Volusia County Charter Review Commission

Florida Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors
Growth Management Task Force
Policies and Recommendations

Executive Summary – Recommendations

o Secretary Cohen of Florida’s Department of Community Affairs (DCA) has said that he wants Florida’s local comprehensive planning process to be more locally-driven and less determined by DCA. We support this idea of a more locally-oriented planning process.

o The goals of Florida’s growth management policies would be better served if the planning process placed more emphasis on long-range planning of the transportation infrastructure – which mainly means roads – and less emphasis on how individual property owners can use their property.

o Growth management should be integrated into the economic development vision and strategies of the municipalities and counties of Florida. At present, land use and economic development planning are completely separate activities with frequently-conflicting goals and policies.

o When major developments are undertaken, they should be required to create thoroughfares to allow traffic to move from one side of the development to the other, even when there are not yet any destinations on the other side of the development. This policy would prevent much future traffic congestion.

o Florida’s growth management policies work against the provision of affordable housing because they restrict the supply of housing. We encourage less restrictive growth management policies to further the goal of providing affordable housing.

o The Department of Community Affairs (DCA) argues for placing more emphasis on build-out plans. Currently, land use maps are based on a five-year planning horizon. If build-out plans were used instead to determine allowable uses of land, growth management would create less of a supply restriction, which would produce more affordable housing and more efficient land use patterns in the long run. We support using build-out plans in place of plans with shorter time horizons for most purposes.

o DCA has suggested that Regional Planning Councils (RPCs) should play a larger role in the growth management process, and that DCA review would focus more on Strategic Regional Policy Plans, leaving the RPCs to review local comprehensive plans for compliance. We support DCA’s focus on a more regional approach to growth management.

o Some people have suggested extending the concurrency requirements of growth management to schools and water. While recognizing problems in these two areas, the problems are not land use problems and trying to use growth management policies to solve them will make Florida’s land use decisions less efficient. Schools and water should not be a part of growth management. Florida’s Department of Community Affairs has suggested eliminating concurrency requirements for parks, water, wastewater, and solid waste. We support DCA’s position.

o Floridians supported Florida’s 1985 Growth Management Act because they wanted relief from the traffic congestion caused by the state’s rapid population growth. Other motivations were environmental preservation and the preservation of the character of their communities. Because these priorities remain, Florida’s growth management policies can be analyzed by the degree to which they further those goals.

o In most cases, markets do a good job of efficiently allocating land resources, just as markets do a good job of allocating other economic resources to produce goods and services. Growth management policies should not interfere with the market allocation of land unless there is compelling evidence that government planning can improve upon the performance of the market.

o There is a close link between land development and the layout of transportation networks. Today, that mostly means roads. Florida’s growth management policies should focus more on the development of the transportation network.

o Florida’s transportation network planning is excessively backward-looking, trying to relieve congestion in already-developed areas, and does not look forward to create an effective future transportation network in places that will be developed in the future to accommodate Florida’s population growth.

o Environmental preservation is an important goal, but should be separated from growth management policies. When specific environmental amenities should be preserved, the government should purchase the amenities or otherwise take control of them to keep them from development, but this is a different issue from whether development should be more compact, or whether urban infill should take precedence over new developments.

o A policy of fighting urban sprawl by promoting higher densities in already-developed areas exacerbates some of the problems growth management was intended to solve. By putting more people in areas that are already more congested, pollution and environmental degradation is increased, and traffic congestion is increased. Urban sprawl helps to relieve these problems.

o Local land use planning should take a more in-depth look at the benefits of mixed-use, or multi-use, zoning. Single-use zoning often creates more problems than it remedies.

o Florida’s growth management policies work by preventing people from developing their property in ways they might have chosen in the absence of those policies. The policies do not enable anybody to do anything that could not be done without the policies. As such, Florida’s growth management policies work by restricting the supply of developable land.

o If the supply of anything is reduced, its price will rise. As a result, by it very nature, Florida’s growth management policies reduce the availability of affordable housing, and make all developed and developable real estate more expensive.

o Florida’s policy of concurrency means that development is not allowed unless the infrastructure to support that development is available at the time the development is completed. While several types of infrastructure were covered, concurrency has mainly applied to roads. There is a current push to enlarge concurrency to cover public services such as education and water. Concurrency should not be applied to these government services because growth management should focus on desirable patterns of land use and these services are not directly related to land use patterns. If they are taken into account to direct development, land use policies will result in less desirable patterns of land use. DCA has suggested that concurrency requirements be scaled back, and we support DCA’s position.

o The Department of Community Affairs has suggested shifting its role from policing the compliance of local comprehensive plans toward providing technical assistance to local governments. We support DCA’s proposed shift in its role in the growth management process.

o Just as central planning did not work well in the former Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, it is unlikely to work well for land use planning in Florida. The state’s growth management policies can help to guide the market by planning for its own infrastructure development, and in particular by developing the transportation network, but should not be viewed as a replacement for the market allocation of land use.

