Sales of the Vanishing Automobile went really well. Although my publicity was limited to a web site and speaking engagements, it sold faster than my previous book, Reforming the Forest Service.
This made me realize that there was a lot of grassroots opposition to urban planning fads such as smart growth and light rail. To promote that opposition, I decided to bring experts and activists together in a national conference.
Previous conferences that I had held, such as the 1984 Mission Symposium, had been backed up by a staff of at least four or five other people. But I organized this conference, which I called Preserving the American Dream, by myself.
I decided to hold the conference in Washington, DC, so I flew there to check out hotels. When planning the Mission Symposium in San Francisco, I learned that everything was negotiable: I got a couple of hotels bidding against each other and reduced the room rates by at least 50 percent from what they first offered. In Washington, I did the same thing, and while I didn’t get as big a reduction, I still got pretty good rates for an excellent hotel.
I managed to raise enough money to pay the expenses of quite a few speakers, so the conference fees only had to be sufficient to cover meal costs. Since many speakers also came from Washington, which cost nothing except for their meals, I was able to pack the conference agenda with three two-hour plenary sessions and three breakout sessions with five breakout groups each. The plenaries had five speakers each and the breakouts three to four speakers each. Some people were on the agenda more than once and there were the usual couple of no-shows, but the agenda shows a total of more than 50 speakers.
I hadn’t previously met more than a handful of the speakers, instead learning their names from my research when I was at Berkeley and Utah State. Somehow I had also been introduced to Patrick Zilliacus, a transportation engineer with the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. Working entirely on his own time and in an unofficial capacity, he arranged a day-long tour of the Washington area showing the group recent and historic transportation and housing projects.
The hard part was advertising the conference. No one sells mailing lists of people who are upset by densification or rail boondoggles. I got the word out as best I could and managed to attract activists from at least 22 states. That’s about right as smart growth and rail transit really weren’t big issues in North Dakota, Oklahoma, or a lot of other Midwestern and Southern states.
We scheduled the conference tour on a Sunday, allowing us to avoid the worst traffic. Not everyone at the conference joined us on the tour, but we filled most of the seats on two buses.
Pat took us to the operations center for high-occupancy toll lanes that had been built on Interstate 405 (part of the Washington Beltway) in Virginia. The lanes had been built by a private company, Transurban, which was paying for them out of the tolls they collected. The operations center monitored traffic and raised or reduced the tolls as needed to keep traffic flowing.
We had lunch at a park near the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, which had been built after years of planning and delay. This was a good example of why cities have become so congested: a bridge like this would have taken a couple of years to plan and build in the 1950s or 1960s; by the 1990s, such work was measured in decades, not years.
Pat showed us Greenbelt, Maryland, which had been built by the federal government as a “new city” in the 1930s. Early residents were afflicted with a collectivist mentality on the part of the New Deal planners who built it, with some threatened with eviction if they didn’t follow community standards. This was quickly jettisoned by the Eisenhower administration and today Greenbelt is an ordinary suburb.
Then we visited Kentlands, a New Urban neighborhood designed by Andrés Duany, one of the founders of the New Urbanist movement. It looked like a pleasant place to live in many ways.
Back at the hotel that evening, we had a “Great Debate” after dinner between Duany himself and Wendell Cox. I had previously met Wendell when he passed through Portland visiting family, as he had gone to high school in the Portland suburb of Hillsboro. He was a long-distance runner and got a scholarship to UCLA and after graduating from college stayed in Los Angeles long enough to get himself appointed to the board of directors to the Los Angeles transit agency. From that position, he promoted the construction of LA’s first light-rail lines. When those lines went way over budget and, after opening, attracted far fewer than expected riders, he became one of the nation’s greatest critics of rail transit. Wendell and I were proud to be once listed as the number one and number two enemies of the transit industry.
Duany proved to be extremely gracious and the debate turned into more of a lovefest. He claimed that he wasn’t interest in imposing New Urbanism on anyone but merely wanted to offer people the option, which was sometimes precluded by zoning codes. This distinguished him from his West Coast counterpart, Peter Calthorpe. Calthorpe’s early New Urban developments were financial failures, so he got in the business of helping cities write zoning codes that mandated that all new developments in those cities follow New Urbanist principles.
Duany later invited me to an annual meeting of the Congress for the New Urbanism. At the conference, I pointed out that the “New Urban principles” that appeared on the organization’s website insisted that all new development follow New Urbanist standards and that all existing development be rebuilt to those standards, thus leaving out any options for any other urban or suburban lifestyles. Afterwards, I noticed, those principles were quietly softened or removed from the group’s website, but many adherents remain as authoritarian as ever.
Monday morning featured numerous speakers critiquing New Urbanism, smart growth, and rail transit, many of whom have since become good friends and frequent colleagues. There are too many to describe in detail, but I want to especially mention Michael Cunneen, a transportation engineer who spent time working for Portland’s Metro. Michael was the person who, several years before, had persuaded my Syracuse interns that light rail was a big mistake. Later, he worked on traffic calming issues, managing to persuade the Albuquerque city council to stop traffic calming due to its negative effects on emergency services. Sadly, he passed away at a relatively young age a few years ago.
Kathleen Calongne had also made a specialty of challenging traffic calming projects from her home in Boulder. She had assembled a huge collection of research showing that traffic calming created more dangers than benefits.
Tom Rubin is an accountant whose worked for the same transit agency as Wendell when that agency was planning rail transit. He has also worked for many other transit agencies and knows where a lot of bodies are buried.
