Smart Growth Concepts Not Oriented Toward Consumers
I appreciate my garage most during winter. It’s attached to our house, a couple of steps away from our living room, and comfortably houses a pickup truck and van. Just the other day, I mused at how such a seemingly simple innovation had improved my life. As the wind whipped around outside, sending wind-chill factors into the single digits, I comfortably walked out of our heated living room and into our truck for a quick trip to the grocery store. An attached garage is a convenience that is now a staple of the American home. It wasn’t always this way.
In the not-so-distant past, most people couldn’t afford a car, let alone a garage, and walked several blocks to a bus stop or corner grocery store. Those with enough money to own a car stored them in former carriage houses, well away from the main house. The post-World War II suburban housing boom changed all that. Automobiles became accessible to virtually every household except the poorest, and incomes rose high enough for more and more people to buy a house with a yard. Builders and developers seized on this market opportunity. For little or no extra cost, the garage could be attached to the house. More important, people would pay for this innovation.
Of course, the attached garage wasn’t the only housing amenity families yearned for. Single-floor, ranch-style houses, large kitchens, great rooms, separate bedrooms for children, multiple bathrooms and uncongested local roads also cropped up. Developers took these innovations and mass-produced them, creating the much-maligned but eminently practical “cookie-cutter suburbs” of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. These suburbs, however, were hardly the random, “irrational,” “unplanned” and architecturally dysfunctional places many critics of suburbanization call them. They were the product of the unseen order of the market place, with little or no prodding from urban planning or zoning codes.
As a denizen of one of those suburbs (my tract home was built in 1961), I’m grateful our town didn’t let the latest planning fads stymie builders and developers, giving them the leeway to create my neighborhood. Now, with mature trees, four decades of incremental adaptation and a string of home-loving families, my neighborhood remains strong in spite of the rapid construction of newer houses, often on smaller lots and sometimes within a few hundred feet.
This is one reason (among many others) I’m a “smart growth” skeptic. Smart-growthers often recite the mantra that we’ve been building houses on lots too large and too automobile-dependent to create the neighborhood glue that keeps communities whole. They then argue that truly “livable” communities need small lots, more townhouses, more detached garages, more urban parks and better access to mass transit.
These smart-growth solutions, however, are unlikely to make most families’ lives more livable. They are more likely to do the opposite. Most of these smart-growth plans subvert the incremental decision-making of property developers - who have to meet the demands of consumers to survive - to the grand design of the urban plan, with its tendency to foreclose innovation by adopting specific goals and design standards. In fact, spontaneity and innovation are planned out of existence on the dubious grounds that communities can successfully be the architects of their own futures.
Citizens and policymakers should resist temptations to comprehensively embrace urban-design theories - whether it is the “garden city” of the early 20th century or “new urbanism” as we move into the 21st century - and recognize their down side: the stifling of the very innovation and flexibility that gives each neighborhood a unique identity and role to play in the ongoing transformation of the American city.
Many of the most cherished neighborhoods of the past are products of the spontaneous order of the real-estate market, not the grand designs of 20- or 30-year plans. The community “vision” was articulated incrementally, by developers, individual households and, to a lesser extent, elected officials, one home sale at a time. Citizens and their elected officials would do well to keep this in mind as we face the planning challenges of the new millennium.
Samuel R. Staley, Ph.D. is a senior fellow at the Buckeye Institute and director of Urban and Land Use Policy at Reason Foundation in Los Angeles. An Ohio native and resident, he is co-author of the forthcoming book Mobility First: A New Vision for Transportation in a Globally Competitive Twenty-first Century (Rowman & Littlefield) and co-author of The Road More Traveled: Why the Congestion Crisis Matters More Than You Think, and What We Can Do About It (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).
