Is The American Dream Endless Sprawl?
Smart Growth and Its Meaning for People and Places

Lunch Address by Robert Liberty,
Executive Director of 1000 Friends of Oregon
at the Growing Smart In Minnesota Conference
Sponsored by 1000 Friends of Minnesota
Cosponsored by Urban Land Institute, National Smart Growth Network and
Minnesota's Smart Growth Network
Friday, June 11, 1999
Minneapolis Convention Center

I . Introductory Remarks

Minnesota is part of America's heartland. Whatever Oregon may be called, it has never been called "the heartland." Oregon is on the left-hand fringe of the United States, a place where the Governor wears blue jeans and cowboy boots to his inauguration

Oregon is where citizens first voted for term limits and then, after seeing the results, voted to allow physician assisted suicide. (It is only a matter of time before we authorize lawyer assisted suicide.) Oregon (or at least Western Oregon) is the place where there are attorneys who wear Birkenstocks and schools close if an inch of snow falls.

In other words, we all understand that Oregon is not Minnesota. So I am not here to tell you to shed your parkas and air conditioning for gore-tex and sandals, to transform yourself into Oregonians. I am not here to admonish you to copy our methods of managing growth. Instead, consider me a friend from out of town, who has dropped by to chat about a little problem we both have. So while you warm up the hot dish and fold the marshmallows and carrots into the jello salad, let's talk about our common problem, sprawl.

II. What America's Sprawl Says About America's Values

America is an urban nation. Three-fourths of our people live in metropolitan areas, like the Twin Cities. And these urban areas are sprawling.

Between 1960 and 1990, the population of America's 213 urban areas increased by 47% but the urbanized land area increased by 107%. In Minneapolis-St. Paul the metropolitan area's population grew by 51% during the same period while its land area grew by 89%. Between 1960 and 1990 Chicago's metropolitan population grew by 14% but its land area grew by 66%. In Kansas City, the metro population grew by 29% while the land area grew by 110%. And alas, in Cleveland, the metro population fell a few percentage points, while the land area grew by 20%.

Ever-expanding metropolitan areas are consuming huge amounts of farmland, forestlands and natural resources. Between 1982 and 1992, 8.3 million acres (net) of farm and range lands, 5.4 million acres (net) of forests and 160,000 acres of wetlands and deepwater habitats were developed.

And while we were wasting lands and resources on the urban edge we were abandoning people, places and private investments at the center, in the hearts of our cities and in our older suburbs. Between 1950 and 1990 the population of the City of Detroit declined by more than 800,000; more than 50,000 housing units were demolished.

Low-density urban development is very expensive to provide with roads, sewers, water, and services like police and fire protection, a consequence felt by the taxpayers, who, judging from the election results, are not feeling particularly generous right now.

What do these patterns say about our values as a nation? First, our growth pattern expresses our wastefulness. We are throwing away neighborhoods and downtowns at the centers of our urban regions; communities that were once vital, desirable places to live. Meanwhile, at the urban edge, we are destroying the productive lands that provide us with food and fiber. And we are wasting taxpayer's money to provide the low-density suburban sprawl with services and infrastructure. However frugal we may be in our private habits, as an urban nation, we are wastrels.

Second, our metropolitan development patterns demonstrate an unhealthy overemphasis on individualism and personal consumption at the expense of community and civic responsibility. Does this sound like an overstatement? If so, consider how our postwar suburban development has omitted sidewalks and parks and neighborhood stores, the places where people interact and form a community.

Instead we have emphasized the private domain; big back yards, three-car garages, cul-de-sac subdivisions. In many suburbs, if our neighbor has an automatic garage door opener, we may never meet her. The same separation of individuals from the community is reflected on a larger scale too. Today, there are about seven times as many Americans living in private communities, usually gated, as there are Minnesotans. The way we have sprawled expresses a profound contempt for the idea of community.

