Growth

I enjoy my profession of urban planning. That’s why I still dabble in it and try to stay somewhat informed. As part of this dabbling, I get to travel all over the state and visit any city that invites me. Each is different. Some problems are typical. Some are unique. The folks who run the cities and operate them are uniformly dedicated.

There is one common characteristic, however. Without fail, every city I visit is, at this very moment, chasing development away to other cities because of its onerous development regulations. This, in turn, is stifling population growth, making the city stagnant, and killing morale. These regulations include zoning codes, subdivision codes, and the state building code, i.e. The Arkansas State Fire Code. Actually, the last one is a state law, but “scolders” hate being burdened with facts.

Those regulations, by the way, are mandated, by ancient law, to “protect the health, safety, welfare, and morals of the community. Would that federal laws enjoyed the same strictures.

Anyhow, I decided to do an amateurish and simple study about this. I formed an operational definition of onerous regulations. Were they complex? Were they very detailed? Did observance result in delays in approval. Did some regs drift beyond the “police power” definition of protecting the health, safety, welfare, and morals of The People? Were some regulations unique to a particular city? In short, did their regulatory system “jump the fence” at times?

Then I went to work. I classified a sampling of major cities against a “ratio” level of measurement. That’s considered the most useful. For snorts and giggles, I factored in population growth since 1971. That’s the year that the U.S. Supreme Court, in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, upheld busing programs that aimed to speed up the racial integration of public schools in the United States. That, as most honest urbanists know, was the single most critical catalyst of population growth among many cities in America since.

Well, wouldn’t you know, strictness of development regulations and population growth came out almost perfectly correlated. Now one of the few things I remember from graduate school was not to confuse correlation with causation. I can’t argue that strict development regulations caused population growth. They sure as hell didn’t stop it though. Probably the perils of rapid and uncontrolled population growth moved cities toward more stringent development control. I’ll let future generations of urban scholars work on that one.

As with many things currently facing America, to understand why some cities flourish and some struggle with out-migration, we need to look elsewhere besides the complexity of municipal codes.

Maybe the mirror?