Democrats Abroad France/Environmental Policy Group Position Paper Feb. 25, 2006 - in pdf form

A Smarter Approach
to Environmental Policy

• Approach for Democratic party to use
• What is Smart Growth?
• What are the benefits?
• Role of national leadership
• How to reframe the debate and gain voter support
• Summary and contacts

Introduction

We offer herein a proposal for reinvigorating and reorienting the Democrats’ approach to environmental and energy issues. The intent of this proposal is to strengthen the Democrats’ arsenal of policies ideas, to bolster their standing as a party of conviction and vision, and to help increase their appeal among the American electorate. Our suggestions are anchored in the concept of Smart Growth, which provides an effective way to address the most serious environmental and energy concerns facing our country and indeed our planet, and a way to integrate these concepts with many other issues of deep concern to the American people, including security, jobs, economic growth, and quality of life.

In the following sections, we provide an overview of the existing Smart Growth movement, suggest how this concept could be embraced and promoted by the Democrats as part of a broader political framework, and analyze what this all means in terms of concrete policies and voter appeal. The scope of this proposal reaches well beyond the typical boundaries of "environmental policy." But as discussed, it is precisely these walls of segregation—between issues labeled as environmental policy and those labeled as economic or social policy—that need to be transcended in order for the Democrats to expand their base of support among the American public.

What is Smart Growth?

• Mix land uses
• Take advantage of compact building design
• Create a range of housing opportunities and choices
• Create walkable neighborhoods
• Foster distinctive, attractive communities with a strong sense of place
• Preserve 0pen space, farmland, natural beauty and critical environmental areas
• Strengthen and direct development toward existing communities
• Provide a variety of transportation choices
• Make development decisions predictable, air and cost effective
• Encourage community and stakeholder collaboration in development

The Smart Growth movement has been expanding in the U.S. for more than two decades, gaining particularly notable momentum within the past 5-10 years. This movement has been spurred by the fact that more and more Americans are finding their lives framed by how many hours a day they spend stuck in traffic, and by how much of their household budget goes towards the costs of fueling their cars. The nation’s population is expected to grow by an additional 140 million people by mid-century. Unless development patterns change swiftly and dramatically, this growth will severely exacerbate the congestion and sprawl problems that are already seriously degrading the quality of life in communities across the U.S.. The remarkable momentum of the Smart Growth movement points to a burgeoning popular desire to actively address these worrisome development patterns.

The Smart Growth movement is a true grassroots phenomenon, driven by changes taking place at local and regional levels; but these developments have also spawned a highly effective and vibrant national movement, spearheaded by organizations such as the Smart Growth Network (www.smartgrowth.org); Smart Growth America (www.smartgrowthamerica.org), the Sustainable Communities Network (www.sustainable.org). Across the country, voters are supporting an ever-increasing number of Smart Growth ballot initiatives, for instance, to build and strengthen public transport systems, to conserve farmland and open space, and to enact new regulatory tools that direct new growth towards compact and environmentally-friendly development (websites listed above provide detailed information about such initiatives).

What is most intriguing about these trends is that they transcend partisanship and traditional ideological differences. Many "red" counties and ardent Bush voters are strongly supporting Smart Growth ballot initiatives, and are even voting to raise their own taxes to pay for these initiatives! An increasing number of candidates for public office at the local, country, and state level are running (and winning) on Smart Growth platforms. Amazingly however, this issue has received very little attention in Washington and hardly any notice in the last two presidential election cycles. The national leadership of the Democratic party seems to be missing a golden opportunity to seize onto and help lead a movement that has rapidly growing popularity across the country.What are the benefits of Smart Growth?

