From the WSJ Opinion Archives
FROM THE HEARTLAND
Smart Woman, Foolish Choices
Christie Whitman embraces Al Gore's agenda. And she's not alone.
During his campaign, Al Gore briefly raised the idea of smart growth--he termed it a "livability initiative"--and then dropped it when it became clear that there was little public interest in having Washington become the zoning czar for all of America.
But a glance at the Web site of the Environmental Protection Agency might leave you thinking that Mr. Gore had won the election on a smart-growth platform. Late last month the EPA unveiled a section it touts as "a resource for smart growth" with numerous links to government and activist groups pushing the "livability" issue. "Smart growth development approaches have clear environmental benefits, including improved air and water quality, increased wetlands preservation, more brownfield sites cleared and reused, and increased preservation of open spaces," asserts the EPA.
Actually, there is a good deal of debate the environmental benefits of smart growth, but you won't find it at www.epa.gov/smartgrowth. The EPA Webmeister mainly directs you to organizations that favor strict land-use controls, expensive mass transit projects, regional governance and the other pet rocks of the anti-property rights, anticar set.
The EPA's continued zeal for such ideas is no great surprise. The person Mr. Bush appointed to head the EPA, Christine Todd Whitman, led the charge in New Jersey to adopt a smart-growth scheme to discourage development in supposedly sensitive ecological zones.
And the EPA is always happy to put your money where its mouth is, even when there is no congressional mandate to do so. As economist Randal O'Toole of the Thoreau Institute has documented, the EPA has handed out about $9 million in recent years to private advocacy groups, such as Environmental Defense and the Gulf Coast Institute, to spread the antisprawl message.
Nor is EPA the only source of such funds. In the name of smart growth, the Transportation Department is shoveling money into the hands of mass transit advocates. Under a little-noticed program inserted in the mammoth Transportation Efficiency Act of 1998, in fact, DOT has handed out millions for studies and research on smart growth, says Mr. O'Toole. And Nancie Marzulla, president of the Washington-based Defenders of Property Rights, has uncovered a collaboration between the Housing and Urban Development Department and the American Planning Association, which produced a 2,000-page "Legislative Guidebook" that constitutes "a comprehensive blueprint of model statutes and planning guidelines whose goal is nothing less than centralization of land use planning."
Ms. Marzulla says the no-growth activists behind the guidebook have persuaded some congressmen to introduce legislation, called the Community Character Act, which would authorize $250 million over 10 years for state and tribal governments willing to impose their land-use ideas on residents and homeowners.
It is the conceit of the bureaucrats and many politicians, of course, that centralization means less waste and a cleaner environment. Michigan Democrat Carl Levin and Vermont Republican-turned-independent Jim Jeffords, co-chairmen of the Senate Smart Growth Task Force, commissioned a General Accounting Office study that "illuminates areas" where the federal government might push state and local government into more-aggressive land-use planning. A quick look at a press release by Sen. Jeffords on the subject makes clear one of his primary motives: farmland "preservation," otherwise known as subsidies for Vermont dairy farmers.
What advocates of growth controls fail to acknowledge is the unpleasant reality of tradeoffs. In Portland, Ore., the showcase of growth controls, the cost of housing has soared as development has been hemmed in. In Seattle, St. Louis and elsewhere, the costs of planned or existing light-rail systems to reduce traffic congestion have soared out of control without improving commuting times. And while Americans might favor "smart growth" over "dumb growth," they continue to move out of central cities into the suburbs.
Lately the smart-growth set has taken to asserting that sprawl can make you sick. For example, two employees of the Centers for Disease Control concluded that suburban sprawl is an important contributor to obesity, because people walk less. But in my neck of the woods, the most obvious problem with obesity is not in the suburbs but in the urban areas. This probably has more to do with poverty than lack of exercise--and Big Government growth controls sound like a great way to make everybody poorer.
As for reducing smog through smart-growth strategies, auto pollution has plummeted even as miles driven have nearly tripled since 1970. The nation's waters are getting cleaner, not dirtier, and surface air pollution is declining sharply in nearly all major cities.
The idea that animates smart growth--that government planning leads to better outcomes than the market--strikes at the heart of the Bush agenda for a lighter touch from Washington. Thus it's disappointing that Al Gore's ideas are continuing to drive the Bush environmental, transportation and housing agenda. The campaign for smart growth may sound innocuous, but when given its proper name--growth control--it has all the earmarks of vast new federal effort to control the way Americans live, work and play. At the very least, Washington should leave it to states, local communities--and willing buyers and sellers--to define "livability."
Mr. Bray is a staff columnist at the Detroit News. His OpinionJournal.com column appears Tuesdays.