Florida’s growth management policies at the beginning of the twenty-first century are undertaken within the framework of Florida’s Growth Management Act of 1985. The Act was popular when it was passed, and was designed to mitigate the negative effects that were perceived to have resulted from Florida's rapid population growth. The most immediate effect that Floridians saw from population growth was increasing traffic congestion. In addition, Floridians wanted to protect the state’s environmental amenities that make the state so attractive, and they wanted to preserve the character of their communities that they viewed were being harmed by development. The Growth Management Act of 1985 incorporated a number of other goals as well, including the provision of affordable housing, but the one issue that most motivated a broad coalition of Floridians to support growth management was the relief of traffic congestion. The Growth Management Act and its many accompanying policies are complex, and it is easy to get bogged down in the details and lose sight of the overall picture. In analyzing growth management policies, we should keep in mind its major goals: relief of traffic congestion, environmental preservation, the preservation of local community character, and the provision of affordable housing.

Because of the way that Florida’s growth management policies have evolved, growth management has sometimes meant stopping – or at least standing in the way of – Florida’s growth. A good example of this is the state government’s recent enticement of the Scripps Research Institute to locate a facility in Palm Beach County. A part of the package that led Scripps to move to Palm Beach County was that a site was available, approved by the local government and facilitated by the state. Yet despite all of the government help in procuring that site, as this report is being written the site is being challenged both for environmental reasons and because it will contribute to urban sprawl. Growth management sometimes stands in the way of desirable development. Another indicator of the types of challenges being created by growth management is a recent report that in Leon County – not a coastal county nor one of Florida’s more highly populated counties – it takes 230 to 311 days to get a building permit even when the property in question is appropriately zoned.[1] Regulatory barriers like this push businesses to locate in other states and hamper Florida’s economic growth and prosperity.

As things currently stand in Florida, land use and economic development planning are completely separate activities in most local jurisdictions, with little communication between economic development officials and the growth management process. Growth management should be integrated into the economic development vision and strategies of the municipalities and counties of Florida. Land use planning is an integral component of the economic development process, because land use choices impact the attraction, retention, and expansion of business enterprises. Delays in permitting and increasingly common lawsuits increase the costs of generating economic growth and job expansion in Florida. The Scripps siting problem in Palm Beach County is a case in point. We recommend closer coordination between the growth management and economic development functions in Florida government, both at the state and local levels.

Floridians do not want uncontrolled growth to lower their quality of life, but at the same time excessive restrictions on development in Florida hurt the business climate, raise housing costs and lower people’s housing options, and can also lower the quality of life of Floridians. We want to strike the proper balance, and doing so requires a clear-headed assessment of the costs and benefits of specific policies, not just wishful thinking. The analysis below suggests that in some cases, the policies Florida has adopted work against the very goals they claim to be trying to achieve.

Florida’s growth management policies are in capable hands being overseen by Florida’s Department of Community Affairs (DCA). Most people at DCA are not trained in economics, and the Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors hopes this report can lend some economic insight into Florida’s overall growth management effort.

The Economics of Growth: The Relationship Between Growth and the Transportation Network

Throughout human history, patterns of land development have been determined by the transportation network. For most of history, this has mostly meant that development has occurred adjacent to navigable waterways. Cities developed around natural harbors and along navigable rivers. Around 1850 railroads supplanted waterborne transportation as the determining factor in development. Cities developed along rail lines, and rail hubs generated major concentrations of development. After 1950 roads became more important than rail lines and since that time there have been substantial shifts in development patterns as development orients itself to the new transportation network that is dominated by highways. Freight is increasingly being delivered by trucks, but more significantly, people have embraced the automobile for personal transportation. As a result, land use decisions – where to develop residential areas, shopping centers, industrial areas, and so forth – have been made with reference to where those locations resided relative to the transportation network, which mostly means major roadways.

One of the goals of the smart growth movement is to have more walkable cities, and this is a desirable goal. People want to be able to walk to stores, to cultural events, and just to walk for recreation. However, we must be realistic about the degree to which people would choose to walk versus choosing to drive their automobiles. Another goal of the smart growth movement is to get people out of their automobiles and into alternative modes of transportation – often busses or light rail. But again, we must be realistic about the degree to which people will choose alternative modes of transportation over personal automobile travel.

The Automobile Lifestyle The personal automobile offers many advantages over mass transit. People can come and go when they please and where they please rather than having to have their travel conform to a bus schedule, and rather than having to have their destinations dictated by what is nearby, or is located on a bus or train route. People have the convenience of being able to shift their travel plans at short notice, for example to stop by a store on the way home from work. And if they do stop to shop, they can carry their purchases in their cars rather than having to deal with carrying them on a bus or train. Plus, many people prefer to travel in the controlled environment of their car, where they determine what will play on the radio, where they set the temperature, and where they can control who (if anyone) will travel with them. Automobile travel offers more comfort and convenience than mass transit, so when people get wealthier, they migrate from mass transit to personal automobile travel.[2] We are not supporting or criticizing the automobile lifestyle, but are merely noting that it has come as a result of market forces and the choices individuals have made as the nation has become wealthier.

The Automobile and Commerce We might, in a fit of nostalgia, lament the passing of the corner grocery within walking distance in most neighborhoods, which has been replaced by supermarkets that can only be accessed by automobile. Setting nostalgia aside, one must recognize that consumers chose supermarkets for their many advantages. Because they are larger, they can carry a bigger selection of goods at lower prices. Furthermore, when one walks to the corner grocery, one is limited in how much one can buy by how much can be carried home, whereas when one drives to the supermarket, one can buy a car-load of groceries that can last a long time, and supermarkets offer more variety than could ever be offered by the corner grocery. Supermarkets exist because shoppers prefer them to the corner grocery, but they only exist because the automobile society allows them to attract customers from a wide area. The corner grocery does still exist, but now in the form of convenience stores that are smaller (about the size of the old-time corner groceries) and that make a smaller selection of products more conveniently available to customers, albeit at higher prices than supermarkets charge.