The most obvious and most touted benefits of Smart Growth are improvements in quality of life for the local citizenry, for instance, by providing:

• more vibrant and diverse neighborhoods, and more beautiful, enjoyable, and convenient places to live, work, and play
• less time spent driving and stuck in traffic, resulting in more free time and less stress
• more mobility and independence for the young, the elderly, the poor, due to transit services and close proximity of shops, services, jobs, schools, and recreation
• more interaction among local citizens and a greater sense of safety and belonging within a community, better overall community image and sense of place
  

More dense development patterns also have immediate local economic benefits for residents, businesses, developers, and municipalities; for instance:

• higher and more stable property values for residents
• lower municipal costs for utilities and infrastructure such as roads and parking facilities
• greater income potential for developers and increased tax base for municipalities, due to the higher density of housing and businesses
• an environment conductive to incubating small locally-owned businesses, with increased sales due to more foot traffic and people spending less on gasoline

In addition to all of these substantive local benefits, we suggest that the Democrats could advance the concept of Smart Growth as a much broader, national-level frameworka framework that encompasses many issues of tremendous strategic importance in today’s political context. This includes security, energy efficiency, and national level job development and economic growth, each discussed below.

Security Benefits

The Republicans have been highly successful in using the issue of terrorism to capitalize on the public’s security concerns and thus to gain voter support. Yet there are many other factors that affect security of the American people, and the Smart Growth movement provides effective array of policy tools for addressing such security concerns. Examples include:

Cleaner air and water. Smart Growth measures that reduce driving and energy demand can dramatically reduce the air and water pollution that results from emissions of cars and power plants, pollution that currently causes tens of thousands of premature deaths, and hundreds of thousands of asthma attacks and other illnesses each year across the U.S.

Healthier and safer lifestyles. Our nation’s rapidly increasing crisis of obesity can be linked directly to car-dependent lifestyles. Smart decisions about where we build new houses, schools, shops, offices, highways, and sidewalks can give people greater opportunity for physical activity and healthier lifestyles. In addition, traffic accidents are a leading cause of death and injury for Americans, in particular for young people. Reducing the amount of driving required for daily routines, and designing communities that are safer for pedestrians and bikers, are thus highly effective ways to increase personal safety and security.

Less vulnerable land use. As the 2005 hurricane season painfully illustrated, sprawling land use patterns that encourage the destruction of storm-buffering and flood-absorbing wetlands are a major factor in increasing the vulnerability of many coastal communities. Conserving these natural habitats is not just about the virtue of environmental protection, it is about preserving the "ecosystem services" that safeguard society’s security and well-being.

Greater emergency preparedness. When Hurricane Kartina struck New Orleans, many thousands of carless residents were unable to evacuate. When Hurricane Rita struck the Texas coast, the evacuation lead to colossal traffic jams that left hundreds of thousands of people stranded on the highway. Such experiences vividly illustrate that effective and equitable emergency preparedness requires efficient public transport systems to facilitate evacuations of heavily populated areas.

Energy efficiency benefits
Recent price increases in the global oil market, and natural disaster impacts on our nation’s oil and gas infrastructure have greatly increased public demand for more sound and resilient national energy policies. The Smart Growth movement and "Smart Energy" movement have a unique opportunity to come together at this time to capitalize on the momentum that each is currently experiencing. The Democrats in turn have a unique opportunity to capitalize on both of these movements.

Widespread implementation of measures that reduce car dependence and that promote energy efficient neighborhood and building design and location are highly effective strategies for reducing people’s vulnerability to increasing (and increasingly volatile) oil and gas prices. They are also highly effective ways to reduce our nation’s emissions of greenhouse gases and thus to combat climate change. As explained by the Natural Resources Defense Council: “Thanks to suburban sprawl, Americans' vehicle use has more than tripled in the last three decades. Smart-growth communities can help residents save gas and time behind the wheel. Environmental Protection Agency research shows that residents of a smart-growth development in Atlanta use half the transportation energy of those in a typical sprawling development. Building better communities holds immense potential for generating oil savings.”

