Comments on: Governor Glendening on the benefits of Maryland’s Smart Growth http://blog.smartgrowthamerica.org/2009/11/09/governor-glendening-on-the-benefits-of-marylands-smart-growth/ News from around the country on creating better choices for our communities Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:49:26 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7.1 hourly 1 By: Jim Noonan http://blog.smartgrowthamerica.org/2009/11/09/governor-glendening-on-the-benefits-of-marylands-smart-growth/comment-page-1/#comment-5829 Jim Noonan Tue, 15 Dec 2009 13:08:21 +0000 http://blog.smartgrowthamerica.org/?p=939#comment-5829 Governor Glendening’s defense of Maryland’s Smart Growth and Neighborhood Conservation Initiatives is right on target. While the Washington Post headline is what got the Governor’s attention, in this case it is not the Post that got things wrong. They simply read an article written by the National Center for Smart Growth, Education and Research that clearly says that smart growth in Maryland has failed. In my opinion the fault for all of this lies at the State level. The National Center simply repeats statements the State has made for years, and have repeated in the last few months even as they tout last year’s ‘most significant planning legislation in a decade.’ They use a language of failure to justify taking what they see as ‘the necessary next steps’. The Maryland Department of Planning and the National Center have been out there for so long saying that smart growth has failed, that the conclusion is now accepted as fact. They will be hard pressed to react to repeated citations of the National Center’s article which uniformly interpret its finding just as the Post did. Instead of citing misleading, and often inaccurate statistics about land consumption, the State SHOULD be saying something like this: “Look. We can show in downtown and existing community revitalization activity across the state that “Smart Growth and Neighborhood Revitalization” (the whole initiative) has succeeded. We can even show that compared to the trends over the past decade in neighboring states that Maryland has actually mitigated the effects of a booming residential housing market (The Knaap study uses data through 2007) and therefore the parcel data shows a degree of success rather than failure. But we need to do more. We need to focus new infrastructure investment to support development and redevelopment in appropriate areas (a statement actually made in the Knaap article). We haven’t failed but we need to do more and do things in different ways.” Governor Glendening’s defense of Maryland’s Smart Growth and Neighborhood Conservation Initiatives is right on target. While the Washington Post headline is what got the Governor’s attention, in this case it is not the Post that got things wrong. They simply read an article written by the National Center for Smart Growth, Education and Research that clearly says that smart growth in Maryland has failed. In my opinion the fault for all of this lies at the State level. The National Center simply repeats statements the State has made for years, and have repeated in the last few months even as they tout last year’s ‘most significant planning legislation in a decade.’ They use a language of failure to justify taking what they see as ‘the necessary next steps’. The Maryland Department of Planning and the National Center have been out there for so long saying that smart growth has failed, that the conclusion is now accepted as fact. They will be hard pressed to react to repeated citations of the National Center’s article which uniformly interpret its finding just as the Post did.

Instead of citing misleading, and often inaccurate statistics about land consumption, the State SHOULD be saying something like this:

“Look. We can show in downtown and existing community revitalization activity across the state that “Smart Growth and Neighborhood Revitalization” (the whole initiative) has succeeded. We can even show that compared to the trends over the past decade in neighboring states that Maryland has actually mitigated the effects of a booming residential housing market (The Knaap study uses data through 2007) and therefore the parcel data shows a degree of success rather than failure. But we need to do more. We need to focus new infrastructure investment to support development and redevelopment in appropriate areas (a statement actually made in the Knaap article). We haven’t failed but we need to do more and do things in different ways.”

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