Similarly, retailers like Wal-Mart and Best Buy could not exist without the automobile. Like supermarkets, they carry a wide variety of products at low prices, but they can only do that by attracting shoppers from a wide geographic area, which is possible only because people can drive there. Furthermore, because people drive their cars, they are able to buy a greater quantity of goods in a trip to the store than if they walked or took mass transit. The development of the automobile society has changed the nature of commerce, and it is apparent from the volume of business done by Wal-Mart and other so-called big-box retailers that consumers prefer the lower prices and the bigger selection of products that these retailers offer. That means that people will continue to use their automobiles for shopping trips no matter how walkable cities become, and no matter how readily available mass transit becomes.

The Automobile and Suburban Living The suburbs are a new form of residential living, almost unknown prior to World War II, because suburban living is based on automobile travel. Many people prefer to live in single-family detached homes with their own yards, and prefer not to live adjacent to busy roads or commercial establishments. Suburban living is a choice many Americans make to enhance their standards of living. Many others prefer to live in an urban environment, to be sure, where goods and services are within walking distance, and in a housing unit that does not require them to take care of a yard. But people who live in the suburbs choose to do so to enhance their standards of living, and they choose automobile travel for its convenience and comfort.

Advocates of the “new urbanism” are critical of the single-dimensional land-use patterns that are associated with suburban living, but the new urbanist ideas of mixed use areas that site commercial and residential activities together is increasingly popular. One reason that so many areas are single-use is that mixed use is often mandated through zoning ordinances. We recommend a re-examination of zoning restrictions that prevent mixed-use or multi-use areas.

Can People Be Enticed Out of Their Cars? People like mixed use neighborhoods where they can walk to stores, restaurants, and other destinations. However, even people within those environments choose to take many automobile trips for shopping, entertainment, and for employment. We can build pedestrian-friendly destinations, but many people will drive to those destinations, and many people who live in those locations will drive to destinations beyond where they can walk or take mass transportation. The idea of making more pedestrian-friendly development is a good one, but it will not cut down appreciably on automobile trips.

Nationwide, less than five percent of commuters use mass transit, and mass transit’s share of commuters has been falling over the decades.[3] If planners were wildly successful in encouraging mass transit ridership and were able to double mass transit’s share of commuters, the reduction in drivers would barely be noticeable. Our modern society is an automobile society, and our land use planning must accommodate automobile use in order to succeed in achieving our broad goals. When people argue the virtues of mass transit and want to build light rail and other options, typically they are thinking, “if everyone else takes the train, there will be more room on the roads for me.” Few mass transit advocates would actually take the train themselves. When we are planning for land use policy in the twenty-first century, we must do so in an environment that is going to continue to be dominated by automobile travel.

With highways as the major transportation arteries, land use decisions naturally align themselves with the transportation network. One might be concerned that without some central plan, gas stations would spring up in residential neighborhoods and land use patterns would be inefficient and would create conflicts. However, market forces work to allocate land use efficiently, just as market forces produce efficiency in the production of goods and services.[4] Commercial uses of land naturally gravitate toward major intersections, and toward locations on major thoroughfares. Commercial establishments prosper when they are easily accessible and have lots of traffic. Residential uses of land naturally gravitate away from major thoroughfares. Residential users want to be located conveniently to major thoroughfares, but not on them. Thus, without anyone making a comprehensive land use plan, commercial and business locations will naturally gravitate toward major thoroughfares, and residential locations naturally fall between commercial thoroughfares, allowing convenient access, but placing them away from heavy traffic. Nobody is going to locate a gas station or convenience store on a quiet residential street, because there will not be enough traffic to support the business, and access will be too difficult. Similarly, nobody will build a residential home on a major thoroughfare, because residential users want to avoid the nuisance of the traffic. However, major thoroughfares may be good locations for apartment complexes, because they offer convenient locations but most of the apartments will be away from the road.

Industrial users are looking for cheap land, and access to transportation such as interstate highways, railroads, and navigable waterways. There is little danger of industrial users siting near a residential neighborhood, because industrial users will prefer land that is less expensive, and will see advantages to locating near other industrial users. Thus, market forces create a natural separation of conflicting land uses to prevent incompatible uses and to allocate land efficiently.

The Economics of Land Use The market can allocate land efficiently as long as developers know the location of future transportation arteries. If they know that a particular location is planned to be an intersection of major highways, that would make a great location for a shopping center and a poor location for a residential neighborhood. Nobody is going to deliberately build a residential home on a future major thoroughfare. However, when the location of future major thoroughfares is uncertain, nobody – not even the wisest planner – can know what the optimal use of a particular piece of property would be. If a quiet road gains traffic as a result of development and evolves into a major commercial thoroughfare, it may be that existing residential owners find themselves on a street more heavily trafficked than they foresaw. Similarly, without advance planning of roads, a developer might build a shopping center in a particular location, only to find that years later a major thoroughfare is built in another location, luring traffic away from the shopping center and causing it to fail.

