ABSTRACT
“Smart growth is an orphan when it comes to having a constituency,” says Fairfax County, Virginia, Board Chairman Gerald E. Connolly. “It's something many people can support until it comes to their neighborhood” (Washington Post, February 8, 2005). The missing constituency is not that of the potential home buyer or renter, but rather the local body politic willing to allow compact development in its own back yard. The dual constituency required for smart growth—buyers and renters on the one hand, and local governments that allow it on the other—suggests new directions for empirical research. Transportation and land-use research has focused on the travel behavior impacts of alternative neighborhood forms but has largely ignored the more fundamental issue: how such neighborhoods are supplied and why there are relatively few of them. These questions call for research on the processes by which transportation and land-use alternatives are generated in the first place, the forces that constrain or facilitate particular choices, and how the choices generated meet the transportation and land-use preferences of various populations. This chapter presents findings of empirical studies that focus on the interaction of private development and the planning function in the provision of neighborhood choices. These include a national survey of developers, a natural experiment in which the New Jersey and Pennsylvania suburbs of Philadelphia were subjected to different planning regimes (the work of Mitchell 2004), and case studies of development in California and Michigan.