Urban employment benefits
Sprawling patterns of development are associated with a growing concentration of poverty in core urban areas, as the growth of good jobs move ever further away from these areas; and with the lack of affordable housing and adequate public transportation in the suburbs/exurbs, central city residents are effectively cut off from these increasingly dispersed labor markets. Moreover, the sprawling development of homes and businesses erodes the tax base in core areas, which creates a systematic web of problems for city governments, for instance, by creating pressure to reduce essential public services and infrastructure improvements; by forcing tax rates to go up, which in turn drives away more businesses, meaning fewer local job opportunities; by undermining funding for struggling inner city schools, thus causing families with the means to move away in search of better schools. By losing opportunities for quality education and training, and losing access to a healthy growing jobs base, core-area families thus remain trapped in poverty [Ref: Opportunities for Linking Movements- Workforce Development and Smart Growth (2000). Available at www.fundersnetwork.org].

Smart Growth policies can help reverse these trends, by keeping jobs, education and training accessible to people in core urban areas. Moreover, Smart Growth development itself is a valuable source of high-quality jobs, for instance, in construction and re-development efforts, in building and maintaining mass transit systems, and in the creation of small locally owned businesses. Such jobs are truly rooted in the community and cannot be outsourced to other regions or other countries, thus offering long-term economic security.

Largely for these reasons, the AFL-CIO recently adopted a resolution urging union leaders to get involved in coalitions for Smarter Growth.
National industrial development and energy policy benefits
With an even broader sense of vision and imagination, the Smart Growth paradigm could encompass major new initiatives to establish America as the world leader in the "clean energy revolution" and contribute to a more resilient national energy policy. At present, the U.S. is falling well behind Europe and Japan in the development and marketing of modern energy technologies, and is in a position of dangerous dependence on foreign oil coming from chronically unstable regions of the world. But with the full commitment and innovative force of American industry and workers, supported by appropriate government funding and incentive structures, the U.S. could rapidly become a world leader in the areas of modern renewable energy technologies, hydrogen-based energy storage and distribution systems, and zero-emission cars.
Such initiatives would have tremendous implications for revitalizing our nation’s industrial economic competitiveness, creating many thousands of new high-quality jobs, and greatly enhancing our national energy security.

These types of initiatives are already being promoted by many prominent organizations and individuals coming from across the political spectrum. We note in particular several remarkably broad and fast-growing coalitions of industry, labor, and environmental groups that are proposing sweeping new clean-energy industrial development initiatives—Set America Free, the Apollo Alliance and the Energy Future Coalition.

Such bold, creative proposals offer a powerful way for the Democrats to broaden their base of support among labor unions and the other constituencies that have jobs and economic growth as primary political concerns [We have included as an Annex a description of some recent focus group studies among swing voters in Ohio, that bear out these ideas in a rather dramatic fashion]. It is also a way to counter conservative lobbyists who have for many years stymied action on climate change with apocalyptic claims about economic and job losses. Rather than continuing to respond defensively to such attacks, the Democrats could reframe this debate, and make a strong case that dealing with climate change is a tremendous opportunity to build new industries and create new jobs.

The role of national leadership

The implementation of Smart Growth policies generally takes place through local and state-level planning decisions and zoning codes. At the same time however, federal actions can have a profound effect on these local decisions, ultimately shaping the development of communities nationwide. National-level political leaders play a key role in raising awareness, providing information, and establishing appropriate economic incentives through federal legislation in areas such as transportation, housing, and taxation. There are many resources available to explain how the goals of Smart Growth can be advanced as concrete policies and programs (i.e. policy "toolkits" available from the national organizations mentioned earlier). [Although this should continue to advance a "home grown" movement, there are potentially useful policy ideas and lessons-learned from the experiences of other countries. For instance, Learning from Abroad: The European Approach to Smarter Growth and Sustainable Development (2004) at: www.fundersnetwork.org]

Specific examples include:

