Preserving the American Dream By Cost Not Coercion

Is the American dream compatible with smart growth? That depends, of course, on how you define "American dream" and "smart growth." For the purposes of our recent conference on "Preserving the American Dream," we defined "American dream" as "mobility and affordable homeownership" and we defined "smart growth" as "coercive land-use planning aimed at compact cities, often combined with expensive and ineffective rail transit."

As noted by Joel Hirschhorn in his PLANetizen column on March 3, the Preserving the American Dream conference was held in Washington, DC, on February 23-25 and featured Andres Duany, Wendell Cox, Peter Gordon, and many other speakers. About a third of the speakers discussed flaws in the smart-growth platform, a third presented our "American dream" alternative, and a third talked about how they have defeated smart growth and promoted the American dream in their communities.

As Mr. Hirschhorn noted, some of the people at the conference were libertarians who would oppose government coercion in any form. But most were not, and if smart growth worked, far fewer people would have attended the conference. Many at the conference might support smart growth if it kept its promise to reduce congestion, provide affordable housing, and otherwise promote urban livability.

In fact, as defined above, smart growth is incompatible with the American dream because smart growth leads to more traffic congestion and less affordable housing. Urban-growth boundaries, impact fees, and land-use regulations drive up the cost of housing. Compact cities will almost always be more congested than low-density ones because the reductions in per capita driving that accompany density never match the density increases. The exceptions would be compact cities that have lots of highways, but rail transit exacerbates congestion because it diverts funds from highway improvements that could do far more to keep people mobile. Smart growth fails in other ways, too, leading to more air pollution, higher urban-service costs, and less urban open space

As a planner, you may agree with Hirschhorn that we need to "redefine the American dream." But that is not your choice. More than 80 percent of all travel in the U.S. is by automobile and more than 80 percent of Americans say their ideal home is a single-family detached house with a yard. Americans have made those choices for good reasons.

Homeownership helps Americans build wealth, partly because 90 percent of business startups are partly funded on second mortgages. Automobiles have probably done even more to make Americans wealthy by giving people access to better jobs, lower-cost consumer goods, better housing, and other things they can't reach by transit or on foot. Policies that increase congestion and housing costs make America poorer, and they fall the hardest on those Americans who are already poor.

No one will object if you can convince some Americans to have a different dream. Andres Duany distinguishes between New Urbanism, which he defines as voluntary, and smart growth, which he considers coercive, and he told the conference that he is willing to let his New Urban developments withstand a market test. Many if not all of his developments have passed that test, including Kentlands, which we toured, and where (we were told) home values are greater than similar homes on larger lots in more conventional suburban developments that are nearby.

No one at the conference objected to Kentlands or other New Urban developments that meet market demand. Personally, I wouldn't mind living in a place like Kentlands; I just don't think cities have the right to force people to do so by prescriptive zoning or artificially high housing prices.

Our goal is to preserve the American dream by giving people freedom of choice in housing, transportation, and other lifestyle issues, while making sure that they pay the full cost of their choices.

• We support highway tolls that vary by the amount of congestion.
• Where air pollution is a problem, we support pollution emission fees that would encourage people to keep their cars clean or retrofit their cars with pollution-control devices.
• We support cost-effective transit, and many of us could be talked into providing subsidies in the form of vouchers to transit-dependent people.
• We support devolving zoning power to individual neighborhoods, so that neighborhoods can control their own destiny instead of being under the smart-growth planning sword of "infill" and "neighborhood redevelopment."

No doubt someone will respond to this commentary by fretting over paved-over farmlands, highway subsidies, and the General Motors' conspiracy to destroy America's transit systems. You can find responses to these and many other smart-growth myths on the Thoreau Institute web site and in my book, "The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths."

If your goal as a planner is to help your constituents and other Americans achieve their dreams and aspirations, then we will be glad to work with you to find ways to reach that goal. If, however, your goal is to impose your utopian ideal of an auto-free, high-density lifestyle on others who may not share that ideal, then I look forward to helping any of your constituents who choose to oppose you.

Randal O'Toole is an economist with the Thoreau Institute, and organized the 'Preserving the American Dream' conference held in Washington, DC in February, 2003. An Oregon native, he has lived most of his life in Portland but currently lives in Bandon, Oregon.