Third, we have turned our back on our origins, on nature. Instead of tending the garden god gave us, we are destroying it. We may not embrace waste, contempt for community and disrespect for nature as individuals, but that is how we live as urban Americans. I want to be very clear that these criticisms are not directed at the suburban dream. The core or the American suburban dream were green spaces, decent housing, good schools and public safety. These are not bad things, they are good things.

But Smart Growth means these things - good housing and schools, public safety and green spaces - are to be shared by everyone in our metropolitan areas and not reserved just for the minority who live on the suburban edge. There are better, smarter, ways to grow. But those better ways require planning, and effective planning requires regulation of the use and development of land.

There are many arguments against the planning and land regulation which is part of Smart Growth. Let's consider the best known among them; that it violates Americans Constitutionally protected property rights, that planning amounts to social engineering and interference with the free market, that local control is more democratic, that urban growth boundaries and land use regulations drive up home prices and hurt the economy.

III. The Arguments Against Planning for Growth

A. Property Rights
The right to own and use property, including land, is a basic component of freedom. In certain respects, is a prerequisite for freedom. I believe that. I'd wager that everyone in this room believes it. Neither the Constitution nor a decent respect for property rights should be regarded as incompatible with land use planning and Smart Growth. Believers in planning can and must reconcile their objectives with these principles. And because they should and do respect these principles, no supporter of planning for growth should ever allow herself to be boxed into a corner as somehow being an enemy of property rights or the U.S. Constitution.

The problem today is that property rights arguments have been carried to an extreme that fails to recognize that the way we use our property affects other people's property. And what better example of that than the continuing controversy over hog farming operations? The way one property owner uses his or her land can have a big impact on the use and enjoyment of other people's land.

Consider the same issue from the perspective of farmers. The value of their property, used for farming, is diminished when urban neighbors make it unwise for them to use chemicals or object to the noise of midnight harvesting. It was a lot easier, and a lot more practical, to be a property rights purist when the next neighbor was five miles away than when they are 500 feet or 50 feet away. A philosophy from the time of covered wagons and buffalo migrations is no longer suited to a nation whose population will pass one-third of a billion early in the next century.

We also need to recognize that land values can also be increased by regulations that restrict development. What do you think would happen to the property values in a neighborhood if a regulation prohibiting fast food restaurants or factories was repealed? Planning helps to reconcile competing property rights in ways that can protect everyoneís land values while balancing individual and community interests. A community requires some sacrifice. A good community makes that sacrifice worthwhile.

B. "Social Engineering" and Interference with the "Free Market"
Next, let us consider whether planning for growth deserves to be rejected as "social engineering" and for because it interferes with the "free market." I am afraid that I have some very bad news for the opponents of social engineering and free market interference. We already have it, all over the United States. You have plenty of it right here in Minnesota.

Here is a partial list of current government policies which constitute our current social engineering and market interference programs in America:

Deductibility of home mortgage interest... but not rental costs. Federal and state funding of an elaborate system of highways used for cars and trucks, but leaving the construction and maintenance of the rail lines used by trains to the private sector. We have socialized highways and privatized rail lines. Imagine what kind of transportation system we would have if for every dollar of taxpayer money we had invested in the interstate freeway system, we had invested a dollar in an interstate rail system.

If your employer provides you with free downtown parking worth $10 a day, $200/month or $2,400 per year, you don't have to count that fringe benefit as income. But if your employer gave you $2,400 worth of transit passes, you have to pay taxes on $2,220 of those passes. (The free parking fringe benefit has been estimated to be worth $12 to 50 billion/year.)

Zoning in general and residential zoning in particular which regulates the use of land in most urban areas. Suburban zoning establishes large minimum lot sizes, minimum square footages and prohibits apartments, in order to make sure that Americans of different classes are kept in separate neighborhoods. This is social engineering with a vengeance.

National flood insurance, in order to allow development in flood hazard areas that would be impossible or very unlikely under a private insurance system.

Let's face it. We have social engineering and a lot of interference with the free market at all levels of government and to serve a wide variety of purposes. Unless opponents of Smart Growth are willing to say that all existing government incentives and disincentives are unacceptable because they are "social engineering," or improper interference with a free market, then they are hypocritical to attack proposed new regulations incentives and disincentives as "social engineering" or market interference.

