Smart growth’s real impact yet to come
“Innovation Briefs” has an editorial concluding (largely, it seems, on the basis of anecdotes and David Brooks’ awful generalizations) that “the most recent Census Bureau data, documenting demographic trends since the 2000 Census, suggest that the “smart growth” movement is having little influence on reshaping America’s urban landscape. The demographic and economic forces driving metropolitan expansion are too powerful to be reined in by the entreaties of smart growth advocates.”
Well, yes. “Smart growth” entered the lexicon in, oh, 1996 or so. It takes an achingly long time to stop a train, much less throw it into reverse, so one wouldn’t expect smart growth to have an immediately huge impact on the way Americans live. Sprawl has been the status quo for the better part of a century now, really, and no crisis moment has arisen to give it the good kick in the rear that it needs.
I sometimes point out that the residential boom in Chicago, for instance, doesn’t reflect an actual boom in population. It reflects increased wealth, for one, but more importantly it reflects the turnaround: the slowdown and gradual reversal of 40 years of population losses. If this is just what the slowdown of the losses — just a change in the rate of change (in calculus, the first derivative) looks like, just imagine what a real boom would look like. The train is decelerating, all right, but it’s been chugging along so fast that the naysayers can still say that we’re moving right along.
