Smart Growth Policies: An Evaluation of Programs and Outcomes

Smart Growth Policies: An Evaluation of Programs and Outcomes, Gregory K. Ingram, Armando Carbonell, Yu-Hung Hong and Anthony Flint, Cambridge, MA, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2009, 277 pp., $35.00 (p/b) State growth management policies have been around in various forms for some 40 years. Their latest incarnation is termed 'smart growth', following the lead of the landmark 1997 Maryland programme. How effective have they been in achieving their goals? How have their institutional structures been designed? What differences have they made in US development patterns? These are the central questions addressed by this ambitious study sponsored by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and carried out by leading American urban policy scholars. To answer these questions, the Lincoln Institute, a non-profit think tank headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, initiated a research project in 2006 to evaluate the effectiveness of statewide smart growth policies during the 1990-2000 decade. The research design compared four states with established statewide smart growth programmes - Florida, Maryland, New Jersey and Oregon - with four other states that lacked statewide land management policies -Colorado, Indiana, Texas and Virginia. The evaluation goal was to find out how well the various types of state policies did in achieving five common aims: 1. Promoting compact development; 2. Projecting natural resources and environmental quality; 3. Providing a variety of transportation options; 4. Supplying affordable housing; and 5. Creating net positive fiscal impacts. Not surprisingly, the top performers were Oregon (compact development and transportation), Maryland (natural resources) and New Jersey (affordable housing and fiscal impact). What was surprising was that Colorado, without a statewide smart growth programme, ranked among the top performers in compact development and natural resources. While individual rankings were useful, statistical comparisons of groups of smart versus non-smart growth states were somewhat misleading. By studying only four smart growth states, the study omitted state growth management programmes in Maine, Vermont, Rhode Island, Georgia and Washington (initiated prior to Maryland), as well as Minnesota, Utah, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee (initiated after Maryland). Choosing only four non-smart growth states similarly omitted a raft of other states that have not enacted smart growth programmes. Thus we see several mixed outcomes where states such as Colorado, with its active Denver-region local programmes, sometimes outperformed smart growth states on particular indicators. This was a thorough study. During the two-and-a-half-year project, the research teams compared changes in some 52 performance indicators among all the states and between the smart growth states and the other states. Case studies were carried out in each state and opinion leaders were surveyed about the implementation efficacy of programmes and their institutions. Along with the four listed authors, some seventeen other analysts made contributions. …