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Everyone
Rallies Behind "Smart Growth." That's A
Problem.
A quick survey of recent Smart
Growth literature reveals that the term is more and
more popular, but less and less clear. Indeed, one
finds an agenda-driven battle going on around the
nation to dictate the meaning of the term, and thus
the outcome it produces. The Environmental Protection
Agency has a Smart Growth website, www.epa.gov/livability/,
but so does the National Association of Homebuilders,
www.nahb.com/smartgrowth/.
Anyone can pick up the term, it seems, and use it
for their own ends.
The New York region, including
New Jersey, has been a proving ground for what Smart
Growth is and isn't. Gov. Whitman's administration
bought up farmlands and forests (or their development
rights), and (less successfully) attempted to redirect
transportation money to maintenance and away from
new construction, under the label of Smart Growth.
Maryland popularized the term.
There, under Gov. Parris Glendening, the term described
policies meant to redirect state infrastructure spending
to established areas and away from less developed
areas, so as to preserve natural resources, reduce
sprawl, save taxpayer money and promote inner-city
redevelopment. But some home builders, architects
and policy planners now use it to mean higher density
development with some urban touches, with little attention
paid to location or infrastructure choices.
Last month, the Lincoln Institute
of Land Policy released Smart Growth: Form and Consequences,
edited by Terry Szold and Armando Carbonell, with
eleven essays, plus a foreword and an afterward, which
explores the slippery concept.
Arthur "Chris" Nelson
of the Georgia Institute of Technology, in his essay
How Do We Know Smart Growth When We See It?,
comes up with criteria that, in his words, "allows
us to separate charlatans from the real thing."
Under his criteria, the New Urbanist community of
Kentlands in Montgomery County, Md. is not Smart Growth,
because it is built well outside the existing metropolitan
area, lacks transit and a diversity of home prices.
Also not fully "smart" is Boulder, Co.,
which has saved its mountain slopes from development,
but been less successful in providing housing for
all incomes. Nelson praises the small development
of Ridenour in Georgia, Silver Spring in Maryland,
and the city of Portland and the state of Oregon as
true, Smart Growth places because of their balance
and attempt to integrate many needs.
Alex Krieger, chairman of urban
design at Harvard’s design school, offers 'seven
impractical suggestions' for pursuing Smart Growth.
He suggests taxing second homes, 'up-zoning' idyllic
communities like Cambridge to accept more development,
and implementing regional tax sharing.
William J. Mitchell, dean of MIT's
architecture and planning school, says policy makers
should use public development of digital infrastructure
to guide growth to appropriate places. The telecommunications
revolution, he says, "does not simply produce
featureless urban sprawl. It has a more complex and
subtle effect, allowing a wide variety of spatial
patterns to emerge."
For a wholly different set of meanings
of the term, there is the Heritage Foundation's and
Political Economy Research Center's A Guide To
Smart Growth, edited by Jane S. Shaw and Ronald
D. Utt and published in 2000 by these conservative
think tanks. In similar fashion as the Lincoln book,
it is an assembly of 10 essays, plus a preface, introduction
and conclusion.
Taken as a whole, these writers
say that Smart Growth means building more highways
and getting rid of government spending and regulation
(except when needed to build more highways.) Former
U.S. Sen. Malcom Wallop (R-Wy), in his preface, calls
Portland, hero of Professor Nelson's piece, one of
the "monstrous experiments in government growth
management."
But if their prescriptions are
set aside, some analysis by the Heritage team is surprisingly
similar to that of the Lincoln Institute authors and
other growth management advocates.
Wendell Cox, a champion of
highways and opponent of transit, observes that "traffic
congestion is a cause of sprawl as people move to
more sparsely populated areas to escape excessive
traffic." But Harvard's Alex Krieger has often
said in lectures that most sprawl is caused by people
fleeing sprawl."
Samuel R. Staley, of the Reason
Policy Institute, criticizes zoning and other land-use
laws as pushing up home prices, excluding people of
lesser income and being inflexible. Of course, New
Urbanists and other growth control advocates have
similar criticism.
Ronald D. Utt, a Heritage Foundation
fellow, criticizes tax-payer funded stadiums and urban
renewal, a criticism shared by many conventional planners.
Utt suggests that the 119 million Americans that were
added to the country’s population between 1950
and 1998 had to be put somewhere and that this was
the chief cause of sprawl.
If there is a flaw in the Heritage
team's general line, it is the authors’ tendencies
to discount the effect of publicly-funded infrastructure
on growth patterns. The free market, like it or not,
did not build the infrastructure of suburbia. Government
money and policies did.
The vagaries of "Smart Growth"
show that we should choose our euphemisms carefully,
or even better, avoid them entirely. It may at first
seem like an advantage that Smart Growth can be so
easily wielded as a slogan and rallying cry, but in
this it is as much a liability as an asset.
Alex
Marshall, RPA Senior Editor
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Big
Yellow Taxis
The spacious checker-cab may no longer rule on city
streets, but a facsimile will soon be running on
the waves, rather than down Broadway. Yellow boats
with a trim of white-and-black checkerboard "water
taxis" are now debuting on the waters between
Brooklyn and Manhattan. They make a startling and
welcome sight. Trial runs are now underway, and
the taxis will begin paid service Sept. 24.
Tom Fox, a familiar figure in
the city's urban planning community, conceived and
is running the for-profit venture, New York Water
Taxis. The company starts out with three boats and
will add another three next year, Fox says. Each
aluminum catamaran will hold 75 passengers and will
operate between 14 stops in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
The boats have a number of unique features. They
will include a full-service bar, LED displays of
stops and low-wake hulls. Fares will range from
$3 at rush hour to $15 for an all day pass for sightseers.
