Posts about Tea Party

Property laws inherently constrain individual liberty

Dramatics aside, the Heritage Foundation isn't all wrong. It's true that smart growth regulations infringe on the market. But that's true of all development regulations—and of property rights themselves. By design, all property regulations constrain individuals' freedom of choice to decide how to acquire and use property.

It's also true that pushing one form of development over another infringes on the market in a different and greater way than simply guaranteeing property ownership. But this too is a necessary evil of all development regulations.

It is a quintessential local government responsibility to effectively use zoning and land use authority to direct development where it needs to go—and, conversely, to prohibit development where it doesn't need to go. The same zoning tools that are used by smart growth advocates to focus dense development around transit are used by suburban developers to build subdivisions of peaceful single-family homes.

Without zoning laws, suburban residential subdivisions would not be protected from intrusion by smelly factories, shadow-casting skyscrapers, and loud night clubs. If the government tried to take away those zoning rules protecting suburban home values, there would be a public revolt.

Similarly, zoning laws and land use controls are necessary to shape development and settlement patterns in a responsible way, both on a local and regional scale. This is particularly true in a county with an expansive land area, like Prince George's County. Without appropriate land use controls, developments could pop up on virtually any greenfield across the vast 500 square mile land area of the county.

But even that type of scattered development depends on big government. You can't build one of those suburban subdivisions—or even one of those fancy new mixed-use "town centers" in the center of nowhere—unless the government blesses, builds, and maintains the roads, schools, sewers, and utilities to serve it.

Even if a private developer fronts money to pay for the infrastructure in and around the development, it's impossible to connect any of it to the larger grid without government help. And after all that new infrastructure supporting scattered development is built, guess who has to maintain it? That's right: big government. And who pays for all of that? That's right: "We the People" do.

Meanwhile, smart growth requires a lot less government infrastructure than sprawl. It also results in huge savings to taxpayers. By making communities walkable and bikeable, and locating them close to mass transit, smart growth reduces commutes, conserves important environmental resources, and facilitates more healthy lifestyles. And yes, as with suburban sprawl, smart growth also requires big government.

Whether the Heritage Foundation and the Tea Party care to admit it or not, it's always been the case that individual property owners can only use property in accordance with the regulations set by the government. The right and responsibility to determine how land is used belongs to the government, for the benefit of the people as a whole, and it always has. That's necessary for modern civilization.

So, since it's big government socialism no matter what, we should dispense with the histrionics and plan for what we want. And if we want smart growth, then we need the government support to do it correctly.

Woodmore Towne Centre: a case study of ineffective TOD

Prince George's County's approach to the development of Woodmore Towne Centre in Glenarden illustrates the problem with a laissez-faire approach to TOD.

In 2005, Petrie-Ross Ventures proposed a massive 4 million square foot mixed-use development on a 245-acre vacant woodland just outside the Capital Beltway, at its northeastern intersection with Maryland Route 202. Best Buy, Costco, Wegmans, and other automobile-oriented big box stores were to be the anchors.

The Woodmore site was upzoned from a rural-residential to a mixed-use transportation-oriented zone in 1998, even though it was outside the Beltway and more than a mile away from any existing or planned Metro station.

Meanwhile, multiple nearby sites with better infrastructure connections were left underused. Right across the Beltway from the Woodmore site, the 145-acre Landover Mall site stood shuttered and in need of redevelopment. Additionally, virtually all the nearby Metro stations were undeveloped or significantly underdeveloped.

Woodmore's planned big boxes could have easily been accommodated at the Landover Mall site. Likewise, much of the lower-density residential uses planned for Woodmore could have been placed at the mall site—thus transforming it into a more compact, greener retrofitted mixed-use development inside the Beltway.

Much of the higher density residential, commercial, and office uses planned for Woodmore could have gone to the nearby Metro stations at Largo, Landover, Cheverly, and New Carrollton.

But instead of focusing the county's efforts on developing those Metro stations and redeveloping blighted sites like Landover Mall, Prince George's officials used their zoning power to upzone rural land and make Woodmore Towne Center possible. And in so doing, the county had to build major new roads, Beltway overpass and interchange improvements, and other expensive public infrastructure.

