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McGreevy's Magic Map

New Jersey's governor is painting the state's future development in three colors.

All the buzz in Trenton these days is about a document that Governor James E. McGreevey calls the "BIG" map of New Jersey. The word BIG isn't a reference to its size--it's an acronym meaning "Blueprint for Intelligent Growth." But the map is, in fact, pretty imposing. It covers every inch of territory in the state in green, yellow or red, depending on whether or not the governor and his administration approve of development there. About one-third of the map is green. This represents depressed inner cities such as Camden and Newark, as well as some of the state's built-up suburbs, where the message to developers is "go." Then there are a few scattered swaths of yellow, which means builders may proceed with caution. But most of the map is bright red, signaling the governor's plans to stop New Jersey's sprawl machine from gobbling up more farm and forest land and turning it into subdivisions, strip malls and office parks.

The BIG map embodies a land use agenda that is shaping up as the most ambitious in any state since the mid-1990s, when Maryland Governor Parris Glendening popularized the term "smart growth" and pushed through legislation to foster it. Glendening, however, was fighting sprawl in boom times, when traffic congestion was the leading issue on many voters' minds. McGreevey doesn't have that luxury. With the economy limping and state and local budgets in deep shortfall, smart growth is no longer an easy sell, even in places such as New Jersey, where nearly everyone realizes that sprawl is a problem. Can smart growth work in a time of massive budget deficits? Or will states and cities desperate for an economic boost decide to relax their rules and accept virtually any growth at any cost?

So far, it seems the coalition that created the issue is holding its own. A bipartisan batch of new governors won their offices in 2002 partly by running on smart growth platforms. And though it's too soon to say how they will put their ideas into practice, there's no question that curbing sprawl sits atop their agendas.

In Michigan, Governor Jennifer Granholm has given a blue-ribbon commission an August 15 deadline to come up with suggestions for how to steer growth away from open space and into cities and towns. In Pennsylvania, Governor Ed Rendell picked Glendening's planning chief, Roy Kienitz, as his deputy, and hired a regional planning expert, Joanne Denworth, as a policy adviser.

Granholm and Rendell are both Democrats, like McGreevey. But smart growth is turning up in the policy planning of Republican governors as well. In Massachusetts, Mitt Romney has combined three state agencies that deal with land use questions--environment, housing and transportation--into one superagency with a prominent environmentalist, Douglas Foy, in charge. In South Carolina, not a bastion of anti-sprawl sentiment, conservative GOP Governor Mark Sanford is talking about ending "school sprawl" by building new schools in existing neighborhoods that kids can walk to.

All these governors see in sprawl and unchecked growth not only a continuing problem but a political opportunity. With all the painful budget choices before them, the governors want to shape a positive legacy, one that doesn't involve slashing programs and raising taxes. Part of smart growth's political appeal is that many strategies associated with it don't carry a price tag. It is a chance to address an important quality-of-life issue without breaking the bank.

In fact, state leaders are increasingly portraying smart growth as part of the solution to their budget problems. McGreevey stresses that growing inward, rather than outward, is the fiscally responsible thing to do. "Sprawl is terribly expensive," the governor says. "In an era of almost universal state deficits, states will be increasingly hard- pressed to supply the infrastructure for suburban sprawl."

McGreevey and the other smart growth governors are making use of influential new research suggesting that curbing sprawl will actually improve the economic health of both cities and suburbs. The idea is that today's young educated workers--those that Carnegie Mellon professor Richard Florida calls the "creative class"--are more drawn to thriving urban centers than to soulless strip malls, a trend that is already driving the location decisions of high-tech, high-wage businesses. "Implementing smart growth programs won't do anything to resolve this current fiscal crisis," says Glendening, who now works as a part-time consultant to state and local officials on growth issues. "But over the next decade or so, it will save governments hundreds of millions and perhaps billions of dollars."

The governors' push, however, is rubbing up against resistant developers, who aren't any happier about growth controls now than they were in the '90s. Local governments, whose budgets are hurting just as badly as the states', are also wary. Some New Jersey mayors are afraid the BIG map will override local authority and pick economic winners and losers among them. Rural Sussex County, for example, shows up mostly red, notes county freeholder Susan Zellman. "Where in the world are we going to be able to create jobs here?"

SPRAWL AND AUSTERITY

If the depressing budget outlook hasn't stopped governors from pushing smart growth, it has changed the tools at their disposal. Nowhere is this more evident than in New Jersey. When Republican Christine Todd Whitman governed that state through the boom years of the '90s, she too talked about "smart growth." But Whitman's smart growth strategy was focused on rural areas: It involved using state money to buy up open space and keep it off limits to developers. In 1998, she backed a bond measure intended to buy 1 million acres of land over 10 years. Voters approved the measure overwhelmingly in spite of the $1 billion cost.

