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States shy away from legislating smart growth
By Dan McCue
Staff Writer
South Carolina may not have a legislated smart-growth plan, but it’s not alone in that regard, according to a Rutgers University professor who has done an analysis of national growth development trends and teaches growth management to planning and zoning officials.
“Maine, Maryland, neither has a smart-growth plan. Connecticut has one, but nobody pays much attention to it,” said Stuart Meck, director of the university’s Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy. “If you go up and down the East Coast alone, this is the kind of pattern you find.
“Maryland had one under Gov. Paris Glendening, but he was voted out of office, and Florida, while it has comprehensive planning, has a system that ebbs and flows depending on the factions that hold political power on the local level.”
About the only place where active, governmentally driven smart growth is going on is in Meck’s native New Jersey, where officials are actively promoting development around the state’s public transportation hubs.
“The entire coast of New Jersey is redeveloping itself, partly because the state is encouraging the redevelopment of Brownfield sites and urban infill adjacent to rail stations leading into Manhattan, and partly because there are pressures on the fringe of western development that make it difficult to go any further,” Meck said.
“Even Asbury Park and Long Branch, former haunts of Bruce Springsteen, are being revived as a result.”
Meck’s operating definition of smart growth is a series of growth practices and techniques that “produce a pattern of compact and contiguous development and encourage mixed use.
“Although industrial development is rarely part of the mix,” he said. “Instead, it’s typically lighter commercial or offices built alongside residential neighborhoods.”
Meck tells government officials taking his classes that smart growth includes the following elements:
Compact building forms that reduce land consumption.
Schools and public facilities within walking distance from different compact neighborhoods.
A variety of housing choices to accommodate the old, the young and those in varied socio-economic groups.
Infrastructure and planning decisions that are made in concert.
“The other thing I encourage them to consider is improving their local development review process so that developers are actually encouraged to provide the kinds of development you want,” Meck said.
Why do people talk more about smart growth than actually do it?
Meck thinks it’s because the conversations often become overly politicized, pitting social classes against each other.
“There’s a school of thought that this is an upper-middle class movement and its advocates don’t pay much attention at all to the creation of affordable housing,” he said. “In fact, there are people out there who will tell you with conviction that architects took the movement over, putting good designs on projects that are hard to sell for affordable prices.
“Those kinds of discussions make people uncomfortable, and they tend to avoid them altogether. The other thing that comes into play, and I think it has in South Carolina, is litigation,” Meck said.
Meck was referring specifically to Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, the 1992 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that if a state so severely restricts development of a parcel to the point that no development is practicable, it has, in fact, effectively taken the property under the Fifth and 14th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.
David Lucas bought two residential lots in Isle of Palms in 1986, intending to build single-family homes on them. At the time, the lots were not subject to the state’s coastal zone building permit requirements. Two years later, however, the state Legislature adopted the Beachfront Management Act, which effectively barred Lucas from erecting homes on his parcels.
Lucas sued and prevailed by arguing that while the act may have been a lawful use of the state’s power, the ban on construction deprived him of all economically viable use of his property.
“In light of that, I think many municipalities have decided that it’s not necessary for them to always have such strong control—and, for instance, impose smart growth as a series of ordinances,” Meck said. “Instead, we’re seeing approaches like one in Oregon, where the state has adopted a plan book and gives developers instant approval if they adopt that plan.
“That’s how Oregon’s getting the planning results it wants and the densities it wants,” he said.
Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@charlestonbusiness.com.
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