Had Prince George's taken its smart growth policies seriously, it never would have used its big government authority to rezone Woodmore's rural property for intense development. Instead, the county would have used its zoning and land use authority, along with its substantial economic development resources, to aggressively promote, incentivize, and steer that same level of development towards better locations.

In the case of Woodmore Towne Center, the county's lackadaisical approach to smart growth has left it saddled with the still-vacant Landover Mall site, many still-vacant Metro stations, and 245 acres of lost woodlands that will likely never be recovered. And the county has assumed the responsibility for maintaining millions of dollars worth of new and unnecessary roads, sewers, and utilities.

Prince George's leaders are already embracing the big government mentality that's necessary for any urban or suburban development. But if they're truly interested in enhancing the county's livability and landing higher quality jobs and retail, they will need to wake up and start using their big government powers to facilitate smart growth instead of sprawl. As the old familiar Proverb says, "Where there is no vision, the people perish." (Prov. 29:18)

The national, and Virginia, Tea Party holds as a fundamental principle that "Governing should be done at the most local level possible where it can be held accountable." Individual counties and cities ought to be able to decide how they want to grow, or not grow. Loudoun, Charlottesville, and Roanoke should make these desicisions instead of the state government in Richmond.

Tea Party groups have been alarmed about "Agenda 21," which they say is a United Nations plan to undermine property rights. There's no UN conspiracy (though planners shouldn't be too quick to dismiss the underlying fears), but Virginia has a very real assault on liberty happening today. Call it Agenda 639.

Agenda 639, or Senate Bill 639 as passed into law, forces each county to match local transportation plans to dictates from the Commonwealth Transportation Board. If a locality doesn't want a particular transportation project, too bad. If VDOT spends money on the project anyway and a county rejects it, they have to reimburse VDOT, even if the county never wanted the project in the first place.

That's not all. Virginia has for many years used a formula to allocate transportation money to the various counties and cities. That gave local levels of government more say over their transportation. Agenda 639/SB 639 moves hundreds of millions of dollars out of the formula, giving the CTB unprecedented control of how it's spent. The governor in Richmond will now have more power to spend tax money than local leaders. That's the opposite of "the most local level possible."

If Virginia's small-government conservatives aren't alarmed at this, they should be.

One of the debates on the national transportation bill is to what extent the federal government should mandate that states and localities spend money on specific types of projects, even if those are projects, like paving sidewalks, that many people support to improve safety and economic development of an area.

The House transportation bill simply eliminates these set-asides. This has led many people in cities where people walk and bike in large numbers to worry that their state departments of transportation would refuse to fund such projects.

A bipartisan amendment from Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Thad Cochran (R-MS) found a common sense and small government approach to this issue: let local communities, or regional metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), choose how to spend the money themselves.

This is the right strategy for both liberals and conservatives. There's little enthusiasm for making more transportation decisions in Washington. Even in Washington, we'd rather make the transportation decisions at 55 M Street, SE (the District Department of Transportation headquarters) than inside 1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE (the US Department of Transportation), 2 blocks away.

Look at the saga over streetcar tracks on the 11th Street bridge. Federal regulations made it impossible for DC to put tracks on a bridge, a project local voters supported and would have paid for with local money. Too many transportation projects are too expensive and take too long because of federal rules.

Let's get rid of many of these federal rules and give the power to "the most local level [of government] possible." Transferring federal power to big state governments isn't enough to advance liberty. Give the power to local counties and cities.

With this bill on his record, Bob McDonnell might well turn out to be Virginia's most big-government governor ever. Let Northern Virginia decide what Northern Virginia wants, let Hampton Roads choose what's best for Hampton Roads, and let the Appalachian west set its own course.

One House Republican floated the idea of exempting District residents from federal income tax (though his spokesperson says it's not on the table). A group of Republicans also proposed cutting off all federal funding for a variety of DC functions, which leaders say would be "catastrophic" for DC.

