Why?

Randal O'Toole invokes the old American sore spot of communism in his latest update (linked by Planetizen) to The Vanishing Automobile. The logic is like this: because communist academics from 1960s Moscow expressed appreciation for high-density, transit-adjacent urbanism, smart growth reeks of communism. For an illustration, O'Toole goes to the East German community of Halle-Neustadt, where this vision was implemented in the form of Le Corbusier-eque, "less-is-more" apartment blocks in somewhat parklike settings.

The buildings were tall yet elevatorless. The community's planning process micromanaged the buildings into having a standard number of bedrooms. The planners put most parking far away from where people live. "Green spaces"--O'Toole doesn't say whether they were usable parkland or useless buffers of vegetation--were later converted to parking. Many of the high-rises were later privatized and some abandoned or demolished. In later years many community members chose to live not in high-rises but in detached, single-family residences added after the reunification. All in all, Halle-Neustadt is a portrait of failed "smart growth" and a foreshadowing of what could be in store for America, O'Toole explains to us.

Forget that smart-growthers reject Le Corbusier's vision; forget that high-rise abandonment was almost certainly a symptom of economic factors post-reunification, not of high density itself; forget that the typical Halle-Neustadt high-rise's flawed design alone is enough to repel potential residents; forget that, like Halle-Neustadt, all-American communities also have ideologically imposed "prescriptive zoning codes, regulations, and subsidies" for decades; forget that O'Toole protests such regulations when they promote smart growth but not when they dictate the status quo as they do in almost every American locality; forget that even today's typical "smart growth" development contains tons of parking; forget that popular ideas among today's supposedly "anti-car" smart-growthers include the libertarian- and market-friendly concepts of charging fair market value for car parking and "unbundling" parking from local development regulation, thereby throwing opportunity at willing entrepreneurs; no, smart-growthers wish to re-erect the Berlin Wall, stack the populace in lifeless apartment blocks, revoke the American citizen's entitlement to a parcel of land, and institute Second-World squalor as a policy for America.

O'Toole puts so much effort into expressing that smart growth will lead to forcing an unwanted lifestyle on the average American, yet he fails to show any understanding that the status quo already does just that. He has stated elsewhere that those who do not like the isolating suburban, auto-oriented lifestyle can "self-select" themselves into some other community that better suits them, yet, without the smart growth movement, such places would no longer be built. If anyone is motivated by ideology, it is Randal O'Toole.

Michael Patrick 23:06 Pacific | #post |