Smart growth critic presents case

Randal O’Toole is a man whose neighborhood was replanned by government officials as part of Portland Metro’s 2040 planning process in the mid-1990s — an event which launched his career as an anti-new urbanist. O’Toole is profoundly pessimistic about the capacity of government, and physical design in general, to ever improve a place — especially if the plan involves higher densities. O’Toole has written a lengthy (over 500 pages), disjointed book, The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths: How Smart Growth Will Harm American Cities. A Libertarian, O’Toole refers to government activities in general as “coercion.” He describes the smart growth movement in caricature, e.g. new urbanists believe that planning will make cars vanish, they want everybody to live in high-density, mixed-use dwellings, and they want to outlaw low-density suburbia. The book is full of unsupported assertions, both large (“smart growth will make congestion, pollution, and other urban problems worse than ever”) and small (increased pedestrian activity in one mixed-use town center is due only to people unable to find parking near their destination). Even the title — in future tense — betrays O’Toole’s lack of solid evidence. O’Toole’s arguments are strongest when dealing with his native Portland, Oregon — where housing prices shot up drastically in the 1990s, and, he says, traffic increased 50 percent from 1990 to 1998. These arguments are undermined by not acknowledging that a rapidly growing high-tech economy contributed to the rise in house prices, and by the fact that the rise in vehicle miles traveled predated the implementation of smart growth planning measures — which began slowly in the late 1990s and likely will continue for decades. The book, self-published by O’Toole’s Thoreau Institute, is useful to better know the arguments of one of the leading critics of smart growth, but reading him is like watching a hunter fire buckshot at random. O’Toole hits a target on occasion, but in between there’s a lot of tedious noise and smoke. Contact: Thoreau Institute, www.ti.org.