One of the questions asked of Spokane City Council District 2 candidates at the League of Women Voters forum (first shown on July 23, link  here, “Other Video Programs“) was, “Sometimes the Council grants developers exceptions to the Comprehensive Plan or zoning regulations. What would be your criteria for granting these exceptions?”

Interestingly, while the other candidates proceeded to set forth the criteria they would apply, only Steve Eugster pointed out that the Council cannot grant “exceptions” per se to the Plan or to the zoning ordinance. It can grant variances to the latter, provided one of the grounds for doing so specified in the ordinance is satisfied. It can also grant zoning changes, which are merely amendments to the ordinance, usually accomplished simply by redrawing a zone boundary. Such amendments, however, are required to be consistent with the Comprehensive Plan.

Therein lies the rub. What is and is not consistent with the Comprehensive Plan is very much a matter of opinion. That is because the Plan consists of a vast number of “Goals and Policies” which are ambiguous, vague, often inconsistent, and sometimes irreconcilable. There is a principle in logic that from inconsistent premises, any conclusion follows. Hence for virtually any proposed amendment to the zoning law, an argument with some plausibility can be advanced that it is consistent with something in the Comprehensive Plan.

Why should that be? Well, one reason is that the Comprehensive Plan (CP) is actually a collective term for several planning documents prepared at different times by different people pursuing different agendas and laboring under different assumptions (and delusions). Although the 2001 Spokane Comprehensive Plan sought to bring some order and unity to this chaos, previous plans, or portions of them, remain “official City policy.” Another reason is that, over time, the Comprehensive Plan, as with urban planning documents everywhere, has suffered serious “mission creep,” constantly expanding to embrace more and more aspects of urban life. The more complex and expansive plans become, the more interest groups they try to placate, the more difficult it becomes to make them coherent and consistent.

One example locally is the recent City Hall squabble over advertising on bus benches. On the one hand, the CP announces a policy (TR 2.20) to “provide transit shelters, bus benches, and other features that support transit use in key locations.” Another section (DP 3.15) asserts, “Identify and implement ways to provide bus benches and control bus bench advertising.” The “discussion” section of the latter policy statement declares bench advertising to be “visual clutter” and undesirable. It also directs the City and STA to “explore” alternate ways to provide benches “within 1 year” of adoption of the Plan. Well, 8 years later, there is still no alternative means of providing the benches. So does allowing the advertising better conform to the thrust of the Plan, by providing the benches, or does banning the benches better serve it by reducing “visual clutter?” Which policy is controlling here? Who knows?

So though Steve Eugster is technically correct that the Council cannot grant “exceptions” to the Comprehensive Plan, it can interpret its policies in ways that, to persons whose Utopian fantasies differ, are indistinguishable from exceptions.

Historically, urban planning was justified as a necessary prerequisite of zoning laws and building codes, which were in turn justified as a means to minimize conflicting land uses, forestall public nuisances, and assure safe buildings. However, if particular land uses are to be confined to particular areas of the city, there must be some means of assuring that enough land is available for all the uses common and desired in an urban area — industrial, wholesaling and warehousing, retailing, residential, recreational, etc. Hence “comprehensive plans.” But over time, the original purposes of making sure zoning laws made sense for the city as a whole, that buildings were safe, and that city services kept pace with growth, expanded to include every aspect of the urban environment deemed by some interest group or other to affect their “quality of life.”

“Urban planning in the early years of its modern phase dealt largely with how to create a healthy, attractive, efficient, and safe community. Thus, most of the selections in this anthology focus directly on forms, patterns, locations, and interrelationships of streets, public and private building sites, parks and recreation areas, shopping and industrial districts, and other parts of the fabric of towns and cities. The authors of other papers explored closely related legal and social issues like public control of land use and building height and bulk and enactment and enforcement of housing standards.

“Although these aspects of the urban environment were once the accepted domain of city planning, few of the writers whose works appear here would recognize today’s expanded definition of the field. As presently perceived by its intellectual leaders, city planning now embraces virtually all aspects of urban public administration. Environmental protection, economic development, income redistribution, crime prevention, conflict resolution, prevention of gender, racial, ethnic, and age discrimination, allievating family disorganization–these and other topics in the economic, political and social arenas are regarded as the subjects planners should be concerned with.” (John W. Reps, Urban Planning 1794-1918, Introduction).

That expansion was inevitable — given a legal mechanism for restricting what a property owner may do with his land, or dictating what he must do with it, every interest group with an agenda will seek to utilize that mechanism to force others to conform and contribute to their particular conceptions of Utopia. So, zoning laws expanded to make sure that blacks did not move into white neighborhoods, that poor people did not invade wealthier areas (so no multifamily buildings), that transients be discouraged from entering neighborhoods (so no more Mom & Pop groceries, cleaners, barber shops, or restaurants which might attract undesirables to residential areas), that older neighborhoods, especially those inhabited by non-Anglos or lower-income families, be replaced with malls or office parks (“urban renewal”), that historic buildings, views, and open spaces be preserved for the enjoyment of “the public” without compensation to the owners, that building styles satisfy the preferences of neighbors or planners rather than those of the owner (“design review”), that developers provide a certain number of “affordable” (i.e., subsidized) housing units, public access easements or other freebies in their projects in exchange for waivers of arbitrary development restrictions, and of course, most recently, that anyone who wishes to build something conform to “green” dogmas.

Needless to say, this situation imposes enormous cost burdens on anyone contemplating a development project. Not only in direct costs for the land use and environmental consultants and attorneys who must be hired to shepherd the project though the approval gamut, but in the time delays entailed, which can prevent the project from staying in synch with the ever-changing conditions in the market (e.g., project which may secure financing today will not necessarily secure it 18 months from now when all the approvals and permits are finally in place). So, the project doesn’t happen. There are now a number of firms around the country whose sole business is to guide development proposals through the convoluted approval process — at huge cost, of course.

In a recent article in The Inlander (“Trashing the Plan,” July 16) Robert Herold lambasts Councilman Al French for seizing “every opportunity to weaken the Plan,” subjecting his “beleaguered contituents . . .to the alienating and demoralizing effects of unregulated commercial exploitation.”

Oh my, how awful! No doubt those constituents’ “quality of life” will suffer horribly if they have more apartments to choose from, a place to sit at the bus stop, or a closer place to munch some sushi.

But I agree the Comprehensive Plan should not be weakened. It should be repealed. It is time for Spokane to scrap its Comprehensive Plan and adopt an “Uncomprehensive Plan,” that is, a plan which confines its mandates to assuring safe buildings, segregating incompatible land uses, and preventing nuisances, and eschews all attempts by Utopians with autocratic temperaments to hijack the machinery for their own parochial purposes, or by parasites seeking to score a free lunch.

The best argument for an Uncomprehensive Plan? The fact that all the elements of Spokane’s urban character now regarded with nostalgia and admiration, the very features the Utopians seek to preserve and emulate — its historic neighborhoods (Browne’s Addition, Peaceful Valley, Cannon’s Addition, West Riverside, the Marycliff district), its outstanding architecture (Cutter, Ritchie, Burnham, Dow, Seaton, et al), its dense, eclectic, mixed-use CBD — were all developed without the oversight of bureaucrats. All those signature features of the city appeared between 1890 and 1920, long before any planners were employed at City Hall. Spokane had no zoning ordinance at all until 1929.

A miracle? Nope — just the unfettered imagination and unsapped energy of free individuals “doing their own thing.”

Tags: Urban Planning

This entry was posted on Friday, July 31st, 2009 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Urban Development, Urban Planning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.