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The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook,...
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The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook,...
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by Randal O'Toole
Sales Rank: 29879
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List Price: $22.95
$15.61
At Amazon
on 12-29-2007.
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Features
Hardcover: 276 pages
Publisher: Cato Institute September 25, 2007
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1933995076
ISBN-13: 978-1933995076
Product Dimensions:
9.3 x 6.8 x 1.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
Editorial Board, The Washington DC Examiner, November 5, 2007
Editorial: Ditch government planners The Washington DC Examiner Newspaper, The Examiner 2007-11-05 08:00:00.0
WASHINGTON - Centralized government planning is almost always a disaster, says Cato Institute Senior Fellow Randal O'Toole, who warns of the dangers of letting government bureaucrats take more and more control over Americans' lives. A generation ago, we laughed at the hilariously predictable failures of the Soviet Union's five-year plans. Now we're allowing our own public planners, two-thirds of whom work for state and local governments, to design our communities, manage our land and natural resources, design our transportation and energy grids, run our health care system and oversee much else. Big mistake. In his new book, "The Best-Laid Plans," O'Toole documents example after example of government planning gone hideously awry, starting with his hometown of Portland, Ore. -- the home of the "Smart Growth" movement. But Portland's artificial urban growth boundary sent housing prices spiraling in the once-affordable city and dramatically increased urban sprawl -- the very ills smart-growth policies are supposed to prevent. Washington-area residents should be particularly suspicious of the current push for "walkable communities," an idea championed by idealistic English planners in the 1970s who created an extensive network of bucolic garden paths in various new subdivisions, only to have criminals become their design's main beneficiaries. Similarly, in a chapter on "Smart Growth and Crime," O'Toole points out how New Urbanism -- a popular planning approach that promotes highdensity, mixed-use development and increased pedestrian and bike traffic -- also inevitably promotes crime, which is far more prevalent in urban settings than lower-density residential neighborhoods. O'Toole demolishes the widely held belief that government planners are somehow smarter or more capable of managing the future than market forces. In fact, even the planners themselves don't believe the hype. "The bitter irony, freely admitted by numerous planners," O'Toole writes, " is that many if not most of the problems that the planners propose to solve were caused not by the free marketplace, but by past generations of planners and other government bureaucrats." Name a contemporary problem -- traffic congestion, homelessness, lack of affordable housing -- all can be traced back to past government planning mistakes. Yet despite all evidence to the contrary, many Americans still expect the planners to miraculously get it right the next time around. Better to fire the planners and let free people, free minds and free markets use the genius of their freedom.
William H. Peterson, The Washington Times, October 9, 2007
Article published Oct 9, 2007 Urban nightmares October 9, 2007 By William H. Peterson - Ideas have consequences. Many if not most conventional thinkers say markets are OK for the private sector, but only government can plan and execute action in the broader areas of, to quote the Randal O'Toole, "transportation, land use, and environmental stewardship." So whether the narrower planning issue is urban growth, air pollution, traffic congestion, pricey oil, management of the nation's 193 million acres of forestlands, affordable housing, smart growth or other planning ventures, government is the way to go. Really? Mr. O'Toole, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute and former visiting scholar at Yale, Utah State and University of California at Berkeley, thinks otherwise in "The Best-Laid Plans," his hard-hitting, fact-filled, well-written volume. His opposition is formidable, to judge from current opinion polls for the 2008 campaign, which show planning-inclined presidential candidates in the lead. Fascinatingly, Mr. O'Toole explains why elected officials tend to favor government planning. Namely, they are happy to turn over hot issues to the planning bureaucracy rather than make the decisions -- and take the heat -- themselves. Meanwhile, he draws insight and inspiration from the late Jane Jacobs, a writer who re-thought and challenged conventional urban planning in such books as "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" (1961). The Jacobs challenge -- she called planning a "pseudoscience" -- jarred the thinking and practice of urban planners. But thinking and practice can change. So Mr. O'Toole counters the five justices of the Supreme Court who in 2005 backed the New London, Conn., contention that by eminent domain the city could take homes and businesses for the common good, even when the land involved is un-blighted. He rejects Justice John Paul Stevens' majority opinion that New London had "carefully formulated an economic