allocate available transportation funds. Pro-growth advocates want more roads; anti- or slow-growth advocates want more transit; and inner-core advocates want more maintenance of existing systems. There is no easy way to settle this dispute. That can only be done as part of the political process.

Resources

1. Burchell, Robert W., David Listokin, and Catherine C. Galley, "Smart Growth: More than a Ghost of Urban Policy Past, Less than a Bold New Horizon," in Fannie Mae Foundation, Legacy of the 1949 Housing Act (Washington D.C.: Fannie Mae Foundation, 1999), pp. 1-49.

2. Moe, Richard, Growing Smarter: Fighting Sprawl and Restoring Community in America, Address Presented at San Joaquin Valley Town Hall, Fresno, California, November 20, 1996 (Washington D.C.: National Trust for Historic Preservation, 1996).

3. National Association of Home Builders, Smart Growth: Building Better Places to Live, Work and Play (Washington D.C.: National Association of Home Builders, 1999).

4. National Association of Industrial and Office Properties, Growing to Greatness (Herndon, Virginia: National Association of Industrial and Office Properties, 1999).

5. National Association of Realtors, On Common Ground: REALTORS and Smart Growth, Winter 2001.

6. Nelson, Arthur C., Smart Growth or Business-As-Usual? Which Is Better At Improving Quality of Life and Central City Vitality? Unpublished Manuscript, 2000.

7. Orski, C. Kenneth, "Maryland's Smart Growth Policy," Innovation Briefs, Volume 9, Number 6 (November-December 1998).

8. Petersen, David C., "Smart Growth for Center Cities," (New York: PriceWaterhouseCoopers, May 1998).

9. Porter, Douglas, "Introduction," Chapter 1 in Collaborative Partnering for Smart Growth, unpublished manuscript, 2000.

10. State of Maryland, Smart Growth and Neighborhood Conservation Initiatives (Baltimore, Maryland Office of State Planning, 1999).

11. Urban Land Institute, ULI on the Future: Smart Growth (Washington D.C.: The Urban Land Institute, 1998).

12. Urban Land Institute, Smart Growth: Myth and Fact. (Washington DC: The Urban Land Institute, 1999).