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Urban Land
and the
Wharton Real Estate Review
in 2003 demonstrate that
retail and office properties located as part of a mixed-
use ‘Main Street’ type development often perform
better than conventional suburban strip centers by
substantial margins (Bohl, 2003; Rybczynski, 2003).
While these trends are impressive, opponents of
Smart Growth and New Urbanism point to the over-
whelming preponderance of conventional sprawl
development in America, and ask why Smart Growth
and New Urbanism didn’t succeed long ago if the
ideas are as good as they’re claimed to be? Why don’t
they dominate the market place today?
The superficial reasonableness of this argument
obscures the facts of history. As we have noted at
some length, dispersed suburban development in
America since World War II was implicitly directed
by federal housing and transportation policies and
subsidized by government funds, including generous
tax breaks on mortgage interest payments. Low
density, large lot, car-dependant suburban life has
been heavily marketed as the zenith of American
social achievement, and this pattern of consumption
and land use has been bureaucratized by planners and
engineers as the only modern way of building and
developing. Developers generally have a history of
following the line of least resistance to quick profits,
and thus the marketplace has succumbed to years of
direction, advertising and subsidies, churning out
cookie-cutter subdivisions and strip shopping centers
to meet the demands that have been manufactured in
the minds of suburban Americans.
In short, it has not been a free market. Principles
of planning and design now labeled as Smart Growth
or New Urbanist were illegal under most local zoning
codes across America for 40 years. In many places
they still are. Until very recently, consumers have not
had much of a choice. In a parody of Henry Ford’s
famous offer of customer choice of color for his
Model T (any color so long as it’s black) homebuyers
and business owners during the 1950s through the
1980s could choose either conventional suburbia,
or … conventional suburbia. Now that Smart
Growth and New Urbanist options are becoming
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available, they are claiming an increasing share of the
suburban market, while studies have shown that the
unmet demand that exists today for compact, alter-
native forms of development comprises between
30 and more than 50 percent of the same market
(Steuteville, 2001: pp. 1, 3–4). This consumer
preference will likely grow as more and more smart
developments come on line. Meanwhile there is clear
evidence from developers’ own costing comparisons
that New Urbanist developments are more cost
effective than their conventional sprawl counterpart.
The developers of a New Urbanist community in
Commerce City, Colorado costed out a compact
New Urbanist development and compared it in detail
with an alternative conventional subdivision for the
same site. The total development costs for the 171 acre
(68.4 hectares) Belle Creek community came to
$6.9 million for the New Urbanist scheme against
$6.5 million for the conventional design. However,
the conventional design yielded only 175 units,
146 single-family, and 29 townhouses. By compari-
son, the New Urbanist version yielded 212 units,
183 single-family, and 29 townhouses. This greater
yield reduced the developers’ cost per lot to $32 567
in the New Urbanist design as opposed to the more
expensive $37 146 per lot in the conventional version
(Schmitz: p. 183).
The last of our six myths, that Smart Growth
means more government regulations that slow devel-
opment and increase costs is the hardest to disprove,
as there is sometimes a disconnect between theory
and practice. In theory, local governments wishing to
promote Smart Growth will revise their regulations
to streamline the process of approval and provide
incentives for developers to comply with the new
rules. In practice this isn’t always so. The decade of
the 1990s in America is littered with examples of
Smart Growth initiatives that were frustrated by city
zoning ordinances and development regulations that
made innovative developments based on traditional
urbanism illegal. There were several other instances
where the project was realized only by the persistence
of the developer and his or her architects in the face
of official opposition and adherence to outdated
standards. Many, many more developers gave up and
reverted to standard sprawl subdivisions that were
approved easily. Fortunately this depressing situation
is changing. The authors and their colleagues in the
Lawrence Group have collectively been involved
since 1994 in rewriting zoning ordinances and devel-
opment regulations for nearly two dozen towns and
cities in the southeastern states of America, including
model codes for the Atlanta metropolitan region.
Many other architect-planners are at work on the
same task across America.
The codes we write embody the Smart Growth
principles noted earlier in this chapter, and also pro-
vide incentives to reward developers for embracing the
more advanced ideas, including speedy approvals for
complying with the more design specific rules. The
codes are focused around traditional urban concepts,
and in their content and graphic format, they go a
long way to resolving the problems of implementing
Smart Growth concepts (see Appendices III, IV and V).
However, there is one further difficulty: elected offi-
cials are sometimes reluctant to give approval quickly
to new schemes within their jurisdiction, thus 
obviating one of the main incentives to developers.
Sometimes this is to avoid the impression of govern-
ment being merely the handmaiden of developers. At
other times, elected officials and some professional
planners have trouble in reorienting their thinking
toward new concepts of design and building form and
away from conventional formulas based on use and
generic dimensions. Progress is being made in this
vitally important area, and we discuss some of our
examples further in our case studies.
As we noted before, some of these myths arise
from honest misconceptions about new ideas, but at
other time, opponents of Smart Growth and New
Urbanism spread disinformation deliberately. Most
of this latter kind of opposition in America comes
from groups on the conservative right of the political
spectrum. At a convention in February 2003, a
coalition of right-wing, libertarian and free-market
organizations met to plot the downfall of Smart
Growth. These groups, such as the Thoreau Institute,
the Buckeye Institute, the Cascade Policy Institute,
the Heartland Institute, Heritage Foundation, and the
Reason Foundation, publicly despise Smart Growth
and New Urbanism as intrusive government plan-
ning and ‘social engineering’ that tramples on
Americans’ ‘rights’ to do whatever they want with
their land. Not content with spreading disinforma-
tion, the 2003 conference actively promoted smear
campaigns against Smart Growth advocates and New
Urbanists. Speakers at the event advised attendees to
‘relentlessly’ undermine the credibility of profession-
als like ourselves, and paint us and our colleagues in
the minds of the public as ‘pointy-headed intellectual
fascists’ out to ruin people’s lives (Langdon, 2003b:
p. 7). Theorists of