Wendell Cox: “METROPOLITAN DENVER AT RISK: How Densification Will Intensify Traffic Congestion, Air Pollution and the Housing Affordability Crisis”

Wendell Cox, a critic of Smart Growth, made this presentation to the Apartment Association of Metro Denver Economic Conference on January 23, 2001. He underscores how density and traffic congestion go together, in Europe as in America:

If Denver were as dense as Los Angeles it would cover a bit more than one half the area. Los Angeles is the nation’s most dense urbanized area… It is no wonder that traffic is so bad in Los Angeles. Imagine how bad traffic would be in Denver if nearly twice as many people were on the roads as today…

The effect of land rationing is clear in Portland, where there is little land left to develop within the urban growth boundary. From 1991 to 2000, the Housing Opportunity Index, which measures the percentage of houses that can be afforded by the median income family, has fallen from 68.9 to 27.6, the largest drop by far of any major metropolitan area… If our parents had faced the same regulations of the housing market, most of us would have grown up in rental units…

Asian and European urban areas have far higher population densities than US areas. They also have much better transit systems with much higher levels of service. Yet, Figure #11 shows that traffic intensity is greater in nations with higher population densities. European traffic intensities are twice that of American urban areas. The same is true in the United States, where higher levels of traffic congestion occur where population densities are higher (Figure #12). Research conducted for the US Department of Transportation indicates that, at Denver densities, each one percent increase in density results in a 0.8 percent increase in auto use. This means that if density is doubled — if it is increased by 100 percent, then traffic will increase 80 percent. This is not less traffic, it is more. Indeed, Portland is experience strong growth in traffic congestion and is now nearly as congested as Atlanta, at 122 percent of roadway capacity. Denver is doing much better, at 108 percent of capacity, according to the Federal Highway Administration…

If air pollution from cars is to be minimized, then traffic needs to be speeded up…

What is in vogue is not always correct…

Planners and architects in the 1950s thought that 20-story public housing projects were the answer — the same projects that are being imploded around the country today…

See also:

The 3rd Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey: 2007 (PDF)
…the housing cost escalation is principally the result of supply factors. Where there are significant constraints on the supply of land for residential development, housing inflation has occurred…

The basic problem is that, in most of the least affordable markets, residential development is permitted only in accordance with inflexible government plans, while where housing remains affordable, people’s preferences tend to drive development (consistent with environmental requirements)…

There is a rush of domestic migration away from the least affordable markets in the United States to the more affordable markets, reversing decades long demographic trends…

Wendell Cox, “Rules to Live By: Smart growth not so smart?” (San Francisco Chronicle, 12/11/06)
[Smart Growth] policies include restrictions on suburban development, such as Portland’s (Oregon) urban growth boundary, and requirements for excessively large lots that reduce the supply of land for residential development…

Take “smart growth” friendly San Diego — where today the median house price is more than 10 times the median household income (a measure called the “median multiple”). The historic norm has been a median multiple of 3.0 or less. In San Diego, the median multiple was 3.6 in 1995… [I]n just the first half of the decade, 100,000 domestic migrants — people who move from one metropolitan area to another — have left the San Diego. Who can blame them?

…In the states with stronger smart growth or other land-rationing policies, the fall-off in existing house sales has been by far the greatest. 

“EcoDensity won’t cut house prices” (Vancouver, 11/29/07)
Vancouver’s developers have, in fact, been densifying Vancouver swifter than the population has grown for 15 years. And, instead of prices dropping, they’ve soared [doubled] since 1991.

Wendell Cox, “Overdevelopment: Consequence of Smart Growth” (Letter to the Washington Examiner, 3/14/07)
Whether it is large areas that are made off-limits to new residents (such as the Montgomery County Agricultural Preserve), or the large-lot zoning sweeping Northern Virginia, the result is artificial land price escalation. Developable land becomes so valuable that over-development becomes attractive. The second and far more damaging impact of smart growth is the destruction of housing affordability… Of course, the third impact is that people move to West Virginia and undertake long commutes or move to other areas. Where smart growth policies have been avoided, housing affordability remains at historic norms.

Randal O’Toole: “Debunking Portland: The City That Doesn’t Work” (PDF, Policy Analysis, 7/9/07)
Far from curbing sprawl, high housing prices led tens of thousands of families to move to Vancouver, Washington, and other cities outside the region’s authority. Far from reducing driving, rail transit has actually reduced the share of travel using transit from what it was in 1980.

