Report from the hustings

Back from a book tour that took me through Denver, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and Chicago, following stops earlier in New York (Mayor's Institute on Long Island sponsored by the Regional Plan Association) and Washington (Brookings Institution, National Building Museum, Politics & Prose bookstore). Two observations. One, people are very eager to talk about growth and our living circumstances and the physical environment we arrange for ourselves. Two, every one of these cities, while wrestling with schools and infrastructure and crime, is entering a new kind of golden age. The condo towers are rising in Seattle's Belltown, the sidewalk cafes in Denver's LoDo, Chicago's stunning Millennium Park -- all clear evidence of a continuing resurgence of interest in cities and city living. With the greater demand comes higher prices, and that led me to address, everywhere I went, the central challenge of the smart growth movement: affordability. My own prediction is that more Americans will be turning away from sprawl in the years ahead, turned off by crushing transportation and energy costs, that will quickly wipe out any inititial savings from lower sticker prices for single-family homes miles from anywhere. But for middle-class families, the worst outcome would be alternatives that are equally expensive. Inclusionary zoning and affordability requirements can help. The best solution, however, is to make livable urban neighborhoods and older suburbs as ubiquitous as sprawl. That means investment, cutting red tape and reforming zoning so the revitalization can extend well beyond what we're seeing in LoDo and South of Market and the Pearl District today. The message is sinking in. San Francisco Chronicle urban design writer John King had this to say about This Land: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/06/06/DDGOGJ7OF51.DTL. Syndicated columnist Neal Peirce also wrote on the need to get busy on viable alternatives to sprawl, given our unfolding energy crisis: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/3981110.html.

Tipping point

Deciding where and how to live is the most personal choice we all make. With gas prices over $3 a gallon, the true cost of that choice -- the energy and transportation costs embedded in housing -- is changing the calculus. It's costing a lot more to heat and cool big homes, and $60 or $70 a week for gasolineis going to loom large in the family budget. Add that to quality of life and time spent in the car, and sprawl may soon seem like less of a bargain. Alternatives to a half-century of dispersal gain new prominence, I argue in this Op-Ed essay on the on-line journal PLANetizen: http://www.planetizen.com/node/19750

Expanding possibilities

Sprawl is getting celebrated these days, by the likes of Joel Kotkin and Robert Bruegmann and others. Their analysis can be convincing. But there is an awful lot of interest in smart growth, too -- that is, living in something other than conventional, spread-out, separated-use suburban or exurban development. The free market is driving the trend; the rules of development -- zoning -- just needs to be changed to allow more alternatives. R.D. Sahl explores current trends in land and living on Business Day on New England Cable News March 31, http://www.boston.com/news/necn/Shows/business_day/.

No end in sight

Believers in the Oregon land use regulation regime were sorely disappointed that the state Supreme Court reversed a lower court ruling claiming that Measure 37 -- the ballot initiative passed in 2004 that gives landowners either compensation or broad leeway to develop outside the zoning framework -- was unconstitutional. Oregonians in Action, the triumphant property rights group that so successfully campaigned for the measure, framed the Marion County Circuit Court ruling as the work of activist judges. In basic terms, what the ruling said was that the measure created a special class of people and ran afoul of other constitutional processes. But the high court rejected the premise, and 1000 Friends of Oregon, the organizers of the lawsuit prompting the ruling, said it would not appeal. 1000 Friends is working on other ways to limit what the group says is Measure 37's most problematic consequences. Oregonians in Action, meanwhile, is back in victory-lap mode. "I'm surprised and relieved and hopeful again," the group's top lawyer, Ross Day, told Laura Oppenheimer of The Oregonian. "We had law, fact and common sense on our side. But I was still wondering if we were going to win." This battle is obviously far from over -- not in Oregon, not in nearby Washington, which is looking at a similar ballot measure for the fall, nor across the nation. I vaguely expected the Oregon case would be taken all the way to the US Supreme Court -- which not incidentally agreed to hear two cases on the Clean Water Act, one of which is based on the grievances of landowners who were unable to build on their property.

Changing horses

After 16 years at The Boston Globe, my desire to do something different coincided with an attractive "voluntary separation" package, and I have moved on from the daily newspaper business. The industry is in considerable tumult right now, as any review of a media website like Romanesko will attest (http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45), and as I acknowledged in a set-up piece for Emily Rooney's "Greater Boston" program on public television WGBH http://www.greaterboston.tv/ last week. I'm going to continue to write freelance, contribute to this weblog, and my book -- "This Land: The Battle Over Sprawl and the Future of America" (Johns Hopkins University Press) http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title_pages/8961.html -- comes out in the spring. My new day job is doing research and writing as smart growth education director at the Office for Commonwealth Development, the state agency in Massachusetts coordinating housing, transportation, environment and energy. I wouldn't have predicted this coming out of journalism school twenty years ago, but there are obviously many more formats and forums today where this voice can be heard.

What next for Smart Growth

Post-Katrina, post-Prince Charles, smart growth and New Urbanism don't seem like outrageous ideas. But what does the future hold for these extraordinary planning movements? I am scheduled to talk about the recent history of sustainable development initiatives, the complicated political, cultural and economic landscape, and emerging strategies Wednesday Nov. 9th at noon at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, co-sponsored by the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston and the Taubman Center for State and Local Government. The dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Design, Alan Altshuler, will be moderator http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/rappaport/. The talk will be based in part on my forthcoming book, "This Land: The Battle Over Sprawl and the Future of America," due out in the spring by The Johns Hopkins University Press http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title_pages/8961.html

Evolving sprawl

While researching my new book I must confess I came away from several far-flung subdivisions thinking the development pattern wasn't my cup of tea, but wasn't so bad. I saw African-American families unloading cars in the driveways. The homes started at $120,000 (closer to the cost of a parking space than a studio in Boston). The houses were close together, and there were schools and community centers that were at least for some in walking distance, or skateboarding or scooting distance. In today's Ideas section of The Sunday Boston Globe I analyze Robert Bruegmann's new book and the general defense of sprawl -- and how the argument for it doesn't hold up for very long. Sprawl giveth, but ultimately it taketh away: separation of uses, long everyday trips and commutes, total car dependence, high gasoline prices, fiscal strains to extend the infrastructure, and inevitably, all the social and economic fragmentation that comes with the relentless abandonment of established urban areas. I point out that the smartest smart growth activists aren't spending a lot of time hammering sprawl these days anyway -- they just want the barriers removed to allow some alternatives to flourish. Then the market can decide. Here's the link to the piece:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/10/02/the_virtues_of_sprawl?mode=PF