development plan that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community." Carefully formulated? Tell that, says Mr. O'Toole, to the nearly 1 million low-income families -- 80 percent of them black -- who were displaced by urban renewal rulings between 1950 and 1980. He echoes critics of the displacement, charging that the activity amounts to "Negro removal." Or tell it to residents of Greenwich Village in New York City, whose attractive neighborhood was spared from urban renewal bulldozers thanks in part to the efforts of Jane Jacobs. Or tell it to the flood of suburbanites who depopulated the big cities: From 1950 to 1990, St. Louis lost 54 percent of its residents; Buffalo, Cleveland and Pittsburgh lost 40 percent to 50 percent; Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Minneapolis and Washington lost 20 percent to 30 percent. Or tell it to survivors of the giant low-income Pruitt-Igoe Project in St. Louis. Designed by Minoru Yamasaki, the acclaimed architect who also designed the ultimately doomed World Trade Center, Pruitt-Igoe had more than 2,800 apartments in 33 identical 11-story buildings with surrounding green spaces. But high construction bids led the public housing authority to cut standards. The cut helps explain why, when the project opened in 1955, new residents found that locks broke, windowpanes blew out, door knobs fell off and elevators did not elevate. Worse, entrances, corridors and laundry rooms became places for muggers, rapists and drug dealers to lurk. The upshot was occupancy topping out at 75 percent and sliding down to 35 percent by the early 1970s. But then St. Louis gave up and, amazingly, imploded the entire project. Chicago and Philadelphia likewise imploded their low-income high-rises. Cost of these implosions? Don't ask. So it goes in the non-market planning game -- one costly mistake after another. Mr. O'Toole tracks the mistake of Portland, Ore., once a model of New Urbanism's smart growth idea (dense, walkable, public-transit oriented), as opposed to the suburban sprawl so typical of Los Angeles. The Portland model simply didn't work, says Mr. O'Toole, a native Oregonian. He also doesn't buy the case that light-rail and other mass transit will replace petroleum-fueled autos on any material scale. And he observes that now many urban housing authorities switch from high-rise to low-rise low-income housing to blend in with adjacent neighborhoods, hopefully ending more planning mistakes. "The Best-Laid Plans" concludes by reminding us that Adam Smith was on to something with his Invisible Hand of mutual self-interest -- that, says Randal O'Toole, "when we all work in our own interest, we also work in everyone else's interest. Thus, the market relies on the very traits that keep government planning from working." Ideas have consequences.
William H. Peterson is an adjunct scholar at the Heritage Foundation and the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Owner Reviews, Ratings, Comments and Criticism
In his 48 chapters O'Toole covers a wide range of government planning efforts. Rather than a complaint only about the disastrous consequences of a specific government planning effort, he shows why such efforts are doomed by the very incentives that motivate government. He has many years of first-hand exposure to the Congressionally mandated planning process for our national forests. He argues that the planning process has wasted over a billion dollars and severely impeded the management of those public lands. It has defocused the Forest Service so badly that they are marginally effective. He description of the various fads that run through the ranks of urban planners are sufficient to suggest they should be called congestion enhancers. Many urban plans in the guise of "traffic calming" actually make congestion worse in the hope that people will chose a high density lifestyle. Like most urban planning this runs counter to peoples wishes. It just makes commutes more time consuming , increases gas consumption, and increases pollution. "Smart Growth" is anything but smart and relies on substituting planners pipe dreams for the citizens personal plans and cost sensitive traffic engineering. He includes a number of examples from Portland, Oregon where urban growth boundaries have run home costs up enough that many people settle in Washington instead. When citizens voted overwhelming against more light rail, Metro chose alternate financing and decided to build anyway. That same Metro opines "Congestion signals positive urban development." His chapters on "The Rail Transit Hoax" and "The Benefits of the Automobile" are worth the whole cost of the book. There have been so many invalid cost comparisons that one can only assume some promoters of rail and transit are willing to lie to get even close to the cost parameters of personal transportation. He spends 6 chapters explaining the reasons government planning fails. The result is incredibly higher costs, and often a solution more dangerous to the citizen. His final 9 chapters suggest replacements for government planning and ways Congress could dramatically improve the management of those public functions that remain in government. This brief outline just lightly touches on a few of the many topics that O'Toole so ably discusses. Every legislator should read this book! The information in this book will help every citizen hold their government realistically accountable.
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