Everybody out there who is for dumb growth raise your hand.
So where are all the hands?
“Nobody is for stupid growth,” says Roger Platt, vice president and counsel for the Real Estate Roundtable, a Washington, D.C. lobbying group made up of real estate industry leaders.
The term, smart growth, says Platt, has captured the high ground in discussions on the issue: “As a term, it seems balanced and mainstream.” But it means different things to different people, he adds.
There is no lack of discussion and agitation about the issue. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of groups around the country that promote smart growth. One Internet database lists 182 smart growth groups around the country that have Web sites. And that doesn’t include all the smaller, local groups without Web sites.
Vice President Al Gore seemed poised earlier to make it the centerpiece of his presidential campaign, though he hasn’t stressed it lately — perhaps because it’s not a simple enough issue for mass-market politicking.
“The way we build and develop determines whether economic growth comes at the expense of community and family life, or enhances it,” said Gore last January in a speech announcing a White House “livability” initiative.
That brief sentence pretty much defines the growth in question: It’s real estate growth, building and developing. And Gore makes clear later in the speech that he’s talking primarily about development going on in suburbs, not cities.
To use another familiar term, the growth that’s in question is suburban sprawl.
The pace of that sprawl is increasing, according to a new government report. The Agriculture Department says the rate that U.S. farmland, forests and other open space is being developed doubled in the 1990s from the previous decade, to a rate of 3.2 million acres a year between 1992 and 1997.
Further, Gore’s statement pinpoints the reason why growth is an issue: It affects “community and family life.”
How? A lot of it has to do with car use, say Gore and others. Often cited as problems are long commutes to work and homes grouped far from commercial centers so that a trip to the store becomes a major drive. Time is spent in the car that could be devoted to family and community, they argue.
Another issue is the disappearance of open space in metropolitan areas, rendering it harder and harder for people to enjoy country air and peace, for children to know what it is to run free.
A further point brought up by Gore and others is less precise and more controversial. They see a loneliness in new subdivisions, which aren’t designed to bring people together they way city blocks do. Because there is no place to walk to, there is little chance to meet people casually, they say.
So smart growth is conceived as a response to the negative effects of suburban sprawl.
And what’s smart? That’s the hard one.
One might ask why people even want to assign a level of intelligence to growth. Growth just happens, right?
That notion was good enough in the 1950s and 1960s, when the suburbs represented an ideal to the post-war generation and the few critics of suburbia’s “American Dream” were considered cranks or ivory tower intellectuals.
But now the critics are coming into the mainstream. For instance, a Tribune poll last summer of residents in the northwest and west suburbs showed traffic congestion to be the chief problem on respondents’ minds, ahead of crime and property taxes. A 1997 poll showed the same thing.
Grinding their teeth in traffic, people get to thinking there must be a better way to do things. A smart way.
So what constitutes the smart version of growth?
“We get asked that question all the time when we go out to talk to mayors and community leaders,” said MarySue Barrett, president of the Chicago-based Metropolitan Planning Council, which spearheaded formation of the region’s Campaign for Sensible Growth in 1998.
Barrett added that the group adopted the term “sensible growth” because of strong feelings that have grown up around the “smart growth” label.
Certainly extremes of opinion on the topic are not hard to find. On one side there are the those who think — and fear — that smart growth is simply code for no-growth.
Local government officials trying to promote growth and builders frustrated by anti-development sentiments tend to adopt that belief.
“It is the City of Joliet’s feeling that smart growth is nothing more than an attempt by supporters of Chicago and the inner-ring communities to obstruct the development of the (outer) suburban areas,” said Joliet City Manager John Mezera.
At the other extreme are those who feel smart growth is really a Trojan Horse for unrestricted development. This group can emerge in areas where environmental feelings run high, such as the Pacific Northwest.
“There is a small minority in Portland (Ore.) that is opposed to smart growth, because they think it is facilitating more growth,” said U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) at a recent panel on the topic sponsored by the Urban Land Institute in Washington, D.C.
Stopping suburban growth altogether is not a likely possibility. Short of war, a major depression or laws of a barely imaginable rigor, it’s not going to happen.
While tastes can change, and an increasing number of Americans are choosing to move back to vibrant central cities like Chicago, the single-family home in the suburbs continues to be preferred by the vast majority, according to a 1999 survey by the National Association of Home Builders. And job growth is also primarily in the suburbs.
So most of the discussion accepts the inevitability of suburban growth, and covers a broad spectrum of ideas about how it should be shaped.
“A useful definition . . . is economic development that takes into consideration environmental and community concerns. It’s pro-growth, but not growth without a plan,” said Barrett.
