Planning Policy and Politics: Smart Growth and the States

By John M. DeGrove

Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2005, 360 pp., paperback $30.

John M. DeGrove sets himself a grim task: gathering an immense amount of information on a Smart Growth movement that currently seems stymied. In the foreword to this 360-page book, Armando Carbonell of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy says DeGrove “has limned a drama animated by the exploits of flesh-and-blood politicians, bureaucrats, and advocates … At times, it is a nuanced story of amazing intricacy: where else will you see parsed the distinct positions on land use control held by the Oregon Farm Bureau, the Grange and the Wheat League? … But there are also epic tales of pitched battles, unexpected coalitions, victories snatched from the jaws of defeat, and vice versa.”

DeGrove, long a prominent advocate of strong land-use planning in Florida and now in his eighties, deserves an award for tenacity. Who else would assemble the history of Smart Growth and its precursor, “growth management,” from the 1970s to the present, compiling year-by-year chronicles of legislation, regulation, and political machination? For planners, advocates, and others who want to know how any of a number of growth-control programs came into being and how it has worked or failed to work, this book is an indispensable source.

DeGrove provides detailed, chapter-length discussions of Smart Growth progress in nine states that have launched some of the most important planning initiatives: Oregon, Florida, New Jersey, Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont, Georgia, Maryland, and Washington. What it comes down to, however, is the story of Smart Growth running up against property rights activists and the forces of development-as-usual in the past few years — a reaction that has thrown significant growth management measures into jeopardy. Oregon is the starkest example.

In a referendum in November 2004, Oregon voters approved Measure 37 by a margin of 60 to 40 percent. That decision undermines the system that governments in Oregon had used to protect rural land and concentrate much of the state’s development within urban growth boundaries. The struggle over Measure 37’s effects continues to this day, but DeGrove is surely right when he says “passage of Measure 37 clearly calls into question the future of the nation’s leading system to manage its growth and change.” While the community design and planning movement known as New Urbanism becomes ever stronger, the public policy approach known as Smart Growth has been put on the defensive.