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Kentucky
Smart Growth Task Force – Best Practices Conference
By
Theresa Fritz Camoriano
On
October 10, 2001, there was a conference at the University of Louisville
on the best practices for “smart growth”.
The meeting was opened by Crit Luallen, Secretary of the
Governor’s Executive Cabinet, who is spearheading the “smart growth”
movement in Kentucky. Crit
Luallen said that the state needs to be concerned about “quality of
life” issues in order to attract “knowledge workers”.
The
first speaker was Joel Hirschhorn, with the National Governors’
Association. Mr. Hirschhorn
said that anyone who disagreed with him and said that the goals of
“smart growth” were to take away property rights or restrict
people’s options was lying. He
said the goal of “smart growth” was to protect quality of life and
future economic development. It
is “intelligent control over growth”, not “haphazard growth”.
Mr. Hirschhorn said that “sprawl” is “not consistent with
American values” and is "unsustainable", and it is destroying
“true communities”, where neighbors care about one another.
He said urban growth boundaries do not work to prevent
“sprawl”. He said
“smart growth” is not about limiting choices but rather is about
increasing choices. He believes that many people want to live in the high density
mixed use neighborhoods the planners favor and said the problem is a lack
of supply, not a lack of demand. His
explanation for why developers did not build the kinds of developments he
believes people want was that existing zoning laws make it impossible to
build these kinds of arrangements, and current policies “subsidize”
the building of roads and sewers that promote “sprawl”.
(This talk of subsidizing sprawl was frequently heard during the
conference, but studies show that “sprawl” pays for itself, while
dense housing ends up being subsidized because it does not create a large
enough tax base to pay for the increased education spending it generates.)
When asked whether we would not have more freedom of choice if
zoning were removed altogether, he said, “Oh, you would not be very
happy with the way things would be if there were no zoning.”
Hirschhorn
wants citizens to participate in “visual preference surveys”,
apparently like the survey that was provided at the earlier task force
public meetings, to make citizens believe they are in control of land use
planning. He favors public
transit over the use of private cars.
He said “smart growth” is not a matter of spending money but
rather a more efficient spending of tax money.
Instead of wasting tax money to build roads and sewers to expand
growth and promote “sprawl”, money would be kept in the
already-developed parts of cities. He
was particularly gleeful to note that a foundation that had previously put
its resources into attacking the tobacco industry was now turning its
sights toward attacking the automobile.
He said we should expect a real public relations campaign to
educate us that automobiles are spoiling our air and making us fat and
unhealthy. (Of course,
automobiles have given us more freedom of choice in our life styles than
probably any other technology in our history. It makes one wonder whether he really favors more choices and
options when he so gleefully attacks the one technology that provides such
choice.)
Frank
Moretti, from Washington, D.C., the Director of Research, Road Information
Program, of the Building Better Communities Alliance, was the next
speaker. It is not clear how
he slipped into this conference, and he certainly was not well-received by
the “powers that be”. He
said that 5 out of 6 people prefer to live in suburbs, where the housing
is cheaper, and there is more room and less crime.
He said “sprawl” happens because it is what people want, and
the role of the transportation department should be to provide the roads
that people want and need, not to restrict growth.
He said suburban growth is not the cause of the decline of cities.
He pointed out that urban growth restrictions cause housing costs
to increase, lowering the standard of living, and devastating the black
community. He pointed out
that Arizona and Colorado had proposals for “smart growth” with severe
restrictions, which were voted down 70%-30%, and they were even opposed by
Habitat for Humanity, which recognized that the proposed restrictions
would make it very difficult for them to build affordable housing in the
city.
Mr.
Moretti said there are things that can be done to make better use of the
roads we already have. We
should take steps to reduce trips during peak hours and expand arterial
roads and highways. We need
flexibility, getting away from restrictive zoning.
People should have the freedom to choose how to live and travel,
and transportation should support the choices people make, not control and
limit those choices. He said
we should recognize that, no matter what planners do, most growth will be
outside of urban areas. We
need the flexibility to design what homeowners want.
Despite the pronouncements by the planners that suburbs are not
friendly communities, he noted that it is residents
who create communities, not
planners. (This talk
was most refreshing and certainly the only bright spot for anyone who
believes in respecting property rights.)
The
next speaker was Jeff Speck, a partner of the Duany architectural firm,
which builds the idyllic communities over which all the planners swoon.
These communities pack people into dense housing with shared green
spaces. There are shops and
businesses mixed in with the housing, and there are sidewalks, so people
can walk to parks and shops. Mr.
Speck displayed all the arrogance of a true “planner”.
He said Mr. Moretti’s talk was full of lies, and no matter how
many roads and highways are built, we will never reduce congestion until
we make the cities so ugly that nobody wants to go there.
(He did not seem to notice that when “sprawl” is allowed to
occur naturally, many smaller hubs develop, and people can work, go to
school, and do their living entirely outside of the main city, thereby
reducing congestion.)
He said that there will not be sprawl if cities and states refuse
to build the roads that permit sprawl to occur, and he understood that the
department of transportation of Kentucky was “on board” with that
idea. In other words, the
idea is to limit road construction and push people into high density
housing and public transportation.
Mr.
Speck waxed poetic about European cities, where the city owns the land
surrounding the city, makes decisions about the development of the land,
and then sells it and reaps the profits that are to be made from its
decisions as opposed to leaving the land in the hands of private owners
and allowing the owners to control it themselves.