Dan Hunt and Rick Harrison are both from the Twin Cities. Hunt is a developer who built several high-density projects, but he wasn’t a believer in the New Urbanism. Harrison is an architect who helped developers lay out suburban subdivisions to maximize the land for housing and minimize the land needed for streets.
At noon, we had a moving speech from South Carolina state representative Joe Neal. An African-American, he told us how his great grandfather was a slave who had purchased land from his former owner after the Civil War. Several large plantations east of Columbia, the state’s capital, had been sold by their white owners to their slaves after the war. The lands were inherited by their children who kept them undivided, so that their grandchildren and great grandchildren today each have shares in the land, but can’t sell it without the permission from all of the family owners. The result is the greatest concentration of black-owned lands in the nation.
Many of the owners of the lands live elsewhere and treat the lands as a sort of safety net. If they lose their jobs in Atlanta, Charlotte, or wherever they lived, they know they can move back to South Carolina for a time, sometimes living by growing small crops and selling them by the roadsides.
Unfortunately, planners in Richland County, where the land is located, had been writing increasingly restrictive zoning codes. Among other things, people who owned an inexpensive home such as a mobile home were required to put them on foundations that could cost more than the homes were worth. Any home that was left unoccupied for more than a couple of years would be declared uninhabitable and torn down. Roadside sales were severely restricted. In other words, the plans were taking away all of the value of the lands to their owners.
Our conference was attended by representatives of two different South Carolina property rights groups helping defend the blacks and other property owners. One of the groups believed that smart growth was a plot by the United Nations as a part of Agenda 21. I’ve never seen any evidence that this was true and I’ve noticed that people who say so are quickly dismissed by politicians and other officials as kooks. The other group was more realistic and had more political sway. Unfortunately, the latter group was funded primarily by realtors and was more oriented to protecting the property rights of whites while the conspiracy theory group worked hardest for Joe Neal and his friends.
In the afternoon, Wendell Cox, Robert Poole, and other speakers presented our alternative to smart growth, which basically consisted of letting people make their own choices about transportation and housing but insuring that they pay the full costs of those choices. Poole, the former executive director of the Reason Foundation who continued to work on transportation issues for the group, was a major advocate of tollroads. Gerard Mildner, a planning professor at Portland State University, showed how Portland’s urban-growth boundary was making housing unaffordable. Bob Nelson, who had joined Karl Hess on the Africa tour, proposed to replace zoning with protective covenants approved by homeowner associations, which he called “privatizing the neighborhood.”
One afternoon speaker that I’ve since lost track of was Michael Penic, who was a transportation modeler with Parsons Brinckerhoff. He had noticed that transportation models failed to account for the extra air pollution that was produced in congestion and started adding that to the models. This would undermine proposals to “reduce” pollution by not building any more roads, which would result in more congestion and might get a few people out of their cars and onto transit. Such policies were self-defeating if the resulting congestion produced more pollution than the amount of relief from getting a few people onto transit. Sadly, it turned out that regional planners didn’t want to know that their densification and congestion plans would make the problem worse, so after the conference Penic was reassigned to an entirely different project.
Tuesday morning focused on how we could get our ideas heard in the political realm and included several inspiring presentations by people who had succeeded. Sadly, some of them had won short-term battles but lost in the long run.
Kemper Freeman, a businessman from Bellevue, Washington had successfully convinced Seattle-area voters to reject a light-rail ballot measure. Unfortunately, rail proponents later came back with more money than ever to promote their campaign and won. Dave Hunnicut described how his group, Oregonians in Action, had put an initiative petition on the ballot that would allow anyone who had lost property rights due to rezoning after they purchased their land to petition for compensation or a restoration of those rights. The measure won, but two years later planning advocates came back with a measure that stripped away most of the restored rights.
One sustained success story came from Cincinnati, whose transit agency had proposed to build an expensive light-rail network. Stephan Louis told us how he took a year off from his job to fight this proposal and almost single-handedly built up a coalition of people to oppose it. After the measure lost, Ohio’s governor appointed Louis to the transit agency board, where he made sure that no similar proposals would be considered again. The region remains free of rail transit other than a silly streetcar line built by the city of Cincinnati (and the results from that underused line should be enough to turn Cincinnatians from any future proposals).
Tuesday afternoon most of the more technically minded speakers drifted off to catch flights home or, if they lived in DC, go to work. The activists remained and we broke up into groups to talk about political and media strategies and whether and where to hold another conference. The group proposed to hold conferences in different cities each year so we could see what was happening in those cities.
I incorporated the American Dream Coalition almost as soon as I got home from Washington and was able to quickly get IRS recognition as a tax-exempt organization. This helped to raise money for future conferences. The 2004 conference would be in Portland, followed by Minneapolis, Atlanta, San Jose, Houston, Bellevue, Orlando, Denver, Austin, plus twice more in Washington, DC. Some years, instead of national conferences, we would hold regional conferences focused on the problems of one urban area. Such conferences were held in Honolulu, Vancouver (WA), Nashville, Tampa, and several other cities.
Although I did most of the work for the first several conferences, at some point Kathleen Calongne became an indispensable coordinator for many of the conferences. Before this, however, Jon Caldara, who attended the DC conference and who directed a Colorado think tank called the Independence Institute, decided he wanted me to help him in Colorado. That led to one of the most frustrating periods of my life.
Thank you