The department's 1999 State of the Cities report, released last June, calls for using smart growth to reduce inner-city joblessness, income inequality, educational gaps, and housing problems. Of course, smart growth's real effect will be to make most if not all of these problems worse.
Most Housing and Urban Development (HUD) funds (as opposed to such things as mortgage loan guarantee programs) are spent in the central cities, rather than the suburbs. This has had the effect of making HUD a partisan in favor of the cities in their battles with the suburbs.
The 1998 State of the Cities report, for example, consistently compares the cities with the suburbs. Although the US economy is booming, notes the report, poverty and unemployment remain higher, schools poorer, and housing worse in the cities than in the suburbs. Therefore the cities need more federal subsidies.
The report blames the differences between cities and suburbs on "middle-class flight that began two decades ago." In fact, this "flight" began well over a century ago, long before any federal urban programs or housing subsidies, and represented peoples' desires to live in lower densities and outside the jurisdictions of the often-corrupt central city governments.
With a few notable exceptions, such as San Francisco, central cities are less overtly corrupt today. But their tax rates are often significantly higher than in the suburbs, and much of these taxes go not to help poor people but to subsidize big businesses.
Frustrated by suburban resistance to annexation, the cities have come to rely on HUD as a source of transfer payments from suburban taxpayers to the cities. About $23 billion of HUD's $33 billion budget is for public housing. Another $7.6 billion is for community development, nearly all of which is spent in the cities. Of the remainder, about $2.3 billion goes to the Federal Housing Administration (mostly for mortgage insurance) and almost all the rest is overhead.
The 1998 State of the Cities report called for conventional solutions to urban problems, namely more federal spending. But the 1999 report (available from the same web site as the 1998 report) has a lengthy section about "promoting smarter growth and livable communities." One of the report's three key findings are that there is a "need for joint city/suburb strategies to address sprawl and the structural decline of cities."
To fulfill this "need," the report calls for developing "smart-growth strategies across jurisdictional lines." In other words, the suburbs are to lose their independence to various regional or metropolitan councils that are encouraged, if not mandated, by federal policy.
The report repeats a familiar litany against "sprawl," including the claims that sprawl increases urban-service costs and threatens open space. To these, HUD adds some costs of its own, including "poverty concentration." In other words, poor people move away from decrepit neighborhoods as soon as they can afford to do so. HUD probably thinks they should stay and gentrify the old neighborhood.
Unfortunately, gentrification leads to another cost, which is "shortages of affordable housing near jobs." This is partly due to gentrification but also partly because businesses are moving from congested cities into the less-congested suburbs. This means the poor people who are left behind have fewer jobs nearby.
HUD also worries about the "travel costs" associated with sprawl. People who live in the suburbs, says HUD, drive 30 percent more than central city residents. HUD calls this a "cost." But maybe they are going somewhere they like. Maybe the city residents would like to go places too, but can't because there is too much congestion. Or maybe the people who live in the cities don't like to drive, but the people who live in the suburbs do. In any case, the simple fact that some people drive more than others does not mean that they are suffering.
Finally, HUD worries about a "decline in sense of community." Supposedly, "people living in sprawling developments gather less often in public places and feel less responsible to one another and to shared surroundings than residents of more dense communities."
Yes, but just propose to build a high-density residential development (even a high-income one) in the middle of a low-density suburb and you will soon find out what kind of "sense of community" that suburb has. It is to overcome just this sense of community that smart growth calls for regional planning and governance.
It appears that HUD's old mission of helping to house the poor has been superseded by a new one of helping cities grab political power over the suburbs. Not surprisingly, this means that many of HUD's actual goals and proposals conflict with one another. For example: