St. Albert's form-based zoning plan needs some additions before it can be called smart growth.
City council will receive an economic analysis of its smart growth plan next month. The plan proposes to tweak bylaws to create denser, walkable neighbourhoods in the annexed lands.
City planners have pitched it as a way to cut greenhouse gas emissions, land use and utility costs while forging strong neighbourhoods. But some see it as a disaster in the making.
Smart growth might look nice, says Michael Mooney of the Urban Development Institute of Edmonton (which represents local developers), but there's no proof it will work here.
Smart growth advocates ignore the fact that St. Albert has cold winters, Mooney argues, which is a problem for walkability — no one will walk to the store when it's 40 below. They also ignore current trends: some 60 per cent of area home sales are for single-family lots, suggesting little demand for denser development.
"We're still a very auto-orientated society, and just wishing it to go away doesn't work," he says. "Why would you design your whole new area around a design that won't meet market conditions?"
Winds of change
Mooney would be right if those conditions were permanent. They're not.
Like most of North America, St. Albert's population is changing fast. Couples with kids (the group most likely to want big homes) made up 60 per cent of the population in 1986, according to the city. Today, they're the minority, with 60 per cent of the city made up of singles, seniors, childless couples, and others. These groups tend to prefer smaller, more compact, walkable neighbourhoods, say analysts.
The market's set to shift, says smart growth guru Dan Burden, and big-house builders could be left behind. The 2004 U.S. National Survey on Communities found that 61 per cent of people planning to buy homes in the next three years preferred a walkable neighbourhood compared to a conventional one. Analyst A.C. Nelson projects that by 2025 the U.S. will have a surplus of big-lot houses and a 75 per cent shortage of small ones due to changing demand. The city needs to plan its future neighbourhoods to reflect future conditions, not present ones.
As for our cold winters, says Reid Ewing, professor of city planning at the University of Utah, "If it's 40 below, no one's going to want to walk. But it's not 40 below all the time." Even if no one walks during winter, they would at least have the chance to walk the other six months of the year — a chance they would be more likely to take if they lived in a walkable neighbourhood.
Climate change, an obesity epidemic, and the rising cost of gas and infrastructure all point to walkability as the future, Ewing says. Compact design and transit can eliminate up to 38 per cent of a city's transportation emissions, his research finds. Studies by Smart Growth B.C. suggest a consistent correlation between walkable neighbourhoods, walking, and less obesity. These benefits make it worthwhile to pursue smart growth — no matter what the weather.
Market disaster?
Smart growth can bring wealth to a community, according to the International Economic Development Council. Portland's streetcar line helped spark some $1.4 billion in development along its length, while its conversion of an old brewery district to mixed-use business and housing almost quintupled land values, creating a thriving marketplace.
Investors also see money in smart growth. A 2009 report from PricewaterhouseCoopers reports that buyers are flocking towards "upscale, pedestrian-friendly neighbourhoods" and fleeing the exurbs and places where getting milk means a 15-minute drive. Buyers dumped on remote, car-dependent suburbs during last year's real-estate crash, notes Joe Cortright of CEOs for Cities, causing them to lose more value than downtown homes.
But smart growth doesn't always make you rich. Just 17 per cent of Vancouver's new jobs have moved to its smart-growth-planned town centres, notes a 2005 study by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). Halifax, likewise, has seen most of its new jobs go to car-dependent business parks.
It can also be hard on homebuyers. Critics such as Wendell Cox say that smart growth drives up home prices due to greater regulatory costs, making them unaffordable to many families.
But these problems aren't due to smart growth itself, says Ray Tomalty, the professor of urban planning at McGill University who wrote the aforementioned CMHC study, but our implementation of it.
Most of the smart growth failures he studied had relied almost exclusively on a land-use plan to make their new neighbourhoods grow. Toronto had great plans to reduce sprawl, for example, but failed in part because its development fees penalized denser development. Calgary set up smart-growth suburbs but didn't follow through with bus service to them, making them car-dependent. Big box stores flourished there as a result.
These communities also ran into entrenched resistance from developers, he found. Builders shunned the higher costs that came with smart growth's wider sidewalks and other features, preferring instead to build the cheaper, conventional homes today's buyers seemed to want.
Fixing the gaps
St. Albert faces many of these same problems, and will need much more than just a form-based zoning plan to solve them.
Land-use plans are useful as a prelude, Tomalty says, but have to be followed with policies to direct growth according to them. "We have to get beyond the superficial level in which we've been adopting policy."
That means changing taxes and regulations to direct homes and business where we want them to go. Many cities have policies that support sprawl, Burden notes — Sacramento, Calif. used to charge new suburbs the same sewer hookup fee as it did downtown homes, for example, despite the fact that it cost more to get the sewers to them. Eliminating these and creating tax incentives for denser, mixed-use development will encourage companies to build smart.
It also means building affordability into those plans. "Unless you make a conscious effort to build in affordable housing," says Martin Bierbaum, associate director of the National Centre for Smart Growth at the University of Maryland, "it's not going to happen."
American cities have used subsidies, low-interest loans, and legislation to ensure builders include affordable homes in their neighbourhoods. Seattle, Burden notes, charges developers a fee for buildings over a certain height that gets refunded if they add affordable units to it.
And we should look for legal methods to hold us to our growth targets. It's too easy for cities to change development plans in response to local pressure, Tomalty says. Vancouver has had some success at curbing sprawl because a regional planning council and a provincial land reserve held its expansion in check. St. Albert should work with the Capital Region Board to create binding land reserves to curb its own expansion.
As Mooney points out, developers have to build homes for today, not 25 years from now. We won't get smart growth simply by making a plan for it. If we want walkability, we'll have to work against current market forces and build it ourselves.
