Euphemism as a Political Strategy

Gerald E. Frug

Gerald Frug is the Louis D. Brandeis Professor of Law at Harvard University.

The standard arguments for smart growth rely on "the substitution of an agreeable or inoffensive expression for one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant"—to quote the dictionary's definition of a euphemism.¹ "Smart growth" is, of course, itself a feel-good term. But it is by no means the only one. Almost as pervasive are terms like "sustainability" and "livable communities."² Who could be for dumb growth or think that unsustainable, unlivable places were desirable? Moreover, it is not just these general catch-phrases that rely on euphemism for their effect. When the goals of smart growth are defined more precisely, they regularly skirt controversy by omitting any hint of conflict or dissonance. Consider, for example, the Sierra Club's one-sentence definition:

Smart growth is intelligent, well-planned development that channels growth into existing areas, provides public transportation options, and preserves farm land and open space.³

This definition combines an appeal to values as diverse as rationality (intelligent, well-planned), economic vitality (growth), freedom of choice (transportation options), and the love of both cities (existing areas) and nature (open space). But its emphasis, as is true for much of the smart growth literature, is on the environment. Channeling growth, like preserving open space, suggests the preservation of natural beauty uncontaminated by development, and opening up transportation options suggests cutting down on air pollution. This appeal to nature evokes the tradition chronicled by Leo Marx's celebrated book, The Machine in the Garden: here again is a "middle landscape," a pastoral ideal that incorporates but tames the industrial revolution.⁴ The Sierra Club's definition fails even to mention equity issues—like the unavailability of affordable housing—that many others include as an essential component of the smart growth agenda.⁵ To be sure, "affordable housing" itself is a euphemism. With housing prices in many metropolitan areas sky high, virtually everyone needs housing that is affordable. One does not have to read the call for affordable housing as a suggestion that one's own neighborhood will become open to housing for the poor. Even housing targeted at low- and moderate-income households can be designed only for those at the highest part of that income scale or be open only to people, such as the elderly already living in the area, thought not to be threatening.

The Revolutionary Nature of Smart Growth

These euphemistic appeals of smart growth are designed to generate support for a revolutionary change in American urban policy. I am very much for this revolutionary change, but smart growth advocates should frankly admit, at least to each other, how revolutionary it would be. No one living in American metropolitan areas would be unaffected if smart growth objectives were actually achieved.

Intelligent, well-planned development would prevent people from moving to where they apparently want to move—farther and farther out of the central city. As a result, it would produce a kind of density that the long-standing dream of a single-family house surrounded by a yard has sought to escape. Moreover, if this increased density is actually to take place in existing areas, it means reviving the central cities—from St. Louis to Detroit, from Camden to Oakland—that are now filled not simply with poor people but with poor African Americans, Latinos, and immigrants from around the world. It thus requires ending the segregation of metropolitan areas by income and ethnicity—a form of segregation that has generated more and more sprawl as the inner suburbs, following the central cities, have begun to diversify. Increasing density, in other words, will mean that the people who are moving to the outer suburbs will need to learn to live with the very kinds of people that they are now running away from. And this reconciliation will have to take place in more than the central cities. If the central cities become more prosperous because that's where growth is channeled—that is, if they gentrify—many poor people will be driven out of them by rising housing prices. They will need places to go. The areas in the metropolitan region now closed to them will therefore have to become places where they can live.

The need to provide housing for people at all income levels is not the only reason that it's important to add smaller, [30 ELR 11190] less expensive houses to the suburban enclaves now zoned only for large, expensive houses. An increase in suburban density is also a prerequisite to a public transportation system that connects the suburbs to the central city and to each other. Public transportation makes sense only in a dense urban world. Yet even if such a large-scale mass transit system can be built, getting people out of their cars and into trains and buses filled with strangers will not be an easy thing to do. People tend to use public transportation only when driving is not an viable option—that is, when car travel is less convenient, more expensive, and more time-consuming than taking the bus or train. There are many places in the world—and not just New York City—where driving is both an option and a nightmare; these are the places where public transportation really takes cars off the road. Of course, smart growth advocates do not envision a world without cars. Nevertheless, if they are to make public transportation viable, they need to oppose efforts to solve traffic problems by building more highways. Driving, in other words, has to become even more unpleasant than it is today if smart growth efforts are to succeed.