The point is: if the location of transportation corridors is known well ahead of time, market forces will lead to optimal land use decisions without any government plan for land use. Conversely, if the location of transportation corridors is not known well ahead of time, nobody – including government planners – can know what would be the optimal use for particular parcels, and inefficient land use decisions are sure to be made. In the past, Florida’s land use policies have planned too much for how individuals could use their property, and have not planned enough for future transportation corridors. More efficient land use planning could be effected if local governments did more advance planning for the location of roads and less planning of how individual parcels of land can be used. The centerpiece of Florida’s local comprehensive planning process is the land use map that specifies how every parcel of land within a local government jurisdiction can be used. This local comprehensive plan specifies levels of service for every existing road, but it would be more effective if the local comprehensive planning process planned more for future development of the transportation network. Without such plans, it is not possible for land use planners to design an effective land use map.

Transportation Policy in Florida Florida is filled with examples of development that has occurred without sufficient transportation planning. Then, major thoroughfares are cut through already-developed areas to relieve traffic congestion. This disrupts existing neighborhoods (one must be sympathetic with people who have a major highway cut through their quiet residential neighborhood), and is more costly than obtaining the right-of-way ahead of time, before the development occurs. Florida’s transportation network planning is excessively backward-looking, trying to relieve congestion in already-developed areas, and does not look forward to create an effective future transportation network in places that will be developed in the future to accommodate Florida’s population growth.

Part of the reason is that citizens want government to ease traffic congestion in developed areas; part of it is wishful thinking. By setting undeveloped areas off-limits to future development, some hope that Florida’s growth can be arrested and its current character preserved. This simply puts more pressure on already-developed areas and makes current problem areas even worse. Meanwhile, new development takes place in outlying areas where minimal transportation planning is being done. It takes a long time to plan and build a road. If we keep planning now for how to relieve current congestion to the exclusion of planning for future development, we will be forever catching up, making our roadway construction project more expensive and less efficient than if they were planned before development took place. Planners should be focusing now on putting into place a road network thirty years into the future.

One policy that could be implemented to help relieve future traffic congestion would be to require major developments to design a way to get from one side of the development to the other. When residential subdivisions or commercial shopping centers are built, they are typically accessible to major thoroughfares, but they block access to the thoroughfares for people on the other side of the development. If a through-street is built (which could be at the edge of the development; it does not have to be through the middle) to allow access – even when there is nothing on the other side to access – this would provide a means for future development on the other side of the new development to have access to existing thoroughfares. This would prevent having to go back after the fact to run new thoroughfares through existing developments. Obviously, this policy would not be appropriate for all developments, and would have to be applied in the context of the specifics of a development. However, too often development has taken place in Florida in a manner that prevents people from conveniently going from one side to the other. Then, when new development comes along on the other side, traffic problems arise.

Unsightly Development Many Floridians dislike the proliferation of strip malls and similar development they view as unsightly. This can be taken care of with setback requirements, requirements for visual buffers, architectural requirements, and other regulations. The argument that landowners should be able to develop their land as they choose – and not be told by government how they can use their land – does not imply that there would be no restrictions on the type of development. Development should not create a nuisance for its neighbors, and this law of nuisance is centuries old. Based on long-established law, visual buffers, landscaping requirements, traffic access requirements and other regulations should be employed so that development does not detract from the surrounding area. But these are local issues, not state issues, and so should not be a part of the state’s growth management policies.

One of the goals of growth management advocates nationwide, and in Florida, is urban infill. The smart growth movement advocates a similar goal of producing more compact urban development. These goals are often worthwhile, but sometimes are counterproductive to achieving the major goals listed at the beginning of this report. A problem is that urban infill and compact urban development may imply different policies to different people, so it helps to make more explicit what such policies are designed to accomplish. Ultimately, we do not really want to achieve urban infill or more compact urban development as ends in themselves, but as a means toward enhancing the quality of life of Floridians. There are two different issues that need to be separated. One is that certain parcels of land are valuable environmental amenities that should be preserved and not developed. The other is the issue of the sequence of development. Is it sensible to require that some land be developed before others? Only one of these issues is really a growth management issue.

Protect Environmental Amenities If certain environmental amenities should be preserved, then the solution is for government to buy that land, or otherwise take control of it to prevent development (for example, by buying conservation easements). This is an environmental issue, but not a growth management issue. We strongly support environmental protection, but we believe that growth management policies are the wrong tool for this job. Using growth management policies for environmental protection ultimately provides less protection for the environment, and reduces the efficiency of land use decisions. If a parcel of land would be developed under a locality’s build-out plan, then the plan is for it to be developed eventually and environmental preservation is not relevant to when the development occurs. Environmental preservation efforts will be more effective if they are directed at parcels that are to be preserved and kept from development for the long term, rather than considering which parcels should be developed before others.

Leapfrog Development A growth management issue is whether some land should be developed before other land, and Florida’s growth management policies have taken a stand on this by promoting urban infill, and by discouraging leapfrog development. Sometimes leapfrog development is undesirable, but often it is beneficial. It often occurs when residential subdivisions are built away from an existing development, requiring a commute by residents to access jobs, shopping, and other destinations. By their willingness to live there, the residents demonstrate that this commuting cost is more than compensated by the cheaper land costs and the better residential environment they can buy in the leapfrogging development. They live there, typically, because they can get more house for the money. However, by leapfrogging, they also create a central location of undeveloped land that makes an ideal location for higher-density commercial development.

