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Committed Foundations: Smart Growth’s Ace In The Hole

Will America’s sprawl-fighting smart growth movement turn out to be a flash in the pan? Will it subside as championing governors leave office? Will the field be left open to helter-skelter big-box stores, strip malls and suburban expansion roads?

Neal Peirce Washington Post

It could happen. Maryland’s Gov. Parris Glendening, smart growth’s most eloquent spokesman, steps down Jan. 15. Economic hard times may press his successor and other state and local officials to embrace any development idea thrust before them.

But don’t count on smart growth to go away.

First, it’s picking up potentially strong new backing from such incoming governors as Republican Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and Democrat Jennifer Granholm of Michigan.

Even more significant, since 1999 a grass-roots support system for smart growth has formed with backing from some of the country’s most influential foundations–Surdna, MacArthur, Irvine, Turner, Ford, Packard and others.

Known as the Funders’ Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities, it now operates in every region of the country–indeed it’s performed a dozen regional assessments of smart growth goals, strengths and strategies, involving 31 states, about 500 leaders and 40 foundations.

The idea from the start, explains Benjamin Starrett, the network’s founding executive director, has been to show the intimate cause-and-effect relation of ill-planned growth and social inequity. As sprawl delivers mounting traffic congestion, imperiling farmland, open spaces and wetlands, the critics say it inevitably triggers urban disinvestment, the flight of jobs from cities and diminished opportunity for the poor.

Starrett himself had been a Florida state government official who helped develop the Eastward Ho! initiative that sought to protect the Everglades while helping less fortunate residents of the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Palm Beach corridor by coaxing jobs and development back toward denser population pockets near the ocean.

Inevitably, liberal and centrist foundations found the Funders’ merger of environmental and social issues highly attractive. Starrett believes the Funders’ support has enabled the network to start matching conservative foundations’ earlier and heavier funding of libertarian and right-oriented think tanks and advocacy groups.

Just a month ago, more than 650 people met in Los Angeles for a "Promoting Regional Equity" summit cosponsored by the Network and a group known as PolicyLink, focused specifically on organizing urban core-inner ring alliances to break racial and economic segregation. Over half the participants were people of color.

The Funders’ Network has sought to give smart growth a firm intellectual base through 10 papers on topics ranging from smart growth’s role in transportation reform to its implications for biodiversity and environments for America’s aging. Its founders worry a little now about some foundations (Hewlett and Kauffman, for example) picking new priority areas. But they see billions flowing into philanthropy in the next years, with a strong potential share for smart growth causes.

The Funders’ Network has built strong ties with groups ranging from the Brookings Institution to the Alliance for Regional Stewardship. Its next major goal: to undergird smart growth groups in metro regions, states or even multistate regions.

Starrett notes with enthusiasm, for example, strong New England-based smart growth movements, especially in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Vermont. Vermont’s Smart Growth Collaborative–an alliance of 10 organizations ranging from the Vermont Forum on Sprawl to the Preservation Trust of Vermont–was coaxed into existence by family funds and foundations anxious to stem development that is rapidly consuming Vermont’s picturesque rural countryside. Starrett encouraged the experiment.

With coordinated foundation financing and a mutually agreed-on work plan, the 10 Vermont groups seem positioned to make a major impact on their state. They got the Legislature to approve expanded incentives for development focused on downtowns and village centers (including residences on upper floors of town stores). To make allies of developers and overcome overly negative opposition from neighborhood "NIMBYs," they are preparing to endorse and support housing projects that are well-placed in city and town locations and include a share of affordable units.

Perhaps most significant of all, the Vermont Collaborative is readying a "report card" to show how well–or poorly–a host of state spending and regulation policies match smart growth priorities. "People really care about Vermont’s rural landscape," says Conservation Law Foundation leader Mark Sinclair. He predicts that chapter and verse on how state government is expending sewer, water, school and road monies–often "to convert our farmlands into subdivisions"–will anger citizens and spur "public watchdogging" of state agencies.

Using their report card data, the Vermont Collaboration partners plan aggressive lobbying of the Legislature. Some partners would like to go further–lodging lawsuits to stop legally questionable, sprawling roads and development. That’s one issue the group has yet to agree on.

As the Vermont Smart Growth Collaborative matures, it raises a critical question: if 50 states had parallel ventures, wouldn’t smart growth initiatives and protections multiply across America?

My guess is yes–whether governors and state bureaucracies start out friendly to smart growth goals or not.

Neal Peirce’s e-mail address is [email protected].

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