By themselves, increasing housing density and creating an extensive public transportation network will not protect open space. Vast parts of America's metropolitan areas also have to be declared off limits to development. This requires not just growth boundaries around metropolitan areas but growth boundaries that actually prevent development. To preserve farm land, large-scale agricultural zoning is therefore indispensable. It's inconceivable that enough tax money could be raised to buy the existing farms that surround America's expanding metropolitan areas—or even to buy the potential gains that farmers might make from development. Spending tax money for these purposes, however, should not be necessary. It's true that many property owners—including many farmers—think that they have something called "development rights," that is, they think that any restriction on their ability to sell their property to a developer is not only unfair but unconstitutional. But property owners do not have "development rights" in this popular sense of the term. If such development rights existed, zoning would be unconstitutional. Zoning ordinances always prevent people from selling their property to some kind of developer. Yet it has been clear for more than 75 years that zoning is constitutional. Property owners themselves strongly defend zoning whenever they think not of making a bundle from their own property but of their neighbors developing their property in a way that changes the character of the neighborhood. To be sure, a property rights movement has been organized in recent years to persuade state legislatures and state supreme courts to define and defend development rights. The smart growth movement needs to fight this movement's efforts. But even success in this fight will not preserve open space other than farm land. As a constitutional matter, property cannot be zoned simply as open space—it cannot be zoned to deprive the owner of all economic return. As a result, this kind of property, unlike farm land, will have to be purchased by state and local governments if it is to be immunized from sprawl. And that will cost the taxpayers a lot of money.

Inthe last few paragraphs, I've raised a lot of controversial issues: limiting the availability of the kind of houses people now want to buy; fostering density; ending income and racial segregation; making car travel more burdensome; taking on the property rights movement. These are the kinds of controversial issues that the euphemistic rhetoric of smart growth advocates seeks to suppress. It's not that these implications of the smart growth movement are a secret. Those who oppose smart growth certainly know about them. But rather than responding to the smart growth agenda by detailing their own vision of America's future, they articulate their arguments through euphemisms of their own. Their defense of the current shape of metropolitan life relies on references to freedom and voluntary choice: people should be allowed to buy whatever kind of houses they want to buy; people would rather drive than use public transportation; people want privacy, not density. Smart growth, they charge, is an attempt to limit people's choices—one more example of a liberal (if not totalitarian) scheme of government coercion. Not only is smart growth an infringement on the rights of property owners and consumers, they argue, but it undermines the welfare of the poor. Smart growth would harm the poor by raising housing prices, not to mention the cost of driving a car. Besides, they add, the proposed infringements on liberty and welfare are not necessary: at the moment, metropolitan urbanization only covers 3% of the nation's land.⁶

By and large, each side's euphemisms now whirl past each other, rarely intersecting at all. Smart growth advocates talk about the government programs that promote sprawl, while opponents emphasize the kind of housing people are actually moving into and, therefore, seem to want. Smart growth advocates talk about the environment, while the opponents emphasize property rights. Smart growth advocates talk about traffic jams and public transportation, while the opponents invoke Americans' love affairs with their cars. Smart growth advocates talk about revitalizing existing communities, while the opponents raise the fear of rising housing prices. Smart growth advocates emphasize things people hate about their current metropolitan area (traffic, environmental degradation, ugly subdivisions, and strip malls), and the opponents emphasize what they like about it (houses with yards, the convenience of car travel, the ability to move to a safe community with good schools). Smart growth advocates imagine people defending their community from over-development or flight, while the opponents imagine people moving to a community that they both choose and like.

What the Reliance on Euphemism Is Hiding

The issue I want to address in this Dialogue is whether the smart growth movement's attempt to match euphemism with euphemism is a good political strategy. I don't think the answer to this questions is obvious. There's a lot to be said for the reliance on euphemism. Current American politics, after all, is characterized not simply by euphemism but by what Frank Rich calls "beatific imagery and oratorical [30 ELR 11191] Muzak."⁷ If smart growth advocates are going to make an appeal in this political climate, they need to speak the contemporary language. Moreover, smart growth can be achieved only if there is coalition building, and coalition building requires general appeals. The smart growth movement has to forge a political alliance among very different kinds of people: farmers worried about being driven off their land; residents of rural communities worried about preserving their area's isolation and natural beauty; commuters living in the outer suburbs worried about traffic; inner suburban families worried about declining neighborhoods; and central city residents worried about jobs, bad schools, and crime. A good political appeal has to focus on issues that these people will agree on (environmental concerns, more mass transit) and not on items that will divide them (racial and class integration, a rejection of development rights). In politics, the first task is to make concrete gains that will promote agreed-on goals. Establishing growth boundaries, channeling government resources into existing areas, buying property for open space, and increasing public transportation funding are examples. Once this agenda is in place, the more divisive issues can be dealt with in due course. This, one should recognize, is the political strategy that made the Suburban Dream a reality. The environmental, social, and economic problems generated by the move to the suburbs—the problems that smart growth advocates emphasize—were suppressed in the vigorous effort to move America out of its central cities. Even now, the defenders of the Suburban Dream underplay these problems. It's not surprising that these euphemistic appeals continue to win them a lot of support. Euphemistic appeals have also won the smart growth movement support, both at the ballot box and in state legislatures.⁸ Why give such a strategy up?

