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Just What Is This So-Called "Smart Growth"?

by Theresa Fritz Camoriano

Kentucky's Governor Patton has organized a "smart growth" task force to study the question of land use in Kentucky.  However, in all the public hearings and meetings, nobody has yet defined the term "smart growth".  The phrase is left open to your imagination.  You are encouraged to envision a land of milk and honey, where the land is lush and green, there are no traffic jams, everyone is pleasant, and life is good.  That is the state of mind the politicians would love us all to have about "smart growth" -- that it will create a Utopia, where everything will be wonderful.  It is time for us now to wake up from this dream world, pull back the curtain in the Land of Oz, and check out the reality of "smart growth".

"Smart Growth" would be a massive shift of power and money from the people to the government.  Instead of property owners being free to use their property as they think best, and instead of people being able to build the kind of home they want, these decisions will be shifted to the government planners.  Maybe you have bought twenty acres in the country, where you plan to build a small home for your retirement.  If the "smart growth" people have their way, it will be their decision as to whether or not you will be permitted to build that small home.  They will be able to prevent you from building a home if they choose, or they may simply prevent you from obtaining water and electricity, which will effectively prevent you from using the property.  You will still have the deed to the property, but you will not be able to decide how the property will be used.  Maybe you are a farmer and would like to sell your farm to a developer and use the money to retire to Florida.  If the "smart growth" people have their way, they may prohibit the development of your farm.  You will suffer a tremendous financial loss, and maybe you will not be able to retire after all.

The "smart growth" people use lots of scare tactics to try to frighten people into going along with a massive theft of property rights, but we should not fall for their tricks.  They say, for example, that unless you allow them to control your property, somebody might put a smelly hog farm or a smelly chicken farm right next door to you.  Well, that is simply hogwash!  You do not have to hand over control of your property to obtain protection from those kinds of nuisances, because you already have that power under the common law! Common law nuisance and trespass give you the right to sue to stop someone who moves in and begins emitting noise or odors or run-off that prevent your peaceful use of your property.  They say that farmland and forest land are being destroyed by new housing developments at an alarming rate, and we will no longer be able to enjoy the scenic beauty of the state unless we give them the power to control land use.  Again, that is nonsense.  We have as much land in cultivation and as much forest land now as we did in the 1960's and 1970's.  Don't allow these scare mongers to frighten you with their carefully selected statistics.  Take a drive across the state and look around for yourself!

Fortunately, most people realize what is going on, and, when they are given a choice, they vote against this kind of massive power grab.  For example, Trimble county just voted two-to-one against zoning.  The city of Houston has voted down zoning three times and still has no zoning.  It is one of the largest cities in the country, and it has no more land use problems than any other city.  Unfortunately, in most cases, zoning is brought in without the people having a chance to vote.  Elected officials bring it in, saying that it is necessary to solve some urgent problem, and saying that only uneducated people oppose it, and that, once they educate us properly, we will accept it.  Sort of the way an educated horse enjoys that bit in its mouth and that saddle on its back!

Not only is planning and zoning a form of theft of property rights, but it creates many more problems than it was supposed to solve in the first place.  First, zoning is the largest corrupter of public officials in the country.  When a bureaucrat, who has no personal money at risk in a piece of property, can make decisions that will greatly affect the value of the property, there is a great opportunity for bribery and pay-offs.  Who has a greater incentive to protect the value of a piece of property -- the person who owns the property, or some bureaucrat?  While the property owner usually will make decisions based on what makes the property most valuable, the bureaucrat doesn't care at all about the value of the property and makes his decisions based on other reasons.  For example, he might be concerned about how much the property owner gave to his uncle's last political campaign; or about whether he likes the color of the property owner's skin, or whether the property owner is well-connected in the community.  So, instead of land use decisions being private decisions made by the person who has his own money at risk, they become political decisions, with the politically powerful having all the control and the politically weak being at their mercy.

While the centralized command and control model has been found to be a failure both in businesses and in governments around the world, we in Kentucky can't wait to adopt that failed model!  Private businesses have learned that a business using centralized command and control cannot compete successfully, so they have put tremendous resources into moving the decision-making down to the lowest possible level, where the decision-maker has the information he needs in order to make a good decision and where he personally feels the consequences of his decision.  This decentralized decision-making has been found to be very effective.  In the area of land use, we already have such a system, and it is called "private property rights".  Each property owner has the right to make the land use decisions and planning for his own property.  All we have to do is stick with a winner and not be seduced by those who want more of our power and money.

Part of Kentucky's "smart growth" plan is to use hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money to buy up development rights to preserve open spaces.  What does that mean?  In all likelihood, it means that bureaucrats will be spreading money around like manure to buy influence.  It means that they will be giving the money of hard working Kentuckians to wealthy horse farmers.  This will be another wonderful opportunity for graft and corruption, which we don't need.  While restrictive covenants that limit development may work out alright in certain limited areas, it is important that the vast majority of property owners continue to be free to adapt to changing circumstances.  A place that seems to be remote and unlikely to be developed today may turn out to be a hub of activity a hundred years from now, and our grandchildren need to have the flexibility to adapt to circumstances we cannot even envision.  The state should not be using our tax money to create restrictions that may hamper our grandchildren's ability to adapt to their changing world.

For those who believe "smart growth" will preserve the beauty of the natural landscape, guess again!  If we really want to protect forests and farms, then we will respect the rights of the people who own them.  Bernheim forest is a wonderful example of a private property that is being well managed and is accessible to the public.  But, when land is owned by the government on behalf of everyone, there really is nobody to take care of it.  For example, the massive forest fires in the Western U.S. have been caused by mismanagement of federally-owned land.  In Honduras, the government took control of all the trees on behalf of the people.  As a result, there was no private property owner looking after the trees, so the trees all disappeared.  When hurricane Mitch came, there were no tree roots to hold the soil in place, so there were huge landslides, and ten thousand people died.  Most of those deaths can be traced to a lack of respect for private property rights!

For those who believe that "smart growth" will reduce traffic congestion in the cities, guess again.  The "smart growth" planners want to make housing much more dense (more people per acre) than it is now, and they want to take money that should be spent on highways and roads and put it into extremely wasteful light rail projects, which do not attract significant numbers of riders, and which further reduce the amount of roads available to car traffic, causing even more congestion! 

For those who believe that "smart growth" will make your kids better behaved or make your hair grow thicker and more beautiful, I give up.  There is no hope for you!

So-called "smart growth" also will make housing more expensive and make it more difficult for our children and grandchildren and lower income people to afford housing.  It will make business development more expensive and difficult.  It will make Kentucky less able to compete with other states for new businesses, and it will result in the waste of land and the plundering of many people, for the purpose of enriching a few well-connected people.  That is not the kind of legacy I want to leave to my children.

In a free country, we are supposed to be able to make our own choices about how we want to live our lives.  Some of us want to live in the city, others in the suburbs, and others in the country.  That's as it should be, and we do not need government bureaucrats to herd us around and force us to live as they think we should.  We also don't need bureaucrats to take hundreds of millions of our hard-earned dollars to spread around buying influence while claiming to be protecting our interests.

What we do need is to let our elected officials know in very plain terms that we are not living in a dreamland.  We are now wide awake, and we have pulled aside the curtain and know what is inside.  We know what they are up to, and we will not permit it!