Reading Rack: Smart Growth's Woes
A new article by the Center for Public Integrity takes a probing look at why Maryland's Smart Growth laws haven't worked that well and finds a culprit - local officials.
"After more than a decade of well-intentioned efforts to serve as a national model of carefully managed development," Dick Cooper writes, "Maryland finds its so-called Smart Growth programs frustrated by local governments whose parochial interests often trump the broader visions of regional and statewide planning efforts."
It's the perennial tug-of-war, given the legal and political climate in Maryland. By longstanding tradition, land use has been left largely to local officials, who jealously guard their prerogative as the decision-makers "closest to the people."
Part of the problem is that one person's sprawl is another's "smart growth," and every community believes it must grow or die. Also, the public often objects to concentrated development, complaining it will worsen traffic backups and overcrowded classrooms that local and state governments should have fixed already, but have been unable or unwilling to pay for.
An effort by Gov. William Donald Schaefer nearly 20 years ago to assert greater state control over Maryland's growth went down in flames, blocked by local officials. A few years later his successor Parris Glendening managed to overcome locals' opposition with a carrot instead of the stick - using state funds to support development only in designated growth areas.
The carrot hasn't been big enough, though - as former state planner now turned develoment consultant Jim Noonan often points out in comments to this blog.
Gov. Martin O'Malley is trying to break Smart Growth out of its rut, relying in large part on a 21-member Task Force that's been hashing its way through the longstanding ambiguities and disputes around what growth is "smart" and who should decide where it goes. O'Malley got a few reform bills through the General Assembly this year, and promises more next year.
It's a painfully slow process, though, which frustrates environmental activists and those who remember when the fifth most densely populated state had much more open countryside than it does now.
Cooper's piece does point to some glimmers that "smart growth," at least as a concept, has been embraced by some local officials, in places like Easton, Chestertown and Berlin. Are there others?
The center, a nonprofit group dedicated to doing investigative reporting, has been focusing on the Eastern Shore as part of a larger, national "Land Use Accountability Project" looking at sprawl. Check out the other pieces here.
Comments
Tim, Thanks for the plug. I will show this to my employers who will immediately ask what developer is paying for my time. If you know of any that need a consultant, send them our way. But enough already...
I read the tag line that the problem with Smart Growth was local land use authority. So I read the article and it is full of examples of local successes, some with State assistance, some in spite of State inactivity.
You ask for other successes. The successes of Baltimore County in preserving rural landscapes, or the successes in Montgomery County in Silver Spring and Bethesda are well known. Communities like Cumberland, Frederick and Annapolis are creating quality urban spaces. Then there are smaller communities like Chesapeake City or Sykesville, and Easton and St. Michaels.
So where are the failures? Honestly, the State can't even define that! The article uses the old saw that 77% of developed acres were outside of PFAs. That number is of course based on the assumption that every bit of a 5 acre rural residential lot is actually developed, as though it were completely paved over, which of course is both untrue and not the point anyway. But if the number hadn't gotten better since the passage of Smart Growth, perhaps the State could claim success in that it hadn't actually gotten worse when the pattern across the country did just that in the same time period, even if the trend was based on an artificially overheated housing market.
So..in the past 10 years the pace of sprawl got no worse in Maryland like it did in most of the rest of the country, and we can show local revitalization successes. Bravo. Now if we can get the State to focus on future issues rather than the planning issues of the 1990's maybe we can get somewhere. We can suggest once again, more infrastructure spending in the right places, less bureaucracy from the State and federal governments in existing communities, and support for administrative and planning capacity at the local level...
Posted by: Jim Noonan | June 26, 2009 10:41 PM
Interesting post, Tim. As a Mayor during the Glendening administration, the City of Frostburg did very well under the SG guidelines---lotsa carrots. The real difficulty, in my judgment, is that many local government officials share in the notion that economic prosperity/the "right kind of growth"/development is a necessity in order to protect the tax base and their reelection chances. And, of course, there is the local prerogative conversation. And what about affordable housing? Often, restricting land use changes inflates the prices of existing homes at the expense of affordable housing. Once home owners have acquired their own homes, it may be in their economic interest to oppose further development. Thus, the conundrum as the burden falls hardest on the poor, minorities, and folks who don't own property---and the gap continues to widen between those who can afford a home and tghose who cannot.
There is also the "American Dream" scenario of having the freedom to choose where to live in a single-family home (maybe with a few acres) with a nice yard in a beautiful neighborhood.
I like carrots.
Posted by: Jbambacus@verizon.net | July 1, 2009 2:04 PM