Blaming Smart Growth

In a mighty leap of logic and misdirection, not unusual for the Heritage Foundation, author Wendell Cox blames smart growth for the housing bubble, economic downturn and alopecia.       

These policies, often referred to as "smart growth," create a scarcity of land, artificially raise the price of housing, and, again, have increased the exposure of the market to risky mortgage debt. When more liberal loan policies were implemented, metropolitan areas that had adopted these more restrictive policies lacked the resilient land markets that would have allowed the greater demand to be accommodated without inordinate increases in house prices.

This is simultaneously ridiculous and boring - other typifying traits of  HF material.

There is a glut of housing tied directly to those  liberal loan policies, not a shortage of land caused by excessive land use regulation.  And we should be so lucky.  The sprawl pattern paradigm of the last twenty-five years was constrained by very little and the least of these was "smart growth" regulation.   The term itself was only more recently popularized to describe the largely ineffective and pathetic attempts to rein in the juggernaut - like Albuquerque's Planned Growth Strategy in 1996 - the potential of which was nipped in the bud by sprawlmeisters.   

Albuquerque's most obvious development constraint is land ownership, not regulation.  The edges of our ubiquitous suburbia are defined by federal, Indian or old land grant boundaries, not smart growth boundaries.  The entire idea of effective growth boundaries was kneecapped by the very developer friendly Legislature early in the decade.

Blaming planning or local government regulation seems popular with those who made record breaking profits in the housing boom and on the way down they are grasping at straws.