ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the relevant historic events responsible for today's growth policy challenges and identifies five catalytic conditions that describe today's policy environment. The banner of property tax reform is now commonly used to justify stripping local governments of the ability to issue debt, control land uses, establish building standards, and annex property. Growth policy must incorporate new and dynamic disciplines gleaned from the comfort and familiarity of the old tenets of economic development, land use, and sustainability. Similarly, resilience metrics and social considerations are still very foreign to most cities and have not made their way into mainstream economic development or land use policy. Paradigms of the past that segregated economic development, land use, community development, housing authorities, and even public safety are no longer adequate. America's first tangible step toward national economic policy was the opening of the Continental Congress–created Bank of North America in 1782.