If development always occurs in concentric rings from a central point, all new development is always on the outskirts and is never centrally located. Such locations are not desirable for high-density development. Leapfrogging creates centrally-located undeveloped parcels and can ultimately lead to higher density development and more mixed-use development than if leapfrogging is prevented. This does not imply that leapfrogging is always desirable; however, the market is a good judge of optimal uses of resources, including land. Three or four decades ago it was common to think that central planning was a superior economic system to the market economy. Now that idea is uncommon, except in land use, where Florida’s policies favor government planning of land use rather than the market allocation of land. Following the arguments made earlier, markets allocate land use efficiently, just as they lead to the efficient production of goods and services.

If environmental amenities should be preserved for their value, then the solution is to buy them and keep them from being developed. However, it is not sensible for Florida’s growth policies to dictate which parcels should be developed sooner and which should wait to be developed later. The market does an excellent job of allocating land to its highest-valued use – as long as the transportation network is planned out ahead of time. When the main transportation corridors were waterways, nature took care of that long-range planning. Now, with roads owned and developed by government, government needs to do this in order to allow the market mechanism to efficiently allocate land to its highest-valued uses.

The Department of Community Affairs has been exploring the idea of placing more emphasis on vision-based build-out plans as opposed to the shorter-term plans now being used to guide growth.[5] Currently, the land use map is based on a five-year time horizon, which severely restricts the supply of developable land allowable under local comprehensive plans. Because, as population expands the land open to development in the plans will also expand, the issue here is one of timing of development and not what ultimately will be developed. If build-out plans were relied on more as a guide to allowable development, this would open up substantially more land to development, and the increase in the supply of developable land would create more affordable housing and ultimately more efficient land use. Relying more on build-out plans would allow more leapfrog development, which would create more centrally-located undeveloped parcels suitable for higher-density development. We see a strong argument for relying on build-out plans rather than using the shorter time horizons that are now a part of Florida’s comprehensive planning process.

Does Leapfrog Development Pay Its Own Way? The claim is often made that leapfrog development is undesirable because it is subsidized and does not pay its own way. The simple and appropriate solution is to quit subsidizing it. If people in already-developed areas are subsidizing the extension of infrastructure to leapfrogged areas, the answer is not to prevent leapfrog development, but to have all development pay its own way. Along these lines, Florida’s local governments have increasingly used impact fees to place the costs of development on that new development. We support the use of impact fees to have development pay its own way.

When one looks directly at two of the problems growth management is intended to address – pollution and traffic congestion – the facts show that higher-density development makes both worse. When one looks at the data on water and air pollution, their levels are highest by a number of measures in areas that have the highest population densities.[6] This makes sense, because pollution is caused by human activity, and the higher the population density, the more pollutants will be emitted. Furthermore, greenspace that can absorb and mitigate pollutants is a smaller percentage of land area in high-density development. Single family detached homes have yards that can absorb water runoff, whereas high-density residences often do not.

Higher-density areas also have more traffic congestion, and again the data agree with common sense.[7] As population density rises, more people per square mile are trying to go places. While high density may reduce travel distances somewhat (people live closer to where they work and shop, for example) and may move some people to mass transit, automobile traffic still increases as population density increases, creating more congestion. As noted above, the reality of modern transportation is that most people will prefer to travel by automobile when it is feasible. Policies that try to control urban sprawl by creating higher population densities in already-congested areas will lead to more traffic congestion. This also creates more air pollution, because automobiles idling in congestion create more pollution than automobiles moving at highway speeds. This means that restrictive growth policies often work to produce more pollution and more congestion – just the opposite of what Floridians want out of growth management.

Thus far we have considered some economic factors related to land use issues and suggested that transportation planning is the key to effective growth management. How do Florida’s growth management policies actually operate to manage growth? Despite all the complexities of the local comprehensive planning process, the key tool for managing growth is the land use map that is required in every local comprehensive plan. That land use map describes the allowable uses of every parcel of land within the local government’s jurisdiction. If a landowner wants to develop a parcel of land in a manner that is inconsistent with the land use map, then that development is not allowed. The planning process does not enable anybody to do something that would not be possible without the process; it only prevents people from developing their property if it is inconsistent with the plan. Cutting through all of its complexities, the planning process works by preventing some people from using their land as they otherwise might choose to were the plan not in effect.

When the growth management act was passed in 1985 it specified that local comprehensive plans were to be drawn up by local governments, and that DCA would review them to see that they were in compliance with the requirements of the act. When the plans began being submitted to DCA in the early 1990s, it became apparent that the planning process was local in name only, and that DCA had strong ideas about what those plans should look like. A majority of the initial batch of plans that were submitted were rejected by DCA on the grounds that they allowed too much urban sprawl. Up to that time, most observers thought that the act’s concurrency requirements (discussed below) would be the most constraining aspect of the process. Urban sprawl was only mentioned in passing in the act. However, DCA’s review of the plans focused heavily on preventing urban sprawl, which was not even defined by the 1985 act. DCA drew up their own definition, which initially met with some resistance, but at least local governments then had an idea of what DCA wanted from them and were able to design their plans to conform with DCA’s vision.[8] What initially was intended as a local planning process, however, was transformed into a state planning process with DCA determining the nature of the local comprehensive plans, even though the local governments were doing the work of writing the plans to conform to the DCA mandates.

