The paranoid style of American politics
by James A. Bacon
With Virginia Tea Party activists egging them on, Republican legislators have submitted at least six bills that would repeal the Urban Development Area (UDA) requirement for Virginia localities. Overturning the law would eliminate an important tool for local governments to contain growth-related costs and hold down taxes — presumably a high priority for the Tea Party.
“The bipartisan UDA statute of 2007 is designed to reduce the costs of infrastructure and the burden on taxpayers. That’s why we are astounded that Tea Party members would campaign so hard to repeal this fiscally conservative planning tool,” said Stewart Schwartz, Executive Director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth in a Tuesday joint statement of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, the Piedmont Environmental Council, the Southern Environmental Law Center and the League of Conservation Voters.
The opposition of the Tea Party — and I say this as a Tea Party sympathiser — arises from naive acceptance of misinformation supplied by a small group of Anti-Agenda 21 zealots led here in Virginia by Donna Holt, president of the Virginia Campaign for Liberty. Holt has energetically proselytized Tea Party organizations and other conservative groups across Virginia, and her message has taken root because no one has offered an opposing viewpoint.
Holt portrays the Smart Growth movement in Virginia as inspired by United Nation’s Agenda 21 project, which seeks to harness the power of government to implement sustainable environmental principles in communities across the globe. Her critique of Agenda 21 itself does have a basis in reality. Agenda 21 reflects a liberal-leftist worldview that entwines environmental sustainability with equity, social justice and the redistribution of wealth. Where Holt goes off the rails is in painting Virginia’s Smart Growth groups as similarly inclined, and even attacking such mainstream figures as House Speaker William J. Howell, R-Fredericksburg, for his leadership in passing the UDA law.
A year ago, Holt blasted out an email to Virginia Tea Parties employing characteristic rhetoric: “Speaker Howell is siding with big corporate developers and eco-extremists to rob you of the right to own and control the use of your private property. … If he has his way, you’ll be forced to forfeit your land in the suburbs for the development of high-density ‘urban development areas’ also called ‘smart growth’. … If they have their way, single family homes will be a thing of the past. We’d become mere lease holders of the homes we live in.”
There is no delicate way to put this: Such remarks are deluded. Virtually nothing in that quote is factually accurate.
I have seen no indication in the Virginia Campaign for Liberty website or in the public remarks I have heard her make that Holt understands the long, complex history of zoning, land use, transportation and growth-management policy in Virginia, much less the pro growth/no growth debates that long pre-dated the articulation of Agenda 21. I doubt she has had any interaction with Smart Growth advocates here in Virginia or has any acquaintance with their thinking. Perhaps most damning, I have seen her advance no alternative ideas for how fiscally stressed state and local governments can provide core services without raising taxes.
The anti-Agenda 21 movement is a case study in the “paranoid style” in American politics, and responsible Tea Party leaders would be well advised to entertain opposing perspectives. The Heritage Foundation, hardly an advocate of leftist social engineering, has distanced itself from the anti-Agenda 21 movement on the grounds that it is crowding out an intelligent critique of Smart Growth. (For details, see this blog post.)
As for Urban Development Areas, they are an admittedly imperfect solution to Virginia’s growth-management challenges. But it is hard to see how anyone would construe them as a gross violation of Virginians’ property rights. Time for a reality check:
All localities with a population of at least 20,000 or a growth rate of 15% are required to designate an Urban Development Area in their comprehensive plan. These areas should be designed to accommodate 10 to 20 years of population growth by incorporating such New Urbanism or Traditional Neighborhood Design elements as:
- Connectivity of road networks
- Connectivity of pedestrian networks
- Pedestrian-friendly road design
- Reduction of front- and side-yard setback requirements
- Mixed-use neighborhoods
- Reduction of subdivision street widths
- Satisfaction of requirements for storm water management
The law also provides for minimum densities of four residential units per acre and a floor-to-area ratio of 0.4 for commercial development.
None of that sounds terribly Marxist to me.
The law does not diminish anyone’s property rights: “Localities that establish Urban Development Areas may not limit or prohibit development in compliance with existing zoning nor refuse to consider a rezoning application for property outside of the Urban Development Area.”
The logic of the law is to encourage (not coerce) developers into concentrating development within a compact geographical area that state/local government can more cost effectively serve with utilities, roads and public services. It recognizes that the scattered, low-density and disconnected pattern of development that has prevailed in Virginia since the 1950s has driven up the cost of providing core services and has put relentless pressure on local governments to increase taxes.
The UDA law is fiscally conservative in its inspiration — something that Smart Growth advocates understand.
“The wish list for transportation projects has become simply unaffordable. Experience has shown that it is more costly to taxpayers and more damaging to farmland and forests to provide roads and other infrastructure for scattered development than for more compact, traditional neighborhoods,” said Trip Pollard of the Southern Environmental Law Center in the joint Smart Growth statement. “UDAs reduce transportation costs to the state and also save on water and sewer, police and fire, school busing and other costs.”
“The traditional neighborhood development envisioned by UDAs is reflective of the beloved, historic towns of Virginia and our best older suburbs that engender a sense of community that we have lost as development has become more scattered,” said Dan Holmes of the Piedmont Environmental Council. “This should be something that the Tea Party supports.”
Virginia is not California, where environmental zealots do run roughshod over property rights. Smart Growth in Virginia is not about marching to the tune of the U.N. It is not about social engineering, sweeping away single-family dwellings or taking away peoples’ automobiles. It is about subsidizing mass transit, an issue where I part company. But the Smart Growth movement does recognize a profound truth: that the cost of government services varies in proportion to which land development is compact or sprawling. Smart Growthers offer a coherent set of principles for reducing the cost of government and holding down taxes.
Republican representatives to the General Assembly should take heed.