• promoting housing policy that places a high priority on mixed-use development and improved community design, and incentives for those who build and buy homes located near public transit
• offering tax credits and other incentives for developers to build or retrofit energy efficient buildings; and to pursue smart growth type commercial developments
• streamlining financing for public transportation projects and the creation of urban “transit-oriented development zones.”
  There was, in fact, a window during the Clinton-Gore administration when these concepts seemed to capture the interest of the national Democratic leadership – for instance, with the initiation of Smart Growth programmes at the U.S EPA (still in place today), and with 2003 proposal for "Build America Bonds," a federal financial incentive to help state and local governments preserve green space, protect water quality, and clean up brownfields. The 2000 Democratic platform contained an excellent section on "Building Liveable Communities" that captured many of the Smart Growth principles, but such concepts have disappeared almost entirely from the current party platform.

Today, a number of individual Democratic politicians continue to promote various pieces of this Smart Growth policy agenda. Ultimately however, the pieces must add up to much more than the sum of their parts. The Democrats must offer more than just a collection of technical policy proposals. They must offer a coherent and inspiring vision that resonates with the desires, aspirations, and values of the American people.How can the Democrats use Smart Growth to reframe the debate and gain voter support?

Reframing the message

Today’s electorate defies simplistic assumptions. It is no longer accurate (if it ever was) to assume that "blue" means pro-environment and "red" means anti-environment. Environmental protection now stands out as a major divide with the GOP, with many Republicans supporting strong government action on environmental issues. One of the most rapidly growing segments of the national environmental movement these days are "green evangelicals." At the same time, blue-collar "Reagan Democrats" have grown increasingly suspicious of government action in general, and increasingly conservative on environmental issues; organized labor has been a stringent opponent of many of the Democrats’ hallmark environmental initiatives over the past decade.

Recent polling studies by the Pew Research Center found that 77% of voters agree that “the government should do whatever it takes to protect the environment." Yet environmental concerns almost always fall relatively low on the list of voter priorities (behind issues such as jobs and economic development), and are rarely a major motivating factor in choosing candidates at election time. We suggest that this puzzling picture stems from a number of fundamental problems in the way that the Democrats are addressing environmental issues:

First is the problem of treating "the environment" as an autonomous category of issues, separate from and unrelated to issues such as jobs, economic growth, and security. This segregation makes it far too easy for far too many people to dismiss environmental issues as special interest and an ‘elitist’ concern that does not relate to their own lives.

Second is the problem of assuming that one can catalyze action and voter support simply by raising awareness about the litany of grave environmental problems facing us and future generations. For most people, this gloom-and-doom rhetoric simply does not work; in fact it largely has the opposite of the intended effect. Giving people a laundry list of things to feel worried/outraged/guilty about often just causes them to tune-out, feeling powerless to deal with such daunting problems.

Third is the problem that most people associate environmental policy with a few major battles over issues such as drilling in ANWAR, raising CAFE standards, and ratifying the Kyoto Protocol. These are all important and commendable issues for the Democrats to stand up for, but is it any wonder that the average American sees no connection between their personal concerns and these sorts of policy battles (with their bewildering acronyms and intangible impacts on daily life)?

Closing

The Smart Growth paradigm described herein offers a radically different way for the Democrats to approach environmental policy. It offers a way to integrate concepts of environmental protection with an array of issues that matter deeply to the American people, issues such as security, jobs, economic growth, and quality of life. It offers a way for the Democrats to position themselves, not at the party of protest against what is, but as the party of bold vision for what can be. This is true leadership. This is smart leadership, that can win over both the hearts and the minds of the American people, and can bring about a long overdue resurgence of the Democratic party.

Drafted by Laurie Geller, with input and review from the DAF Environmental Policy Committee. Comments and questions are welcome: Environmentalpolicy@yahoogroups.com and [33] 06 68 52 98 92.

Related speech by Adam Erbach, former Sierra Club president

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