The Lone Mountain Compact:
Principles for Preserving Freedom and Livability in America’s Cities and Suburbs
Lone Mountain Coalition
The phenomenon of urban sprawl has
become a pre-eminent controversy throughout the United States. Recently a number of
scholars and writers, gathered at a conference about the issue at Lone Mountain Ranch in
Big Sky, Montana by the Political Economy Research Center, decided to distill their
conclusions into the following brief statement of principles. The authors have called this
statement the "Lone Mountain Compact," and have invited other writers and
scholars to join in endorsing its principles. A partial list of signatures appears at the
end.
Preamble:
The unprecedented increase in prosperity over the last 25 years has created a large and
growing upper middle class in America. New modes of work and leisure combined with
population growth have fueled successive waves of suburban expansion in the 20th
century. Technological progress is likely to increase housing choice and community
diversity even further in the 21st century, enabling more people to live and
work outside the conventional urban forms of our time. These choices will likely include
low-density, medium-density, and high-density urban forms. This growth brings rapid change
to our communities, often with negative side effects, such as traffic congestion, crowded
public schools, and the loss of familiar open space. All of these factors are bound up in
the controversy that goes by the term "sprawl." The heightened public concern
over the character of our cities and suburbs is a healthy expression of citizen demand for
solutions that are responsive to our changing needs and wants. Yet tradeoffs between
different policy options for addressing these concerns are poorly understood. Productive
solutions to public concerns will adhere to the following fundamental principles.
Principles for Livable Cities:
The most fundamental principle is that, absent a material
threat to other individuals or the community, people should be allowed to live and work
where and how they like.
Prescriptive, centralized plans that attempt to determine
the detailed outcome of community form and function should be avoided. Such
"comprehensive" plans interfere with the dynamic, adaptive, and evolutionary
nature of neighborhoods and cities.
Densities and land uses should be market driven, not plan
driven. Proposals to supersede market-driven land use decisions by centrally directed
decisions are vulnerable to the same kind of perverse consequences as any other kind of
centrally planned resource allocation decisions, and show little awareness of what such a
system would have to accomplish even to equal the market in effectiveness.
Communities should allow a diversity in neighborhood
design, as desired by the market. Planning and zoning codes and building regulations
should allow for neotraditional neighborhood design, historic neighborhood renovation and
conversion, and other mixed-use development and the more decentralized development forms
of recent years.
Decisions about neighborhood development should be
decentralized as far as possible. Local neighborhood associations and private
covenants are superior to centralized or regional government planning agencies.
Local planning procedures and tools should incorporate
private property rights as a fundamental element of development control. Problems of
incompatible or conflicting land uses will be better resolved through the revival of
common law principles of nuisance than through zoning regulations which tend to be rigid
and inefficient.
All growth management policies should be evaluated
according to their cost of living and "burden-shifting" effects. Urban
growth boundaries, minimum lot sizes, restrictions on housing development, restrictions on
commercial development, and other limits on freely functioning land markets that increase
the burdens on lower income groups must be rejected.
Market-oriented transportation strategies should be
employed, such as peak period road pricing, HOT lanes, toll roads, and de-monopolized mass
transit. Monopoly public transit schemes, especially fixed rail transit that lacks the
flexibility to adapt to the changing destinations of a dynamic, decentralized metropolis,
should be viewed skeptically.
The rights of present residents should not supersede
those of future residents. Planners, citizens, and local officials
should recognize that "efficient" land use must include consideration for
household and consumer wants, preferences, and desires. Thus, growth controls and land-use
planning must consider the desires of future residents and generations, not solely current
residents.
Planning decisions should be based upon facts, not
perceptions. A number of the concerns raised in the "sprawl" debate are
based upon false perceptions. The use of good data in public policy is crucial to the
continued progress of American cities and the social advance of all its citizens.
For more information and background on these principles, see A Guide to Smart Growth:
Shattering Myths, Providing Solutions, edited by Jane S. Shaw and Ronald D. Utt,
(PERC/Heritage Foundation, 2000). |
