Home Builders Association: City’s proposed code changes undermine “smart growth”

Published by Staff on May 21, 2008

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One Response to “Home Builders Association: City’s proposed code changes undermine “smart growth””

1. Mark Robinowitz on 22 May 2008 at 4:01 pm #

   An excerpt from Peak Traffic: Planning NAFTA Superhighways at the End of the Age of Oil:

   Smart Growth versus Sustainability

   “You will change nothing until you change the way that money works”
   —M. King Hubbert, author of the mathematical model to predict Peak Oil

   Sustainability refers to practices that can be continued generation after generation. This word has been co-opted by polluters trying to confuse the public to ensure continued unsustainable extraction, the basis of the modern industrial economic paradigm.

   Sustainability does not mean nice words or good intentions—it refers to practices that your great-great-great-great grandchildren will still be able to do once the oil is gone. By that standard, virtually no one in North America is living “sustainably,” with the exception of Amish and some Native American / First Nations communities.

   Most of the best practices marketed as “sustainable” are merely efficiency. A 100 mile per gallon car is an efficient use of non-renewable petroleum, but it is not sustainable. Most forms of renewable energy are a means of using non-renewable resources (oil for plastics and transport, minerals) to capture sunlight, wind, etc. It is hard to envision a successful transition from our current industrial paradigm to true sustainability, but honesty is critical for designing any successful outcomes.

   “Smart Growth,” sometimes called “Sustainable Growth,” is another mantra of pseudo-environmentalism. This oxymoronic slogan ignores the realities of overpopulation and overconsumption.

   The first politician to use the term “Smart Growth” was Maryland Governor Parris Glendening (1994–2002), a Democrat. In 1997, he embraced the term at the height of his campaign to promote construction of the Inter County Connector (ICC) superhighway, part of the long planned Outer Beltway around Washington. This policy claimed to refocus public subsidies away from sprawling outer suburbs to reinvest in urban areas, but it also allowed connector roads between designated growth areas—a loophole large enough for the entire Outer Beltway. “Smart Growth” was embraced by the foundation funded environmental groups but scorned by grassroots who saw it as a distraction from the Governor’s superhighway plans. This “greenwash” (the false claim of environmentalism) did not succeed in approving the project, since in 1998 the FHWA quietly concluded that the ICC would not withstand a legal challenge, and the approval process stalled.

   “Smart Growth” is an example of how highway funds are used for social engineering. The Glendening plan directed public subsidies toward the most urban parts of the State which are the most Democratic constituencies. In contrast, outer suburb edge cities and rural areas are more Republican and use more gasoline per capita than Democratic. Oil consumption is a variable that shows whether a community is more likely to vote for the D’s or for the R’s.

   In 2006, former Governor Glendening is now president of the Smart Growth Leadership Institute and a board member of Smart Growth America, a national coalition of organizations advocating alternatives to urban sprawl. If the Democrats are allowed to take over the White House in 2008, look for Glendening to take a key post promoting “Smart Growth.”

   New land use and economic paradigms needed

   Most who promote “Smart Growth” have good intentions. But this paradigm is an inadequate examination, since it only looks at personal transportation issues and ignores many of the other ecological impacts of cities. Whether people live in apartment buildings served by public transit or dispersed edge cities, they use the same amount of energy to grow and transport the food they eat. Urban areas have an ecological “footprint” that is many times larger than the size of the metropolitan region to extract the raw materials needed to keep the City fed, lit, heated and economically vibrant.

   “Smart Growth” won’t do much to keep metropolitan areas fed after the peak of petroleum is past. It might keep some farmland near cities from being paved – but urban agriculture will be needed to address food shortages in the future—which is in contradiction to “Smart Growth’s” insistence on greater density in cities. It’s hard to have community gardens when cities get too dense, although rooftop gardens are a practical way to supplement urban diets.

   A new form of urban planning is needed to integrate transportation and land use planning with ecological footprint analyses. Most ecological efforts to reduce car use and create more livable cities have stressed density as a solution to the transportation crisis, but overbuilt neighborhoods still require lots of delivery trucks bringing in food from distant farms. A genuine solution would balance neighborhood density, intelligent urban design, converting lawns and parking lots to gardens and other efforts to make cities become more locally oriented in their consumption.

   Steady state economics are a prerequisite for any sensible strategy to achieve a harmonious balance with the natural world to plan beyond the era of cheap oil. M. King Hubbert pointed out that the solutions required abandoning the economic paradigm of growth and shifting toward steady-state economics. Several articles about this are linked from http://www.permatopia.com/growth.html

   One analogy for a steady state economy is an old growth forest ecosystem. A definition of a mature forest is a system where growth and decay are in balance. The total tonnage of biomass may remain consistent in a given area, but life continues to be dynamic for individual species. A forest in balance is still a dynamic place for the mouse being eaten by an owl, or for a sapling feeding on the soil created by trees that fell over decades ago.

   Smart Growth cannot solve exponential growth, overshoot, Peak Oil and other resource depletions. Smart Growth is riding First Class on the Titanic, ecological destruction with good taste.

   In nature, endless growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. A truly sustainable society would mimic natural processes, since we live on a finite planet and must change our politics, economics and psychology to adjust to this reality.

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