To explore the reason to do so, let's focus on one specific assertion I offered above: smart growth requires ending the current division of American metropolitan areas along the lines of class, race, and ethnicity. One of the costs and benefits of the smart growth movement's reliance on euphemism is that I don't even know if smart growth advocates agree that eliminating this kind of segregation is necessary. I therefore need to make the argument that it is.

One of the reasons that people are extending regional boundaries further and further into the countryside, I submit, is that the legal system now organizes American cities and suburbs in a way that fosters a fragmented metropolitan landscape. State law, for example, currently empowers American suburbs to engage in exclusionary zoning. It therefore enables prosperous suburbs to exclude not only the poor but anyone whocannot afford a house priced at a specified level. State law also authorizes these suburbs to spend the money they raise from property taxes solely on local residents. This rule of taxation enables local residents to make sure that their tax money is not spent on anyone poorer than they are because, as we have just seen, they have already excluded such people from town. Given these two legal rules, those who can afford to move across city lines can dramatically improve their quality of life by leaving other people behind. Some people move to wealthy communities, if they can afford it, simply to save the money that they would have spent on the poor had they remained in a class-integrated jurisdiction. Others move in order to gain the benefits that these rules provide, such as better funded schools. These two legal rules, in short, create a sprawl machine—a legally generated incentive to move out of town. As the wealthy move to their suburbs with this cost-consciousness in mind, taking their resources with them, the cities they abandon begin to decline. As a result, people in the middle class who have remained in these jurisdictions move to their own suburbs and exclude those poorer than they are, and the cities they leave behind decline even further. When this sprawl machine is fully in operation, neither the central cities nor the individual suburbs have a truly diverse population. Class segregation becomes the norm.

This sprawl-generating legal structure has widespread popular support. In part, this support derives from the world that current legal rules have made possible. The people who live in exclusive suburbs organize their lives so that they do not come into contact with people that make them uncomfortable. Not only are "undesirables" not permitted to become residents but they also do not shop at the same mall or work in the same office park. This degree of isolation is self-reinforcing: without the experience of regularly coming into contact with different types of people, the prospect of unfamiliar strangers moving into the neighborhood—even of seeing them on the street—generates feelings of discomfort, anxiety, and fear.⁹ This reaction is at its height when the unfamiliar strangers are people of color. Moreover, this attitude is by no means found only in the exclusive suburbs. Racial antagonism between blacks and whites has increasingly taken on a spacial dimension in central cities as well, and so has the widespread prejudice against the poor. Of course, racial and class prejudice are not new phenomena. The slave plantation was full of racial antagonism. But the physical distance between the races on the plantation—indeed, in the segregated South in the first half of the 20th century—was small. Now, many whites feel the need to live in their own neighborhoods and to shop and work in white areas as well; many residents of black neighborhoods are equally happy to have no white people around. Similarly, while the poor and the rich have long lived in different neighborhoods, traditionally these neighborhoods were only a few blocks—walking distance—from each other (in some cities, they still are). Now, the spacial distance between rich neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods is more commonly measured in miles: the rich live on one side of the central city while the poor on the other. This spacial division is vigorously, even emotionally, defended. "Complete strangers," as former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich puts it, "suddenly feel intense solidarity when it is rumored that low-income housing will be constructed in their midst or that a poorer school district will be consolidated with their own."¹⁰ This desire for spacial separation is often wrapped in the language of "property values": many people think that the presence of low-income households will diminish the value of the biggest investment of their lives. And their resistance is not just to the poor. Distance from [30 ELR 11192] anyone with less income than one's own family—whatever their level of income—has become not only a sign of security and status but a way to define the self. "Tell me someone's ZIP code," Reich quotes a founder of a direct-mail company bragging, "and I can predict what they eat, drink, drive—even think."¹¹

