050303 City planning by Those Who Know Best

The Orange County Register - April 3, 2005

City planning by Those Who Know Best

By Steven Greenhut Sr.

Many readers may be unfamiliar with New Urbanism and Smart Growth, two planning ideologies that are the hippest thing in the world of urban design. While the fixations of trendy planners might not register on the list of things that average Americans think about, these new utopian land-use ideals are filtering down into government agencies and city councils, and might eventually impact the way we all live.

It's time for more of us to get concerned, and to pay attention to what the planners are thinking, especially as O.C. seems to be at a planning transition point - continuing to spread out southward (i.e.: Rancho Mission Viejo) even as it rises upward with new high-rise proposals in more densely populated areas of Anaheim, Santa Ana and Irvine.

Recent history, in fact, shows that crucial debates in Orange County are to some degree an outgrowth of that new way of thinking about land-use planning. The attempts to build the CenterLine light-rail system despite the Orange County Transportation Authority's own data proving that the system would not move more than a fraction of a percent of county commuters is just one example of it.

It was never about transportation, but about planning, about implementing the transportation system that is at the core of the New Urbanist thinking, which emphasizes high-density urban living and eschews the supposed wastefulness of the car culture.

The cartoonish redevelopment-driven, subsidy-created faux downtowns built (or planned) in cities such as Brea, Yorba Linda, Placentia, Buena Park (officials there have dubbed the old mall a "downtown"!), Huntington Beach, Dana Point and elsewhere also contain echoes of New Urbanism/Smart Growth. (New Urbanism is the planning philosophy and Smart Growth is its implementation in the political world. For purposes of this article, I use the terms interchangeably.)

Here's a description of the New Urbanism from the Web site, www.newurbanism.org:

"New Urbanism is the most important planning movement this century, and is about creating a better future for us all. It is an international movement to reform the design of the built environment, and is about raising our quality of life and standard of living by creating better places to live. New Urbanism is the revival of our lost art of place-making, and is essentially a reordering of the built environment into the form of complete cities, towns, villages and neighborhoods ... ."

Whenever some ideologue claims to offer the most important thing since sliced bread and then promises to reorder my life around it, we should all get nervous.

New Urbanists are reacting against the suburbanization of American society. In their world, selfish Americans abandoned the inner city, with its joyful mix of high-rise living and neighborhood stores, and took up residence in ugly, look-alike tract houses rimmed by Wal-Mart-encrusted strip malls. Suburbanization embodies everything they hate about our society: consumerism, automobiles, the triumph of low culture.

New Urbanists never mention that urban liberalism helped destroy urban life through its emphasis on social engineering and its failure to provide decent basic services (schools, safe streets, trash removal, etc.) and thus propelled family-oriented people into the hinterlands. But there is some truth that the newer suburbs lack distinctiveness.

A non-New Urbanist, Joel Kotkin, puts the matter succinctly in a recent Washington Post article, which I found on the Claremont Institute's Local Liberty blog: "The suburbs have given us - in terms of space, quality of life, safety and privacy - much more of what we call 'the American Dream' than cities ever could. What they have failed to do, often miserably, is to live up to their promise of becoming self-contained, manageable communities that can both co-exist amiably with the natural environment and offer a sense of identity."

Proudly, fiercely suburban Orange County might strike the urban sophisticate as a miasma of sprawl, but it is no such thing. Many cities have their own downtown, their own distinctive flavor. Fullerton functions like an old Midwestern city. It runs together with other cities, but so what? That's what happens in urban areas.

Look at the thriving Little Saigon in Westminster, at the stylish beachfront cities such as Laguna Beach and San Clemente, at Old Towne Orange or downtown Santa Ana, or at any of the many beautiful, tree-lined suburban neighborhoods that epitomize this lovely county. This county is awash in style and personality - even if it is not the particular style and personality preferred by Those Who Know Best.

The New Urbanists pick on the ugliest form of suburban sprawl and compare it to the loftiest vision of urban living. They don't mention that even the most sprawling older suburbs (such as those in north Orange County) are bubbling with life, as immigrant businesses revamp strip malls. The suburbs are not uniform or soulless, despite the rhetoric.

New Urbanists never mention the word freedom. They are consumed by the form of a city, without thinking about the people who inhabit the communities they seek to reorient. Well, they think about them, much in the way that chess player thinks about his chess pieces. But they don't think about the hopes and aspirations of individuals.

The New Urbanist paradises have a certain appeal, especially when one is on vacation. But because of the growth controls and central planning, these are expensive places to live. The average family cannot afford to live in places like San Francisco, Santa Barbara and Ann Arbor, the model societies the New Urbanists want to create everywhere.

In Portland, Ore., the city where Smart Growthers have had control of the government for years, the hip neighborhoods "seem to have everything in new urban design and comfort," reported the New York Times last month. "Everything except children. ... Officials say that the very things that attract people who revitalize a city - dense vertical housing, fashionable restaurants and shops and mass transit that makes a car unnecessary - are driving out children by making the neighborhoods too expensive for young families."

The New Urbanists claim to want to give our lives meaning by creating superior urban forms of living, yet they miss the most meaningful things in life because they emphasize architecture over people. Like all totalitarians, they assume that what they prefer is so good and noble that they have the moral right to impose it on everybody else.

The rest of us need to take notice now, so there is still time to oppose it.