Let them eat sprawl

A few months ago on the website New Geography, pro-sprawl provocateur Wendell Cox challenged smart growth proponents to debate the issue of affordability. Smart growth, he says, raises housing costs and runs counter to helping those in need. He accused smart growth advocates of "increasing poverty" and compared them to Marie Antoinette ("Let them eat cake").

To my knowledge, nobody has taken him up on his offer. That's probably because the research upon which he bases his conclusions is so loaded with contradictions and false assumptions, as articulated by California writer and planner William Fulton.

One of the false assumptions in his argument is that the term "smart growth" is interchangeable with "restrictive land-use regulations." If that were true, then restrictive land-use regulations would tend to produce what is commonly understood to be smart growth.

Cox's list of restrictive land-use regulations runs as follows: urban growth boundaries, large-lot zoning, excessive public facility requirements, building moratoria, high development fees, and mandatory regional or county planning.

This list hardly covers the gamut of restrictive and costly land-use regulations. Omissions, such as the ubiquitous single-use zoning, are noteworthy. If you allow only one building type over large swaths of developable land, is that not exceedingly restrictive? How about off-street parking requirements? These fundamentally limit what can be built, often negatively affect the character of development, and are very costly. Excessive setback requirements and street widths make certain kinds of development — i.e. the walkable kind — difficult or impossible to build.

Land-use regulations do not merely restrict development, but also shape the built environment in widely different ways. Broadly speaking, there are two opposing approaches to planning in the US — pedestrian-oriented smart growth and auto-centric conventional suburban development (CSD), otherwise known as sprawl.

Smart growth is compact, mixed-use, and served by existing or planned public infrastructure, preferably near transit. Sprawl is characterized by spread out, single-use development patterns. Most restrictive land-use regulations in the US — large-lot and single-use zoning, excessive setback requirements and street widths, and off-street parking requirements — promote sprawl and prohibit quality smart growth.

There's one item on Cox's list that can be considered part of the smart growth toolbox — urban growth boundaries. These are found mostly in Oregon, a minority of California municipalities, and cities like Miami that press up against sensitive ecosystems (e.g. the Everglades).

Another item, building moratoria, belongs in a category of regulations, primarily aimed at process, that delay or obstruct development. In some parts of the US, seemingly endless hearings and impact assessments can hold up approvals for years. Regulations that delay or obstruct development certainly raise costs, but it's doubly unfair to confuse them with smart growth.

First, since most zoning is set up to favor sprawl, smart growth developers face additional hearings and hurdles, and thus more costly delays. Second, sprawl and its city-oriented cousin, urban renewal, bear at least some of the blame for institutionalized obstruction. Citizens are so accustomed to development making their built environment worse since the middle of the 20th Century that a culture has become established to oppose and delay it. Additionally, the proponents of form-based codes, the primary zoning tool to promote smart growth, argue for streamlined approvals because these codes encourage development that is better aligned with a community’s vision.

Still, I am grateful that Cox raised the issue of smart growth’s impact on household costs. To start with, transportation costs must be accounted for in this discussion. The two biggest household costs — housing and transportation — are profoundly impacted by which of the two planning approaches is applied. Why? Because it is always possible to find a cheaper house if you drive far enough. But when greater transportation costs outweigh the lower house purchase or rental payments, the household is in worse shape financially.

A recent study from the birthplace of the term "smart growth," Maryland, deals a severe blow to Cox’s argument with regard to housing. This state was the first to adopt a smart growth policy. Funding for state infrastructure was directed toward "priority funding areas" that are served by public infrastructure. In articulating the kind of development they were looking for, state planners borrowed design concepts from New Urbanism and transit-oriented development.

The attached chart at top right, "Median sales price of homes in Maryland," from data gathered by the Maryland Department of Planning, shows that houses outside the state designated smart growth areas cost in excess of $100,000 more than those inside the boundaries. So much for smart growth raising housing costs.

Now let's look at transportation. The Housing + Transportation Affordability Index (H+T Index), created by the Center for Neighborhood Technology, calculates average housing and transportation costs for households by census block for metro areas nationwide, and covers much of Maryland.

A map from that index, “Maryland transportation costs” at upper right, shows household transportation costs by a percentage of income for much of the state. As the map clearly shows, transportation costs rise dramatically outside of urban, walkable (smart growth) places.

High transportation and housing costs correlate with sprawl in Maryland, which is shown in the attached map, also generated by the H+T Index, titled “Maryland housing and transportation costs.” The suburban and exurban areas, where one can drive around and find mostly sprawl, consistently have combined housing and transportation costs that exceed 45 percent of household income. As you get farther out into the exurbs, the combined costs are often over 60 or even 70 percent (you need to go to the website to see the exact figures). The smart growth areas, by contrast, are mostly in the 35 to 45 percent range.

The picture in Maryland is similar to that of metro areas all across the US (see map Minneapolis/St. Paul), the H+T Index confirms. Average transportations costs range from a low of 14 percent of household median income in transit-rich, compact communities, to highs of 28 percent or more in exurban areas. If new households could reduce their average car ownership by half a vehicle per household and if existing households could reduce average car ownership by a quarter vehicle below the country’s current average of 1.6 as a result of compact, walkable development, families would save $200 billion annually by 2030, CNT calculates.

Household transportation and housing are just part of the enormous financial burden of auto-centric development patterns, as Steve Mouzon explains. The costs that rise with dispersed development patterns range from fire and police protection, where coverage distance climbs, to added national security burdens from oil dependence. Add to those the enormous environmental cost of climate change — which will certainly translate into direct and indirect financial burdens for US households over time. Smart growth uses substantially less energy than sprawl, and therefore imposes lower costs on our children and their children.

Sprawl has been massively subsidized by the federal government through policies such as sprawl-inducing highway spending and the mortgage interest deduction, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser noted March 15.

Wendell Cox says “the evidence that smart growth boosts prices seems incontrovertible.”

A long-time mouthpiece for highway interests, Cox has been called “one of the biggest advocates of big [government] spending I’ve ever encountered in my 28-year political career” by John Norquist, former mayor of Milwaukee and now CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism.

On affordability, Cox speaks from Bizarro World, where regulations that create low-density suburbs are synonymous with smart growth.

In the real world, it’s sprawl that drives up the cost of living.