Articles

Georgia can't leave transit in the dust

Opinion by Jay Bookman
Atlanta Journal Constitution
December 4, 2006

Developer Wayne Mason wants to build two residential towers of almost 40 stories each on property adjoining Piedmont Park, but his plans have been frustrated by Atlanta land-use regulations against high density in that area.

Developer Charlie Brown, who built the high-density Atlantic Station project, wants to build five high-rise buildings of 18 to 25 stories in Roswell, but Roswell doesn't have zoning that allows such projects.

Those two cases - and there are many more variations - contradict one of the central themes in what might be called Atlanta's "creation myth."

American cities, we are told, are unique in all the world in their sprawling development patterns, and among sprawling American cities, Atlanta is perhaps the least dense, most sprawling of all.

This, we are told, is the natural order of things. This is what happens when market forces are allowed free play to design an American city. According to groups such as the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a local conservative think tank, the only way our sprawling pattern of growth can be altered is through draconian land-use regulations, which it opposes in part because of its opposition to government intervention.

It's all nonsense. In fact, draconian land-use regulations helped create this problem. We don't have density in metro Atlanta in part because we have rules that discourage or even outlaw it. Left to their own devices, free market forces would have created a metro region far more compact than we see today.

While that runs counter to accepted wisdom, the economics are pretty simple. Imagine that you're a developer with a 100-acre parcel. In simplified terms, you can build 400 houses on quarter-acre lots on that property, or 20 houses on 5-acre lots. Which would you choose, density or sprawl?

Unless government intervenes, you're going to build the 400 homes, because there's a lot more profit to be had that way. I've covered my share of zoning meetings, and never once have I seen a developer begging for the right to build fewer units on his property. Market forces want density.

Atlanta's built landscape, in other words, is a political creation, not the natural order of things. And if we decide that greater density can reduce the number of miles we drive each day and make mass transit a more realistic option, it's perfectly legitimate to use government to allow that to happen.

That's a critical term: "Allow."

Nobody is proposing that the Atlanta region ban the suburban development that has characterized this area in the past. That lifestyle option remains popular with many, and that's fine.

However, it's important to acknowledge that the suburban lifestyle will never again be as dominant as it has been since the end of World War II. Every single trend argues otherwise.

Fewer and fewer Americans live in traditional families, and the traditional families that do form are having fewer and fewer children. Fuel prices are rising; we are older on average; there are a lot more of us than there used to be; and urban lifestyles are becoming increasing popular. With rising population has come rising traffic congestion, and with it a hunger for alternatives. With all that change, designing a transportation system that pretends the growth of the next 40 years will mirror that of the past 40 years would be foolish.

For example, mass transit in its many forms - commuter rail, bus rapid transit, light rail, etc. - will play a far more significant role than in the past. But there, too, we run headlong into myth.

One of the most common excuses for opposing mass transit in Atlanta is that it would need taxpayer subsidies. That's essentially the position taken by Gov. Sonny Perdue, who says he would support mass transit that proves it can operate without subsidies.

That is the same Sonny Perdue who gave Kia, a South Korean automaker, $400 million in subsidies to locate an auto plant in Columbus. In rural parts of the state, we try to subsidize growth by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on "developmental highways" - four-lane divided highways that are often so empty you could use them as airport runways. Georgians for Better Transportation, a lobbying group that generally opposes transit in favor of roads and highways, wants to fund its wish list of projects with a new statewide one-penny sales tax, which would be a subsidy of enormous proportions.

Yet somehow, subsidizing transit is considered, well ... un-Georgian. It's a mind-set that has to change.

Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor. His column appears Mondays and Thursdays.

Copyright 2006 The Atlanta Jornal-Consitution. More information: www.ajc.com

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