Truths and falsehoods in the attack on smart growth

Here are some of the assertions made in the Preserving the American Dream conference, and their implications for New Urbanism: Transportation depends on private motor vehicles, not mass transit. Andres Duany presented an American Automobile Association figure showing that a car costs its owner $5,400 a year — a sum that in a walkable, transit-equipped community, might instead pay the mortage on $50,000 of housing. Alan E. Pisarski, an expert on commuting, dismissed that figure. He said the average car in the US is now nine years old, far older than in the AAA calculation. Said Pisarski, “The average low-income person can go out and buy themselves a six-to-eight-to-ten year-old vehicle that allows them to participate in the mainstream of America.” Pisarski acknowledged that 24 percent of African-American households do not own vehicles; many blacks continue to rely on transit. However, even among blacks, the proportion without cars has declined — from 31 percent in 1990. Walking is practically un-American. “We are a nation that drives to where we want to walk,” said Pisarski with evident contentment. He made no mention of the epidemic of childhood obesity, adult-onset diabetes, and other ailments afflicting a nation in which walking has been eradicated from much of daily life. Duany argued that half the population is too young, too old, too frail, or otherwise unable to drive cars, making walkable communities essential. Walkable communities are a nostalgic fantasy. Wendell Cox showed a photo of individuals on a Paris sidewalk, most of them talking on cell phones. From this, he leapt to the conclusion that “Anybody who thinks a walkable community is going to produce community had better outlaw cell phones.” It seemed not to occur to Cox that a person might be in touch with the wider world and still enjoy — or need — strong relationships at the neighborhood level. Highway construction alleviates traffic congestion. A somewhat lonely figure among the libertarians and free-market advocates was Robert D. Atkinson, a self-described “centrist Democrat” who is vice president of the Progressive Policy Institute. Atkinson, who has a PhD in urban planning, was there because he believes highways relieve congestion. He argued for more highway construction, and he accused the Surface Transportation Policy Project of having sold Americans a “defeatist” myth about highways’ ineffectiveness. See the September/October issue of Blueprint: Ideas for a New Century, from the Democratic Leadership Council (www.ndol.blueprint/). Reid Ewing, director of the Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers University, told New Urban News that Atkinson has a point about the usefulness of highways. But he said the expected congestion relief offered by road expansion is often overstated, failing to take into account how much new roads encourage additional travel. Transit-oriented development performs poorly in suburbs. John Charles of the Cascade Policy Institute charged that “developers are allergic” to the idea of building dense housing or mixed-use projects next to suburban stations on Portland’s MAX light-rail line unless subsidized. He showed the suburban “Beaverton Round” development, which stood uncompleted for years, and another suburban Beaverton project where all the ground-floor shops were vacant. The transit agency Tri-Met explained to New Urban News that the long delay at Beaverton Round was caused by an inexperienced developer’s bankruptcy. The other Beaverton project suffered when a large adjoining development was unexpectedly cancelled, leaving the shops with too few customers. Jillian Detweiler of Tri-Met noted that the latter project’s office and retail space is now leasing successfully while conventional developments on a nearby automobile-oriented corridor endure “huge vacancy rates.” A paper by Charles and co-author Mike Barton, “Light rail and the Myth of Transit-Oriented Development,” focusing on Orenco Station, is available from the Institute at www.cascadepolicy.org. Development controls harm minority and lower-income families. Last November, a report from the conservative National Center for Public Policy Research charged that if smart growth policies like those in Portland had been applied “in major metropolitan areas nationwide over the last ten years, over a million young and disadvantaged families, 260,000 of them minority families, would have been denied the dream of homeownership.” Experts questioned by New Urban News said the report was poorly conceived. Ethan Seltzer, director of the Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies at Portland State University, dismissed it as “pretty much garbage.” Joe Cortright, an economist with the consulting firm Impresa, in Portland, said that, contrary to the Center’s report — provocatively subtitled, “The New Segregation” — metro Portland is less racially segregated than other US cities, and segregation decreased in Portland in the 1990s. The report’s inference that smart growth puts minorities at a disadvantage, resulting in segregation, “isn’t manifested in the data,” Cortright told New Urban News. He suggested that segregation is actually more prevalent in sprawling metro areas where local governments are allowed to require large lots — “a legislative attempt to maintain de facto segregation in the suburbs.”