Ron Utt, the Antiplanner’s faithful ally, has uncovered the first steps of President Obama’s plan to force smart growth on those parts of the country that managed to escape the housing bubble. The departments of Transportation and Housing & Urban Development have signed a joint agreement to impose smart growth on the entire nation.
Under the agreement, the departments will “have every major metropolitan area in the country conduct integrated housing, transportation, and land use planning and investment in the next four years.” Of course, nearly all of the metropolitan areas that already did such integrated planning suffered housing bubbles, while most of those that did not did not have bubbles. The effect of Obama’s plan will be to make the next housing bubble much worse than the one that caused the current financial crisis.
It comes in 100 mg fluid sachets purchase generic viagra which are advantageous to utilize. There is a good chance that you may have already tightened up, and to use a sacroiliac cipla cialis canada joint belt. tadalafil australia Anyone can experience the problem of low sex desire, no matter whether you are a man or a woman. Conventional treatments are also available like ordine cialis on line impotence injections and impotence vacuum pumps. Obama first hinted about this plan in a town hall meeting in February. “The days where we’re just building sprawl forever, those days are over,” he told a group in Fort Myers, Florida. “I think that Republicans, Democrats, everybody recognizes that that’s not a smart way to design communities.” Not everybody.
Ironically, earlier in the town hall meeting, Obama pointed to a local couple who were forced by the recession to make a big “sacrifices,” said the president: “they’ve sold their home and moved into a smaller one.” It isn’t clear from the press statement whether he was bemoaning or celebrating their sacrifice. After all, the whole point of smart growth is to force more people — not everyone, certainly (the planners will want to stay on their quarter-acre lots), but more than now — to live in smaller homes.
Never forget that the original definition of the word “smart” was not “wise” or “intelligent,” but “a sharp, stinging pain.” Obama’s plans will inflict pain on many more Americans.
Millions of Americans have sacrificed — i.e. gave up spending, saved, and worked to pay for — for housing in the suburbs.
I can see how there are legitimate arguments about how suburbs are not optimal for the whole population. But I just don’t see a groundswell of people wanting to move into dense housing in the urban areas — the debate just seems to be about how to force people to move into dense housing in the urban areas.
Where am I wrong?
Explain why “housing, transportation, land use planning, and investment” should not be integrated.
I don’t know too many planners who want a 1/4 acre lot unless that is the standard in the area they live in. I’ve met many more who would prefer a smaller house in a central location in their metro area, or a townhouse/condo on the outskirts of downtown or a regional node.
the first steps of President Obama’s plan to force smart growth on those parts of the country that managed to escape the housing bubble.
Maybe they are trying to un-force the single-use auto dependency forced on us by the auto-dependency fetishizers represented on this site. Gosh – fewer fat unhealthy people! Does Randal shill for pHarma as well?
DS
The AP/commentators here always seem to make “either-or” statements, wherein you live either on a big lot with a big home in the suburbs or you live in a tiny apartment five-stories high. In reality, typical streetcar suburbs of the late 1800s and early 1900s offer substantial homes (many of several thousand square feet), which offer the added bonus of flexibility (can remain a big three-story Victorian or can be split into flats as the owner decides). These homes offer the same size as a typical suburban home, and also have yards (not big enough for a football game but enough for a small pool), but are arranged on smaller lots in a connected grid that is (gasp) walkable.
I wouldn’t call this “dense urban housing” by any stretch, unless by “dense” you mean more than 1-2 residences per acre. And the idea that we can and should keep consuming valuable and fertile land to provide 1-2 houses per acre for a growing population is to me ludicrous.
Ron Utt: The Liberals’ Anti-Suburban Bias
THWM: Does this mean that right-wingers have an anti-urban bias?
RU: Long ago, when it focused on the plight of low-income families, the American Left welcomed the suburbs as a healthy alternative to the airless teneÂÂments, congestion, and industrial concentration that characterized the cities and their working-class residents in the late 19th century. By the 1950s, however, it had become more fashionable for liberÂÂals to turn against the suburbs when a more prosÂÂperous America looked outside the central cities for better housing and public services and, in the proÂÂcess, abandoned public transportation for the flexiÂÂbility, mobility, and privacy of automobiles.
THWM: These are not the same types of suburbs.
RU: Today, approximately 75 percent of Americans live in the suburbs, and only a handful of older citÂÂies that have not annexed suburban areas have popÂÂulations exceeding their 1950 levels. Despite these near-universal preferences, however, many liberals continue to oppose the trend of suburbanization.
THWM: If you were really a “Liberal”, then you wouldn’t even care.
RU: Their efforts bore some fruit in the 1990s when the environmental movement joined forces with the anti-suburban Left to create the Smart Growth and New Urbanist movements. While both movements encouraged the concentration of people in denser communities that relied less on the automobile for transportation, both were quickly corrupted by the anti-growth, not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) factions that used the rhetoric (and acquiescence) of the Left to adopt exclusionary laws to upgrade their comÂÂmunities’ demographic profiles by discouraging prospective homebuyers of more modest means (disproportionately ethnic minorities) from living in the community.
