Smart Growth and Regional Planning

• I believe in the principles of the Smart Growth movement: suburban sprawl is an unsustainable form of development and devastating to our environment and the ideals of social justice and democracy; regional problems require regional solutions; the massive government subsidies for suburban sprawl are the fundamental historical causes of the urban crisis and the prime catalysts for the patterns of residential segregation by race and class in the United States; the "free-market" ideology of developers and homeowners who contribute to suburban sprawl is based on a mythical understanding of this history; and building better living spaces requires sustainable development policies that include urban revitalization, higher density, mixed-use zoning, walkable communities, mass transit, and race/class diversity. I believe that progressive land-use policy is not only about environmental sustainability, but also one of the most important fronts for a revitalized civil rights and social justice movement in the United States.

• I am a member of the Public Interest Research Group in Michigan (PIRGIM), a nonpartisan and progressive advocacy organization that is actively involved in the anti-sprawl and environmental sustainability campaigns. I also recommend the Michigan Land Use Institute as a resource for Smart Growth initiatives in Michigan, a state which is disadvantaged from translating most of the good ideas of the MLUI into policy by its extremely decentralized political structure, automobile-based political culture, and longstanding tensions between the city of Detroit and its surrounding suburbs. For information and debate about local planning and politics in Ann Arbor and Michigan, I recommend two blogs: Arbor Update and Ann Arbor Is Overrated.

• I also work closely with Students for PIRGIM, a campus organization at the University of Michigan that is at the center of land-use debates in the state as well as promoting anti-sprawl and higher density policies in metropolitan Ann Arbor. In the fall of 2003, Ann Arbor voters passed a Greenbelt referendum that will provide taxpayer money for the purchase of development rights outside of the city limits, in an effort to slow down the rate of sprawl. For more information on the Greenbelt and other local environmental issues, visit the Ecology Center or the website of the Friends of Ann Arbor Open Space. In the fall of 2003, Students for PIRGIM hosted a panel discussion on the Greenbelt that included promises by leading advocates that a commitment to increasing density within the city would follow passage of the referendum to address sprawl beyond its boundaries. Along with my colleague Rick Hills in the U-M law school, I wrote an editorial about the Greenbelt and Affordable Housing in Ann Arbor that ran in the Ann Arbor News on November 16, 2003. WEMU 89.1, the NPR station at Eastern Michigan University, interviewed me about sprawl and affordable housing in Ann Arbor on May 5, 2004. The interview was part of the "Issues of the Environment" segment hosted by local "Morning Edition" host David Fair that runs every Wednesday at 8:20 am.

• The Regionalism agenda is crucial for public policies that curb suburban sprawl, revitalize our cities, improve our environment, and break down patterns of race and class segregation. The two best resources for regionalism are the Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy at the Brookings Institution, and the Metropolitan Area Research Corporation supervised by Myron Orfield. I also have compiled a list of Urban and Suburban Resources through my History 364 website. From these and other sites, I have gathered a list of the key elements of the Smart Growth movement into a regionalist agenda:

**Metropolitan Governance (City-Suburban Consolidation)
**Prohibit Sprawl Subsidies
**Open Space/Farmland Preservation
**Urban Growth Boundaries
**Tax Revenue Pooling
**School Funding Equalization/School District Consolidation
**Affordable Housing Subsidies (Racial/Class Integration)
**Mandatory Mixed-Use and Mixed-Income Zoning (Inclusionary Zoning)
**Mass Transit Funding/Mandatory Transit-Oriented Developments
**Higher Density Infill Development
**Urban Redevelopment and Revitalization (with safeguards against Gentrification)
**Genuine and Accessible Public Spaces

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