Is Urban Planning "Creeping Socialism"?

• Author: O'TOOLE, RANDAL

Socialism is commonly defined as government ownership of the means of production. With the exception of a number of services that are viewed as natural monopolies, such as sewer and water supplies, socialism in the form of government ownership has never achieved prominence in the United States. Instead, governments here have relied on regulation as a way of obtaining the same goals that socialists claim to seek: efficiency, equality, and control of externalities. If this approach is socialism, then urban planning has represented creeping socialism since around 1920. But it has recently accelerated and is now running rather than creeping. Moreover, it has such a head start that lovers of freedom may not be able to halt it, much less turn it around.

Urban planning rests on the ideas that urban residents impose numerous externalities on one another and that planning and regulation can minimize such externalities. Despite their claim of scientific expertise, planners often have little idea what they are doing: cities are simply too complex to understand or control. As a result, the history of urban planning is the story of a series of fads, most of which have turned into disasters. Urban renewal and public housing are two obvious examples.

Ironically, the failure of past planning is the premise for the latest planning fad, variously called new urbanism, neotraditionalism, or smart growth. Smart-growth planners see numerous problems in our urban areas, including congestion, air pollution, sprawl, unaffordable housing, disappearing open space, and costly urban services. These problems they blame on past generations of planners who, say smart-growth planners, got it all wrong. The solution, of course, is to give the current generation of planners more power than ever before because this time they claim to have it right.

Smart-Growth Prescriptions

Smart-growth prescriptions include variations on the following themes:

* Metropolitan areas should be denser than they are today. In growing regions this objective is achieved by limiting or forbidding new construction on land outside the urban fringe and instead increasing the density of existing developed areas.

* Transportation should emphasize mass transit, walking, and bicycling instead of automobiles. This strategy means few or no new investments in road capacity, combined with considerable investments in transit, preferably rail transit. Investments in roads are often aimed at reducing their capacity, a concept known as traffic calming.

* Land-use planning should focus on making areas more suitable for transit, walking, and bicycling. A major way of achieving this goal is through transit-oriented developments, meaning high-density, mixed-use developments located near rail stations or along transit corridors.

* Developments also should be pedestrian friendly, meaning (among other things) narrow streets, wide sidewalks, and stores fronting on the sidewalk rather than set back behind a parking lot.

Smart growth received a public boost in January 1999, when it was endorsed by Vice President Al Gore. Metropolitan planning agencies across the nation are considering or adopting these or similar smart-growth policies. The Environmental Protection Agency has threatened to deny transportation dollars and other federal funds to many cities that do not adopt such programs.

Smart growth is attempting to reverse two strong trends of the twentieth century. First is the increasing use of personal motorized transportation. As incomes have risen, people who once walked or rode transit have chosen to purchase and drive automobiles instead. Second, and related to the first, is an increasing demand for personal living space, in the form of both house size and lot size. As autos have made transportation less expensive, people have moved beyond central cities and purchased large lots for their homes.

These trends are most obvious in the United States, but they are not uniquely American. All over the world, as incomes rise, people purchase autos and move to low-density suburbs. In the United States, smart-growth advocates blame these trends on government subsidies such as highway funding and mortgage-loan guarantees. But the same trends are observable in western European countries, where the subsidies have been directed to transit and high-density residential development while people desiring autos and low-density housing have been penalized.

As early as 1922, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright saw that new technologies were decentralizing cities. "In the days of electrical transmission, the automobile and the telephone," he said, urban concentration "becomes needless congestion--it is a curse" (Fishman 1988, 286). Today Wright would add jet aircraft and the Internet to his list of decentralizing technologies. In the United States, auto driving per capita has steadily increased by 25 to 35 percent per decade, an average of 2 to 3 percent per year, since at least the 1920s. In parallel people have increasingly moved to low-density areas until today nearly half of all Americans live in the suburbs, and half the remainder live in low-density small towns and rural areas (source citation).

Since the 1950s, urban critics have complained that suburbs are sterile, lifeless, and placeless. John Keats called the suburbs "conceived in error, nurtured by greed, corroding everything they touch" (1956, 7). "Little Boxes," a 1960s song by the Berkeley writer Malvina Reynolds and popularized by Pete Seeger, labeled the suburbs "ticky-tacky." More recently, James Kunstler described the suburbs as "a trashy and preposterous human habitat with no future" (1993, 105) and "the mindless twitchings of a brain-dead culture" (112). These complaints were largely aesthetic in nature and did not stop people from moving to low-density areas.

Since the 1960s, transportation critics have warned that automobiles are destroying cities. A. Q. Mowbry (1969) warned that highway advocates were planning to "blanket the nation with asphalt" (229). Jane Holtz Kay (1997) claims that the auto has diminished "both the quality of mobility and the quality of life" (19). Yet Americans continue to drive more and more.(*)

Smart growth represents a merger of the anti-suburb and anti-auto movements. To reverse the driving and suburbanization trends, adherents are willing to impose draconian regulations on urban residents. These include minimum density requirements, strict design codes, and limits on parking and transportation.

Minimum Density Requirements

Density requirements are the next logical step in the zoning regulation that American cities began adopting in the years just prior to 1920. Zoning was originally aimed at protecting property values from externalities (Nelson 1977). No one wants to live next to a dirty, smelly factory. For that matter, people in many residential areas resisted commercial developments in their midst, and people in neighborhoods of single-family homes opposed the construction of apartments.

Initially, cities adopted four basic zones: industrial, commercial, multi-family housing, and single-family housing. Early zoning was cumulative, so that any use was allowable in industrial areas; any use but industrial was allowed in commercial areas; and so forth. Eventually, refined zoning categories were developed, such as single-family residential on quarter-acre lots, on half-acre lots, and so on, but the cumulative nature was retained. No one objected if someone built on a half-acre lot in an area zoned for quarter-acre lots. After World War II, zoning became increasingly exclusive among the four basic zones. An industrial zone would have only industry; no commercial construction was allowed. But the subcategories remained cumulative: zoning might specify maximum densities, but not minimum.

In contrast, smart-growth zoning is prescriptive. It is completely exclusive, including both maximum and minimum densities. Moreover, it tends to contain many more design requirements, which will be discussed later. The minimum-density requirement can lead to a rapid transformation of a neighborhood, especially when a neighborhood is rezoned from single-family to multi-family housing. Such rezoning is common in the Portland, Oregon, urbanized area, whose regional government adopted a smart-growth plan several years ago.

The west Portland suburb of Orenco was rezoned to very high densities when a light-rail line was built nearby. Many residents owned large lots or second lots adjacent to their homes. Some planned to build a second home on those lots for their children, for their parents, or simply to sell. But the new zoning rule required instead that they build fourplexes or other multi-family housing. Constructing a single home was not...