Geoffrey Anderson, the new executive director of Smart Growth America, injected a sense of urgency into CNU in early April by calling for an aggressive campaign to shape development policies across the nation.
“We have to rally people, do polling, hire lobbyists, run a campaign,” Anderson told an enthusiastic crowd April 5 during CNU’s annual congress in Austin, Texas.
Less than three months after leaving the US Environmental Protection Agency to lead the eight-year-old Smart Growth America (SGA), Anderson said he’s become convinced that “we’re losing, or we’re not winning yet … so we need to do some things differently.”
“We need to move more toward work that is like political campaigns,” declared Anderson, who ran the smart-growth program of EPA from 2000 until last January. “If we are not advancing proposals in a political way … we will have lost,” he warned. He argued that SGA, CNU, and other advocates of compact, pedestrian-oriented, transit-accessible development must coalesce around issues that are capable of altering the public agenda.
Advocates of intelligent community design and regional planning must “have specific targets” and “choose what’s important,” he said during a Congress that attracted some 1,500 participants from the US, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere.
The “old way,” not yet abandoned by new urbanists, has been to “do the study, show the connections, make speeches, and hope,” Anderson said. That approach all too often results in failure, he said. “The right answer has never been enough to make change,” he contended. “You can see the wrong idea implemented every day.”
“We rally around the fact that we need a better environment,” Anderson observed, “and then we fragment” and go back to relatively specialized concerns, unable to achieve far-reaching progress. “We need to stay together on a focused agenda.”
To drive his point home, Anderson cited two campaigns in 2004 — one in Oregon, the other in Colorado. In Oregon, libertarians and other foes of planning sponsored a successful statewide ballot initiative that has undermined land-use planning. Measure 37 elevated the rights of property owners who wanted to develop their land, at the expense of existing government land-use regulations. Having done that, the opponents of planning and land-use regulation then launched similar efforts in eight other states.
The same November that Oregonians voted for Measure 37, residents of metropolitan Denver voted for a region-wide sales tax increase to start FasTracks, a 12-year public transportation expansion plan for their region. FasTracks — aimed at establishing a 119-mile system of light rail, diesel commuter rail, and electric commuter rail lines — was a great victory, in Anderson’s view. But unlike the Measure 37 campaign, it wasn’t followed up by a series of similar initiatives elsewhere.
Proponents of smart growth may have to conduct “opposition research,” among other tactics, Anderson said. He admitted that he may not have “all the right answers,” but said it’s clear that “we have to invent ourselves again.” He argued that “the time is right for this [campaign] because of market factors” such as the high price of petroleum and the depression in the homebuilding industry.
Anderson’s speech, on the next to last day of the congress, energized many of those attending. “Clearly, we were inspired by Geoff Anderson’s talk of a need for a campaign,” Ray Gindroz, the new chairman of CNU, told the congress’s closing session the following morning.
David Goldberg, communications director of Smart Growth America, elaborated for New Urban News on Anderson’s talk. Goldberg said there is likely to be a shift “from working primarily to develop and disseminate a knowledge base that we hope will take root, to more actively aligning our coalition allies toward campaigning for significant leaps forward in targeted areas.”
“For now, that means trying to get land use/transportation measures into climate change legislation and working on a campaign for bold new direction in the next federal transportation bill,” Goldberg said. SGA is a coalition of more than 100 national, state, and regional organizations that advocate for making neighborhoods, towns, cities, and regions more livable and sustainable while preserving valuable landscapes. National members include CNU, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the American Farmland Trust, and The Trust for Public Land.
In the closing plenary, Chicago architect Doug Farr announced that the CNU board has endorsed a campaign aimed at achieving major changes in sustainability by 2030 (see page 22 of theApril/May 2008 issue for details). Farr floated the name “2030 Community Campaign: A Convenient Remedy” which may include among its goals a 50 percent reduction in vehicle miles traveled and a 25 percent reduction in buildings’ electrical consumption.
In the same session, author James Howard Kunstler argued for profound changes in US leadership. Among Kunstler’s proposals: “We desperately need to rebuild the railroad industry in America if we’re going to go anywhere.”
This article is available in the April/May 2008 issue of New Urban News, along with many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue. |