Metro Portland’s Long Experience with Smart Growth: A Cautionary Tale
Small cities surrounded by developable land, like Eugene and Salem, now have housing prices that rival those in San Francisco Bay Area communities, when the purchasing power of local incomes is considered…

Oregon actually has a tremendous amount of available land… Oregon has apparently successfully engineered a shortage of sites in a state with plentiful land…

New York Times: “Vibrant Cities Find One Thing Missing: Children” (3/24/05)
After interviewing 300 parents who had left the city, researchers at Portland State found that high housing costs and a desire for space were the top reasons…

Randal O’Toole: “The Folly of ‘Smart Growth'”
..Open space in valuable locations such as people’s backyards, urban parks, and golf courses will be transferred to less valuable locations such as private rural farms that are unavailable for recreation.

Bozeman Daily Chronicle: “Bozeman’s Growing Pains” (9/7/05)
Open space for recreation [in Portland] is at risk after 10,000 acres of parks, fields, and golf courses were rezoned for infill development.

Rocky Mountain News: “Smart Growth? Sprawl-reducing policies suffer setbacks around the country” (7/9/05)
Another sign that smart-growth policies face tough times comes from a new census category introduced by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget in 2003. “Micropolitan areas” fall between metropolitan and rural areas. Micros lack the large central city of more than 50,000 residents that is a criterion for a standard metropolitan area, but they are “too urban to be rural,” as one demographer has put it. They are a new form of quasi-urban settlement – free-standing, low-density communities ranging from 10,000 to 50,000 people that are outside the geographic influence of metropolitan areas. Almost 30 million people, or one in 10 Americans, live in micropolitan areas.

According to the latest demographic data (Lang, Dh
avale and Haworth 2004), these areas, along with exurban (distant suburban) counties, are among the fastest-growing places in the country. Much of their growth is due to the continuing outward migration of young families in search of affordable housing and an environment in which to raise their children.

Some of the higher growth is also attributable to higher fertility rates among residents of the micropolitan places. As commentator Steve Sailer points out, lower densities seem not only to attract families of childbearing age, they also seem to encourage families that are already there to have more children.

Planetizen: “Trouble in Smart Growth’s Nirvana” (6/30/02)
Densification is no more popular in Portland’s neighborhoods than it is in Berkeley, Boulder or Bozeman. As a result, a recent citizen’s initiative sought to limit Metro’s (the land use regulation agency) densification power…

Mary Riddel, “A Dynamic Approach to Estimating Hedonic Prices for Environmental Goods: An Application to Open Space Purchases”
One important outcome of the Boulder [Colorado] open space purchase program has been leapfrog development of areas outside the greenbelt. Many critics of the program maintain that development was not thwarted, but rather relocated. Our [research] results support this conclusion. In fact, commercial and residential expansion occurred because of the program.

Peter Pollock, “Controlling Sprawl in Boulder: Benefits and Pitfalls” (January 1998)
Boulder, Colorado, has developed a national reputation for having dealt creatively with growth management issues. The city has developed a 27,000-acre greenbelt, a system for controlling the rate of population growth by limiting building permits, and a defined urban growth boundary managed in cooperation with Boulder County. Boulder’s approach to urban growth boundaries, called the service area concept, offers important lessons for controlling sprawl, preserving rural land uses outside the city, and extending urban services in a rational manner…

What specifically does the service area boundary do? It defines that part of the Boulder Valley planning area where the City of Boulder either already provides a full range of urban services [e.g. water, sewer] to annexed properties or will provide services upon annexation. Land outside the service area boundary remains in the county at rural densities until the city and county jointly agree to bring the property into the service area. Land can also be “moved” out of the service area…

What Are the Pitfalls?

  • Boulder’s region encompasses the whole county. Therefore, the city’s surging job growth and limitations on residential growth have had a significant impact on housing demand in adjoining communities. The most striking example is the nearby town of Superior. In 1990 the population of Superior was 255; in 1996 it was 3,377. It has practically no jobs and no sales tax base. This regional imbalance between jobs and housing has created tremendous problems with traffic congestion, lack of affordable housing and school facility needs.


  • Getting a hold on sprawl is only half the equation. What happens within the urban service area is the other. In Boulder’s initial planning efforts, there was a clear expression of a preference for infill and redevelopment over sprawl. Since there is no requirement that a certain amount of land be contained within its service area (such as the 20-year required land supply within Oregon’s urban growth boundaries), Boulder does not have to make a trade-off between expansion versus infill and redevelopment. However, it is increasingly difficult to convince specific neighborhoods and the community as a whole that additional density is in their best interests. The community can choose to not expand the service area, maintain current densities and simply not grow.