C. Local Control
Opponents of planning often rally around the cry of "local control." "Local control" sounds wonderful. It conjures up the ideas of grass roots democracy, of New England style town hall meetings. "Local control" suggests that decisions about land use will be better because they will be made by citizens who are knowledgeable about local conditions and responsive to local concerns and values. Local control means democracy.

But what is the reality? The reality is that many Americans who express support for "local control" cannot even name the city or town councilor or county commissioner who represents them. The reality is that the highest number of votes cast is for the Presidency and the lowest is for local officials. As for town hall meetings, what percentage of Minnesotans do you think have ever attended a local government meeting or hearing on a land use planning matter?

And finally, exactly what does "local control" mean when so many decisions affecting a community are made by entities they do not control? When a bypass is built around a metropolitan area and it reshapes commercial development patterns and commutes, do the affected cities have "local control" over those changes? When one city gets the benefit of a new regional mall or new plant and gets the jobs and tax revenues, do the other communities have "local control" over the effects these changes have on their own community? When Wal-Mart builds a new megastore just outside the city limits of a town, and guts the historic mainstreet, does that city have "local control" over Wal-Mart's effects on their downtown?

At the metropolitan level, the phrase "local control" is a silly fiction. As the nighttime view from space reveals, our metropolitan regions are the fundamental unit of economic and social organization in the United States. They operate as organic unities, where residents live in one community, shop in another and work in yet another. Yet they are governed by an insane patchwork of local governments designed in and for the era of the buggy whip, not the silicon chip. This fragmentation of authority means that there is no one in charge, and no one is responsible for these metropolitan areas.

"Local control" certainly does not mean democracy when there is no democratic institution with the capacity and responsibility for dealing with our metropolitan regions, the fundamental unit of social organization. If Los Angelenos in 1950 whether had been show how their region would appear and function in 2000, do you think they would have chosen that future if they had been allowed to vote on it? Only by creating regional, democratic, institutions with real power to plan a common future, can citizens of our metropolitan areas exercise choice about their common futures.

But when, God forbid, someone dares to even suggest that it is time to reconsider our structures of governance, such ideas are immediately classified as outlandish, beyond the pale. Yes, the Soviet Union can collapse, South Africa can integrate and elect Nelson Mandela President and China can permit free enterprise, but Americans can't possibly dream of modifying local governments!!! If they were good enough for Martin VanBuren then by golly they are good enough for us today!

To which I say: "Bunk!" How would the voters in any city, township or county in Minnesota respond to the question; "If you had to choose between keeping all of the existing structures of local government or protecting the quality of life from sprawl, which would you choose?" "Local control" sounds good in theory but we have to judge the system by its results. It is the system of unbalanced, hyper-balkanized ìlocal controlî and the absence of effective planning that has given America sprawl and urban decay. Local control is what produced Southern California and New Jersey and Detroit. Smart Growth forces us to recognize that we have outgrown "local control."

D. Urban Growth Boundaries Drive Up Home Prices
Now we turn one of the most commonly repeated myths that is specific to Oregon's planning program; that the urban growth boundaries around metropolitan Portland and all the other Oregon cities, have made the housing in those cities the most expensive and least affordable in the nation.

The fact is that while home prices in the Portland area are notably higher than in the Twin Cities, we don't have unusually high homes prices compared to other places in the West. The statistics from NAHB's own website show the median price for a Portland home in late 1998 was $155,000, compared to $150,000 in Denver, $157,000 in Salt Lake City, $186,000 in Seattle, $193,000 in San Diego and $350,000 in San Francisco.

If sprawl and unlimited land supplies assured affordable housing, why are home prices in Los Angeles $24,000 more than in the Portland region? Why are homes in sprawling Orange County $80,000 more expensive than in the Portland metro region?

