Posted on 02/17/2005 6:27:19 PM PST by hedgetrimmer
"Smart Growth" is here, a collection of proposals, guidelines, and goals that will ultimately make homebuying less feasible and commuting more difficult. And that's the good news.
The essential idea behind various "Smart Growth" initiatives is to move zoning decisions from local communities to Washington.
This is necessary, it's alleged, because we have too much traffic congestion, metro areas are getting too big, and we're losing too much farmland. To solve such problems, we must allow the federal government to spend $10.5 billion for programs and strategic planning.
The "Smart Growth" concept is a wondrously curious idea precisely because it does not address the root cause of urban sprawl, to wit: more people need more space. As our population has grown from 151 million in 1950 to 272 million today, virtually all additional residents have opted to live indoors, thus creating a need for more housing. The catch is that not only do more people demand more housing, they also want to leave such housing from time to time. This requires the construction of roads and also destinations for things like schools, shopping, and jobs.
If you travel you quickly understand that this is a big country -- a very big country. We do not have a shortage of land, a shortage of farm land, or a shortage of forests. What we have is a desire by most people to live in certain core areas, and those areas, not surprisingly, are densely populated.
There are a number of ways we could resolve the problem of urban and suburban overcrowding:
Annex Canada. The attraction of this proposal is that Canada has plenty of empty space and most people there already speak English. Alas, Canadians would probably object and point out that our problem is not a need for more land, it's a desire for less "sprawl."
Encourage emigration. We can reduce the need for larger urban areas by lowering per capita densities. This can be done helping people move to other states or countries. Or, by mandating birth control.
Make people live in smaller houses. If citizens would stop taking up so much space, we could preserve farm land. However, since there's no shortage of farm land, it's not clear why it needs to be preserved. As the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas, TX points out: *Less than 5 percent of the nation's land is developed and three-quarters of the population lives on 3.5 percent of the land.
* Only about one-quarter of the farmland loss since 1945 is attributable to urbanization.
*Predictions of future farmland loss based on past trends are misleading because farmland loss has been moderating since the 1960s, falling from a 6.2 percent decline in farmland per decade in the 1960s to a 2.7 percent decline in the 1990s.
*In addition, with dramatic increases in agricultural output, American farmers are producing almost 50 percent more food than in 1970, using less land.
Raise gasoline taxes by $4 a gallon. That will put an end to commuting logjams -- and also bankrupt the auto industry and much of the country. Since millions of now-jobless people would be foreclosed, we will finally have a use for all those surplus tents owned by government.
Stop building roads. The best way to get people off the highways is to build fewer of them. This would be funny except that it seems to be a core "Smart Growth" principle. The Portland, Oregon metro region is often held out as a model of urban planning. Growth is tightly controlled and the result is that property values went from $64,400 in 1988 to $158,100 in 1998, according to the National Association of Realtors. That's a 145-percent price increase and sure it sounds like good news -- at least until it's realized that soaring home prices freeze out everyone but the income elite.
"Smart Growth" planning presumes that local development should be controlled at the federal level because, er, well, folks in Washington are simply smarter than you and I.
But there's no evidence that federal planners are more adept than local zoning boards, no consideration of the life-style limits implicit in "Smart Growth" programs, no concern for the loss of housing opportunities that will develop, no worries regarding personal preferences, no weight attached to the idea that all real estate is both local and unique, and certainly no interest in such issues as property rights and economic "takings."
The biggest problem in government today is a surplus of money. There is so much money in federal vaults that new and inventive ways must be devised to spend what we have, otherwise the notion will arise that taxes should be lowered. "Smart Growth" policies exist not because they're needed, but because without them both tax bills and government would be smaller.
Problem is they have stopped building roads, gasoline has neared $4 in some areas, and Canada is virtually annexed through NAFTA. But the federal government is still pushing smart growth and that giant sucking sound is your tax dollars being lifted by the smart growth advocates.
And we were lead to believe that abortion and birth control was the key to smart growth!
Problem is, much of the growth has been from immigration.
Of course, immigration is controlled by Washington.....loosely.
Dr. O'Toole will be lecturing in San Jose next week if you're interested.
The Insanity of Light Rail Transit: San Jose as a Test Case
Tuesday, February 22 , 2005
5:15-6:45 P.M.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, Room 225 (Second Floor)
150 E. San Fernando St. (@ 4th St.), San Jose
THE GENERAL PUBLIC WELCOME TO ATTEND this FREE event.
Astronomical housing costs, suffocating traffic congestion, and pollution are taking a heavy toll on our quality of life. Are these all inescapable consequences of modern life or the results of bad government policies?
San Jose has devoted enormous sums and unending time to the construction of light rail transit lines that allegedly will alleviate the problems. But urban economist Randal O'Toole argues that such heavily subsidized public transit throws away resources to only make matters worse. Come and hear his case for market-based alternatives to government planning.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER - RANDAL O'TOOLE
Dr. O'Toole is an economist with the Thoreau Institute (http://www.ti.org) and director of the American Dream Coalition, which is dedicated to finding free-market solutions to urban problems. In its review of O'Toole's book, THE VANISHING AUTOMOBILE AND OTHER AMERICAN MYTHS the American Planning Association says that "O'Toole is an articulate skeptic who marshals a formidable array of facts and figures to argue against the major tenets of smart growth." In 1998, Yale University named O'Toole its McCluskey Conservation Fellow. In 1999 and 2001, he was the Scaife Visiting Scholar at the University of California at Berkeley, and in 2000 he was the Merrill Visiting Professor at Utah State University.
You might be interested in this.
:-)
When I was a lad, the growth aspect was called planning. If there were crowded roads or utilities stretched to the breaking point, the people moved to build more resources in advance of the population growth. Of course the planning and development took time and too often they were obsolete by the time they were developed. But at least people had water and power for their new homes, even if the commute did not work out like they hoped.
Now with environmentalists in charge, power plants are blamed for growth and policies are actually anti-growth. And roads that are clogged with cars have one lane removed from use except for carpools. This led me to move to train commuting and finally to leaving the state of California. Smart growth indeed.
I'm not, being quite familiar with his schtick for nearly seven years.
Man-O-Man I love that last paragraph of the artickle the bestest!!!
Here's a radical thought. There would be no need for smart growth or dumb growth or much of any other kind of growth, few traffic headaches, reduced crime, reduced crowding in the schools, if we didn't have people being forced out of the close-in suburbs by the influx of millions of immigrants. I know it's inconceivable but if we're welcoming millions of new resident every year, they have to live somewhere, and most of the places they can afford to live are in the cities and closer suburbs. Which makes the people who were here before move further out. Which encourages the construction of new housing. Which causes more road congestion. Which makes people spend less time with their families and experience stress and road rage. So maybe putting up a great big wall across the Rio Grande is the smartest control of housing problems of all.
San Jose .. BART or Bust! BUMP
SMART Growth, my patooty.
Denny Crane: "There are two places to find the truth. First God and then Fox News."
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