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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gao seng who wrote (214841)	1/4/2002 6:50:48 PM
From: gao seng	Respond to of 769670

Central Planning Dooms "Smart Growth" By Randal O'Toole Difficult to believe? The most important part of soviet communism is central planning. Now go back to the previous paragraph and replace the word "communist" with "planner" and "communism" with "planning." Then the paragraph turns out to be the truth. In the United States, many planners agree with architect Andres Duany, who urges land-use planners to write plans "with such precision that only the architectural detail is left" to the land owners. Most planners believe property rights are "flexible," and that no property owner should be able to do anything with his or her land without government approval. Despite their scientific pretensions, planners really have no idea how a city or any other economy works. So they rely on fads to tell them how to run our lives. In the 1950s and 1960s, the fad was urban renewal. Today, it is "smart growth." Smart growth says Americans drive too much, and the large lots on which they live waste too much land. The smart-growth fad is furthest advanced in Oregon, where planners have passed an unbelievable set of regulations for land use and transportation. Here are just a few of them. Planners have drawn urban-growth boundaries around all of Oregon's cities and towns. These boundaries contain just 1.25 percent of all the land in Oregon, yet planners hope to force 90 percent of Oregon residents to live within them. Only actual farmers should be allowed to live outside the boundaries, say planners. Inside the boundaries, planners regulate everything from parking on the streets to the use of church buildings. One Portland church with 400 seats in its sanctuary was told it could allow no more than 70 people to worship in the church at one time. A growing church was told it could not expand unless it remained closed on Saturdays and held no more than five weddings or funerals a year. To fit a growing population within the urban-growth boundaries, planners are rezoning existing neighborhoods to higher densities. If you own a quarter-acre lot in such a neighborhood, you would not be allowed to build a single house on it--even if many other homes in the neighborhood are on quarter-acre lots. Instead, if the area is zoned to 24 units per acre, you will be required to build a six-unit apartment. If your existing house burns down, you will be required to replace it with an apartment. Planners also want to control the design of people's homes. They derisively call houses with garages in front "snout houses," and say people who own such houses drive too much. So Portland has passed an ordinance requiring that garages be recessed behind the front of new homes. To further discourage driving, planners are deliberately not building new highways. Their goal is to increase congestion so people will walk or ride public transit instead of drive. Planners are building concrete barriers and speed bumps on existing roads to slow traffic and reduce traffic flows. They call this "traffic calming" . . . though the people who must drive on such roads feel anything but calm. Smart growth turns out to accomplish the exact opposite of almost everything it promises. It makes cities more congested. It increases air pollution. Artificial land shortages lead to unaffordable housing. Open spaces are rapidly filled with high-density housing. Portland planners admit their goal is to "replicate" Los Angeles--the nation's most congested and polluted city, and one of its least affordable. In the last 18 years, congestion in the Portland area has grown faster than in any other U.S. urban area. The city has gone from being one of the 50 most affordable to one of the 10 least affordable markets for single-family housing in the nation. A decade ago, smart growth ideas were peculiar to Oregon. But now they are rapidly taking over the country. Government officials in such diverse states as Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Mnnesota, Washington, and Wisconsin have strongly endorsed smart growth. In retrospect, it is likely that planners in our city governments will do far more harm to our personal and economic freedoms than communists in the State Department. The solution is simple: Fire all the planners. (Randal O'Toole is senior economist with the Thoreau Institute and author of the recent book, "The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths.") newsalert.com.