Smart Growth in Dumb Places: Sustainability, Disaster, and the Future of the American City

I. INTRODUCTION On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake rocked Japan and triggered a massive tsunami that devastated the country's northern coast.1 While the cautionary tales of this heart-breaking disaster will be written over many years or even decades, some critical lessons can already be discerned. Japan's experience confirms, for example, that strict, well-enforced building codes are crucial tools for mitigating disaster risk.2 There is little doubt that an earthquake of this magnitude would have killed many more people had it occurred in almost any other densely populated urban area. Japan's famously strict building codes saved many, many lives - likely reducing the death toll by tens of thousands.3 The relative success of Japan's building codes, however, should not obscure an equally important lesson: we cannot "build away" all disaster risk. No matter how stringent, no matter how well enforced, no matter how costly, building codes cannot eliminate disaster risk.4 Even when life can be preserved, the cost of property and other economic damages can be staggering. Moreover, structural solutions to disaster risk - such as strengthening building codes or building seawalls and levees - can sometimes deceive communities into increasing their exposure to hazards by lending a false sense of security through the air of invincibility that surrounds much modern engineering and construction.5 These measures can mask a basic truth: a community's location is likely to be the single most important factor in determining a community's vulnerability to natural disasters.6 Poorly designed cities in relatively "safe" locations may well fare better than the most carefully designed cities in particularly hazard-prone regions.7 The fact that location is such a crucial determinant of disaster vulnerability might suggest, at first glance, that we have the capacity to mitigate disaster risk only at the margins, because settlement patterns were established, and major cities sited, long ago.8 However, the deterioration of existing infrastructure, together with the infrastructure demands of a growing population, suggest that the largest potential gains in disaster mitigation can yet be achieved by making wise decisions about the location of new infrastructure. 9 In the United States, a large percentage - likely well more than half - of the infrastructure that we will need in 2050 to accommodate our growing population does not exist today.10 Thus, the most far-reaching and important question for disaster mitigation today is where we will channel the growth that will be needed to accommodate our expanding population. Increasingly, environmentalists are promoting sustainability agendas - such as Smart Growth - that have a ready-made answer to this question: channel growth into existing cities.11 This preference for increasing the density of existing urban centers is understandable, as the costs of sprawl are substantial.12 However, this prescription and the various legal tools being used to implement it throughout the country often fail to grapple both with the serious disaster exposure facing many of our great American cities and with the concomitant potential that channeling future growth back into these cities may significantly exacerbate the disaster risk faced by future generations. While Smart Growth has great potential for making our communities more livable, more cost effective, and more environmentally sound, "Smart Growth in dumb places" - those that are particularly disaster prone - is the antithesis of true sustainability. This Article explores this critical tension between disaster mitigation and current sustainability policies.13 Although environmental protection and disaster mitigation are often fellow travelers, these sustainability initiatives may put significant environmental policies on a collision course with the goal of mitigating natural disaster risk. This result is particularly ironic given that much of the recent support for these initiatives has been motivated and framed by concerns about climate change. …