Yes the NAHB ranks Portland's home affordability as 180th out of 186. But listen to this; at 179th place, i.e. slightly more affordable, is San Jose, where homes cost $310,000, twice as much as in Portland! Affordability must be measured not just by the price of a home but by the ratio of average income to home price. Using this standard, NAHB numbers still don't make sense.

The median price in supposedly more affordable San Jose is four times the median household income, compared to Portland where the ratio of price to income is 3.2-to-1. NAHB ranks Portland 16 places below Salt Lake City in affordability, even though Salt Lake Cityís income is slightly lower than Portlandís and its home prices are slightly higher. Incidentally, Portland has moved up six places in the NAHB affordability rankings in the last two years or so--without adding a single acre to its urban growth boundary.

In February the Oregon Housing Cost Study was released. The research was sponsored by several groups with an interest in affordable housing including the Oregon Building Industry Association, Marion-Polk Building Industry Association, Oregon Association of Realtors and various units of government. The report noted that according to the NAHB's "Housing Opportunity Index" only 35% of the houses for sale were affordable by the median household income in the Portland area. But the report noted: "Despite the poor HOI, a separate analysis conducted for this study indicated that in 1998, households classified as having median incomes (as defined by HUD) could still afford the median house price in Portland, Salem, Eugene-Springfield, and Medford." (pages iii, 37)

Three case studies, included as part of the study, examined the costs of building a house in the early 1990s with the cost of building the same house in 1997, to quantify the sources of the big increase in prices. The case studies suggested that the price of raw land remains a modest part of final sale price; 14% in 1997 in the Portland case study, and 3% in 1997 in the Salem and Eugene-Springfield case study areas.

In the Portland area, where the price of land rose the most, the total increase in land costs between 1993 and 1997 was $15,704, less than the $25,317 increase in hard and soft land costs (e.g. installing water and sewer lines, utilities, system development charges, architecture fees.)

Finally, if you think urban growth boundaries cause rising home prices, do a little thought-experiment. Imagine a long line of people in the Portland area, all waiting in line to pay developers $155,000 for a new house. Then imagine that the urban growth boundary is greatly expanded, dropping the developers' land costs. What do you think will happen? Will they automatically lower prices because their costs decreased - even when there is a long line of people willing to pay $155,000? Rising home prices are and should be a cause for concern. Urban Growth Boundaries are not the source of the problem, and as part of a balanced system of Smart Growth efforts, they can be part of the solution.

E. Planning Hurts The Economy
Another common argument is that land use planning and regulation, including urban growth boundaries, hurts the economy. Certainly we have heard these arguments in Oregon. In 1982, during the worst recession since the Great Depression, Oregonians had an initiative on the ballot that would repeal the land use planning laws. With unemployment at 12% statewide and population falling, opponents of planning pointed to Oregonís land use planning system as the culprit for the stateís economic woes.

Nonetheless, the repeal measure was decisively defeated by the voters. Starting a few years after repeal was defeated at the polls, Oregon's economy began to blossom and then boom. On Monday of this week, I read that in 1997 Oregon lead the nation in job growth in the manufacturing sector. In fact we have had so much growth lately, that anti-growth advocates blame land use planning for facilitating and accelerating the economic boom.

But you don't have to take it from me that planning and urban growth boundaries donít hurt your economy or cripple development. Listen to the Real Estate Research Corporation. Each year ERE/Yarmouth which manages a real estate portfolio worth more than $10 billion, commissions the Real Estate Research Corporation to produce a report entitled Emerging Trends in Real Estate, which is based on interviews with hundreds of real estate professionals.

Here are some extracts from the 1998 edition of Emerging Trends in Real Estate:

Growth Controls (page 8)
In realty, the most stable investment markets-the ones that have staying power and hold
value-also have growth controls, either government-enacted or enforced by natural geographic boundaries. It's no coincidence that San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston are hemmed in by water, Chicago borders a huge lake, and Manhattan is an island. Developers reflexively loathe the regional growth boundaries set by Portland, Oregon, but admit the laws have led to a thriving downtown center as well as a healthy metropolitan area. On a more micro level, cities and suburbs that set aside parks and thoughtfully zone residential areas to integrate with commercial and retail districts are more likely to thrive over the long term than towns with "anything goes" zoning boards. Then there is the associated issue of mass transportation. Regions that ignore the need to provide alternatives to the automobile will become increasingly troubled, especially in their suburbs.