This use of space to isolate people from each other is also not limited to matters of race and class. Schools, ball fields, libraries, churches, and housing for the elderly also generate intense opposition if they are planned for residential neighborhoods. It doesn't matter that one's own children would attend the school or use the library. People insist that only a narrow range of uses—houses like one's own—are acceptable.¹² In fact, those who can afford it make sure that these houses themselves are far apart. It's best if you cannot hear—better still, not see—one's neighbors. Not only has more space between houses become a desirable consumer good, but house sizes have also been increased to generate privacy. In Victorian houses, children shared bedrooms with each other, and servants lived on the same floor as the family. Privacy was associated "with short periods of time alone, in a special place in the house: a window seat, a cubbyhole under the stairs, a man's library."¹³ All this is now widely experienced as unacceptable. Family members now seek to maintain spacial distance not only from strangers but from each other.

If people continue to demand this kind of space to feel comfortable, sprawl will be uncontrollable. Large houses on large lots generate sprawl. Exclusion of nonresidential uses from residential neighborhoods generates sprawl. Spacial divisions between different kinds of people generate sprawl. Walling oneself off from the poor or from people of color generates sprawl. Do smart growth advocates therefore seek to confront this desire for more and more space by helping people learn non-spacial ways to come to grips with their discomfort with other people? Not all of them. On the contrary, a good deal of the current support for smart growth comes from people who embrace this intensifying desire for exclusion. Gregg Easterbrook describes some of these advocates when he says:

The emerging national voter concern about development is in considerable danger of becoming a form of political selfishness. After all, when people complain to their political leaders about traffic backups and parking shortages, what they mean is they want government to get everybody else off the roads. They certainly do not mean they want policies that would put them out of their own cars or deprive them of parking. Similarly, when voters oppose construction of new housing subdivisions, what they mean is that everybody else should live in higher density circumstances. They certainly do not mean they are willing to have their own lots carved up to put in more housing per acre. That is to say, as the issue is currently defined, when voters complain about sprawl, what they are really saying is that they want to preserve sprawl—at least their own version of it.¹⁴

Of course, not everyone who favors smart growth adopts this attitude. Many smart growth advocates emphasize the need for integrating different housing types as well as commercial uses in the same neighborhood, and many see ending racial and class fragmentation as one of their primary goals.¹⁵ But the environmental emphasis of current smart growth rhetoric allows those who adopt both of these opposite positions to mouth the same slogans. Both sides love nature. Both sides are for open space, mass transit, density, economic development—even affordable housing—somewhere in the region. Their disagreement over what they picture when they hear the terms "livable" community or "sustainability" is papered over by euphemism.

Consider this excerpt from the Clinton-Gore smart growth manifesto:

Our goal is to help build livable communities for the 21st century—to develop places where older neighborhoods thrive once again; where you can walk safely on the streets; where historic neighborhoods as well as farms, forests, and other green spaces are preserved; where Americans spend less time in traffic and more time with their children, spouses, and neighbors; where homes are safe and secure from nature's forces; and all can share in our prosperity. We want to develop places with good schools, clean environments, and public and private spaces that help foster a spirit of community. . . . The Livable Communities Initiative contains an array of existing and proposed programs and policies to help communities meet these objectives. It offers communities resources and tools they can use to revitalize urban neighborhoods, ease traffic congestion, preserve farmland and open spaces, become disaster resistant, address the distribution of environmental burdens and benefits, and achieve equitable development. Through collaboration among neighboring jurisdictions, smart growth planning, and engagement of the private sector, these programs can help improve air and water quality, clean up abandoned brownfields, and improve traffic safety. The Livable Communities Initiative recognizes the importance of investing in places and is founded on community-based solutions. It is based on the notion that communities know best. Every community is different. Decisions about how they grow are best made by the communities themselves. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the federal government to assist and to inform, not direct.¹⁶

Those who favor exclusion and those opposed to it can equally embrace this appeal. The repeated reference to the term "community"—itself a euphemism—sharpens this [30 ELR 11193] dispute while suppressing it. Who is included in the word "community"? If the community is defined by existing city and suburban boundaries (as suggested by the imagery invoking the romance of the small town, the appeal to the "spirit of community," the indication that federal government would simply be supporting already existing communities, etc.), it would mean that the localities that wanted to remain exclusive could continue to do so and preserve their natural resources at the same time. For these readers, smart growth and "local control" are compatible goals. If, on the other hand, "community" refers to the metropolitan area as a whole (as suggested by terms like equitable development, the distribution of environmental burdens, collaboration among neighboring localities, etc.), it suggests that the central cities and suburbs now divided by race and class need to work together to overcome the centrifugal forces now generating suburban sprawl. For these readers, smart growth and regionalism go hand-in-hand.

