CT CHANGE AGENT?
Pictured from a New York TIMES feature story from September 26, 1993, regional land use advocate in CT Legislature still at work (on Program Review & Investigation Committee 2007)
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CT Land Use Issues:  the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Take the time to read the article immediately below, from the September 26, 1993 NYTIMES.

Program Review and Investigation - the only Committee with equal number of Democrats and Republicans: MEMBERS
Staff:  12
Studies (1998-2007)
Publications

Smart Growth...how smart is it?  Getting smarter every year as more open land disappears
How about a term such as "responsible growth" in this, the 21st century?

INFRASTRUCTURE DISCUSSION
The Ledyard Fairgrounds at the intersection of routes 117 and 214 and a new Center location.

NOTE:  We apologize for this presentation of the 1993 NYTIMES article--it was so long ago that this website was not even a glimmer in the author's eye!




Ledyard Looks To Put Itself On The Map For Development
DAY
By Jenna Cho
Published on 12/3/2006

Ledyard -- Step into our bedroom community, developer.  Here, 80 percent of the town's grand list is residential property. Five percent is commercial.  The tax burden is heavy on our residents, many of whom work at the casinos, Pfizer Inc., or the Naval Submarine Base.

Rather than build more houses, we'd like to increase our commercial tax base — ideally, to about 25 percent of the grand list. We have some land you can develop.

But we don't want this town to become one giant strip mall. No big-box stores, please. And can we keep development confined to Ledyard Center and Route 12? Can we make Ledyard Center a true town center, with a town green and a village feel?  We've made a good start, but we're thinking, maybe, of a pedestrian-friendly shopping district lined with locally owned retail stores.

We know development is coming. The region is growing. We're sort of in the midst of it all, and we want to be ready. But honestly, we don't have all the answers. We're not sure how to attract you when, for one thing, we don't have sewers in the right places.

But we know you're going to come calling, and when you do we want to make sure you'll build to our liking.  It's not easy being Ledyard.  It's home to the Mashantucket Pequots' Foxwoods Resort Casino — the largest casino in the world — but the town doesn't collect taxes on most of the property on the tribe's 2,000-acre reservation.

Despite the casino's immense success since opening in 1992, Ledyard hasn't been able to parlay its presence into much spin-off business. The only recent business plan that would cater to casino-goers off the reservation has been a “destination resort” proposed by the tribe itself.  Part of the problem, reasons Brian Palaia, the town's director of planning and development, is that visitors will drive through North Stonington or Preston, not Ledyard, to get to Foxwoods.

Ledyard remains relatively anonymous, Palaia said, “because it's not important.”

“The casino is contained within the reservation,” Palaia said. “You don't need to know what town it's in to go to the casino. ... Everything associated with you going to the casino is in the casino grounds.”

And while routes 117 and 214 are not the main roads to Foxwoods, traffic in town has increased since Foxwoods and the nearby Mohegan Sun casino were built.  According to the town's 2003 Plan of Conservation and Development, the state Department of Transportation reported that “average daily traffic on Route 117 in Ledyard Center jumped from 8,500 (vehicles) in 1988 to over 12,000 in 1998, and is expected to increase to at least 15,500 by 2007.”

For Bill Saums, chairman of the Ledyard Town Center Committee, increased traffic through the town center means more exposure of the town to the outside world, which means more opportunities to attract the right types of businesses. The committee was established in February to draft recommendations for economic development.

“The region as a whole is going to see more growth in resort-like things and other resort-type activities,” Saums said. “What that means for Ledyard is increased pressure on housing, increased traffic on the roads and therefore more opportunity for retail in Ledyard Center.

“... We need to have a plan so that we're prepared for whatever comes along, when it comes along. So we can say, 'OK, does this fit the plan or not?' ”

Mike Cherry, chairman of the town's Economic Development Commission, said he saw a consensus forming among residents that the town should prepare for development today, not later.

“Once things start to happen, it may be too late to ensure that our vision for the future is preserved,” he said.

•••••

Aside from the success of the ever-expanding casinos, the promise of economic growth in the region in recent years has come mostly from Utopia Studios, the $1.6 billion entertainment complex proposed for the former Norwich Hospital property in Preston, Ledyard's neighbor to the north.  But last week that promise took a hit when Preston's selectmen terminated a development agreement with Utopia. Almost immediately, however, other proposals for the property began to surface.