Markets to Watch (Page 26)
While the past 25 years of American land-use history has highlighted urban deterioration and cities in crisis, Emerging Trends predicts the next quarter century will be kinder to cities and harder on some suburban areas, especially for investors. The reasons:
•Poor suburban planning: Laissez-faire development has created a hodgepodge of subdivisions and retail strips without the infrastructure to support evolving embedded commercial centers or further growth. People loathe the resulting traffic jams. But mass transportation solutions are difficult in suburban areas developed for the car, with multiple centers and incoherent road systems. Properties in congested areas will fare poorly.
•Loss of exclusivity: People left the cities to find privacy, space, and peace. But these very elements made some suburban areas too attractive. With development came more people and a less desirable environment. Now migration is reversing in certain areas.
•Aging housing stock: Some older suburbs must confront the deterioration of poorly conceived housing stock and its consequent abandonment, a process which spreads, or leaches, into adjoining areas. Smaller municipalities lack the means to stem this tide of declining property values. Tax rolls diminish and school systems suffer. Instead of working together to pool resources, neighboring suburban communities typically fight each other for limited tax dollars from state and federal governments as well as for commercial projects and businesses. The fractionalization and lack of coordination further weaken the regional fabric, and everybody loses.
•Empty nesters: The baby-boom generation and their parents were the leading edge of suburban population growth. The "burbs" were oases for raising families in the Leave It To Beaver era. Now, the boomer bubble is hurtling through middle age. Increasingly, these 40- and 50-somethings will be facing large homes with dark bedrooms, lots of yard work, and a rusting basketball hoop over the garage. Most of all it's just lonely. Expect many graying boomers to move back into cities or live in apartments or condominium townhouses closer to suburban commercial centers.
•Slash and burn: Whether forced by geographic boundaries or zoning mandates, cities and regions with growth limitations are healthier and inherently more stable investment markets than those without limits. "There's no greater risk to land values than unrestrained development." The traditional 24-hour cities typically have growth restraints; the suburban agglomeration markets don't. Atlanta, Dallas, and Phoenix sit in wide-open spaces and spread out in all directions. Their original downtowns are now secondary markets. In restraint-free markets, today's ground-zero project could be out in left field tomorrow. Tellingly, office markets in both downtown Atlanta and Midtown Manhattan nosedived in the early nineties, but while New York has bounced back, Atlanta's CBD may never fully recover from the swing toward Buckhead and the Perimeter. "The notion of an inexhaustible supply of land undermines the whole rationale for investment real estate. This is a real problem for many suburban areas.

Second-Tier Cities (page 34)
A classic growth-constrained market, Portland, Oregon, ranks at the top of the second-tier group for both investment and development prospects-an unusual one-two punch. It also claims the lowest risk for overbuilding. Who says "growth boundaries" are dirty words?

IV. Smart Growth, Not Boundless Sprawl, Is The New American Dream

Having examined the depressing aspects of American sprawl and responded to the usual criticisms to making changes to our pattern of development, we need to consider the alternative, Smart Growth. What exactly is Smart Growth?
Smart Growth is defined in many ways by many people.

I would define Smart Growth first in terms of a good neighborhood. And I define a good neighborhood as one that has these things:

Different kinds and costs of housing, that provide decent shelter for people with a range of incomes, from the professional person to the blue collar worker and including seniors of all incomes. This kind of neighborhood will include small houses on small lots and multifamily housing as well. After all, is it really fair for communities to say, "You are good enough to pick up our garbage, wait on us in the store, patrol our streets and teach our children, but you are not good enough to live in our neighborhoods?" This kind of housing is needed not just by Minnesotans of modest means; it reflects the new demography.