The Reliance on Euphemism Won't Work

Do we need to resolve this dispute to build a political coalition that will promote smart growth? I think we do. Imagine what a metropolitan area that adopted an environmentally sensitive smart growth agenda would look like if the exclusion of "undesirables" were still a protected goal. As I picture it, the region in question would have adopted an effective growth boundary, protected open space both inside and outside the boundary, allocated more money for mass transit, and channeled development into "existing areas"—in short, it would have implemented the smart growth agenda without addressing the identification of status with exclusion and without modifying the incentive to move out of class-integrated cities in order to gain the advantages of exclusionary zoning and current finance rules. As existing parts of this metropolitan area became gentrified because that's where growth was channeled, housing costs would force poor people to move to new jurisdictions. Since they could not move outside the growth boundary and would be excluded from large areas within the growth boundary, the places where they could move would be quite limited. Moreover, these densely crowded areas would continue to seem undesirable (this attitude, we have simply assumed, remains the same), and those who could afford it would therefore continue to seek to move away from these parts of the region. But many of these people would find it hard to buy an adequate place to live given the largeareas open only to those who earn a higher income than others. As a result, the pressure to open up space within the region for housing—either by moving the growth boundary or developing open space—would be intense.

Meanwhile, the people living in the most exclusive parts of the region would likely try to prevent mass transit from being connected to their area in order to ensure that "undesirables" would have no access to it. Neighborhoods across the country—from Marin County, California, to Georgetown in Washington, D.C.—have already adopted such a strategy to protect their isolation. To defend their position, they could claim—plausibly claim—that their area is not dense enough to make mass transit a viable option. If those who live in these areas succeeded in this effort to exclude mass transit, they would, out of necessity, continue to rely on their cars whenever they leave home. And they wouldn't want to drive very far. Surely shopping and jobs could not be located solely in the parts of the region dominated by the poor. By hypothesis, some development would be channeled to those areas. But many developers would also continue their efforts to build in "nicer" areas—areas that would provide a more comfortable setting for business owners and employees. These too, after all, would be "existing areas." As a result, the pressure for development, like the demand for housing, would threaten to invade open space and to breach the growth boundary.

The reason that this version of smart growth is so fragile is that the fundamental dynamic that is now generating the spread of housing and commercial development in American metropolitan areas remains untouched. People who would have sacrificed nothing to protect the environment would continue to demonstrate that the most livable communities in America are built on exclusion. Conversely, density, mass transit, and lower level development—not to mention undesirable land uses—would still be associated with those who cannot afford to escape them. This continued division between the haves and have-nots would transform smart growth into an elitist political program and, as this became recognized, the political coalition built on euphemism would unravel. Those prevented from moving out of their limited part of the region would refuse to support a program that they would see as adopted at their expense. They would be able to build alliances with farmers who would equally resent a policy that prevented them from selling their land to developers while enriching others. And members of these groups could be joined by suburban residents who wanted their jobs to be closer to home, developers seeking more profitable business ventures, and liberals who thought that such a fragmented world was not worth fighting for. You should notice that I have not even mentioned school inequality—an issue that, oddly enough, is rarely mentioned in the smart growth literature but that would also undermine support for this version of smart growth.

Overcoming the Desire for Exclusion

If this scenario rings true, it means that the smart growth movement needs to reject those who embrace exclusion and work instead to end it. And this requires combating the exclusionary instincts not just of the opponents of smart growth but of its advocates as well. Doing so entails a massive educational effort for allies and adversaries alike. For far too long, Americans have been taught that the way to deal with the country's increasing diversity is to isolate oneself from it. Women's magazines, government officials, car manufacturers, and real estate developers have contributed to this romance of isolation by linking the suburbs with family life and nature and by describing large cities in the traditional American language of anti-urbanism. Much of the smart growth literature has built on the exact same contrast by embracing the imagery of the small town rather than that of city life. Meanwhile, local government law has ensured that the schools associated with exclusionary development have not only been isolated from unfamiliar strangers but better funded than central city schools. And federal and state governments have subsidized exclusionary development through their tax and spending policies. Given this immense effort, it's not surprising that millions and millions of Americans [30 ELR 11194] have embraced the Suburban Dream as their own. An equally immense effort will be necessary to turn it around.

