The Best-Laid Plans. Randal O'Toole
land, each suitable for dozens of different uses. Each person in the region may have a different idea about the best use of each parcel, and picking any particular use for a given parcel will influence the best possible uses of other nearby parcels. This means that the number of data needed to find the optimum use of each parcel in the region is literally in the quadrillions. This is far beyond the ability of anyone to collect, much less comprehend.
In response, planners simplify. Too often, that simplification is not limited to the models planners use to understand what they are planning. Instead, it extends to actually simplifying reality. Oregon planners, for example, believe that the only legitimate lifestyles are urban and rural. State planning rules prohibit anyone from building a house on their own land in the 95 percent of the state that is zoned rural unless they own at least 160 acres, actually farm the land, and earned $40,000 to $80,000 (depending on land productivity) farming it in two of the past three years. This rule was needed, said the state, to prevent “lawyers, doctors, and others not really farming [from] building houses in farm zones.”3
Planning a complex regional economy becomes more feasible once planners simplify the economy to just a few possible lifestyles. But that does not mean that the economy planners get will be as productive or desirable as one that is allowed to evolve with minimal planning and regulation.
New Urban design, the idea of high-density, mixed-use developments, often located on transit lines, is another simplification. Though planners deny it, such so-called transit-oriented developments have become a one-size-fits-all solution to any urban problem.
• Do you have a decaying warehouse district near your downtown? Build a transit-oriented development such as Portland’s Pearl District.
• Do you have a thriving suburb where most people drive to most places they go? Build a transit-oriented development such as the Round in the Portland suburb of Beaverton.
• Do you have an undeveloped greenfield inside the urban-growth boundary whose owner is eager to subdivide? Build a transit-oriented development such as Orenco near the Portland suburb of Hillsboro.
• How about a town so small it does not even have any regular transit service? Build a high-density, mixed-use development such as one recently proposed in my current hometown of Bandon, a town of 3,000 people.4
The simplifications planners make may change over time. In the 1950s and 1960s, planning was all about urban renewal: slum clearance and construction of high-rise luxury housing or high-rise low-income housing projects. In the 1990s and early 2000s, planning focuses on suburban renewal: redevelopment of suburbs to higher densities. Perhaps in another couple of decades planning will turn to exurban renewal, with planners attempting to impose their visions on the increasing number of telecommuters who choose to live in rural areas. But in all these cases, the plans are based on planners’ simplified notions of how people should live rather than on how people actually live.
9. Urban Renewal
In June 2005, five members of the U.S. Supreme Court agreed that New London, Connecticut, could take people’s homes by eminent domain and give or sell the land to private developers, even if the area was not blighted. While this decision provoked widespread outrage, few noted that Justice Stevens’s majority opinion specifically approved of the taking because New London had “carefully formulated an economic development plan that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community.”1 Justice Kennedy concurred, saying, “The taking occurred in the context of a comprehensive development plan.”2 As the American Planning Association gleefully observed, “The decision validates the essential role of planning”—at least, essential to the process of taking people’s homes by eminent domain.3
In other words, the majority of the Court was seduced by the claims of urban planners. These five justices never asked whether the outcomes of plans ever turned out as well as the planners promised. They merely presumed that, if a plan had been “carefully formulated,” the benefits would be greater than the costs.
Tell that to the former owners of homes and businesses in the Bronx, Ft. Lee, New Jersey, or many other places whose properties were taken by eminent domain decades ago and reduced to rubble for “urban renewal.” On many of these sites, that rubble can still be seen today as no urban renewal ever took place.
Or tell it to the nearly one million low-income families—80 percent of which were black—displaced by urban renewal—sometimes called “Negro removal”—between 1950 and 1980. Since urban renewal often replaced slums with luxury housing, one study found that urban renewal “succeeded in materially reducing the supply of low-cost housing in America.”4 Another study concluded that urban renewal cost the average displaced family “20 to 30 percent of one year’s income.”5
Or tell it to residents of Greenwich Village, New York, whose neighborhood was saved from urban renewal bulldozers by the efforts of people like the late Jane Jacobs. Today, property in that neighborhood is extremely valuable, no thanks to the urban planners of the 1950s and 1960s who considered it a blighted slum and slated it for demolition.
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a government agency could use eminent domain to take property from private owners for redevelopment if land around the property was “blighted”—even if the property itself was not blighted. Just as in 2005, the fact that the agency in question had written a comprehensive plan swayed the Court’s decision.6 The ruling led many cities to prepare grandiose urban-renewal plans, some of which proposed to sweep away entire neighborhoods of thousands of families. One of those plans called for leveling 14 blocks in Manhattan and displacing nearly 10,000 residents and workers to build an eight-lane elevated freeway connecting the Holland Tunnel with the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges.
Jacobs, then a critic for Architectural Forum magazine, responded by writing The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which she described as “an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.” Urban planning, she said, was no better than “the pseudoscience of bloodletting” because it has “not yet broken with the specious comfort of wishes, familiar superstitions, oversimplifications, and symbols, and [has] not yet embarked upon the adventure of probing the real world.” “Having swallowed the initial fallacies and having been provisioned with tools,” planners “go on logically to the greatest destructive excesses.”7
Since urban renewal was legitimized by the existence of blight, Jacobs focused much of the book on proving that many high-density, mixed-use urban neighborhoods were not blighted at all but were living, vibrant communities. A journalist at heart, she took a journalist’s approach to the problem: “The way to get at what goes on in the seemingly mysterious and perverse behavior of cities,” she wrote, “is to look closely, and with as little previous expectation as is possible, at the most ordinary scenes and events, and attempt to see what they mean and whether any threads of principle emerge among them.”8
By looking closely at her neighborhood, Jacobs concluded that cities need “a most intricate and close-grained diversity of uses that give each other constant mutual support, both economically and socially.” To attain the diversity necessary to allow a city to thrive, she continued, “four conditions are indispensable”: mixed uses, short blocks, a mixture of old and new buildings, and a dense concentration of residents as well as workers. “The necessity for these four conditions is the most important point this book has to make.”9
There is a contradiction here. First, Jacobs tears down the science of urban planning. But then, by reducing to a simple formula all the conditions needed for a lively, thriving city, she creates the foundation for a new science of urban planning. “By deliberately inducing these four conditions, planning can induce city vitality,” she claims.10
Jacobs cautions readers not to “try to transfer my observations [about great cities] into guides as to what goes on in towns, or little cities, or in suburbs.” But it is a half-hearted warning: she admits she likes “dense cities best” and considers suburbs, with their separated uses, to be “city destroying.” Eventually, as suburbs are “engulfed in cities,” she expects