Posted on 03/10/2002 7:51:51 PM PST by StopGlobalWhining
About half way down the right side of their page.
By MICHAEL COLLINS
Scripps Howard News Service
March 07, 2002
WASHINGTON - Supporters say it's a how-to manual for controlling urban sprawl through planned or "smart growth" development.
Critics say it's a handbook for radically altering land-use plans nationwide, stripping property owners of their rights and devastating small businesses.
A $2.5 million, government-funded guidebook that tells states how they can manage urban sprawl and other land-use problems has ignited a debate among business groups, property-rights advocates, environmentalists and members of Congress.
"It's anti-freedom. It's anti-choice. It's anti-culture,'' said Harry Alford, president and CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce.
Nonsense, countered Robert Manley, a Cincinnati attorney who helped draft the document through the American Planning Association.
"The guidebook contains nothing that is not already on the books, with a (proven) track record,'' Manley told the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution. The panel held a hearing about the manual on Thursday.
The subcommittee chairman, Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, said he has serious concerns that the guidebook promotes a "top-down" approach to land-use planning that would remove such matters from the hands of local authorities.
The "Growing Smart Legislative Guidebook,'' a seven-year project sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, was drafted by the American Planning Association. The document contains recommendations for changing state and local land-use laws.
Opponents contend that property-rights groups and small-business organizations were deliberately excluded from the 18-member committee that developed the manual. Some are asking that Congress refuse to give money to states and local communities to carry out the recommendations.
The guidebook promotes "bad policy" that would make the United States "one big zoning law,'' Alford said.
Among the critics' primary concerns are recommendations that local governments be required to write land-use plans that follow state goals and regional plans - even if residents in those areas don't agree with such plans.
The guidebook also says local governments should be authorized to regulate the location, size, height and other features of commercial signs, including those found on small businesses.
Such signs generally are given greater constitutional protections than large commercial billboards, but business groups fear local communities would be permitted to ban them outright under the guidebook's recommendations.
That could change the character of minority communities such as San Francisco's Chinatown, where signs posted on businesses help give the area the ethnic identity that makes it such a big tourist draw, Alford said.
Manley said the guidebook does not promote a "top-down" approach to planning but merely offers a "menu" of options states can choose from.
Land-use plans need updating because planning tools in most states are based on model statutes drafted during the 1920s, when growth was largely confined to central cities, Manley said.
The rapid development of rural areas means the "one-size-fits-all" approach no longer works, he said. Local communities should be allowed to select the approach that best suits their needs, he said.
LOL ! ! !
Gee, that's not a leading question or anything. You want to see how well federal incentives to "help states and communities promote smart growth and solve problems" just visit your local inner city housing development.
The guidebook contains nothing that is not already on the books, with a (proven) track record
Take another look. The record is one of poor performance. The roads are clogged. The neighborhoods have no stores. Everyone has to commute to work. A dismal failure.
The County of Santa Cruz, California now has the worst housing affordability index in the nation.
Don't we trust the government planning process? :)
"Lookee here, Todd. I didn't know we even had 365 members."
I used to, until I learned how corrupt and destructive it was. The power to manipulate the value of property is too much power. There is a better way to manage objectively the balance of risks, externalities, and intangibles in the marketplace. We will have to evolve our way into it as we learn how to use the principles involved.
Gee, that's not a leading question or anything. You want to see how well federal incentives to "help states and communities promote smart growth and solve problems" just visit your local inner city housing development.
The Texas Eagle returns!
When I posted this last night it was 78%Yes to 22% No with 160 or so respondents. Thanks Freepers for turning this around, but I'm sure they will be e-mailing everyone they know to try to turn it back, so lets raise the margin of the No's.
The American Planning Association should always be shown in red type. It's an old Marxist organization, born about the same time as another, The League of (Socialist) Women Voters.
They have done more to erode freedom in this once great nation than any ten others you can name. - The idea that government should be in any way involved in land planning is absurd beyond comprehension.