When our group met with DCA Secretary Cohen on August 27, 2004, one of the things he said to us was that DCA was going to take more of an advisory role and make the planning process more locally-driven rather than centrally-driven by DCA. We see this as a positive development, and encourage DCA to take more of an advisory role. Local communities should be able to develop their own visions, which certainly will be different in different locations in our diverse state, and surely would be at odds with DCA’s vision in some cases. If DCA adopted the attitude of an advisor to local governments, its services would have to be valued by local governments for local governments to use that advice. As a result, DCA would be more customer-driven, because in an advisory capacity, its services would only be demanded if local governments viewed its advice as valuable.

DCA has since released a draft report indicating areas where DCA’s role could change.[9] That report proposes that DCA play a greater advisory role to local governments (pp. 101-103), that DCA engage in less direct oversight of local comprehensive plans by giving Regional Planning Councils the responsibility for monitoring compliance with the Growth Management Act (pp. 99-100), and that concurrency requirements be scaled back considerably (pp. 104-105). Again, we strongly support moving DCA to more of an advisory role. We also support DCA’s increased emphasis on a regional approach to growth management. Such an approach has been successfully used by the state for emergency management and homeland security issues, and it makes sense to view growth management in a regional perspective, rather than as an activity undertaken separately by local governments whose policies may have substantial impacts on each other.

DCA can provide expert help to local governments, which the local governments can use if they find it helpful and ignore if they do not, which will make DCA more customer-driven. If they do not provide valuable services, their services will not be used. The scaling back of DCA oversight of the local planning process is desirable, but passing more responsibility to Regional Planning Councils may have a negative impact if RPCs are more motivated by local politics, and if they have less expertise than DCA. Thus, we think that if RPCs are to assume some of the oversight role currently done by DCA, the role of the RPCs in the oversight process must be carefully delineated and restricted so that local planning is actually done at the local level.

Of course the 1985 growth management act needs to be enforced, as the law requires, but this enforcement can be interpreted in different ways. The most desirable interpretation is simply for DCA or the RPCs to see that the plans contain what is required by the act. Early on DCA took on a stricter interpretation of judging whether the plans actually would accomplish the goals (e.g. provide affordable housing, prevent urban sprawl) that they were supposed to. Secretary Cohen’s suggestion that DCA would be taking an approach more oriented toward allowing local governments to design their own plans is a welcome and desirable development.

One of the goals of Florida’s growth management act is to provide affordable housing for Floridians, but the planning process, by its very nature, works against the provision of affordable housing. The price of housing – and of all other goods – is determined by the laws of supply and demand. Because growth management restricts the supply of developable land, it reduces the supply of housing, and this reduction in supply causes housing to be more expensive. Growth management causes housing to be less affordable.

One approach to affordable housing has been to require developers to build it. However, while we can build cheap housing, we cannot build affordable housing. The affordability of housing is determined by the laws of supply and demand. As is well known, housing prices are very high in San Francisco. The reason is that there is no undeveloped land left there, and San Francisco is surrounded on three sides by water, creating a natural limit to the supply of land. A similar situation is in the making on Florida’s southeast coast, which is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the east and the Everglades to the west. When the supply of land is restricted, its price will rise making housing less affordable. Most places in Florida do not have these natural constraints on available land, but by creating a land use map that mandates that some land is off-limits to development, growth management does something similar. By restricting the supply of available land, housing becomes less affordable.

This is true even if growth management does not slow the rate of development. If the land use map offers many choices for development, competition among landowners will keep prices low. If the land use map is designed so that there is only enough developable land to support the actual growth in the area, land and housing prices will be higher because people with the developable land will have some monopoly power. Land that the plan declares is off-limits to development cannot compete with land that is developable according to the local comprehensive plan. Because Florida’s growth management policies are built upon restricting the supply of developable land, by its very nature Florida’s growth management policies reduce the affordability of housing. This provides a strong argument for using build-out plans to determine where development is allowed rather than the current practice of designing the land use map based on a five-year time horizon. The Department of Community Affairs has recommended placing more emphasis on build-out plans. The affordable housing issue gives a good reason to use build-out plans as the primary land use map for determining where development should be allowed.

The best way to provide affordable housing for lower-income Floridians is to encourage the construction of housing for everyone. Even if only luxury homes are built, people who move from existing homes into new luxury homes create a house for sale (or rent) on the secondary market, which makes high quality older housing available to people with lower incomes. Even if we try to build cheap housing, if the overall supply of housing is restricted that cheap housing still will not be affordable.[10] Despite the requirement that the local comprehensive planning process include an element for affordable housing, the whole process itself works to make Florida’s housing less affordable. The goal of affordable housing can be furthered by assuring that the supply of developable land exceeds demand, so that buyers have a choice of where to build and so that suppliers compete with each other.