Still, the current insatiable desire for space is not built into the human genome. Like all aspects of human desire, it is the product of a long process of adjustment to, and choice among, a limited set of socially constructed options. Its transformation will have to be as well. We don't know what Americans would have done had the best schools and lowest crime rates been in diverse neighborhoods. We don't know what they would have done if no area in the country had been allowed to exclude affordable housing and, as a result, exclusion could not have become the preferred vehicle for raising property values. We don't know what they would have done had more money been spent for parks than for yards and for mass transit than for highways. We do know that, having adopted the policies of the last 50 years, far too few Americans have had the experience of living in a diverse world. As a result, far too few have gained an adequate understanding of either the problems or the pleasures that it generates. This lack of experience cannot be overcome by euphemism. Perhaps smart growth opponents can rely on euphemism because they can build on the momentum that the last 50 years of government policy and individual decisionmaking have created. If the smart growth movement is to reverse this momentum, however, it needs to develop a strategy to do so.

The question before us is what such a strategy might be. Many of those who agree in principle with the goals outlined above think that there is no possible strategy. Too many Americans like exclusion, they say, and those who support it are too important an ingredient in the effort to build a smart growth majority to offend. It doesn't matter that there are problems with the reliance on euphemism. There is no alternative. My response to these doubters is not based on a disagreement about the extent of the current embrace of exclusion in America. What I am suggesting instead is that we are devoting too little attention to thinking about ways to counteract it. Many people seem to think that the only available tactics—other than a reliance on euphemism—are making people feel guilty about their desire for exclusion, inspiring them with appeals to diversity, or informing them about the costs of their current ways of life. Although I wouldn't suggest abandoning any of these tactics, I think we need more ideas. I don't think that the best strategy for smart growth advocates is to confront the current attachment to exclusion and spacial distance head-on. Guilt-tripping, appeals to the values of diversity, and testimonials about the pleasures of riding the busare not likely to win many converts. It's also not enough simply to provide information to metropolitan residents about the environmental and social costs of the classic Suburban Dream. It's not even enough to point out the mistaken assumptions people make about their current choices (for example, the fact that studies show that the introduction of affordable housing does not lower neighborhood property values).¹⁷ The movement's success depends on changing people's most fundamental attitudes—the kind of neighborhoods that feel "nice," the kind of people with whom one feels comfortable, what a livable community looks like. These attitudes go deeper than can be reached by evangelism or the recitation of facts.¹⁸ They certainly cannot be changed by showing pictures to middle class white people of cutesy small towns filled with middle class white people and asking them if these towns look like nice places to live.

I have no magic solution to the strategic problem that the smart growth movement faces. I do, however, want to suggest an example of a strategy that does not rely on evangelism or argumentation. Instead of trying to overcome people's desire for exclusion by contesting it, thereby setting up a power struggle, it would be better, it seems to me, to encourage people to articulate, in detail, the kind of world that fulfilling their current desire is likely to create.¹⁹ Smart growth opponents should be encouraged to fill in the picture of a built-out metropolitan region: its impact on open space, the additional highways that would be needed, and the class and racial divisions that would be produced. The more space they want, the more self-interested they are, the more exclusion they feel is necessary, the better. Let them say where they would put the people they want space from, as well as the people who want space from them. If they insist upon their own freedom of choice, the response should be to suggest that everyone else should be equally free to do whatever they want in terms of housing, development, and transportation. If they have a love affair with their cars, everyone else is entitled to the same love affair; if they need space, so do others. As they articulate what they see as their region's future, it's important to translate their words into visual images. Architects and planners should present computer-generated photographs of the kind of metropolitan area that smart growth opponents envision as the future. Let people see for themselves—to experience as their own insight—the impact that unrestrained individual decisionmaking would have on their own lives, as well as on their region.