"...The roads are clogged. The neighborhoods have no stores. Everyone has to commute to work. A dismal failure."
But a resounding success from the point of view of the global Socialist-fascist. - Drive the little guys out of business, and empower the global mega-corporazi.
Out of a total of 456 votes.
No 68%
Out of a total of 477 votes.
Stay well - Stay safe - Stay armed - Yorktown
Weekly Question: Results
Do you support a federal incentive to help states and communities to promote smart growth planning and solve problems related to growth and development?
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Out of a total of 525 votes. Thanks for the ping editor-surveyor!
VOTE NO ON PROP. 100!!!
Smart Growth: Damn the Track Record, Full Speed Ahead
author Randal O'Toole
The smart-growth urban planning fad that is sweeping the nation's cities has taken root in Phoenix, where proposition 100 aims to increase urban densities and limit low-density development at the urban fringe. Supporters of smart growth claim these policies will reduce congestion and air pollution, increase affordable housing, and protect more urban open space.The reality is exactly the opposite. Smart growth's prescriptions of high-density housing and rail transit greatly increase congestion. This dirties the air because cars pollute more in stop-and-go traffic.
Smart growth creates affordable housing if you want to live in an apartment, but it prices most families out of the American dream of owning their own home. And urban open spaces rapidly disappear under smart-growth demands for infill development.
All these trends are visible in Portland, Oregon, which has adopted the strongest smart-growth plan in the nation. Planners promised to save Portland from becoming like Los Angeles, the most congested, most polluted, and one of the least affordable urban areas in the country. So voters agreed to create Metro, the nation's strongest regional planning authority.
Metro planners drew an growth boundary around the region that included Portland and some two-dozen suburbs. Most land outside the boundary was so restrictively downzoned so that almost no one can build a house on his or her own land.
Inside the boundary, Metro projects an 80 percent increase in population. To accommodate those people, Metro ordered the cities and towns inside the boundary to upzone existing neighborhoods to much higher densities.
As a part of infill zoning, many cities rezoned neighborhoods of single-family homes for apartments, which are now popping up in people\rquote s backyards. Zoning rules are often so strict that if your house burns down you are required to replace it with an apartment.
Portland's light-rail lines carry less than half as many people as originally projected and do nothing to relieve congestion. The light-rail system cost as much per mile as an eight-lane freeway but carries fewer people than one-third of a freeway lane. Yet Metro wants to build another eighty-five miles of rail transit, while building almost no new roads.
To promote transit, Metro directed construction of dozens of high-density transit-oriented developments. Developers objected that there was little demand for high-density housing. So Metro and the region's cities provided tens of millions of dollars of subsidies to promote these developments, which now have the highest vacancy rates in the region.
These policies might be worthwhile if they reduced auto driving and congestion. But Metro predicts its plans will reduce the share of travel by automobile by just 4 percent, from 92 percent in 1990 to 88 percent in 204. Per capita driving will continue to increase. With 80 percent more people and few new roads, Metro adds that the amount of time people waste sitting in traffic will more than quadruple. Metro calls this congestion a "positive urban development" because it fears that without it few people will ride its expensive trolley cars.
Meanwhile, the shortage of land inside the growth boundary has caused land prices to increase by ten times since 1990. Before 1990, two out of three Portland-area families could afford a median-priced home. Today, less than one out of three can afford such a home.
Metro's plans are also destroying the urban open spaces they promised to protect. To meet Metro's density targets, cities rezoned backyards, vacant lots, urban farms, golf courses, and even a few city parks for high-density housing. When voters gave Metro funds to buy parks and open spaces, eighty-five percent of the land it purchased was outside the growth boundary, where it was inaccessible to most residents. Recently, Metro asked which U.S. urban area was closest to its plan for Portland: a high-density region with few roads and lots of rail transit. It turns out that the nation\rquote s highest density urban area also has the fewest miles of freeway per capita and is building one of the most expensive rail transit networks. Which urban area is that?