Concurrency, in the context of Florida’s 1985 growth management act, means that infrastructure to support development must be available concurrent with the completion of the development. While concurrency applies to many infrastructure items, in practice concurrency has primarily applied to roads. Every road is required to have a target level of service in the local comprehensive plan, and new development is not allowed if it would add traffic to roads to bring them below that target level of service, or if it would add traffic to a road that is already below that level of service. In practice, the concurrency requirement has not been quite this binding, as some exceptions have been allowed, and when concurrency prevented some urban infill development, the legislature explicitly allowed local governments to add concurrency areas to their local comprehensive plans. Within a concurrency area, development can occur even if roads are already excessively congested, if the developer pays money into a fund that would be used to finance road improvements within the concurrency area.

The concurrency requirement sounds desirable on its surface, especially if a major goal of growth management is to relieve traffic congestion, but it has had the consequence of creating urban sprawl in some areas. Where there is already substantial congestion, concurrency might prevent urban infill or development near developed areas, pushing development out to rural areas that do not have traffic congestion problems. In this way, Florida’s concurrency policies have contributed to leapfrog development. As noted above, however, this is not necessarily undesirable. Leapfrog development gives people an opportunity to own a more affordable home, it creates a desirable location for higher-density infill, and development away from an already-congested area acts as a relief valve to draw some traffic away from areas that are already congested.

Concurrency for Water and Schools Despite the problems that Florida has encountered in applying the concurrency requirement, there is a tendency to want to apply concurrency to a larger set of government services. The most recent push is to prevent development if there are inadequate school resources, or inadequate water supplies, to support the development. To be sure, schools and water are two important government services that Florida is now struggling to supply in some areas. Every member of the Council views education and water policies as vitally important to Florida. However, we should be wary about applying growth management solutions to every problem that Florida faces. If we hope to make progress on the problems that growth management was originally designed to address – relieve traffic congestion, preserve the environment, and preserve the character of our cities and towns – we should not dilute growth management by hoping that it can also solve problems of school crowding and water shortages. If we do, it will not solve Florida’s water and education problems, and will be less effective at addressing Florida’s land use issues.

When new residential developments are built in previously undeveloped areas, nobody worries that the new residents will have no places to buy groceries, or to buy the gas they need for their cars to commute long distances to existing developments. Those commercial establishments will follow the development, and where new residential developments appear, the supermarkets and gas stations will not be far behind. Market mechanisms work to bring those services to those who demand them. The same should be true of water and schools.

New development brings with it the property taxes (and state tax revenues, through sales taxes) to finance new schools. The issue here is one of state and local government finance, not land use, and the only way in which land use is relevant is in finding a site for new schools. For large-scale developments, it is reasonable for the developers to make provisions for schools to be located nearby to residences, but beyond the issue of school location and site provision, growth management should not be held hostage to school districts, and concurrency with regard to schools should not be relevant to growth management. New development brings with it new taxpayers, and school districts should provide them with schools just as supermarkets and gas stations are provided through market suppliers.

We are not arguing that growth does not present problems to school districts, and that there may be real issues involved in funding new schools for new developments. Rather, we are saying that the issue here is one of school finance, and if school finance issues are allowed to direct land use planning decisions, land use decisions will be less efficient as a result. Schools should not be included as a part of concurrency under Florida’s growth management policies. To do so would simply redirect attention from the real issues that underlie the problems of school crowding and school finance.

The same arguments apply to water. We acknowledge that some parts of the state are experiencing water shortages, but this is a water policy problem, not a land use problem. It should be addressed as a part of the state’s water policy, not its land use policy. Water is easily transportable over long distances. Los Angeles gets a substantial amount of its water from the Colorado River, located in another state.[11] Florida could solve its water problems with a market-based strategy for allocating water, but the point here is that if we try to solve Florida’s water problems by making water subject to concurrency under our growth management policies, we will create less efficient land use decisions and the goals of Florida’s growth management policies will be undermined by trying to do too much. Water policy should not be a part of land use planning.

The Department of Community Affairs has suggested eliminating concurrency requirements for parks, water, wastewater, and solid waste.[12] Most of our Council concurs with this recommendation, and would add schools (not currently subject to concurrency) to the list. However, some members expressed the reservation that Floridians view schools and water as such major issues that are under pressure from growth that if our growth management policies do not address them, the policies will not be viewed as credible. Everyone on the Council agrees that schools and water are major issues that must be dealt with through state policy, and the only disagreement is whether growth management policies are the appropriate tools. As Florida’s growth management policy currently stands, it is a land use policy that is not well-suited for addressing problems like education and water. Regardless of whether we say we will address these issues through growth management, if we try, we will not solve our water and education problems, but will create less efficient land use policies. That is why, with the caveat noted above, our Council supports the Department of Community Affairs suggestion that concurrency be narrowed. As policy is now carried out, it is most applicable to roads, which is appropriate.

The Council is unanimously opposed to the “hometown democracy” movement that would amend the Florida Constitution to require that any changes to local comprehensive plans must be approved by the voters before they can take effect. This hometown democracy movement is an example of what can happen when people have unrealistic expectations about what growth management can accomplish. If citizens are promised more through growth management than can be delivered, they will be justly disappointed and may react by supporting policy initiatives that would lead to undesirable results. Most members of our Council believe that subjecting schools and water to concurrency requirements would promise more than growth management can deliver.

Florida’s Growth Management Act of 1985 was popularly supported because Floridians hoped that it would address a number of specific problems associated with growth: traffic congestion, environmental impacts, adverse impacts on the character of Florida’s communities, and rising housing prices that created a lack of affordable housing. Despite good intentions, Florida’s growth management policies sometimes exacerbate the problems they were intended to solve, and sometimes neglect to address the underlying causes of those problems. Analyzing growth management from an economic point of view helps to shed some light on some of those problems.

