The Omaha World Herald
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Let Liberty, Sense Shape Urban Growth

BY MARK W. POWELL
August 17, 2000

Analysis and commentary by the writer, of Salt Lake City, have appeared in major North American newspapers since 1989. This article was commissioned by the Sutherland Institute, a Salt Lake City-based think tank

As cities grow into the new century - greater Salt Lake City, for instance, may triple its population by 2050 - major questions loom about maintaining and enhancing our quality of life. First-glance modern "wisdom" might be that we need more growth management and community zoning from state and local government. But we shouldn't jump to that conclusion or even accept it.

Modern municipal zoning is an albatross not only facilitating ponderous government encroachment on legitimate private sectors but often demonstrably failing its presumed goals of mitigating traffic and pollution, preserving open space and promoting infrastructure efficiency. Excessive codes and regulations artificially cut home building and boost home prices. That's one reason this issue is one of few making bedfellows of conservatives and liberals.

Conservatives decry government's constraint of property rights and free markets; liberals decry lower-income Americans' losing access to homes. Housing expert Anthony Downs of the liberal Brookings Institute estimated that "probably over half of the cost of building new housing in the average U.S. community is a direct result of local government regulations rather than of any minimum requirements truly necessary for the occupants' health and safety."

Many communities' zoning regulations serve those who've gotten what they want while, or by, denying others similar success. Haves confronting have-nots often become NIMBYs (not in my back yard) and BANANAs (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything) and co-opt planning and zoning to their ends.

Development anarchy is not the answer. The answers are less government control and more citizen responsibility - and a different fundamental idea. We must overthrow the bad idea that government must control development and dictate property use because free people can't or shouldn't shape communities themselves. This country was built by free people pursuing life, liberty and happiness. Those imperatives should inform further growth.

Environmental conservation in growing areas is important to everyone's quality of life and occasionally requires government's intervention - but not its habitual leading role. Preserving and creating attractive, healthy urban and suburban environments is rightly the citizens' responsibility, both in volunteer groups and individually. If they cede their interest and responsibility to government, it will be all too happy to take them and become as dubious a master for fostering quality environment as for improving education.

While government micromanagement is supposedly improving our surroundings and lives, it's eroding a basic right, ownership and use of property. It's no accident that four of the first five rights in the Bill of Rights protect, in part or exclusively, private property - making it arguably the paramount American liberty.

John Adams said at our beginning: "The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tryanny commence." Our country grew and prospered in the spirit of Adams's conviction. Of course the Founders didn't see strip malls, Wal-Marts and modern urban sprawl; but, being wise, they foresaw great human and infrastructure growth. It's unlikely they'd ever have supported control of community development by government of any level, especially state or federal.

Free people earnestly pursuing business and residential interests can work together to achieve good results, often better results than expensive, oppressive, cumbersome government.

Zoning advocates may point to Houston, America's only major zoning-free city. Defined by almost unfathomable sprawl and relatively little mixed-neighborhood ambiance and convenience, it's not the homiest city. But it's a function of that area's economy and culture as much as it's a function of no zoning. Houstonians saw little benefit in government regulatory onus and rejected it.

Many cities' regulations are both too numerous and mis-aimed. Many planning-zoning bureaucracies are simply too rigid to allow timely, if any, development outside narrow conventions.

Neighborhood quality of life reaches from the individual up, not from government down. Government can no more legislate that than it can morality. Local government may play a role in response to specific need, but as last resort, not driver of the process.