Dissing "smart" growth

Frequent commenter (from back when I could allow comments) "Da Wife" sent along an interesting link on so-called smart growth:

Simply put, smart growth means an end to sprawling, car-oriented suburbia. In its place should rise transit-friendly communities where you can live, play and work.

The province's Places to Grow legislation has made it the new normal in the GTA and communities like Markham Centre are developing in response. But Mr. O'Toole is not impressed.

Q: Has the smart growth idea been around long enough to evaluate it?

A: Yes. California has been doing various versions since the 1970s, Hawaii since the 1960s . . . Are more people riding transit, riding rail because of higher densities? The answer is, no. One per cent of travel is by transit. Maybe 98 per cent is by car.

Has it has any effect on preservation of open space? Well, their urban growth boundaries are preserving marginal pasture land, but it's forcing people to drive 100 miles to build their homes on prime farmland.

It's also making housing very expensive. In Canada, the city that has done the most planning for smart growth is Vancouver, and it has the least affordable housing.

Q: But when you talk about housing prices in a city such as Vancouver, there's also geography and the economy; how high on the list does planning rank?

A: Number one. Seventy per cent of the Vancouver metropolitan area has been ruled off-limits to developers. There's plenty of room for growth if they allowed people to live in those areas. So people are having to accept housing they don't really want.

Most Canadians and Americans agree their preferred form of housing is a single-family home on a lot, where they can have a garden or place for their kids or pets to play.

Q: Is the model we've been living with, with a downtown, suburbs and bedroom communities, outdated?

A: It's definitely outdated. The part that's outdated is the downtown part.

In many metropolitan areas, more than two-thirds of the jobs are not in any kind of centre and that's because we have such good personal transportation, namely automobiles.

We have much a better distribution of jobs and that’s a remedy for congestion.

When we draw an urban boundary, we're saying we're going to deny people access to low cost land. I don't think government knows where people ought to live. I don't think government knows where jobs ought to be.

One of the attractions of "smart growth" policies is that it puts a lot of power in the hands of appointed planners, and keeps it out of the hands of those irresponsible property owners and developers. Bureaucrats almost always believe that they know better than individuals what is best for those individuals. This is the same thing on a larger scale: the government explicitly dictates what kind of land use is going to be allowed (to a finer degree of granularity than existing zoning rules), and there's little or no recourse for the people directly affected by the rules.