Getting to smart growth relies on common sense, while staying with stupid growth thinking allows us to remain foolish

While I mentioned this letter to the editor, "Smart Growth needs common sense,"from the Gazette in a blog entry yesterday, I was thinking about it more this morning.

For the most part, "growth" or new development, is going to happen--so long as it is supported by existing zoning--whether or not people want it.

The challenge is to manage the process, and to work to mitigate the possibilities of problems.

Counties like Montgomery in Maryland have adequate public facilities ordinances which require that impacts on public infrastructure and facilities be measured and linked to approvals or disapprovals of development proposals.

Note that DC doesn't have adequate public facilities ordinances and for new projects, for the most part only the traffic impact is measured, no other impacts are considered, even though looking solely at traffic is a limited measure of the total impact of certain kinds of projects. (This is the heart of some of the arguments over intensification of land use along Wisconsin Avenue NW in Ward 3. Some smart growthers term opposition to this as nimbyism, but the reality is that there are legitimate infrastructure and capacity issues that must be addressed in various locations with regard to school capacity, water and sewerage lines, etc.)

So if development is going to happen anyway, which we can call "growth" or "stupid growth," shouldn't we try to shift as many of the trips that will happen anyway to transit, walking, and bicycling away from the automobile and the limited capacities of roads.

Focusing development in ways that optimizes the use of existing infrastructure and facilities of all types is what smart growth policies are about.

(To my boss, I mentioned an ungodly number, $500 million or more, for the cost to retrofit bicycling and walking infrastructure, including an off-trails network, in the County in which I am working in at present, and her retort was "think of how much it cost to build the street network" implying that providing basic walking and bicycling infrastructure should be considered just as basic as providing roads.)

The challenge of smart growth is that the people who challenge the policies as "lacking common sense" fail to see the lack of common sense in the policies that they espouse in their place. Doing what we are doing now is truly the foolish policy.

The reality is that they are advocating for stupid growth, or really for no growth at all, even though the U.S. continues to add population as does the region, and at some level a goodly amount of this new population must be accommodated and as many people point out in the comment thread, not everyone can be accommodated within the center city only (the position that people seem to think I espouse).

It is the stupid growth policy that is nonsensical and unsustainable.