Smart Growth? Are they kidding?

Continuing Education is one of the begrudgingly accepted duties of life as as professional. The National Council of Architectural Registration Boards puts out a series of education packets for the anti-social professional, and I just couldn’t pass up the one labeled “smart growth.” A quick summary of one chapter:

Getting to Smart Growth: 100 Policies for Implementation

1. Enact an inclusionary zoning ordinance for new housing developments.
2. Provide home buyer assistance through support to community land trusts.
3. Revise zoning and building codes to permit a wider variety of housing types.
4. Plan and zone for affordable and manufactured housing development in rural areas.
5. Educate developers of multifamily housing units and nonprofits on the use of limited-equity (or equity-restriction) components.
6. Educate realtors, lenders and home buyers on the use of resource-efficient mortgages.
7. Implement a program to identify and dispose of vacant and abandoned buildings.
8. Adopt special rehabilitation building codes to regulate the renovation of existing structures.
9. Enlist local jurisdictions in implementing a regional fair-share housing allocation plan across metropolitan areas.
10. Give priority to smart growth projects and programs that foster smart growth in the allocation of federal housing and community development block grant (and other) funds.

What’s telling about this list is that there’s not an item on it that’s actually architectural. I’m not sure what one’s supposed to do with this list, as I can’t remember the last time a client asked me to write legislation. Implement a program to identify vacant buildings? As part of which contract? Maybe the packet was intended for the American Bar Association (come to think of it, they’d probably provide them with a list of constitutional amendments.)

Property rights. Market forces. Supply and demand. These are the ideas left out of much of the discussion, but the critical steps between theory and reality. Subsidy, proscription, involuntary collective – the paternalistic imperative permeates so much of this movement. I, for one, refuse to believe that it’s necessary to recreate the city at the point of the sheriff’s gun. Perhaps it’s the way the choices between street and street are presented, and crude assumptions made about the demands of the market, that land the community where it is.