Category Archives: Regional planning

Though they put a good face on it, advocates of smart growth will find little to cheer about in a new report from the National Academy of Sciences on using compact development to reduce driving and greenhouse gas emissions. The report says that, if three-quarters of all new and replacement housing is built at twice current densities, it would reduce driving and related CO₂ emissions by only 8 to 11 percent by 2050.

Hardly anyone thinks that even the most restrictive government planning can double the density of 75 percent of new development. As a summary of the report given at a congressional hearing this week noted, the committee that wrote the report (most of whom are fairly objective people) “disagreed about the plausibility of extent of compact development and policies needed to achieve high end estimates.”

If a more reasonable figure of 25 percent is used, then CO₂ emissions from driving would be just 2 percent less. Since driving autos accounts for only about 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a 2 percent reduction from that is pretty small.

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Much has been written about how the recession has led to a transfer of power from Wall Street to Washington, and you might think this is a good thing if you are naive enough to think Washington is more democratic than markets. But Joel Kotkin points out something even more serious: power is shifting from all American cities to Washington.

Wall Street traders might have, for a time, captured a greater share of national wealth than they once did. But they never tried to tell the rest of us where to live, how to travel, or what kind of jobs can locate in your city. Washington is poised to do just that.

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Thomas Ragonetti has practiced land-use law for more than three decades and taught land-use planning at the University of Denver since 1993. This has led him to the same conclusion as the Antiplanner: “Growth management is inherently an elite or luxury good.”

“The wealthy will always win a bidding war for the most desirable dwellings while the poorer classes end up being squeezed,” Denver Post writer Vincent Carroll explains. “The more extreme the growth management, the farther it will slice up the income scale.”
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So Colorado has Boulder, one of the nation’s earliest practitioners of growth management, whose housing is more expensive (relative to incomes) than 90 percent of the rest of the country. Most of the 10 percent that is more expensive is in California, most of whose coastal cities having practiced growth management almost as long as (or longer than) Boulder. Of course, the people in these cities mostly regard themselves as “progressive,” meaning they care about poor people — they just want them to live somewhere else.

During a recent meeting, the Antiplanner was extolling the virtues of Houston‘s land-use policies, and a home builder at the meeting said, “Of course, no one here wants our city to be like Houston,” meaning no one wanted Houston’s land-use regime.

Why not? I asked. “There is too much competition down there. My company can’t make a profit,” he said. “You have to have some barriers to entry to be able to make money.”

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Urban planners are eagerly anticipating the next step in their efforts to take control over the lives of unsuspecting Americans: megaregional planning. Last September, the Department of Transportation published a report on “the implications” of megaregions “for infrastructure and transportation planning.” Now there is a group calling itself America 2050 that thinks we need a “third century vision” for the eleven megaregions it claims are emerging across the nation.

From the America 2050 web site. Click for a larger view.

Jane Jacobs once defined a “region” as “an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.” The Antiplanner would go further and say that, now that urban planners have totally screwed up many metropolitan regions, they want the power to screw up even larger areas of land — in the guise, of course, of fixing the problems that the won’t admit they created at the metropolitan level.
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As an unabashed supporter of Democratic Party policies, Paul Krugman has made some enemies in conservative camps. So the right-wing blogosphere was gleeful to discover a 2002 column in which Krugman actually urged the Federal Reserve Bank to “create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.” As near as I can tell, the first to point this out was someone named Patrick who commented on a Reason blog.

Since then, Mark Thornton at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute has uncovered many other examples of Krugman saying things in 2001-2004 that promoted a Fed-led housing boom. “Krugman did cause the housing bubble,” Thornton concludes.

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