Smart Growth Is Better Than Dumb Growth S ome of the best cities in the U.S. were created by plan around an economic centerpoint. Some of the worst were the unplanned product of an amoebic sprawl that slithered along according to developers' opportunistic ambitions. Today, even some of the best planned communities have degraded along with their original economic focus. Size has made the unplanned ones even worse than when they started. It is time for that degradation and slithering to stop.
Efficiency is the most obvious.
Placement of housing, jobs, schools, shopping and transportation should make them all work together as a coordinated package. This makes sense financially, since extending sewers, schools and transportation to support opportunistic growth costs a fortune and doesn't work as well. But most cities and towns don't work with a clean slate. If development and economic decline are not balanced, people will vote with their feet to work and raise their families elsewhere. This was seen in many cities where urban cores largely were abandoned by the middle class after they became unsafe and unattractive.