THWM: Reminds me of vulgar libertarians complaining about mass transit.
hkelly1: “I wouldn’t call this “dense urban housing†by any stretch, unless by “dense†you mean more than 1-2 residences per acre. And the idea that we can and should keep consuming valuable and fertile land to provide 1-2 houses per acre for a growing population is to me ludicrous.”
ws: Density is relative, however, many traditional neighborhoods are above 6 dwelling units an acre. I can count many in Portland where the net density is almost 10 du/acre (composed of just single family homes).
Now, this is not near 30 du/acre, but it’s a good balance for those who wish not to live in very dense areas and want their single-family residence. I think planners get to caught up in making things dense, without regard for placemaking. The developers will ultimately come in and build whatever is zoned to flip a buck, without regard for building a neighborhood. And then the public sees what bad density looks like instead of what good density looks like, and their only reaction is to think that any dense area is bad because that’s all they know.
Explain why “housing, transportation, land use planning, and investment†should not be integrated.
Those things can be and are integrated through markets, notwithstanding government interference that prevents them from clearing. Its not as if you need government regulation to force developers to put roads and parks in communities. They must provide those to attract people into their developments. Governments face poor incentives to get the mix of land use right.
Those things can be and are integrated through markets
Then are you saying that their integration doesn’t cause housing bubbles, as the Antiplanner would have us believe?
If they would just scrap most zoning laws, there would be plenty of affordable housing.
“The idea that we can and should keep consuming valuable and fertile land to provide 1-2 houses per acre for a growing population is to me ludicrous.” –hkelly1
What about places like Salt Lake City, Denver, Phoenix, El Paso and others that are not consuming fertile land? Can they be exempted from this?
I’m curious to see what the details of this sort of thing will be. I think it would be really interesting to see core cities like Minneapolis finding themselves having to drop some of their R-1 zoning.
Could one of you constitutional scholars tell me where in the Constitution local and regional planning responsibilities are assigned to the Executive Branch of the federal govenment?
Explain why “housing, transportation, land use planning, and investment†should not be integrated. –D4P
There are a slew of reasons. For me, the most compelling is that anytime you have that level of central planning things become irrational. For example, look how zoning has been affected by politics. How different would things be if we hadn’t had large investments in all-you-can-eat freeways? IIRC a 30 mile round trip on e470 here would cost $7-90 a day. Now maybe that would mean people eat out for lunch less. But it could be that they would be more interested in transit. I would argue that while density helps drive demand for transit use to/from downtowns, another big factor is facing spending $8, $10, $14 a day on parking. And with employers concerned about finding and retaining employees, how many would be looking to locate on transit corridor to make sure they can find those employees for which that would be a factor in a toll road world. We’ve also seen the drive for the ownership society and forces influencing the process in ways to their advantage.
Others here have pointed out other factors in the gov’t. processes that have lead to minimal lots, parking, et al. As a whole the approach of smart growth feels like the age old “well, we just need the right people regulating and more regulations to get people to behave the way we want”. We forget we really can’t control the world, only have a bit of influence on how people behave. Look at recent major regulation that aimed to control like Sarbanes-Oxley [sic]. SOX was a huge set of laws eseentially governing accounting and meant to prevent scandals like WorldCom, Enron, Quest and others. Yet within a decade we’ve seen all sorts of accounting scandals like Freddie Mac (or was it Fannie Mae, sorry, I mix them up), Madoff, AIG and others.
So if all this central and metro planning is beefed up a la Sars-Ox, are we really going to see this “problem” resolved and people behaving as we want them to? I would argue what we’ll get is yet another lesson in for every action their is an equal or greater reaction. These rules will result in things we didn’t anticipate. Some places may find some loop holes, for example if all SFH officially are office/residential mixed use but actually just have blueprints that officially designate what used to be the 3rd and 4th bedrooms as office space, they can have SFH homes on 1/2 acre lots. Or that new growth will leapfrog the growth boundaries to just outside of where it’s more strictly controlled. We’ve seen that in places like Boulder (I’d argue Boulder is much more sprawled than a relatively small city like it would normally be because of it’s policies). Or how LA’s growth spilled 40-60 miles west into the the Inland Empire and even up and over the San Gabriels into the desert. Or depending on how the planning goes, we may find that smaller metro areas near larger ones suddenly find themselves gaining a lot of growth. Maybe we’ll see people and employers suddenly moving to places like Northfield, MN or Berthoud, CO so they’re just outside of the area of control but near enough to a major metro to attract the employees they need. Or if these measures only affect larger metro areas, we may find smaller metros like Boise, Colorado Springs, Richmond, Waco, Fargo, Rockford, Provo and others seeing a lot of growth.
