Lafayette, Louisiana would seem to be the last place in the world that you would expect to adopt a smart-growth plan. Yet the city adopted one recently and is now beginning to implement it by revising its zoning code. The Antiplanner believes that this code will make housing and other developments more expensive and slow the economic growth of Lafayette.
I suspect the problems can be traced to a decision made a couple of decades ago to consolidate the city and parish government. The argument at the time was that most people lived in one of six Lafayette cities and towns, and the few people scattered across the rural parts of the parish couldn’t afford to maintain the roads and other infrastructure. Consolidation was supposed to fix that.
Today, the roads are in worse shape than ever, both in the city and the parish, and congestion is a major local problem. When the parish asked for a tax increase to improve roads, the parish council at that time refused to guarantee that the money would actually be spent on roads, so the voters rejected the increase.
Advocates of a comprehensive plan invariably pointed to the congestion and deteriorating road, saying that the congestion was the result of poor planning. Yet the real problem was financial. Parish leaders seem more interesting in subsidizing a new Costco and similar developments than in repairing the roads.
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Predictably, the comprehensive plan does nothing to relieve congestion, nor does it suggest any way to finance road repair. Instead, it would make congestion worse by converting two lanes of many four-lane roads into bike lanes and by subsidizing the construction of high-density developments.
Lafayette has one New Urbanist development called River Ranch. It is fairly successful, yet the narrow streets prevent adequate emergency services and even the multi-family housing is expensive. When one single-family home caught fire, fire trucks could not negotiate their way to the home and the structure burned to the ground.
At a luncheon on Tuesday and a city-parish council meeting on Tuesday evening, the Antiplanner gave presentations recommending that the council not approve the new zoning code until it submits it to an independent review, preferably an economist. The council should ask the reviewer two questions: First, have similar plans elsewhere accomplished their goals? Second, have there been any negative unintended consequences?
You can download my lunch and council presentations, which are a little different, to see what I said. They are about 12-14 megabytes in Powerpoint format. You can also download a presentation I did two years ago on Lafayette’s comprehensive plan, which is about 40 megabytes.
This is misleading. The AP is implying that this had something to do with the “narrow streets.” In fact, if you look at pictures of the fire you can plainly see that fire trucks were able to negotiate the narrow streets and are directly in front of the house. If anything prevented them from getting to the fire it was the fact that the house was deeply set back behind it’s own fence and ornate gateway.
Fire trucks eventually made it to the house, but they were delayed by the narrow streets. Though the fire was more than four years ago, the lot remains vacant today.