Mr.
Speck’s Duany group is currently building an 800-acre development in the
Louisville area called “Norton Commons”, which will use these high
density design techniques and give Kentuckians the choice of living in
this type of a development. We
will then see whether Kentucky consumers really want this type of life
style. If so, presumably
other developers will build similar types of developments.
If not, we can expect that Duany’s group will continue to push
for more government controls that will force people into making this type
of “choice”.
Peter
Meyer, a professor at U of L, spoke briefly about “brownfields”, which
are contaminated sites within the urban area.
He said that, unless we restrict “sprawl” and prevent people
from moving out of the city, there will be no way to force anyone to
reclaim and reuse these contaminated sites.
These sites are sources of crime and decay in a city and must be
dealt with.
The
luncheon speaker was David Rusk, former mayor of Albuquerque, NM and
current planning consultant. If
Mr. Hirschhorn had been a smooth-talker, trying to slip new government
controls and regulations past the people while all the while talking about
freedom of choice, Mr. Rusk was the sledgehammer, explaining what should
happen once the regulations were in place.
He began by giving a whole new interpretation to the 10th
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. According
to Mr. Rusk, any power that is not expressly granted to the federal
government is retained by the states (nothing about the "or the
people" part of the amendment).
In other words, in his world, any aspect of your life that is not
under federal control is under state control.
He said that gentle urgings and reducing restrictions would not get
us where we want to go with respect to land use planning, social programs,
education, and so forth. His
approach was simply to use government to force people to live in the
manner he thinks is best.
Mr.
Rusk wants people of different races and different economic groups to be
forcibly mixed together by land use restrictions. First, you prevent building beyond a certain urban boundary,
so you have city on one side, an abrupt end of building at the border, and
farms on the other side of the street.
Then, you demand that builders put “affordable” housing into
their developments, mixing housing of different values, and you demand
that the city be able to buy a percentage of the affordable housing to be
used to disperse welfare families out among the wealthier families.
He had nothing but disdain for Mr. Moretti’s comments about how
land use restrictions create hardships for the poor and minorities.
He said that “sprawl” was just part of “white flight”, but
now we would use government to end “sprawl” and force people of
different races and different economic levels to live together in harmony.
He bemoaned the end of busing for desegregation and said that poor
children need to be among wealthier children in order to become
well-educated. (Of course,
there are many examples of private programs in which economically poor
children have become well-educated, but it is certainly true that
government schools have become a nightmare for them.)
Mr.
Rusk said that states like Maryland had adopted policies under which
communities would refuse to build roads or sewers outside of urban growth
boundaries. The idea was to
use the financial levers of the government to prevent growth outside of
those boundaries. The
counties would tell prospective developers that they could build outside
of those boundaries but they would have to pay for their own roads and
sewers so they would not be “subsidized” by the taxpayers.
(This really means that they would have to pay twice for many
services, once through taxes for which they would not receive benefits and
then again by paying outright for the services.)
He thought that was a good idea, but he was then appalled when
developers agreed to pay those costs and went ahead and built outside the
boundaries anyway. Obviously,
even tying up the money, so that suburbanites do not receive in benefits
anywhere near what they pay in taxes, will not be sufficient to prevent
“sprawl” or to satisfy the planners.
Greater levels of force will have to be used, according to Mr.
Rusk.
I
must confess that this was about all I could take, so I cannot report on
the last two speakers.
Summary:
1.
Kentucky’s Governor Patton and right-hand woman Crit Luallen want
a large shift in power from property owners to government throughout the
state. This is to be
accomplished in a strategic, stepwise manner, to avoid creating the kind
of opposition that occurred in Colorado.
Most of the talk will be about "quality of life" and the
need for "planning", but there will be no discussion of
specifics until the power has shifted. The first step will be to create regional planning
authorities, with the state providing economic incentives and penalties to
ensure that these regional planning authorities are created and that the
counties are “on board”. This
will be called “voluntary”. Mr.
Rusk made it plain that towns cannot be trusted to handle their own
planning, because they might act in a “self-serving manner” and
actually allow development to occur.
2.
The Department of Transportation will be encouraged to restrict the
building of roads that might promote “sprawl”.
Public transit, such as expensive, wasteful, light rail systems
that few people ever use, will be encouraged.
This will result in greater traffic congestion, which generally
causes greater flight out of the urban area (i.e. greater “sprawl”).
However, even if those in power know that the results will be a
deterioration of "livability", they don't really care, because
what they really care about is having more power.
3.
Once the regional planning districts have been created and the
planners are on the state payroll, feeding at the public trough, they will
then have plenty of time to figure out how to grab more power, by pushing
through zoning and other land use restrictions.
They will also budget tax money to be used to buy “development
rights” in order to preserve farmland and other green spaces.
It will only be coincidental that the recipients of all that money
and the people who will have the freedom to develop their land will be
friends of those in power, while those who are not friends will find their
land lying outside of the development boundaries.
In other words, the politically powerful will receive large
windfalls, while the politically weak can expect to suffer great losses in
property values. How this
helps Kentucky as a whole is very questionable, but it will certainly make
those in power happy.
4.
Anyone who believes
that property owners should control their own property as long as they are
not creating a nuisance for their neighbors should strongly oppose this
large power shift.
5.
Crit Luallen obviously hopes that promoting "planning"
and “smart growth” will win her lots of votes when she runs for
governor. We hope she will
have an opponent who will promote "respectful growth".
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