Whatever the actual outcome actually is, as we’ve seen in the past it’s likely not to be what we intended. Whether it’s from people getting around the rules or politics yet again allowing influential groups to have a large influence on how the rules are written in ways that while the politicians will be saying the plans are written for smart growth, density, transit oriented development, or whatever that it’ll be more lip service than actual implementation. Or worse that it’ll be full of subsidies that rent-seekers influenced so they profit from the changes, changes that historically have resulted in outcomes different from their intentions.
But if housing, transportation, land use planning, and investment are going to happen anyway, why make decisions about them independently without considering their impacts on each other? If X affects Y and Y affects X, why act as if X and Y are independent?
Making decisions about these things in an “integrated” fashion doesn’t inherently mean “smart growth”: it just means acknowledging that these things are connected and taking these connections into account.
prk166: What about places like Salt Lake City, Denver, Phoenix, El Paso and others that are not consuming fertile land? Can they be exempted from this?
ws:No, but some are consuming and relying on engineered (federally subsidized, I might add) water systems upstream. This is not responsible nor is it growth that has occurred from the “free market”.
hkelly1 said:
The idea that we can and should keep consuming valuable and fertile land to provide 1-2 houses per acre for a growing population is to me ludicrous.†–hkelly1
The last I heard there was a SURPLUS of farm land and and the government was paying not to produce
hkelly1: The last I heard there was a SURPLUS of farm land and and the government was paying not to produce
ws: You can’t really have too much and suitable for agriculture. Having food security and cropland is imperative due to the possibility of droughts, disease and crop destruction.
The point is, once farmland is consumed by development, it is essentially gone. It is imperative that we create reserves of valuable crop land/fertile soils (in areas that do not need vast quantities of supplemental water).
A calculation of whether there is a surplus or shortage of farm land depends in part upon farm land productivity. (In other words, the more production per acre, the less land we need, and vice versa).
Production per acre depends in part upon fertilizer use. To the extent that fertilizers cause environmental problems, it’s misleading to ignore them when declaring that there’s a surplus of farm land.
The last I heard there was a SURPLUS of farm land and and the government was paying not to produce
All the more reason to pave it over, so when there are 600M in the country, they can just go ahead and rip up the paving. All that wealth created from the pavement will make the task ever so cheap.
DS
IT’s worth remembering there is no such thing as productive land per se.
Land is only productive when human beings apply their labour, knowledge and capital to the land to make it productive.
Some land is more fertile than other land but the most fertile land is not necessarily the most productive.
I grow truffles on land which is carefully selected for being dreadfully unfertile.
But given that truffles sell for up to $13,000 a kilo that land is highly productive.
Of course you need to invest in a beagle.
Land is only productive when human beings apply their labour, knowledge and capital to the land to make it productive.
Bullsh–.
This is true only in a narrow, blinkered, human-centered economic approach. Or perhaps you’d have New York clear-cut its entire watershed and build multi-billion $ water treatment plants as a replacement? Fortunately, such ideas from crackpottia don’t filter up to decision-makers too often.
DS
DAn, I know you cannot help being rude and ignorant but the comments I was responding to related to farm land and raised the issue of the supply of productive farmland.
The role of eco systems is supporting the eco system and the water soil and air is another discussion. We do no normally refer to a wetland (and I have built several) as productive land but as a efficient or effective ecosystem which of course maintains the fertility of the soil etc. When we measure changes in the productivity of the economy we do not count the wetlands. That is a different calculus.
The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment.
You could put a productivity number on watersheds/wetlands — clean water is an essential component to any crop. You’re also seeing the word productivity in a monetary sense; ecologically speaking, wetlands are highly “productive”.
For that matter, money is an article of faith between people.
ws:No, but some are consuming and relying on engineered (federally subsidized, I might add) water systems upstream. This is not responsible nor is it growth that has occurred from the “free marketâ€Â.
good point
The meaning of a word is determined largely by the context.
When people are debating the use or misuse of an asset and refer to productive in terms of the economic use of that asset then the standard economic definition applies.
I am well aware that some people like to use the term productive in relation to the riole of ecosystems in supporting other ecosystems but this remains the exception rather than role and usually impedes rational debate rather than enhancing it – unless of course the new set of definitions are spelled out at the beginning.
For the record the Oxford dictionary defines productivity as:
Econ: the rate of output per unit of input, used esp in assessing the effective use of labour, materials etc., and
Ecol: The rate of production of new biomass by an individual, population, or community; the fertility or capacityof a given habitat or area.
These are two definitions are apply to different contexts. It seems quite clear to me, as someone who lives in a highly productive farming economy that a reference to productive farming or farm production will normally be grounded in the economic definition.
I know you cannot help being rude and ignorant
I expect these sorts of comments when folk don’t have an answer.
And the argument that speaking of ecosystems in the same breath as the economy “usually impedes rational debate” is the snake oil argument from the exploiters who wish to go on exploiting without heed for the future. It’s a bullsh– argument and I call bullsh–.
DS
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