Does anyone here know what percentage of households in Minnesota consisted of just one person in 1990? The answer is 25%. And another 33% of households consist of just two people. So almost three out of five households are just one or two people. We need to keep that in mind when we think about new housing for the 21st century.

Greenspaces, both developed parks within walking distance, larger parks with recreational facilities and natural areas. One of the most appealing things about the old suburban vision was the greenspaces it promised, big yards and proximity to the countryside. Smart Growth embraces green spaces too, but it gives more consideration to public green spaces, where recreation and community building go hand in hand. And just as Smart Growth should embrace a variety of types of housing it should recognize the need for a spectrum of green spaces, from nearby pocket park with a swing set to a larger park with ball fields and lareg natural areas serving an entire region. These are not new principles, they were expounded by Frederick Law Olmsted a century ago.

Along with houses, a Smart Growth neighborhood includes a mixture of uses, including home offices, a convenience store, within walking distance and a day care center. A friend of mine, Rod Stevens, once said, you shouldn't have to burn a pint of gas to get a pint of milk. (I used this phrase in front of Al Gore a year ago and then one of my colleagues here informed me that when he used the phrase on the East Coast it had become "You shouldn't have to burn a gallon of gas to buy a gallon of milk." It sounds like their problems are a bit worse out there.)

A grade school within walking or biking distance. Just imagine what a big difference it would make if every city and every urban school district in Minnesota adopted a land use regulation that required all grade schools to be sited and neighborhoods designed, so that every single grade school child could walk or ride safely to school?

Greater transportation choices, including mass transit of one form or another and sidewalks that connect to useful destinations.

Smart Growth at the Regional Level
What does Smart Growth mean at the regional level? It means rethinking and integrating land use and transportation facilities planning. This sounds obvious and banal but it is very hard to break through the mentality that transportation issues are engineering questions not planning and community design issues. The idea that building highways is merely a passive response to actual or anticipated demand needs to be replaced with a recognition that highways shape land use and that there are many transportation solutions other than new highways.

In the Twin-Cities region, between 1982 and 1996, your population increased by 28%, you added 400 line miles of freeway (a 34% increase) but the vehicle miles traveled on your freeways increased by 103%! As Met Council Chairman Ted Mondale said earlier today, to build enough freeways to avoid congestion would cost you $12 billion and require you to bulldoze the sculpture garden next to the Capitol.

Increasing transportation options
Thanks to the leadership of Governor Ventura, your region is moving forward with an initial investment in light rail. That is a very important achievement and I hope you give the Governor the thanks he deserves. But you should explore other transit options too. (I counted 9 different public transit vehicles in San Francisco when I was there this spring.) And the principle that land use and transportation planning need to be integrated applies just as much to light rail as to highways.

By the way, you can expect a continuing barrage of detailed criticism of the inefficiencies and subsidies for light rail that will get lots of play in the press. Don't ignore it, because it may help you to improve your projects, but remember that very few highways, especially those built through farmland or poor neighborhoods ever had to withstand that level of scrutiny.

A regional infrastructure investment strategy
Your Met Council has had the responsibility for regional infrastructure investment decisions for a long time, so this may seem old hat. But a regional strategy means much more than log-rolling and trading off one city's sewer for another city's arterial. It means defining and making commitments to investments that reconcile and promote Smart Growth at the local and regional level: some way of separating the city and country, of defining the limits to urban growth and to make that growth urbane while keeping the country rural and protecting rural lands for farming and the natural resources, lakes, streams and forests, that make Minnesota a special place.

A regional strategy for affordable housing, to make sure that people can find housing in the same community where they work. This means breaking down zoning barriers that stop people from moving to opportunity. It means making sure local governments are all working hard at attracting the resources needed for affordable housing and promoting local land trusts and assisting nonprofit housing developers.

A regional strategy to promote economic and social vitality in the poorest parts of the region: There are too many examples in cities big and small in America of slums and barrios and ghettos. You can see this hollowing out process now in places as small as DesMoines. Thanks to the work of people like Minnesota's own Myron Orfield and john powell, we are learning that the concentration of poverty is powerfully aided by the structure and powers of local and state government. We are now understand how devastating this pattern or urban decay is not only to the individuals, but also to the property owners and the neighborhoods.