When McGreevey came into office, he didn't have that kind of cash to burn. He immediately faced a gaping budget hole that he filled, at the cost of much of his popularity, by raising business taxes. This year, the budget situation is twice as bad. With huge cuts looming in education, health care and the arts, McGreevey used his January state of the state address to move the subject away from deficits and toward land use. "There is no single greater threat to our way of life in New Jersey than unrestrained, uncontrolled development," he said. It was clear when McGreevey used the words "smart growth" that he meant something more than Whitman did. But exactly what he meant, in this time of austerity, wasn't immediately certain.

McGreevey, a former mayor of Woodbridge, in the densely populated Middlesex County suburbs, understands as well as anyone the long tradition of home rule in New Jersey. Municipalities voraciously guard their powers over planning and zoning. This bottom-up approach is so ingrained that when a lawsuit forced New Jersey to adopt statewide planning in 1986, lawmakers made local participation voluntary. Yet as a mayor, McGreevey had also seen firsthand how 566 municipalities going it alone led to a "ratable chase" that valued the pursuit of tax-generating office parks and big-box retail stores over any kind of coherent planning. Whitman's open-space strategy addressed one side of the equation--it told local governments and developers where they could not build. McGreevey wanted to send a stronger signal. He wanted the state to say not only where development shouldn't happen but also where it should.

This past January, McGreevey and environmental commissioner Brad Campbell unveiled the BIG map, in all its vivid colors. Nothing like it has been tried before, in New Jersey or anywhere else. Essentially, the map translates every written environmental rule affecting the state's development into visual form, literally painting a picture of where development may and may not occur. In many of the places where the map is red, regulations regarding wetlands, clean water or endangered species make the area unfit for building. Where the map is green, no such barriers exist. Where it's yellow, the regulations are murky or conflict with each other.

What's remarkable about the BIG map is its level of detail. Campbell's Department of Environmental Protection used aerial photographs of every square mile of New Jersey to draw it, and then dabbed red, green and yellow on individual parcels using thin brushstrokes. Some 2.9 million acres show up red. One million acres are green and 628,000 acres are yellow. The color coding does not give state officials any more power than they previously possessed, but it does focus the powers they do have on the goal of driving development patterns. Try to build in the red zone, and state regulators will throw in the way every obstacle they can think of. Build in the green zone, and the state will eagerly get out of the way.

McGreevey didn't stop with the BIG map. He also has proposed two key environmental rules that are currently under review. One would bolster stormwater management. The other would raise most state waterways to the highest level of environmental protection. Both rules, if enacted, would significantly increase the amount of red on the map.

FIX IT FIRST

In short, the McGreevey approach to smart growth is by and large a regulatory one. "You can do a lot of these things without spending money," says environmentalist Barbara Lawrence, executive director of New Jersey Future. "The Whitman administration had the luxury of being able to spend money on the problem. In dark times like these, the McGreevey administration is looking for both state and local regulatory changes that will make smart growth happen."

Not that money isn't on the administration's mind at almost every turn. With so few state dollars to go around, McGreevey argues, it is more important than ever to select where those dollars will go--using the BIG map as a guide. If developers insist on building in red zones against administration policy, New Jersey won't pick up the tab for road improvements, sewers or schools. At the same time, money available in the budget for infrastructure will support growth in the green zones.

This is already beginning to happen. McGreevey's budget slashed roadway expansion, for example, and is opting instead for a "fix it first" strategy. As a result, several highway projects in suburban and rural areas have been deferred for review. The same goes for school construction. New Jersey is currently investing $8.6 billion in new schools, money it has to spend to fulfill a state supreme court mandate. McGreevey is steering these dollars toward green zones. Then there's funding for "brownfields." At a time when key state programs are getting cut, New Jersey is increasing funding for cleaning up the dozens of polluted urban industrial sites where environmental restrictions have deterred developers from building.

If followed rigorously, the map would fundamentally reverse development patterns in New Jersey. The state's population is expected to grow by 1.2 million people over the next 20 years, and the idea is for most of them to settle in older cities and towns. "It's not realistic to think we should build homes for 1 million people and use up every square inch of open space to do it," says Susan Bass Levin, McGreevey's community affairs commissioner. "All over the world people love to live in cities. Look at New York, or Paris--even Hoboken. Our goal is to make our cities and small towns attractive so people want to live there."

