Baton Rouge is a wide city, and we are all familiar with both ends of her. Drive down Airline to the pet store, over to Siegen for the bookstore, head over to the overpass area for lunch – that’s a whole Saturday right there.

We sprawl, and we’re suffering because of it, not just in terms of peace of mind, but economically: a bankrupt bus system, ghost neighborhoods, crumbling infrastructure within the city, while development in the surrounding suburbs are flourishing.

Next week, the Center for Planning and Excellence will hold it’s annual Smart Growth Summit, a conference of some of the most brilliant and bold minds – both local and national – in urban land use and development. These urban planners are advocating for smart growth, one of the latest trends in progressive urban development. Smart growth is a development philosophy that pairs pre-automobile urban design with the needs of modern life to create sustainable, walkable communities.

But smart growth isn’t without its criticisms – and the debate has residents, developers and designers asking themselves, ‘is smart growth really smart for Baton Rouge?’

What do you mean ‘smart’?

Smart growth has been dubbed the ‘anti-American dream,’ meaning that the ideals of a white picket fence and two car garage, once a universal measure of success, have lost appeal in a world of growing populations, rising fuel costs, and endless hours spent in mindless congestion. As a planning philosophy, it represents the anti-thesis to suburban development, and in the last few years has become a popular model for urban development here in Baton Rouge.

Mark Goodson is the vice president of East Baton Rouge’s Redevelopment Authority, a redevelopment institution created in the wake of Hurricanes Gustav and Ike that focuses on rehabilitating economically distressed neighborhoods.

“The issues that we are dealing with in Baton Rouge are not really unique to Baton Rouge,” Goodson said in a phone interview earlier this week. “They’re happening in New Orleans and Alexandria and Shreveport and Monroe, New Iberia, and Lake Charles.”

The problems he’s referencing including mournful traffic, swaths of blighted neighborhoods, huge suburban sprawl, and a distribution of valuable services that makes it nearly impossible to live well without a car.

“We’re all struggling with the same things,” he said.

It’s proved to be a downward spiral. As tax-payers leave the city proper for the suburban outskirts, developers continue to build out, businesses are drawn to the neighboring parishes where the people – and the money – exists.

The cycle we’re witnessing here in Baton Rouge is indicative of a ubiquitous obstacle of smart growth initiatives: Private developers have so far been hesitant to jump on the urban revival bandwagon.

Jeff Carney, an urban designer and professor at the LSU School of Landscape Architecture, concurred that private companies don’t have much incentive to take the risks involved in redevelopment.

“It’s a lot cheaper to buy a cornfield and develop a neighborhood on it than it is to redevelop a brownfield site downtown,” Carney said in a phone interview.

Tom Murphy, a senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute, and the former mayor of Pittsburgh, said that’s why public-private partnerships are the key to establishing successful smart growth projects.

“In part, it’s the institutional structure that you need to make that happen, like the redevelopment authority,” said Murphy, who is also a keynote speaker at the Smart Growth Summit next week. “How does the public institution partner with the private developers? How you do it is by sharing the risk.”

Public-private partnerships seem to be the only way to lure developers and business into areas that are essentially devoid of economic activity, for good reason. Even once incentives have been established, though, there’s no guarantee that business will thrive in the newly revived neighborhoods.

Psuedo-smart growing trends

“It’s hard to criticize smart growth,” said Carney, who’s also the director of the Coastal Sustainability Studio, a think tank of scientists, engineers, and designers committed to studying the intersection of environment and economy.

“But are we actually doing smart growth? We’re saying we’re doing it, but actually we’re sprawling out, because we can’t control sprawl. The government may be working really hard at achieving smart growth, but at the same time, the communities on the outskirts are exploding.”

Carney said that the city has been involved in a number of projects that appear to align with the tenets of smart growth, but in reality are not hitting the mark.

“A lot of [projects] have actually occurred at the margins,” Carney said. “It’s been a way to mask some of the flaws of suburban development, but it’s still suburban development.”

He pointed to Perkins Rowe as an example. It’s a beautiful, brand new, mixed-use, walkable environment. But almost everyone jumps in a car and onto the interstate to get there.

Mark Goodson agreed.

“The knock that a lot of people have on smart growth is that yeah, the principles, the tenets of smart growth are great, but you have to drive twenty minutes to get to the area that you want to enjoy the principles of smart growth – it doesn’t do much good,” Goodson said. “That’s a great point.”