Douglas Durst, the real-estate developer, is backing
the project financially.
Fox believes the ferries fill a niche.
"The current ferry system
is designed to bring folks from New Jersey back
and forth from work," Fox said. "We think
a small scale system that meets the needs of neighborhoods
along the waterfront will help open up parks and
cultural institutions along the waterfront, and
bring in new development."
The
Fall and Rise of (Some) New Jersey Downtowns
Walk down Oak Tree Road on a
weekend, and the stores are humming with activity.
Scents of cardamom and other spices will waft to
your senses, as well as the sound of different tongues
and the sight of women in colorful silk dresses.
Welcome to Iselin, an old New
Jersey downtown that has revived under its adoption
by Indian immigrants, and is an example of the resurgence
of some state downtowns even as the state struggles
to contain sprawl.
New Jersey downtowns began to
decline in the roughly the 1960s, as the suburbs
expanded further into undeveloped land. Soon,
many New Jersey residents depended entirely on the
car, and no longer could walk or take a train or
bus to downtown. When people moved to the suburbs,
the merchants followed. Suburban malls on the highway
surrounded by huge parking lots became the norm.
Many downtown storefronts were boarded up, and vacancies
were common.
But in the last 10 years, the
tide has begun to reverse. Much of New Jersey has
run out of room to expand. Commuting farther distances
at slower speeds caused commuting times to escalate.
Some people have moved to transit-accessible areas
and take the train to work, although they still
own cars to run their errands on evenings and weekends.
Many downtown success stories
of recent years have occurred in towns with NJ Transit
commuter rail stations such as Metuchen, New Brunswick,
Red Bank, Somerville and Westfield. At almost every
suburban NJ Transit train station there is a waiting
list for monthly parking permits ranging from two
months to four years in length. Some train stations
such as Maplewood and Metuchen offer concierge services
that include dry cleaning pickup and drop off, film
processing, take-home food from local restaurants,
and many more.
Parking built for commuters is
starting to also serve downtown shoppers. In New
Brunswick, for example, parking is available along
the street at meters that allow a maximum of 2 hours,
or at decks where commuters can park all day and
ride the train to NYC. But on weekends, almost all
parking in the city is free, even in the decks,
to encourage suburbanites from surrounding communities
to drive to New Brunswick and shop in the stores,
eat at the restaurants, or watch a show at the theatres.
A combination of access to transit
as well as parking has helped many Jersey downtowns
to revive. Regional Plan Association, in partnership
with Project for Public Spaces and New Jersey Transit,
has been working with Rutherford, Bayonne, Trenton
and eight other downtowns to demonstrate ways to
leverage access to transit into new development.
Still, downtown merchants
face stiff competition from the big box malls and
outlet centers that buy in bulk quantities and can
offer goods and services at lower prices. Downtowns
that have revived more fully tend to be those that,
by default or design, have become specialized places
that offer an alternative to business as usual.
The Little India shopping district
along Oak Tree Road, near Metropark train station,
is one such example. The Indian immigration
started in the mid '70s and has grown about 5-10
percent annually to where the area now has one of
the highest concentration of Indian population outside
of India. The first few Indian specialty stores
on Oak Tree Road opened in the early '80s. This
attracted more Indian population, which in turn
created a growing market that attracted more stores.
When the previously-vacant stores filled up, parking
and traffic became a problem.
An important policy lesson is
that downtown's fortunes were helped when the Iselin
section of Oak Tree Road was narrowed from five
lanes to three. Parking was provided on both sides,
with a left-turn lane down the middle. This had
a traffic-calming effect that made the area more
pedestrian-friendly.
Even in this auto-dependent society,
New Jersey downtowns are coming back around a range
of policies that boost connections to transit, emphasize
the pedestrian and create public places that can
become a magnet for new development and new communities.
By
Gary Johnson, RPA New Jersey office
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Calendar
September 12, 5 pm -- Voorhees
Transportation Center Speaker Series, "Making
National Transportation Policy: The Next Surface
Transportation Act," Emil Frankel,
U.S. DOT. 33 Livingston Ave, New Brunswick.
732-932-6812, cdanku@rci.rutgers.edu
Sept. 19, 4–7 pm -- Open House
at the New Jersey offices of Regional Plan Association.
94 Church Street, suite 401. New Brunswick,
NJ 08901. Tel. 973-623-1133.
September
21, 2 pm -- The Future of Public Architecture
in New York. Featuring a panel of New York
City architects, planners, and historians. The
Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue.
Call (212) 426-6891.
September 24, 6-8pm -- Auto-Free New
York Meeting. Alex Marshall, journalist,
senior editor at Regional Plan Association and
author of How Cities Work, speaks and shows
slides on how transportation has shaped cities
and neighborhoods. 104 Washington St., (just
north of Rector St.), in the community room
of the Police Station. Tel. 212-475-3394 or
www.auto-free.org.
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Spotlight
on The Region
A publication of
Regional Plan Association
Robert Yaro, President
Alex Marshall, Senior Editor
212-253-2727, x360
alex@rpa.org
www.rpa.org
New York Office
4 Irving Place, 7th Floor
New York, NY 10003
Tel. 212-253-2727
Connecticut
Office
Two Landmark Square, Suite 108 Stamford,
CT 06901
tel: 203-356-0390
New
Jersey Office
94 Church Street, Suite 401
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
tel: 732-828-9945
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