The idea behind sessions such as these—run by government officials, smart growth organizations, universities, and others—is to help people understand the social implications of their own decisionmaking. These sessions would put people into the position of planners rather than that of consumers shopping for a house or a school for their kids. For most people, this would be the first time they would have thought of these issues from this perspective. The sessions should also be organized to allow people to imagine and discuss not just projections of their current desires but alternative possible futures. One such future would be a world with growth boundaries, the channeling of development, protected open space, mass transit—and no legally protected exclusion. People should be encouraged to express the fear of [30 ELR 11195] "undesirables" that such a picture generates and to discuss what might be done to alleviate those fears. They should also be encouraged to articulate the impact on their own lives and on the lives of their children of a country increasingly divided by race and class. I'm not suggesting that the people who would engage in this kind of process would have a conversion experience. I am making a much more modest claim: fundamental attitudes are most likely to be transformed when the transformation is experienced as self-initiated. Such a process cannot even get underway unless people confront the unpleasantness of getting what they hope for as well as of the alternatives. This position, one should recognize, is the opposite of that adopted by the current reliance on euphemism: euphemism seeks to overcome people's fears by hiding them from view rather than bringing them to the surface.

These planning sessions can serve another purpose as well. They can help undermine the efforts of smart growth opponents to frame the sprawl debate in terms of a choice between individual freedom and government control. The people who attend these sessions will see for themselves that there is no such thing as the freedom to make individual decisions apart from the collective framework within which these decisions are made. The current sprawl machine is itself based on a plan. The plan can be found in the rules of local government law—the rules that enable exclusionary zoning, tax inequality, and the power of exclusive suburbs to export the costs of exclusion to neighboring jurisdictions free of charge. This plan derives from the exercise of state authority, not individual choice; it is product of state law. And it provides the current context for individual choices about where to live. The issue raised by the sprawl debate is whether the existing plan should be changed in order to improve the lives of metropolitan residents as a whole. By organizing planning sessions to include the public at large, it will become clear that the task of designing a better plan need not be left to government bureaucrats. The planning sessions can be organized democratically. To be sure, government officials and planning experts can, and should, play an important role in these sessions. Not only can they organize the meetings, as I have already suggested, but they can help the public understand what their choices are. Still, if a revision of the current plan is to become widely accepted, planners and officials have to learn how to engage, inspire, educate, and learn from popular opinion. The promotion of smart growth has to be a product of choice—the collective choice of the people within the metropolitan region about how they should live with one another.

The discussions I am proposing cannot be postponed until after growth boundaries and open space protections are in place. Smart growth advocates rightly celebrate the 1998 victories at the ballot box that protected the environment, but voters have not grappled with the issue of exclusion. In New Jersey, for example, as Phyllis Myers points out, "voters approved long term state and local financing for conservation measures, not the whole program that Governor Whitman had proposed to promote jobs, create affordable housing, restore brownfields, assure good schools, and foster inner city and suburban equity."²⁰ We need to be educating our allies now.²¹ I have sought to structure this Dialogue as a contribution to this effort by adopting something like the strategy I described above. I have sought to address those advocates who think that smart growth and exclusion are compatible by developing the implications of their own position. I have been limited, of course, by the form of writing a paper. It would have been better if those within the smart growth movement whom I am addressing had themselves described and debated the world that they think their ideas will generate. I suggest that we set into motion a process that will enable them to do so.

1. Merriam-Webster Online (visited Aug. 28, 2000) http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary.

2. E.g., The Joint Center for Sustainable Communities, http://www.usmayors.org/USCM/sustainable; Livable Communities, Building Livable Communities (June 2000) http://www.livablecommunities.gov/.

3. Sierra Club, Sprawl Costs Us All: How Your Taxes Fuel Suburban Sprawl (visited Aug. 28, 2000) http://www.sierraclub.org/sprawl/report00/.

4. LEO MARX, THE MACHINE IN THE GARDEN: TECHNOLOGY AND THE PASTORAL IDEAL IN AMERICA (1964).

5. See, e.g., Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable Development, Draft Compact for a Sustainable Bay Area, Economy, Environment, Equity, Introduction (visited Aug. 28, 2000) http://www.compact survey.homestead.com/files/introcom.htm:

Traffic congestion, long commutes and overburdened transit systems, the lack of sufficient housing and skyrocketing housing costs, loss of open space, declining neighborhoods, air and water pollution and the increasingly inequitable distribution of the benefits of our thriving economy are inter-related problems that require integrated solutions. Sustaining the region's environment and economy in a way that ensures equity for all residents requires innovative thinking and "e-vision"—a balanced, integrated, inclusive, collaborative approach.