In reviewing local comprehensive plans, the Department of Community Affairs has often rejected plans because they allow too much urban sprawl, but in many cases urban sprawl is not the problem, it is the solution. This is not to say that urban sprawl is never undesirable. However, it can be beneficial by relieving traffic congestion in areas that are already the most congested, by taking people (and their pollution-causing activities) out of areas that are already the most polluted, and by increasing people’s standards of living by giving them better housing amenities where land is less expensive. When analyzed in an economic framework, the market does a good job of efficiently allocating land use and determining land use patterns, just as it does in producing goods and services. However, the optimal use for any parcel of land is heavily influenced by its location relative to the transportation network, and this suggests that growth management could be more effective if it focused more on planning the transportation network and less on determining how individuals are allowed to use their property.

The problems Floridians have hoped to address with growth management regulation are land use problems, and to be as effective as possible, we should resist trying to apply growth management policies to other activities, such as education and water supplies. Doing so will dilute the effectiveness of growth management to deal with the land use issues Floridians want to see addressed.

Although planners bristle at the comparison, there are similarities between Florida’s land use planning process and the central planning that took place in the economies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and that still takes place in North Korea. Rather than ignore the similarities, we should try to learn from them, so that we do not make the same mistakes that those centrally-planned economies made. In all cases, planners were trying to do what was best for their citizens, but markets do a very good job of allocating resources when market participants have the information they need to make good decisions. In Florida’s land use planning, we should try to rely on market allocation as much as is feasible, but we must also recognize the crucial role the transportation network plays in the process. Because the transportation network consists mostly of government infrastructure, there is a vital role for government to play. Nobody can make optimal land use plans – in the public sector or the private sector – without knowing where future transportation corridors lie relative to the land in question.

Along these lines, we took a move in the right direction when 2004 legislative session approved SB 1456, which requires Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) to coordinate their plans with the Strategic Intermodal System (SIS). Planning ahead and having a coordinated state plan for transportation provides better information for effective land use planning in both the private and public sector. The state can be more effective in growth management if it focuses its attention more on the planning of the state’s transportation network and infrastructure, and less on what individual landowners are allowed to do with their own property. As the above analysis has illustrated, growth management restrictions on how individuals can use their property, while well-intentioned, have had the effect of making housing more unaffordable, of increasing traffic congestion, of exacerbating pollution in those places that are already most-polluted, and of limiting housing choices in a way that lowers the well-being of most Floridians. Growth management’s potential is in guiding the market-oriented decisions of Floridians on how they can use their property by planning for government’s development of infrastructure. If growth management is undertaken as government planning of land use, then it has the same drawbacks and will impose the same costs as any other type of central planning.

[1] These numbers are estimates from the city staff in Tallahassee, reported in the Tallahassee Democrat, November 8, 2004, page A1. A developer in that same article claims that the permitting process takes about a year and a half, or roughly twice as long as the estimate made by the city.

[2] Some people cite European cities as examples of places that have embraced mass transit over automobile travel, but trends in European cities mirror those in the United States, with an increasing share of travel being done in personal automobiles. Furthermore, European cities are sprawling outward at lower densities, as in the United States. See Robert Bruegmann, “Urban Density and Sprawl: An Historic Perspective,” Chapter 9 in Randall G. Holcombe and Samuel R. Staley, eds., Smarter Growth: Market-Based Strategies for Land-Use Planning in the 21st Century (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001).

[3] See Peter Gordon and Harry W. Richardson, “The Geography of Transportation and Land Use,” Chapter 3 in Holcombe and Staley, Smarter Growth, cited earlier.

[4] For a good exposition of these ideas, see Bernard H. Seigan, Land Use Without Zoning (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1972), and by the same author, “Non-Zoning in Houston,” Journal of Law & Economics 13 (April 1970), pp. 71-147.

[5] See Department of Community Affairs, “Growth Management Initiative: Redefining the State-Regional-Local Partnership for Managing Florida’s Growth,” Draft Report, November 15, 2004, pp. 102-103.

[6] See Kenneth Green, “Air Quality, Density, and Environmental Degradation,” Chapter 5 in Holcombe and Staley, Smarter Growth, cited earlier.

[7] See Peter Gordon and Harry Richardson, “The Geography of Transportation and Land Use,” Chapter 3 in Holcombe and Staley, Smarter Growth, cited earlier.

[8] DCA initially defined urban sprawl in a technical memo released in 1989, and subsequently had their definition incorporated as a part of the Florida Administrative Code 9J-5.003 (134).

[9] Department of Community Affairs, “Growth Management Initiative: Redefining the State-Regional-Local Partnership for Managing Florida’s Growth,” Draft Report, November 15, 2004.

[10] Another strategy would be to place rent controls on housing to keep its price low, but rent controls cause housing shortages, so this would be an undesirable policy.

[11] See http://wsoweb.ladwp.com/Aqueduct/historyoflaa/ for some background on how Los Angeles has addressed its water problems.

[12] See Department of Community Affairs, “Growth Management Initiative: Redefining the State-Regional-Local Partnership for Managing Florida’s Growth,” Draft Report, November 15, 2004, pp. 104-105.