If combined, however, DC could raise its own income taxes to recover some of the missing cost. The Republican Study Group wanted to cut $210 million from DC-related spending plus the $150 million a year to WMATA, whereas DC residents paid $3.6 billion in taxes last year.

If both measures passed together and Congress didn't try to stop DC from raising its local income tax to compensate, the District might be able to cover the $210 million on its own and even pay the federal share of WMATA's capital contributions out of the new revenue, and still keep taxes lower on average.

Let's also cut the National Park Service's budget while also eliminating its authority over all parks in DC except for the Mall area.

The federal government also gives each state, including DC, money for Medicaid, transportation, and many other types of payments allocated by formula. Medicaid and transportation, in particular, come out of payroll taxes and gas taxes, and it's not clear if the $3.6 billion number includes those. It can't include everything, since one IRS list says total federal tax receipts from DC total over $20 billion. Brookings estimated that DC received $2.7 billion in formula money in 2008.

Would conservatives and tea party activists like this? Anyone who simply wants to see lower taxes might be somewhat but not entirely pleased. Those who want to give more power to lower levels of government, however, ought to find common cause with those who chafe at federal policies which deprive metropolitan areas of the ability to set their own priorities and the fruit of their own economic activity.

Similar principles apply in Virginia. The state government collects many taxes and pays them to localities by formula. The Dillon Rule limits the abilities of counties to set many of their own policies. If the Virginia tea party indeed wants to see counties and cities do more legislating for themselves, perhaps both urbanists and tea partiers can support repealing the Dillon Rule and those state taxes, and letting individual counties decide if they want to assess comparable taxes to cover those programs or not.

Virginia tea partiers likewise could support letting the Northern Virginia counties directly raise the money they pay to WMATA, instead of having the state collect it from Northern Virginia taxpayers, and to keep WMATA Board membership in the hands of local officials instead of state ones.

Likewise, Northern Virginia counties, working together, should set their own transportation priorities. Why not give each county or city its own share of the gas tax directly, and let them fund transportation improvements in their own areas or use that revenue in other ways as they see fit?

The Washington region would become much more self-sufficient, which is something tea partiers and urbanists should both be able to support. Liberal local governments might still choose to levy taxes to pay for various services, but shouldn't that be a local decision? The federal government or state government in Richmond would be making fewer decisions affecting residents' everyday lives, which is a good goal.

A bill in the Virginia legislature would let counties opt out of designating these areas. Speaker Bill Howell (R-Fredericksburg) has been opposing this bill. Donna Holt, leader of Virginia's Campaign for Liberty, sent an email to Virginia tea party members making some astounding statements about the effects of UDAs:

If [Speaker Howell] has his way, you'll be forced to forfeit your land in the suburbs for the development of high-density 'urban development areas' also called 'smart growth'.

This is a gross violation of property rights. The inalienable right to own and control the use of private property is perhaps the single most important principle responsible for the growth and prosperity of Virginia. ...

You see the corporate developers stand to gain high profits from the construction of up to twelve homes on a single acre of land. They also get huge tax breaks for their green building practices in the "new urbanism design".

Eco-extremists are heavily funded for their lobby efforts to grab and preserve up to 90% of all the land that would be off limits to humans and move you into high-density feudalistic transit villages.

They use global warming and environmental disaster to scare the citizens and politicians into abolishing private property ownership.

If they have their way, single family homes will be a thing of the past. We'd become mere lease holders of the homes we live in.

The claim that any of this would take anyone out of any homes is so ridiculous as to be laughable, except for the fact that the tea party groups have acquired significant influence over national and state legislators.

More ironic is the way Holt argues that property rights are "the single most important principle" in Virginia, but almost immediately then castigates "corporate developers" for wanting to maximize their own property rights.

It'd be fascinating to see what would happen if a property owner next door to Holt's single-family home requested permission to have the right to put 12 homes on his or her one-acre property. I'm sure Holt would quickly insist that while property rights may be inalienable, the right to prevent any development denser than her own within viewing distance is even more inalienable than that.