BAY CITY'S NEW MASTER PLAN

The New Urbanism Trap!

Community has always meant different things to different people, so what kind of "community" is understood within the philosophy of the New Urbanism?

Bay City planners have a vision of Bay City's future approximately fifty years from now. As planners describe it, it is a very pleasant vision of people living and working in pedestrian-friendly communities, walking to the store, riding your bike to the park and using the automobile only as a last resort.

But there is a dark side to this vision. In order to succeed, Bay City residents will face the greatest coercion ever applied to an American city.

· The vision requires higher population densities than people would ordinarily choose for themselves;

· To achieve those densities, planners want more control than ever over where people live, where they work, and how they get from one to another;

· To enforce these standards, Bay City may require that people who want to build new homes can only build on small lots;

· Fewer people will be able to live in single-family homes and fewer still will be able to have large yards; and

· The cost under this vision will be so staggering that property and other taxes will be raised to unprecedented levels, leaving little local money for such luxuries as schools, law enforcement or code enforcement.

Promises and Problems

New-Urban Design

Bay City is promoting pedestrian-friendly environments, transit-oriented developments, Neotraditional housing, and other New-Urban designs with the aim of reducing congestion and making Bay City more livable. Yet these ideas are often unrealistic and will have insignificant effects on auto usage.

Many New-Urban designs are infeasible --Four-story apartment buildings, residential areas mixed with full-service supermarkets, and shopping areas with parking hidden in back are probably not commercially viable. Developers won't build them or, if they do, they and the commercial occupants risk failure.

New-Urban designs won't make Bay City more livable --New-Urban designs aim to increase livability for the 5 to 10 percent of the public who walk, bicycle, or use transit while they reduce livability for the 90 to 95 percent of the public who drive. This trade off is neither fair, worth the cost, nor even necessary. We as a city should focus on reducing blight rather than building a city plan around the claim high density, pedestrian friendly neighborhood will make Bay City a better place to live. When in fact it will do no such thing.

Make no mistake :

Urban problems are real. Many architects and planners say they can fix these problems-- if we give them the power to redesign our cities. Calling themselves New Urbanists , they want to stop building freeways and build more light rail and other transit facilities. They want to block suburban sprawl and move people into higher density developments. Some of them want to control the shape of our houses, our front porches, even the pitch of our rooftops. They claim these things will reduce our dependence on the automobile and make our cities better places to live. Most cities employ urban planners, but few have granted them this kind of power. Lets use Bay City's limited resources to enforcing the existing code to reduce blight.

Why invest the city's resources in making Bay City a pedestrian-friendly community. When despite the fact Bay City is an automobile community and almost everybody drives their car to the near by store. Let use the resources to reduce blight through the city. Lets use Bay City's limited resources on make Bay City a better place to live for everyone.

Marti Murphy compiled this paper from various articles off the Internet.