Guest Column: Urban housing vital issue in smart growth

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Smart growth is now a common catch phrase for discussions about growth and development. The problem is it suggests different things to different people. |ret||ret||tab|

Housing advocates think it means increasing the availability of affordable housing. Environmentalists see a way of protecting open space and natural habitat. Commuters see a possible solution to reducing gridlock. Cities see a solution to sprawl. Some developers see a smarter blueprint for future development. Others see a real threat a conspiracy to limit rights. Some even see smart growth as a way to stop growth altogether,|ret||ret||tab|

It is no surprise that many in the real estate industry consider growth good and desirable. Almost everyone, including the Sierra Club, also considers it inevitable. But most will also agree that where and how growth occurs is not inevitable. As a long time developer, and now as the current chairman of the Urban Land Institute, I find the confusion over the intent of a smart growth approach disturbing.|ret||ret||tab|

For me, smart growth is pretty simple stuff. Growing smart means guiding and encouraging development that is environmentally sensitive, economically viable, and community-oriented and sustainable. It means shaping growth in a way that minimizes sprawl, promotes housing choice, and helps locate homes closer to employment, thereby reducing our dependence on the automobile. I'd go so far as to say that I think smart growth is not just a land use issue. It is also a matter of social justice.|ret||ret||tab|

Growth can create tremendous societal benefits, and it can impose serious societal burdens. One of those burdens is urban sprawl. Ironically sprawl is due in large part to the tremendous success of Washington's subsidized highway construction program, accompanied of course by the ever rising use of the automobile by the U.S. population. Atlanta, my hometown, has become the poster child for sprawl. In just the past ten years Atlanta's circumference of development has almost doubled, from 65 miles to 120 miles.|ret||ret||tab|

In addition to sprawl, both prosperity and immigration have spurred strong economic and physical growth. The U.S. population more than 270 million people is growing at the rate of 1 percent per year. Of those 2.7 million net new people, 900,000 are immigrants. |ret||ret||tab|

The 1997 American Housing Survey recorded 100 million occupied housing units, about 60 percent of which were single-family homes. Now a record 67 percent of all households own their own homes. In recent years we have averaged approximately 1.6 million housing starts of which approximately 80 percent are single family homes and 20 percent are multifamily units. Most of the new housing construction has occurred in medium and lower-density counties at or beyond the fringes of metropolitan areas.|ret||ret||tab|

And therein lies one of the real inequities. Smart growth, the movement, usually addresses inner city reinvestment in some way, but many times it does not take on issues of regional inequity a major cause of inner city dis-investment. In fact, in the absence of a dialogue about the equity component of smart growth, everybody loses. |ret||ret||tab|

Business leaders lose by equity's absence. Research has shown that regions that do not address equity concerns are less likely to sustain high levels of economic growth. Gaining regional equity requires the engagement of institutions that can connect community-based activists across lines of race, geography, class and issues.|ret||ret||tab|

Smart growth should imply a more efficient use of land and more compact development. That also means, in part, encouraging the revitalization of existing city neighborhoods and the development of higher density infill housing in both cities and suburbs.|ret||ret||tab|

The point is that one of the serious burdens that can result from poorly managed growth is this abandonment of older neighborhoods by middle and upper class families as they choose newer homes in outlying areas. Often newly developing areas exclude low- and moderate-income families through zoning that ensures large homes with large price tags on large lots. |ret||ret||tab|

Such practices magnify social injustice by limiting locations and housing types available to less affluent families.|ret||ret||tab|

Sub-urbanization of middle-income housing has also created a spatial mismatch between the locations of jobs and housing, and a fiscal mismatch between the location of higher-income populations and communities' revenue needs. Many businesses have moved out of cities to the suburbs and, along with businesses, jobs have been lost. |ret||ret||tab|

The shrinking tax base of older city neighborhoods has eroded the quality of public schools, limiting educational opportunity. The distant location of jobs and the poor quality of public education limits the economic opportunities available to low-income city residents, and fuels further deterioration of their neighborhoods.|ret||ret||tab|

One of the real promises of a smart growth discussion is bringing together public officials, civic, neighborhood and environmental leaders, the development and business community to manage growth in a way that encourages the creation or restoration of communities and neighborhoods. |ret||ret||tab|

As Ed Blakely of the University of Southern California has observed, "We must build our way out of this problem as we have built our way into it."|ret||ret||tab|

The smart growth movement suggests ways to approach development in a regional context to help relieve the economic and social isolation. Within this context, the issue of housing affordability looms large.|ret||ret||tab|

Thanks largely to programs like HUD's Hope VI, public housing authorities are encouraged to partner with private entities to create mixed-finance and mixed-income affordable housing. |ret||ret||tab|

The results are communities that are clearly different from traditional public housing projects. The program's flexible funding for both physical improvements and social services makes it possible to integrate public housing residents and communities into the mainstream of American life. |ret||ret||tab|

|bold_on|(J. Ronald Terwilliger is chairman of the Urban Land Institute and chief executive officer of Trammell Crow Residential, one of the largest builders and managers of multifamily rental housing in the U.S.) |ret||ret||tab|

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