For all of you planners out there who have believed in the “goodness” of your life’s work (this includes me, btw), here’s a perspective that should make us all sit up and go “hmmmph, really?”
This may sound like something directly out of the AICP exam, but do you all know what the HUD 701 Planning Assistance program was, and how it likely influenced the broad spread of local comprehensive planning and associated land-use regulations?
Many credit the 701 grants made by HUD to local communities, regional councils, and states with the institutionalization of urban planning. Money given to these local entities helped them to hire planners (and thus motivated the establishment of urban planning programs at universities to generate more of those now-in-demand planners) to create local comprehensive plans and write code for zoning and subdivision ordinances. All good, right?
Here’s how Patrick Dugan, a past respected planning director of several cities and regional planning agencies in Washington State and Oregon and planning consultant, wrote about the 701 program several years ago in The Western Planner:
Ever wonder how comprehensive planning got started in your community? If you are in a small- to mid-size community, chances are that planning began with a Housing and Urban Development (HUD) 701 grant made to your community between 1954 and 1981. If your city did not receive a 701 grant directly, it may have participated in a council of government (or similar association of local governments) that prepared comprehensive plans using 701 funds. Even if this assistance did not reach your community directly or indirectly, your community may have emulated those communities that had their plans financed by 701 by developing plans with other grants or its own funds.
Planning probably would still have evolved even if there had been no HUD 701 or similar program, but it would have no doubt been a much slower evolution. The 701 program primed the pump for planning by reaching into virtually every community, even very small and rural ones. While it would be hard to document the value of these 701 plans, they must have had some value to the communities they served, since after the funding went away, most local governments found a way to continue planning, often picking up the bill for local planning from their own scarce and constricting revenues. To those of us who practiced planning during the 701 period, it would have seemed impossible that planning would have taken root without federal or state aid.
Great stuff, right? A great legacy. But now that we’re in the throes of a crisis in housing that is blamed at least in part on local land use planning and regulation, here comes an alarming study that puts even more blame on those local land use efforts, specifically because of the HUD 701 program.
Taming the Growth Machine: The Long-Run Consequences of Federal Urban Planning Assistance, by Beau Bressler of UC Davis and Tianfang Cui of New York University, just out early this month, cites plenty of evidence that communities, after adopting plans and regulations funded by 701 money, built less housing than their counterparts that did not use 701 funds. Say what?
From their study abstract:
Planning assistance caused municipalities to build 20% fewer housing units per decade over the 50 years that followed. Regulatory innovation steered construction in assisted areas away from apartments and toward larger single-family homes. Textual evidence related to zoning and development politics further shows that, since the 1980s, assisted communities have disincentivized housing supply by passing on development costs to developers. These findings suggest that federal intervention in planning helped institutionalize practices that complicate community growth, with subsequent consequences for national housing affordability.
Their study is pretty dense and uses a lot of statistical modelling and other methods to compare and contrast, but it is certainly a worthy criticism of just what was accomplished with the proliferation of federal assistance and associated “accepted practices” for local planning. The ultimate conclusion is quite damning:
Our main result on housing supply uses decennial Census data on changes in the housing stock. We find that for the average municipality treated by 701 assistance, each decade following treatment in the 1960s had 18-20% fewer housing units started than the policy counterfactual… (and) that the effect accelerates to 20-23% fewer units per decade after 1970.
Much of this they attribute to new requirements that reduce the ability for apartments to be built, and the minimum lot size for homes increased.
The study authors go on to show that after 1970, communities that had received 701 funds also were more prevalent in requiring new developments to provide more “public goods,” such as parks, school sites, roadways and other features, which made housing more expensive.
Like I said, the study is dense, there’s lots to read about their methodology and sources, but the conclusions are there for all to see.
So how did this happen? The study, in discussing to some extent the politics of local land use, seems to imply that these new-fangled planning tools and processes were in essence captured by those residents of communities with an interest in keeping their home values up and growing (they cite William Fischel a fair amount). In essence, they become the NIMBYs and they use the political processes of local government to dominate. So does that make us planners complicit in this use of the planning tools?
Something surely to think about.