Professor Manuel Pastor of the University of California has provided the best research to date that regions that are highly polarized between rich and poor simply do not compete as well as other metropolitan regions where the burdens and benefits of growth are more evenly distributed. Your region here is already the best known example in the nation of an effort to pool local tax bases so that the benefits and burdens of growth are shared more equally so that older poorer parts of a region share in the revenues generated by growth.

Smart Growth At the State Level
Those are some elements of smart growth at the regional level. What about the state level? Here is a short list of some state Smart Growth efforts:

State investments, in highways, roads, sewers or offices should be made only in conformance with smart growth principles and local plans and regulations implementing those principles.
State can provide objective, common data, on which to base planning efforts and technical expertise from its agency staff.
It can adopt binding principles for guiding growth, and the ten principles already drawn up by the Minnesota Smart Growth Network, seem like a good starting point to me. Of course, to actually provide guidance to local planning efforts they will have to be translated into a much more specific form.
I have discussed what Smart Growth means at the neighborhood and local level, at the regional level and at the state level. I've talked about sewers and light rail and zoning.

What Smart Growth Requires of Individuals
What does Smart Growth require of individuals? A lot. The most important change in infrastructure needed to substitute smart growth for boundless sprawl is the change to that soft, grey infrastructure that lies between our ears.

The first step is to publicly admit, as this Conference is doing, that boundless sprawl is not the American dream and that our pattern of growth is unworthy of a great nation and a great state like Minnesota. The second step is to stop telling each other that sprawl is inevitable and that Growth Smart is politically impossible. If Atlanta can create a powerful new regional agency to govern transportation investments, if the citizens and business community in Utah can embark about a regional planning effort and if the citizens of Southern California can vote to adopt urban growth boundaries, then Smart Growth is possible anywhere. (By the way, do you know which county in Southern California voted in urban growth boundaries? Ventura County.)

Third and foremost, we need to expect more of average citizens and nongovernmental organizations. They can, and should be asked to do a lot more than stick colored dots onto butcher paper or react to slides. I have watched a struggling cattle rancher explain the intricacies of the local land use appeal process, to his amazed neighbors. I watched a school teacher assemble information on the relationship between lot size and forest management that ultimately reshaped state policy governing 9 million acres of forestland. On Sunday I watched an activist display and manipulate data his neighborhood collected through volunteer efforts, using a IS program he taught himself.

Officials need to respect and promote the contributions these citizen experts can provide, even when they disagree with them, (which ought to be easier for Minnesotans to do than say, New Yorkers.) As a friend of a friend once said, "Activists may be hell to live with, but they make great ancestors." My organization's founder, Governor Tom McCall, said, "Heroes are not statues framed against a red sky, they are people who say: 'This is my community and its my responsibility to make it better.'"

V. Closing Comments

This Conference and the impressively broad Minnesota Smart Growth Network that has formed, demonstrates your determination to redefine the American dream so that it is not represented by endless sprawl. Your new dream is Smart Growth, a new way of growing that assures livable communities and lovable landscapes. This new way of growing will keep Minnesota a place your children, and your children's children, will be proud to call home.
Now, how about some of that hot dish?

ABOUT ROBERT LIBERTY
Robert Liberty has degrees from the University of Oregon, Oxford University and Harvard Law School. During the 1980s he was a staff attorney at 1000 Friends of Oregon, a non-profit advocacy group supporting Smart Growth principles, founded by Governor Tom McCall. During the early 1990s he had his own land use law practice and served as a land use hearings officer. In 1994, he became Executive Director of 1000 Friends. He is a member of the Future Vision Commission for Metro, the Portland area regional government, a founding member of the Coalition for a Livable Future and was the 1997-98 President of the National Growth Management Leadership Project, a nation-wide association of state and regional nonprofit organizations working for smart growth.