Smart Growth and the Future of Communities

Here's an oldie from 2003.  (This was an editorial for the Riverside Press Enterprise)

"Smart Growth" and the Future of Communities

by Don Cicchetti

It sounds good, doesn't it?  The colorful descriptions we often hear of the development issues facing Southern California cities and towns.  Usually, the issue is cast as a case of big developers squaring off against small towns, with the quality of life in those towns hanging in the balance. 

It makes for a great story but what is the real-world  result of limiting the building of new houses?   

The movement and desire to master-plan all growth in communities and limit new and individual construction is called "smart growth".   The operative scary-word in the "smart growth" movement is sprawl.   But what is sprawl, really?    Sprawl, is your house, if it is built after the houses belonging to the smart-growth folks and if they have to see your new house while relaxing on their porches with a latte.    Their houses are, of course, "appropriate" to the rural character of the community, while the house you are planning there is damaging and offensive to that character.   Sprawl is anything that is not master-planned, out of place, not perfect, idiosyncratic, owner-built, painted differently, and worst of all, commercial and/or industrial.   "Smart Growth" is basically applying the worst attributes of homeowner's associations to entire communities, and it kills them as dead as Downtown Disney after closing.   They become a prop, a movie set, whose residents demand higher sound walls to protect them from the noise of the poor souls commuting out to where they can actually afford housing.   

The life of communities cannot be so carefully planned out, as anyone who has tried it finds out.

As a recent letter to the PE said, they want to preserve the "rural atmosphere and quality of life" and "the visual qualities of the hillsides".  (FYI, the town in question was Calimesa)  And of course, to do so, the smart-growth folks want to make sure that you do not come live there, by requiring that all future development meet with their esthetic opinions and ever-escalating environmental agenda.   What happens in real communities when these values are enforced is that the cost of property inside the magic "smart-growth, no big-bad developers allowed" line goes through the roof, and those who already live there are instantly rich while all the other poor fools (that's you and me if you don't live there already) can go commute to Hades for all the "I've got mine" crowd cares.

This is exactly what happened to Portland OR. and it has become a distopian nightmare with little 1940's stucco houses inside "the line" going for 400K and above and everyone else commuting down an endless 2-hour line of headlights every day.    You can live in an apartment, forever, or you can commute (unless you are rich of course), but the dream of middle-class home ownership is dead as dirt inside the city.

Let's not do that to SoCal.   It is not who we are.   Do we always build perfect communities?   Nope.  But we build real communities, with room for new Californians and the not-rich who want to buy a house.    After all, what do developers actually do?   They build houses.  For Californians.  That sounds pretty good to me.   I would rather have imperfect communities full of first-time homeowners (some of whom actually work on the car in the driveway!  (horrors!!) than little perfect poodle-towns full of pretentious utopians and the ever-vigilant esthetics-police, as lifeless and quiet as a movie set.