This scenario seems to be the catch-22 for smart growth. Support from residents, even if only verbal, may indicate growing public support for such initiatives, and consequently a burgeoning niche waiting to be filled by private developers. But it has proved difficult to translate verbal support into tangible market forces when suburban populations are still booming.

“That’s the capitalist argument for deregulation: if we have an intelligent educated population who knows what they want then they’re going to choose to buy quality,” Carney explained. “The argument is ‘well, is that a choice? Or did the school districts dictate that choice, did the taxes dictate that choice, or did the developers dictate that choice in that the only options are suburban sprawl?’ That’s a really big question.”

“[Developers] have made a lot of money over the years doing drive-able suburban kind of stuff,” said Chris Leinberger, a fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, and speaker at the Smart Growth Summit. “So in their mind, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But quite honestly, it’s now broke, it doesn’t work financially.”

That’s a longer-term perspective on development in the city than most people aren’t willing to take without more incentives like employment, schools, and most importantly, transportation.

Transit[ition] to prosperity

Urban designer have been point to transportation time and again as the lynchpin to an efficient, sustainable, thriving community.

“The most important infrastructure category is transportation,” said Chris Leinberger, “That’s why you have a Secretary of Transportation in the state cabinet, and not a secretary of sewers. Transportation is crucial to getting it right. If you just keep on building roads, you’re just going to get more sprawl.”

Transportation reform represents a formidable challenge for all sprawl cities – Baton Rouge included. But Leinberger said mass transit is where pseudo-smart growth becomes actual, and effective, smart growth policy for a government to implement.

“That’s a conscious decision to invest, even in today’s tough economic climate,” he explained. “I bet right now that the state of Louisiana is spending a half to one billion dollars on roads. That’s a decision that you don’t have to make that way, they’re just sort of on auto-pilot doing the same ‘ole, same ‘ole. There’s a lot of money going into roads and you can make different decisions. That’s one.”

Jeff Carney agreed, adding that there’s no money for CATS, but plenty for the Mayor’s Green Light Plan.

“Baton Rouge can’t afford to build a really high quality bus system right now. There’s no way. But they are putting a lot of money into roads. Until the incentive structure is changed to benefit [transit] systems, then people are going to continue to drive their cars, relatively cheaply.”

There are several projects in Baton Rouge that are striving to mitigate the challenges of smart growth projects. The Baton Rouge Redevelopment Authority is involved in a slew of programs to revive economically distressed neighborhoods in a “smart” way, including five community improvement plans, a land banking program and grants for small business to rehabilitate storefront facades. The Center for Planning and Excellence, in addition to offering educational opportunities like the Smart Growth Summit, offer a variety of grants for similar community endeavors. Let’s not forget the Downtown Development District, one of the strongest, and most successful, smart growth projects in Baton Rouge.

Goodson said that these initiatives are pioneers in urban design in Baton Rouge, and their success bodes well for future initiatives.

“Urban development, in its latest form, is still pretty new to Louisiana,” he said. “The more consensus, and public and political support we can get for it, it benefits all of us who are trying to do this work across the state.”

The Center for Planning and Excellence’s annual Smart Growth Summit will be held August 17th -19th at the Manship Theatre. Tickets are $50 in advance, and $75 at the door. Visit www.Summit.CPEX.org to register.

Five Tenets of Smart Growth

The smart growth development philosophy is rooted in urban designs that dominated the first half of the 20th century, before the automobile became a household commodity. Here are some of the basic principles of the modern vision of the ‘traditional’ neighborhood.

Existing Infrastructure: Smart growth focuses on putting wasted land to use to the benefit of the community by rehabilitating areas already established within a city, from blighted neighborhoods, old industrial lots, and abandoned storefronts.

Low Auto Dependence: Perhaps the most fundamental infrastructural reform of smart growth is a reduction of driving within a community. This is achieved by offering a variety of transit options, including pedestrian walkways, bike paths, trolleys, rails, and bus systems.

High Density: Smart growth functions as a type of anti-sprawl, meaning that instead of building out in the form of strip malls and quarter-acre lots, developers build up, creating a functional and sustainable community within specific boundaries.

Mixed-Use, Mixed-Income: One of the primary ways to ensure development is ‘smart’ is through bringing services such as employment opportunities, schools, supermarkets, pharmacies, and retail into a multi-income community.

Whole Community: By reducing sprawl, bringing services closer to communities, and offering alternatives to driving, smart growth can create a sustainable, efficient, and healthy community that residents can take pride in; Employers and employees, store clerks and customers, and cross-the-street neighbors are able to develop a meaningful sense of community.