PRAISE AND BEWILDERMENT

Local reaction differs in big cities and rural towns, in green areas and red ones. The loudest cheers for McGreevey's vision are coming from the older industrial cities in the green zone. Mayors in these towns see the BIG map as the equalizer they have been waiting for, one that will finally convince builders that urban redevelopment is just as attractive as ripping up fresh farmland. "This is about altering the economics of development," says Christian Bollwage, mayor of Elizabeth, a rebounding port town near Newark. "It won't prohibit developers from building in the red areas, but it will make it more difficult and more costly."

Other communities that wound up in the green zone aren't sure what to make of it. Take Bergen County, which sits northwest of New York City and is 97 percent developed. A few parts are urban but much of the county is affluent and suburban. People move to the suburban towns for the lawns and driveways. Yet the BIG map shows almost all of the county as ripe for development. This can only mean one thing--more density. But especially in the suburban areas, local officials can hardly fathom how to build more densely without sacrificing the towns' suburban character. "What's appropriate in New York City may not work in Bergen County," says Donna Orbach, president of the county planners association, who also works for Bergen County. "Maybe some green areas with rail access can be built up and other green areas can't. We're not even sure what the questions are yet."

Then there are the red zones. Some mayors, especially in fast-growing suburbs, are delighted to see their last remaining farms and woods bathed in red. In these places, a backlash against growth is already underway, and mayors are only too happy to have the state on their side. They applaud McGreevey for proposing to give municipalities several new tools to use against developers, including the right to charge "impact fees" on new projects, the ability to impose moratoriums on new construction and the power to protect land from the bulldozer through transfer of development rights.

It's the rural red areas that pose the biggest obstacle for McGreevey. Dozens of small towns on the exurban fringes of New York City and Philadelphia have been expecting to grow substantially in the next 10 to 20 years. With the weakened economy, they are even more impatient for economic development to arrive. But now they find most of their land in the red zone, and think McGreevey is spoiling their plans. Rumblings of a backlash can be heard in Sussex County, up in the northwest corner of the state, as well as in Cumberland County down south. "We only have two tiny spots in the whole county that are green," says Susan Zellman, the Sussex freeholder. McGreevey's map ignores what Zellman sees as the biggest contributor to sprawl: New Jersey's reliance on funding local government with property taxes. "Until we get property tax reform, municipalities are going to need those ratables."

By and large, developers also are critical. Their biggest complaint, simply put, is that there isn't enough green. In fact, they call McGreevey's creation the "Big Red Map." Given population growth estimates, they think the plan simply isn't leaving enough room for all the new people. "The green areas won't handle 20 percent of that growth," says John Canuso, a south Jersey real estate developer. "Sure I can go into towns and find parcels to build 50 units here and 100 units there, but over time the supply and demand will become incredibly imbalanced. You won't be able to find a house for less than $300,000."

The complaints have been growing louder and louder. State officials released a new version of the map in March that showed more green and less red, but that still didn't mollify critics. Then in April, after a public comment period netted thousands of suggested changes, the state pulled the map down from its Web site. Although the map will continue to be refined through the summer, developers think McGreevey continues to put too much faith in the back-to-the-city trend. As they see it, pushing to transform New Jersey's housing market from a mostly suburban one into a mostly urban one is a quixotic effort that is doomed to fail. "You can't force all the development into those green areas," says Doug Fenichel, a spokesman for mega-builder K. Hovnanian Co. "Not everyone wants to live there."

McGreevey's team also has made mistakes. Inevitably, some of the color coding turned out to be inaccurate. The mayor of one town looked closely and noticed that a parcel painted red was already the location of a busy new Wal-Mart. The problem there was old data. But there's also concern that the map places environmental rules above all others, making it a crude planning tool. Take the case of Washington Township, outside of Trenton. Two new developments under construction there would appear to be models of smart growth thinking. One is a mixed-use "town center." The other is a warehouse district located at an exit off the New Jersey Turnpike, where trucks can get in and out easily. Common sense says both places should be colored green. Yet both show up red on the map, apparently because they are "suitable" habitats for an endangered species. "I think their intent is proper," says township planner Bob Melvin. "But the science they've used isn't good."

Indeed, debate over the map will only intensify as it moves toward adoption later this year. There will be hundreds of fights, big and small, over green parcels turning red, red land that could be yellow, or yellow plots fading to green. Mapping out an entire state this way may have its advantages. But some of the interested parties, no doubt, will wish they had more colors on their palate to work with, reflecting all the complexities and nuances of land use planning. "There's just three colors," says Bonnie Goldschlag, a Monmouth County planner. "But in planning, there's so many shades of gray."

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