Smart Growth Equals More Congestion, Bigger Tax Bills
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“Smart Growth” is here, a collection of proposals, guidelines, and goals that will ultimately make homebuying less feasible and commuting more difficult. And that’s the good news.
The essential idea behind various “Smart Growth” initiatives is to move zoning decisions from local communities to Washington.
This is necessary, it’s alleged, because we have too much traffic congestion, metro areas are getting too big, and we’re losing too much farmland. To solve such problems, we must allow the federal government to spend $10.5 billion for programs and strategic planning.
The “Smart Growth” concept is a wondrously curious idea precisely because it does not address the root cause of urban sprawl, to wit: more people need more space. As our population has grown from 151 million in 1950 to 272 million today, virtually all additional residents have opted to live indoors, thus creating a need for more housing. The catch is that not only do more people demand more housing, they also want to leave such housing from time to time. This requires the construction of roads and also destinations for things like schools, shopping, and jobs.
If you travel you quickly understand that this is a big country — a very big country. We do not have a shortage of land, a shortage of farm land, or a shortage of forests. What we have is a desire by most people to live in certain core areas, and those areas, not surprisingly, are densely populated.
There are a number of ways we could resolve the problem of urban and suburban overcrowding:
Annex Canada. The attraction of this proposal is that Canada has plenty of empty space and most people there already speak English. Alas, Canadians would probably object and point out that our problem is not a need for more land, it’s a desire for less “sprawl.”
Encourage emigration. We can reduce the need for larger urban areas by lowering per capita densities. This can be done helping people move to other states or countries. Or, by mandating birth control.
Make people live in smaller houses. If citizens would stop taking up so much space, we could preserve farm land. However, since there’s no shortage of farm land, it’s not clear why it needs to be preserved. As the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas, TX points out:
- Less than 5 percent of the nation’s land is developed and three-quarters of the population lives on 3.5 percent of the land.
- Only about one-quarter of the farmland loss since 1945 is attributable to urbanization.
- Predictions of future farmland loss based on past trends are misleading because farmland loss has been moderating since the 1960s, falling from a 6.2 percent decline in farmland per decade in the 1960s to a 2.7 percent decline in the 1990s.
- In addition, with dramatic increases in agricultural output, American farmers are producing almost 50 percent more food than in 1970, using less land.
Raise gasoline taxes by $4 a gallon. That will put an end to commuting logjams — and also bankrupt the auto industry and much of the country. Since millions of now-jobless people would be foreclosed, we will finally have a use for all those surplus tents owned by government.
Stop building roads. The best way to get people off the highways is to build fewer of them. This would be funny except that it seems to be a core “Smart Growth” principle.
“Smart Growth” planning presumes that local development should be controlled at the federal level because, er, well, folks in Washington are simply smarter than you and I.
But there’s no evidence that federal planners are more adept than local zoning boards, no consideration of the life-style limits implicit in “Smart Growth” programs, no concern for the loss of housing opportunities that will develop, no worries regarding personal preferences, no weight attached to the idea that all real estate is both local and unique, and certainly no interest in such issues as property rights and economic “takings.”
The biggest problem in government today is a surplus of money. There is so much money in federal vaults that new and inventive ways must be devised to spend what we have, otherwise the notion will arise that taxes should be lowered. “Smart Growth” policies exist not because they’re needed, but because without them both tax bills and government would be smaller.
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Published originally by Realty Times on April 6, 1999 and posted with permission.
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