Report cites fiscal advantages of Smart Growth on public infrastructure and economic performance – What about Montana?

More compact development patterns and investments in urban centers would save taxpayers’ money and improve regions’ overall economic performance, says a new report from The Brookings Institution.

Southern Growth Policies- Southern Compass http://www.southern.org/main/tools/tools.shtml

Based on a review of academic literature, the report suggests that more compact development could result in significant long-term savings on public infrastructure outlays: an estimated 11 percent savings on road building and 6 percent savings for water and sewer.

See Investing in a Better Future: A Review of the Fiscal and Competitive Advantages of Smarter Growth Development Patterns at http://www.brookings.edu/urban/pubs/200403_smartgrowth.pdf

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Seeds to grow

Everybody wants protection from unbridled growth,
but so few are willing to adopt the necessary principles

By Tim Davis
for Headwaters News

http://www.headwatersnews.org/perspective.html

I spend a lot of time asking people in Montana – Republicans and Democrats, businesswomen and builders, waiters and environmentalists – what they want their slice of the West to look like in 20 years.

They almost always talk about open space and clean water, vibrant towns and lack of traffic, and the like. People never say they want more strip malls. They don’t say they hope Montana in 2020 will look like California or Colorado today. They don’t ask for subdivisions to carpet our valleys.

We haven’t learned how to mesh the legitimately competing desires (and fears) of enough Montanans to make smart growth happen.

And yet that is just what we are getting. Why, if so few of us want this, are we building it anyway? Why aren’t we embracing smart growth?

Partly, this is because smart growth is hard for people to grasp, even if they know it when they see it: It’s those older, walkable, and marketable neighborhoods with tree-lined streets, front porches, and affordable homes that are a short hop from thriving downtowns with hardware stores, coffee shops, offices, and lots of people mingling and interacting.

The other side of smart growth is the open spaces and working farms and ranches just outside town, and those undisturbed floodplains, ridge lines, and streamsides. In other words, smart growth is exactly what most people say they want and come to the West for.

But the wasteful sprawling development that we have seen so much of in the past 15 years isn’t due only to a lack of understanding of smart growth and the tools necessary to make it a reality. Another problem is that we have skewed our state and local infrastructure investments and development permit systems in a way that actively promotes and subsidizes sprawling development.

One reason is that we haven’t learned how to mesh the legitimately competing desires (and fears) of enough Montanans to make smart growth happen.

To create the future most Montanans and Westerners want, we need to know how different people in what remains of the undeveloped West see growth. The following are admittedly gross generalizations, but they’re also broadly true.

* The rancher: He’s concerned the regulations needed to implement smart growth will limit his ability to sell his land for development in the future. But he also resents the encroachment of subdivisions that threaten his operation and the rural life he loves.

* The city dweller: She enjoys being close to her kids’ schools, to the store, and to work, so she doesn’t have to spend all her precious free time as a taxi driver. But she also worries about how the new apartment building proposed down the street will impact her property values.

* The home builder: He works on a thin profit margin from house to house. The more expensive the house, the higher the profit. So he’s glad to build McMansions outside town. He recognizes sprawl makes the town less attractive, traffic has gotten worse, and his hunting grounds have been fragmented by ranchettes. But he figures that is the price of progress.

* The new rural resident: She loves the quiet of her few acres. But she worries about new subdivisions proposed nearby, and about growing traffic, worsening roads, and the threat of new septic systems to her drinking water — as well as the added taxes needed to fix such problems.

* The conservationist: He supports smart growth because it will protect wildlife habitat, river corridors, water quality, and open space. But he often forgets we need to ensure that all Montanans can find an attractive and affordable home in town.

* The low-income mom: Single mothers or low-income families worry most about paying the bills. Their need for affordable rent forces them to live in a poorly built and unattractive home, often on the edge of town, which means they drive a lot. The cost of maintaining the car isn’t cheap, and the constant driving is a hassle.

* The Realtor: He appreciates the open lands and small-town life that make living and buying a home in Montana so attractive. But he doesn’t want to support the measures that protect those amenities and property values over the long term because he fears they’ll limit his short-term income.