6. See, e.g., Clint Bolick, Subverting the American Dream: Government-Dictated "Smart Growth" Is Unwise and Unconstitutional, 148 U. PA. L. REV. 859 (2000); Gregg Easterbrook, Suburban Myth, NEW REPUBLIC, Mar. 15, 1999, at 18; Gregg Easterbrook, Comment on Karen A. Danielsen, Robert E. Lang, and William Fulton's "Retracting Suburbia: Smart Growth and the Future of Housing," 10 HOUSING POL'Y DEBATE 541 (1999) [hereinafter Easterbrook, Comment]; Peter Gordon & Harry W. Richardson. Prove It: The Costs and Benefits of Sprawl, BROOKINGS REV., Fall 1998, at 23.

7. Frank Rich, Don't Worry, Be Happy!, N.Y. TIMES, July 29, 2000, at A-13.

8. See, e.g., Phyllis Myers, Livability at the Ballot Box: State and Local Referenda on Parks, Conservation, and Smarter Growth, Election Day 1998 (Jan. 1999) http://www.brookings.edu/es/urban/publications.htm.

9. GERALD FRUG, CITY MAKING: BUILDING COMMUNITIES WITHOUT BUILDING WALLS (1999).

10. Robert B. Reich, The Secession of the Successful, N.Y. TIMES, Jan. 20, 1991, at 6-16.

11. Id.

12. David Herszenhorn, Now It's "Nothing in My Backyard": Just About Any Kind of Project Can Rile Homeowners, N.Y. TIMES, Apr. 16, 2000, at 1-35.

13. GWENDOLYN WRIGHT, BUILDING THE DREAM: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF HOUSING IN AMERICA 112 (1981).

14. Easterbrook, Comment, supra note 6.

15. See, e.g., Norman B. Rice, Smart Growth: A Catalyst for Public-Interest Investment, 26 FORDHAM URB. L.J. 1417, 1418 (1999):

Because smart growth demands that society sacrifice many of the benefits offered by sprawl, such as low-density residential neighborhoods, dependence on the automobile and the ability for middle-and upper-income households to separate themselves from the problems of poverty commonly found in city centers, it can foster social equity. Indeed, by lessening the physical distance between rich and poor, smart growth makes everyone partners in the prosperity.

The rhetoric of the new urbanists—unlike many of their developments—also embraces this version of smart growth. See, e.g., PETER CALTHORPE, THE NEXT AMERICAN METROPOLIS: ECOLOGY, COMMUNITY, AND THE AMERICAN DREAM (1993).

16. Livable Communities, Building Livable Communities, Introduction (June 2000) http://www.livablecommunities.gov/report2k/introduction.htm.

17. For evidence that affordable housing does not lower the property values of the neighborhoods where it is built, see ADVISORY COMM'N ON REGULATORY BARRIERS TO AFFORDABLE HOUSING, "NOT IN MY BACK YARD": REMOVING BARRIERS TO AFFORDABLE HOUSING 8-2 n.1 (1991) (citing 14 studies denying such an effect).

18. See Jerry Frug, Argument as Character, 40 STAN. L. REV. 869 (1988).

19. Variants of this proposal are already being adopted. Myron Orfield has prepared maps of the existing fragmentation of a number of American Metropolitan regions, see, e.g., MYRON ORFIELD, LOS ANGELES METROPATTERNS: SOCIAL SEPARATION AND SPRAWL IN THE LOS ANGELES REGION (2000). Visual surveys have been used, among other places, in Milwaukee and Chattanooga (rating types of communities on a graded scale), questionnaires were sent to 500,000 households in Portland, Oregon, and large-scale public meetings, such as the charrettes that are part of many new urbanist projects, have been held around the country. See Neal Pierce & Curtis Johnson, Stepping Up to Stop Sprawl, TENNESSEAN, Oct. 10, 1999, at 21A. In addition to these experiments, my proposal draws on insights offered by LEON F. SELTZER, PARADOXICAL STRATEGIES IN PSYCHOTHERAPY: A COMPREHENSIVE OVERVIEW AND GUIDEBOOK (1986).

20. Myers, supra note 8, at 16.

21. Cf. Sheryll D. Cashin, Localism, Self-Interest, and the Tyranny of the Favored Quarter: Addressing the Barriers to New Regionalism, 88 GEO. L.J. 1985, 2041 (2000) ("One hopes that regional coalitions born of a concern with traffic congestion and sprawl can be sustained and expanded to address other regional concerns that transcend local borders, like affordable housing and job access for inner-city residents."). In my view, "one hopes" is not good enough.