Believe it or not, it is Los Angeles, which turns out to be the epitome of smart growth. Metro concluded that Los Angeles "displays an investment pattern we desire to replicate" in Portland. Once again, smart growth produces exactly the opposite of what it promises.
If you want to replicate Los Angeles in Phoenix, then by all means follow Portland's smart-growth example. However, if your idea of livability is something other than congestion, pollution, unaffordable housing, and disappearing open space, then you should avoid smart growth like the plague.
Randal O'Toole (rot@ti.org) is the senior economist of the Thoreau Institute (http://www.ti.org)
and the author of The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths.
Friday, March 08, 2002Local lawyer defends land-use handbook
Critics say property rights get short shrift
By Derrick DePledge
Enquirer Washington BureauWASHINGTON — A Cincinnati land-use lawyer Thursday defended a new national planning guidebook against critics who claim it fails to adequately recognize private-property rights.
Robert Manley, a partner with Manley, Burke, Fischer and Lipton, told Congress that the “Growing Smart Legislative Guidebook” is a resource for state and local planners to consult when updating land-use plans.
The American Planning Association drafted the guide over seven years with advisers from state and local governments and representatives from environmental and building interests. The federal government paid most of the $2.4 million cost to produce the document, which outlines planning models to discourage sprawl and protect farmland.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has accepted the guide as reference material, but it does not carry the weight of federal policy.
“Smart growth is a set of public policies designed not to stifle growth but to promote development in ways that create communities of balance, consumer choice and lasting value,” Mr. Manley told the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution.
Critics, including several conservative lawmakers, believe property-rights advocates, small-business groups and others were left out of deliberations on the guide and that some state and local planners may misconstrue the guide's suggestions as federal policy.
In November, several lawmakers, including House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas, asked HUD Secretary Mel Martinez to oppose the guide. The lawmakers claimed the guide's provisions would “trample the rights of private-property owners by seizing their land without the just compensation that our Constitution requires.”
Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, chairman of the subcommittee, said Thursday he also has reservations that the guide could evolve into rigid standards that undermine local control.
“I have serious concerns about this approach,” he said.
Harry Alford, president of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, said the guide's suggestions could lead state and local governments to adopt uniform planning in diverse minority and ethnic communities such as Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati or Harlem in New York.
“It's anti-freedom. It's anti-choice. It's anti-culture,” he said.
Weekly Question: Results
Do you support a federal incentive to help states and communities to promote smart growth planning and solve problems related to growth and development?
|
|
Out of a total of 635 votes.
You do realize that the planners and zoners in your area will try to do this anyway and that the fight is only beginning...
Don't you?
Now if you want an honest system that accounts the value of intangible assets in an objective manner, a free-market alternative to Smart Growth... :-)
It seems that the groups that were pushing this nationally sent people here to organize their respective rah rah grouops to affect legislation and then left. They don't have anything past 1999/2000 on their websites.
It leads me to believe that the came, they LIED, and they conquered... (Gov. Jane Dee Hull and all the city planning committees) 2 years ago and that it IS a done deal.
But I am still trying to get a fix on the timeline of this crap. I was uninformed and not paying attention when this battle had its beginnings here, and I now find that our EX-Gov. Babbit (and Arizona traitor) had a lot to do with it.
Which is why he now works for Washington Mutual as a fixer.
Bad Planning Disease is a product of our megalomanaical university professorate. It was born in Santa Cruz County, California in the early '70s. It was a way for the Democrats to make money for the outrageously wealthy by stealing the from conservatives and profiting by controlling who gets to build. All it takes is the power to control or regulate land use. Such is environmental law.
B-b-b-babbit helped put the b-b-bureaucratic b-barriers in the way and now he gets to take a fat check for clearing them for those developers with the "political acumen" to support the right politicians, or should I say left?
It's all so confusing.
It sointenly is!!
But little by little I'm learning who's da good guys and who's da bad guys. I'm grateful for input from someone with your background.
and UNrelated.
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