There is some validity in all of these hopes and fears. The trick is how to address enough of them so that a majority of us see smart growth as in our best interest. Let me address the concerns of each of these people one at a time.

The rancher:

Most farmers and ranchers already know that one of the only ways to ensure an adequate land base of working lands is zoning. But many don’t know that you can zone working lands to protect them and either allow small parts of those lands to be developed or to sell their development rights.

What if counties helped farmers and ranchers by halting development from eating up most of the best lands while also helping them develop small portions of farm and ranch (mostly the less productive lands) to be used for cluster development?

Put another way, if you’ve got 200 acres of farmland, you could put 20 houses on 10-acre lots and be forced to quit farming while ensuring that the land will never be used for farming again, or you could put 20 or more houses on 10 acres and still farm most of the remaining 190 acres.

When designed correctly, these types of developments will make the farmers and ranchers more money than simply selling or developing all their land because people are willing to pay a premium for the open space that is the remaining farmland. It’s win-win.

The city dweller:

For smart growth to work, most people need to live in town. But people in cities sometimes get nervous when, say, apartments go up down the street. There are two ways to address such fears.

One is to explain how bringing more people to town protects city dwellers. This is because when people move out of town, in-town schools shut down, in-town traffic gets worse, open space is lost, and vibrant downtowns deteriorate as strip malls rise.

Second, we need to show that new development can protect urbanites’ property values. Cities can do this by working with neighborhoods to pass design standards that ensure that new development looks like the older parts of town that people cherish.

The home builder:

Cities can do a hundred things to make building in town attractive but most cities in Montana haven’t done everything they can.

We need to make our zoning and building codes simple and predictable, and we need to level the playing field by making sure that everyone builds to the same standards, whether you are inside the city boundary or just outside.

Cities and counties need to work together to help with the cost of providing city services including streets, sewer and water for affordable homes inside and immediately adjacent to our cities.

We also need to streamline the permit process for building smart growth so that it takes less time and costs less to build. And cities must convince the Legislature to direct funding away from building bigger roads that are a gigantic subsidy to sprawl and instead address the existing transportation needs of our towns.

The new rural resident:

Most people in the country want to keep their area lightly developed — that’s why they moved there. Some people call this a "pull up the drawbridge" or "I’ve got mine" mentality. Perhaps it is.

But it’s also an important source of support for smart growth. We need to show rural residents how they can protect the lifestyle that they moved there for, either by working with their county commission to adopt zoning or by creating their own, citizen-initiated zoning district. Without zoning, rural residents have no say in how their areas will grow.

The conservationist:

Conservationists need to continue to work with fishermen, hunters and average Montanans to explain the threat that out-of-control sprawl poses to fish, wildlife, family farming and ranching, and the quality of our drinking water, while actively helping cities and counties implement plans to accommodate growth as efficiently, attractively and affordably as possible into our existing cities and towns.

The low-income family:

We urgently need to convince cities and counties to identify areas inside and immediately adjacent to existing cities where small lots will be encouraged.

Small lots do not mean "low-income ghettos." Rather, mixing small-lot developments with a variety of housing types creates areas just like the historic neighborhoods in and around our downtowns.

These neighborhoods have big and small houses, apartments and townhouses, all mixed together — and all on modest, town-sized lots. When we build this way, attractive homes that sell for $70,000 can sit next to attractive homes that sell for $170,000, and taxes can be less because streets, sewers and water lines are all shorter.

To achieve this, cities need to give all the incentives and streamlining that I mentioned for the builders, above.

The Realtor:

The arguments for Realtors are mostly the same as for the builders. We need to show them smart growth is not no-growth, that there’s a lot of money to be made, and that in the long term, we’ll protect the things that make Montana real estate so desirable (and profitable).

These marketable amenities will become ever more important as more and more places in the West refuse to make smart growth a reality and we take the steps necessary to make it a reality here.

Obviously, this will take a lot of education and organizing. A farsighted governor and Legislature will have to redirect growth subsidies. Wise county commissioners and city councilors will have to reform local zoning and building regulations.

It’s a tall order, but by not doing it we guarantee the Californication of our part of the West. Do we have any other choice?

Tim Davis is the executive director of the Montana Smart Growth Coalition.