| The misleading "1% growth" myth |
The pro-growth candidates for Louisville City Council—Mike Deborski, Michele Van Pelt and Hank Dalton—are defending their position of adding massive growth (1,600+ new homes and 4,000+ new residents) by saying that their growth plan calls only for "1% growth" a year. That's terribly misleading. The background. Candidate Van Pelt is on record as saying she opposes any "population controls", and she sees Louisville's population as being, at a minimum, "23,000-25,000." Both Candidate Deborski and Candidate Dalton voted for the Comprehensive Plan that adds 1,600+ new homes and 4,000+ new residents. Nothing in the Comp Plan limits residential growth to "1%." On September 20, the City Council adopted a resolution, Resolution No. 38, which purports to add residential growth in "phases." The resolution says the city will "strive" to limit building permits to 250 biennially and up to 150 a year. Candidates Deborski, Van Pelt and Dalton are each relying on Resolution No. 38 as support for their stated plan for "1% growth" a year. The result of testing the "1% growth" defense: it's a highly misleading fiction. Louisville has 7,401 homes. One percent of 7,401 is 74. So, if Candidates Deborski, Van Pelt and Dalton are telling us the truth, then Louisville citizens should expect that a developer would be prohibited from building more than 74 houses a year. But Resolution No. 38 says that building permits will be limited to 250 biennially and up to 150 a year. That's NOT "1% growth." It's 100% more. It gets worse from there. First, even the 250/150 numbers are misleading, because Resolution No. 38 says only that "the City should strive to limit the number of residential building permits to 250 biennially, not to exceed 150 in any given calendar year." That language hardly inspires confidence that building permits will be limited in any meaningful way, especially with a pro-growth Council. Second, Resolution No. 38 contains all kinds of provisos and loopholes to permit the pro-growthers to blow past the 150-building-permits-a-year "goal." The Council is free to exempt any developer from the 150-building-permits-a-year "goal" if (A) a housing development project meets unspecified "principles and policies" in the Comp Plan, or (B) the Council finds there is an undefined "fiscal benefit" to the City. Since the Highway 42 redevelopment, which calls for adding 350 housing units, is an urban renewal project that meets Comp Plan principles and policies, 350 "special" plus another 150 "annual" building permits—500 total building permits—could be issued in one year alone under Resolution No. 38. That's not "1%." A planning commissioner wrote in a recent letter to the editor that Resolution 38 is a "tight document with sensible controls," and it only has loopholes if one looks at it "through jaundiced eyes, suspicious minds and half-empty perspectives." Then let's not do that. Let's look at Resolution 38 through the eyes of the Planning Commission and City Council. Their public record proves the point: in the last 16 months they have demonstrated an appetite for residential growth and a blind eye to growth creep that would counsel against reliance on any document with growth loopholes. Third, the Comp Plan, which Resolution No. 38 keeps looping back to, is full of flaws. For example, the pro-growth Council members, including Candidate Van Pelt, repeatedly and deliberately made the Comp Plan extraordinarily vague to give developers maximum "flexibility" to develop housing and other projects. The result is that pro-growth Council members could approve a housing development under Comp Plan "principles or policies" that are completely inconsistent with our community's values and needs. The rate of growth isn't even the issue. Candidates Deborski, Van Pelt and Dalton are advocating something extraordinary in this community: they say we should grow by at least 4,000 new residents and at least 1,600 new homes. That they could be advocating that position itself suggests they are out of touch with our community. We are not Erie, Firestone or other community competing to build houses. We don't have the ability to annex thousands of acres to "grow" into. We know who we are and what we want to be. We intentionally surrounded our community with open space to separate our city from our neighbors. Our ideals and our planning led to CNN/Money Magazine's naming our city as one of the five best cities to live in the United States. If we don't want to be a big city with big-city problems, why are Candidates Deborski, Van Pelt and Dalton telling us we can grow to be a big city at a slow rate? Especially if the "slow rate" is not even true? |
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