'All Government Planning Is Bad'

"Q: Can you give us a quick synopsis of 'The Best-Laid Plans'?

A: Well, I’ve often heard people say, 'I’m not against planning, I’m just against bad government planning.' After 30 years of looking at government plans -- forest plans, park plans, transportation plans, city plans, state plans, all kinds of plans -- I’ve realized all government planning is bad. Government planning -- that is to say, comprehensive, long-range planning that often tries to plan and control other people’s land and resources -- always does more harm than good because the planners don’t have an incentive to make sure that their plans are the right plans. Cities, forests and so on are just too complicated to plan, so they oversimplify, and since they don’t pay the costs of their mistakes, they don’t have an incentive to try to get it right.

Q: If you had to single out which kind of planning was most harmful, what would it be?

A: Certainly, in general, “Smart Growth” planning is planning on steroids. Back in the 1950s, we had urban renewal that devastated individual neighborhoods and often replaced them with unlivable high-rise towers that since then have been blown up because they have been proven to be so terrible to live in. But that just harmed individual neighborhoods. Smart Growth attempts to apply the same benefits to entire urban areas -- not just cities but all the suburbs, all the incorporated areas around those urban areas -- with devastating effects. Smart Growth makes housing too expensive; it makes traffic worse; it usually results in increased taxes or declining urban services. If I had to point to just one Smart Growth plan that was the worst, it would probably be San Jose’s in California. But, of course, Portland, which is often held as a shining example of good Smart Growth planning, has lots of problems too."