A dozen Maryland counties have followed Montgomery County’s initial lead and adopted Adequate Public Facilities Ordinances to manage high-growth areas by ensuring that demands of new development do not swamp existing road, school, recreation and public safety infrastructure. But a recent University of Maryland study found APFOs have instead produced quite unintended consequences: “APFOs appear to be fueling the same pattern of development the state’s [1997] Smart Growth policy is intended to curtail.”
Simply put, government meddling is making urban sprawl even worse than it would be otherwise. Since numerous Virginia localities are grappling with these same issues, the Maryland study should be of direct interest on both sides of the Potomac River.
The study by UMD’s National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education (www.smartgrowth.umd.edu) — which conducts independent, data-driven research on land use issues — concluded that APFOs “deflect development away from the very areas designated for growth in county comprehensive plans to rural areas never intended for growth, to neighboring counties or even to adjacent states.”
Worse, the AFPOs also “deflected as much as 10 percent of the new home development that otherwise would have been built in areas specifically designated by the state for financial assistance under Smart Growth.” Two well-intentioned but misguided government policies appear to be canceling each other out.
Researchers discovered that local officials who use APFOs as their major planning tool typically impose lengthy building moratoriums until developers agree to pay steep impact fees. But even the relatively low-impact fees charged by Montgomery and Prince George’s counties in the state’s Priority Funding Areas jacked up prices in areas where new growth was intended and put “a disproportion burden for the cost of new infrastructure on new home buyers.” That in turn forces many of them out of the local housing market altogether and out to the exurbs.
Ironically enough, APFOs are used more in areas that are already eligible for state financial assistance for added infrastructure costs than anywhere else. “The intentional high-growth characteristics of a Priority Funding Area make them precisely the type of areas where APFOs are the most likely to be applied,” the study’s authors noted. Smart Growth this definitely is not.
And as has already become abundantly clear in the affordable housing-starved Washington region, when government policies clash with attempts to meet the area’s critical housing shortage, “growth simply moves elsewhere.” Elsewhere tends to be further and further out from the urban core, deflating Maryland’s carefully cultivated image as a national leader in concentrating growth in existing population centers.
And driving yet another nail into the coffin of the already discredited notion that centralized bureaucrats are any better at managing demographic growth than they are in regulating other areas of our complex and dynamic economy.
