Posted on 04/24/2002 5:17:09 AM PDT by Phantom Lord
America's drive for acreage
By RICK MARTINEZ
RALEIGH - The problem with "Smart Growth" is that it's almost always smart for someone else.
Given a choice, most folks want what Smart Growth denies -- a big house with a big yard and at a bargain price. If they have to drive to a former cow pasture to get their piece of the American dream, so be it.
Espousing this position has earned me the title of urban neanderthal, but it appears I'm not the only member of this new species.
The National Family Opinion organization recently conducted a survey for the National Association of Home Builders and the National Association of Realtors. It would be shortsighted to dismiss this poll as providing the industry with preordained answers: the builders and real estate agents I know will build and sell anything anywhere, so long as there's a market.
The survey, conducted in January and released Monday, never mentioned Smart Growth. It simply asked 2,000 respondents who had bought their primary residence in the past four years what they considered important in a home and community.
In nearly every instance, big, roomy and cheap homes -- the upside of urban sprawl -- generally won out over the small, crowded and expensive housing that tends to be the end result of Smart Growth polices.
When asked to rate the importance of 16 aspects of a home and its location, "houses spread out" received top billing from 62 percent of the respondents. Highway access was selected as the top community amenity by 44 percent of the respondents. When asked what single factor they would change in their present home and community, lower taxes was the top choice.
Somebody get this survey down to the General Assembly.
Density lost out big time among these homeowners. Forty seven percent said they looked for a bigger home, and 45 percent wanted a bigger lot. Only a measly 10 percent wanted a smaller house, and 9 percent a smaller lot.
The open space most of these homeowners preferred was out in the country, not in the city. Living in a less-developed area and living away from the city were deemed significant quality of life issues for 40 and 39 percent of the respondents, respectively.
The most damaging survey result for Smart Growth came when respondents were asked to select their favored housing lifestyle option. The anti-sprawl notion of a small single-family home in the city, close to work, public transportation and shopping, was the choice of only 18 percent. Ouch.
Forty percent said they wanted a smaller home in a suburb closer to the city. Forty two percent said housing utopia for them was a large single-family home in an outlying suburban area with longer distances to work, public transportation and shopping. Urban neanderthals unite!
If this consumer survey isn't enough to make our civic leaders and planners take a second look at Smart Growth, I suggest they read a sobering scholarly study by Matthew E. Kahn of Tufts University, published in the Fannie Mae Foundation journal "Housing Policy Debate" (Volume 12, Issue 1).
Kahn's article, "Does Sprawl Reduce the Black/White Housing Consumption Gap?", warns that Smart Growth has the potential to squeeze minorities out of the housing market at a time when they are making their most dramatic gains.
"Affordability is likely to decrease in the presence of more anti-sprawl legislation. Such rules reduce the supply of new housing, which in turn raise the price of homes. This article has documented that such policies will have distributional consequences by limiting progress in minority housing consumption."
In other words, Smart Growth legislation tends to jack up the price of housing, which tends to lock minorities out of housing choices.
Civic leaders and planners need to confront a chilling question -- Is resegregation an ugly, unintended consequence of Smart Growth communities? There is a growing amount of evidence that it is.
There is nothing inherently wrong with Smart Growth. Southern Village in Chapel Hill is a good example of a such development done well. But as the housing survey and Kahn's study demonstrate, Smart Growth works best for everyone when it's a free market option instead of government policy.
Rick Martinez can be reached by e-mail at rickjmartinez@mindspring.com
It reminds me of the idiotic "statistics" quoted by gun control advocates. A local paper in my area recently carried a huge article touting the Million Mom March. In one paragraph it cited an academic study which claimed that a gun in the home is 22% more likely to be fired at a family member than at an intruder. A couple of paragraphs later, the article quoted a local MMM leader patronizingly saying "People tend to forget that a gun in the home is 22 TIMES more likely to be used on a family member". The newspaper printed this nonsense without comment, and now there are hordes more people absolutely confident that they KNOW guns in a home are just WAY more likely to hurt a family member, and thus it makes no sense to let anybody have one. The dangerous result of this sort of rampant innumeracy is that in a recent election for State House Representative, we had no pro-gun candidate to vote for. The Republican candidate (who won) even sent out repeated mailings emphasizing how hard she would work for stricter gun control laws.
You didn't. I just made the point that I believe one thing leads to another, whether or not that is the intent.
Nonsense. It is only in the last hundred years or so that crowding has become a serious problem. And before the development of modern medicine, population growth in crowded areas was kept in check by deadly diseases. Now that phenomenon is greatly limited.
Quality of life in countries that are poor and often refered to as "3rd world" is not low because of population. It is low because of a lack of FREEDOM. Tyranny and government oppression reduces quality of life, not population growth.
It is due to both. In areas where people have little or no education and there is only a simple agrarian and scavenging economy, it's not a lack of freedom that prevents families from sowing 20 acres of land to produce a havest -- it's a lack of land that isn't already being used by somebody else. And once stuck in this predicament, these people are easy marks for socialist, communist, and other anti-freedom political movements, which all promise to take from the rich and give to the poor. All that's required for these political movements to take over the world is the continued increase in the number of poor people. Desperate people can't afford to pursue lofty ideals like freedom; they have to focus on getting fed today.
Crowding is a problem? Take some time and do some research on the % of land in America, since this is where we live, that is populated. A vast majority of the land in America is uninhabited.
And as far as modern medicine goes, it is a product of FREEDOM and our capatilist system. Not government invention and ingenuity. And the improvement in quality of life has afforded significant numbers of people the opporutnity to persue jobs and careers in the medical and research field as opposed to scrounging for todays meal. And also no small part due to our population growth. How many of the past centuries scientists and doctors would never have been born or grew old under a "zero population growth" mandate?
The doom and gloom predictions of the population growth fear mongers have ALL failed to materalize. NONE of their predictions have ever come true.
And I have a suggestion for the "zero population growth" crowd. Lead by example and off yourselves.
For a textbook example, see the San Francisco Bay Area. Twenty years of "Smart Growth" style development policies have left us with the highest housing costs in the country, and have substantially reduced the black populations of San Francisco and the Penninsula. And yet vast areas of land have been set aside as "open space" preserves.
There are two options available. Voluntary and mandatory. When the 1st doesnt work, the 2nd is implemented.
Regardless of how many habitable acres per person currently exist, we have to stop increasing sooner or later, since the acreage won't expand. Might as well stop increasing now, at least until we figure out how to get economic and political systems developed which will enable the present number of people to live decent lives. The alternative is to declare that it doesn't matter how many people starve, are tortured, sell their children into slavery and prostitution, etc., as long as we don't have to exercise any self-restraint in reproduction.
Hong Kong is the densist city on the planet and has ZERO natural resources. NONE. ALL food and other neccesities are imported. Yet the quality of life there is amongst the highest on the planet and the population continues to grow.
You have fallen hook line and sinker for Paul Elrich (sp?) and his minions. They are liars and scam artists.
Probably the same thing that happened to the "coming ice age" in the '70's.
But, if the "voluntary" method fails (and who sets the standard for "success") that leaves one option to achieve the goal... Mandatory reduction or elimination of child births. And who decides who can and who can not have children, and how many?
And with your apparent philosophy you should change your handle to GovernmentKnowsBest. And not in a sarcastic tone.
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