With Gas Over $4, Cities Explore Whether It’s Smart to Be Dense

…For decades, backers of “smart-growth” planning principles have preached the benefit of clustering the places where people live more closely with the businesses where they work and shop. Less travel would mean less fuel consumption and less air pollution. Several communities built from scratch upon those principles, such as Celebration in Florida, sprouted across the country. But they were often isolated experiments, connected to their surroundings mainly by car. So, as gasoline remained cheap, the rest of the country continued its inexorable march toward bigger houses and longer commutes.

Now, smart-growth fans see a chance to reverse that.


“Expensive oil is going to transform the American culture as radically as cheap oil did,” predicts David Mogavero, a Sacramento-based architect and smart-growth proponent.

Sacramento — yoked to the car and mired in one of the lousiest housing markets in the country — offers an intriguing laboratory for that idea. Four years ago, just as oil was gaining momentum in its torrid climb to $140 a barrel and beyond, the six-county region adopted a plan for growth through 2050 that roped off some areas from development while concentrating growth more densely in others, emphasizing keeping jobs near homes.

The local governments in the area aren’t compelled to follow the so-called Blueprint, but the plan — backed by a strange-bedfellows coalition of ordinary citizens, politicians, developers and environmentalists — shows signs of working, nonetheless.

Wall St. Journal