The heart of the issue is the plan, and smart growth discussions at some level end up being about all the issues that town planning officials talk about in mind-numbing detail: Housing density, transportation, infrastructure, mixed-use zoning, open space, street layouts, design, environmental protection, wetlands, etc.
The list is long and the issues can be technical and interrelated in complex ways, which is why the average person’s eyes might glaze over.
But most of the talk comes down to two or three of these topics. The big ones are housing density and transportation. Open space is right up there as well, and in fact they are all connected with each other.
Density
Housing density tops the list because it goes right to the heart of the American Dream, the single-family home with the big yard. The very mention of increasing density causes many suburbanites’ heartbeats to race.
But for a wide range of smart growth advocates, from home builders to environmentalists, getting municipalities to increase the number of houses per acre they will allow is a primary planning objective.
For one thing, clustering homes in a compact segment of a given piece of land enables builders to preserve open space within the rest of the parcel.
For another, concentrating enough population in a single area makes possible stores and transit stops, which require density to operate efficiently. In effect, a subdivision becomes more like a traditional village or neighborhood.
Higher density, however, is resisted by many municipal officials who fear it will change the character or their single-family home/big yard community. Those officials are often supported by residents who voice fears about congestion in the higher-density area.
The issue of congestion is complicated. Smart growth advocates see higher-density building as ultimately reducing traffic congestion because it contributes to more efficient traffic control and possibly to fewer car trips and greater use of mass transit.
But residents and officials of areas considering higher-density development often focus on the fact that there will be more people in their immediate area, which to them can outweigh any benefits enjoyed over a larger area beyond their borders.
Higher density can also — but doesn’t have to — mean townhouses or multifamily buildings, which some suburban residents object to for a variety of reasons, often relating to fears of diminished property values or an influx of lower-income newcomers.
There are a couple of approaches that can lessen this conflict. One is to build in older suburbs or cities where there is already relatively high density, which is called infill development. Complaints may be heard, but they usually aren’t quite as rancorous.
That doesn’t answer the needs of those who don’t want to live in cities or urbanized suburbs, however. For that market, high-density development in new locations where there are few existing neighbors is an increasingly popular alternative. Of course that means the consumption of more countryside — though presumably in a “smarter,” more efficient way.
Traffic and transportation
The greatest transportation efficiency is achieved by channeling development into existing traffic corridors, particularly those served by mass transit. Indeed, many early suburbs — along the North Shore, for instance — grew up along commuter rail lines.
In some areas of the country, governmental units pursuing smart growth policies are starting to offer incentives to development in designated “growth corridors” where major highways, mass transit and other necessary infrastructure elements already exist.
Such policies can induce communities, counties and regions to create and make use of master plans that suggest locations for new homes, shopping centers and offices that cause the fewest car trips and make the most efficient use of existing roads and mass transit lines — as well as sewer and water connections and the like.
As with density, the problem with such large-scale planning is the power of local interests, which often resist being usurped by a county or regional plan.
In Maryland, a leader in promoting smart growth through allocation of government funds, “communities are asked to designate planned growth areas, but the local governments try to limit growth,” said Maureen McAvey, director of business development, Federal Realty Investment Trust in Rockville, Md., speaking at the Urban Land Institute seminar. “They want somebody else to have the problems.”
Open space
Open space preservation usually gets the most support of all smart growth initiatives. Last year voters in Lake, Kane and Will Counties OKd $195 million in bond issues to buy forest preserve land, and DuPage County took similar action two years earlier. In addition, the state set up a $160 million trust for wildlife habitat acquisition.
Yet development expands at a pace that dwarfs forest preserves, putting the experience of true countryside ever farther away for most metropolitan area residents.
The most radical attempt to counteract that trend has come in Oregon, where a government-imposed urban growth boundary around the Portland area makes a clear division between the suburbs and surrounding farmland.
That controversial measure required an unusual degree of public support for rigorous state and regional planning which hardly exists elsewhere — and certainly not in Illinois.
The Oregon experience as well as reactions around the country to channel development in higher-density “growth corridors” points to the key factor in the smart growth debate.
Controlling suburban sprawl effectively almost always comes down to a measure of regional planning and cooperation that will in some cases conflict with local interests, particularly private property interests.
And that conflict always brings questions. Who’s going to have the power to decide what the plan will be? How will the power be used? How will individual community interests be protected?
Those are political issues, and that’s why smart growth is a term that will always spark strong emotions — however the term is defined.
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MORE ON THE INTERNET: Learn more about smart growth strategies in Chicago and elsewhere at chicagotribune.com/go/smart