Saums said the very prospect of Utopia had sparked a sense of urgency that Ledyard officials used to encourage people to think about growth. Development at the former hospital site, he said, was bound to occur and Utopia's collapse did not “take the pressure off.”

Despite a general sense that the town must plan for imminent economic changes in the region, Ledyard faces some obstacles. It has no municipal sewers on routes 12 and 117, the areas considered most likely to be developed.  Developers tend to build where infrastructure exists. A water line is coming to Route 117, but water alone is not enough to attract commerce.

“Development is market-driven,” Palaia said. “So if it's profitable, somebody will do it. But in order for it to be profitable, the infrastructure has to exist.”

The town is focusing its plans for economic growth on Ledyard Center now, but the state has designated Route 117 as a rural area. The town, which recently studied sewer feasibility in two areas of town, including Ledyard Center, will have a hard time convincing the state to grant it money to build sewers there. Route 117 also falls within the Groton Utilities watershed area, which restricts growth further due to worry that build-out will contaminate the water.

In addition, the town must update its zoning regulations, which are more than 40 years old. A comprehensive update could make the regulations more suitable for dictating the type of developments that are being proposed today.

“(The regulations) were written in a time when the two casinos weren't here,” Cherry said. “... It's time to take action, not time to wait for a proposal that we can't support to come in.”

Various town officials have requested funds to hire staff to help rewrite the regulations. Due to budget constraints, those requests have not been met.

•••••

In the past 20 years, the town has made some progress in creating development standards. It drafted design districts for the Gales Ferry and Ledyard Center commercial areas and developed a tax-incentive program meant to attract business.

Town officials praise businesses that have come to Ledyard Center: the Dime Savings Bank; the Village Market, which replaced the old Ledyard Community Store and includes a gasoline station, a car wash and soon, four more retail spaces; the renovated Valentino's restaurant; and Holdridge Farm Nursery.

The town established both the Ledyard Town Center Committee and the Open Space Committee this year to plan intelligent use of its 38 square miles — develop where suitable while preserving and connecting open space parcels to create greenways and wildlife corridors.

“I think open space and development kind of work hand-in-hand,” Mayor Susan Mendenhall said. “If you plan it well, there is very much a happy medium.”

The town is negotiating the sale of the former Gales Ferry School on Route 12 for retail use and may do the same with the old firehouse next door to the Town Hall.  In the case of Ledyard Center, the town has a history of planning changes that are never implemented. The town drafted conceptual plans for a more dominant heart of town in 1965, then again in 1985. Twenty years later, town officials are still discussing some of the same issues they were back then.

A 1979 report by the town planning department reads: “Ledyard lacks a focus to give it identity. Urban designers have learned that a 'sense of place' is the cornerstone of a meaningful environment. In addition to stone walls and wooded hills, the town needs a center to give character and form to its civic identity.”

Town Councilor Sharon Wadecki said finding that right balance in development is tricky.

“People want development, but they want smart development,” Wadecki said. “They want stuff that's compatible with the area. And things that will bring in people ... but not adversely affect the (area). I think the hope is that we'll somehow strike that balance. Have we been able to do that? Nope.”
 

U.S. Department Of Sprawl
Hartford Courant
November 20, 2006
 
Local officials in the Washington, D.C. area, beset with increasing traffic, energy use, pollution and loss of woods and farms to exurban development, are trying to direct development to town centers and transit corridors.

This smart growth strategy makes great sense and might work - if only the federal government would cooperate.

The Washington Post recently reported that U.S. government agencies have scattered tens of thousands of employees to the fringes of the region in recent years, frustrating efforts to manage what has become helter-skelter growth. Officials say the federal government has become the region's master planner, with no mandate from local or county governments, and isn't doing much of a job at it.

"They seem to have no interest in trying to plan for the rational development of a sustainable community," said Fairfax (Va.) County Supervisor T. Dana Kauffman. The Post cites numerous examples of federal workers, including 30,000 military and civilian Pentagon employees from the District and nearby Arlington, being moved to southern Fairfax County, an area with crowded roads and little transit.

This is wrong.

Someone in the federal government has to step back and realize that these major personnel shifts will have a profound effect on the region's transportation and development patterns for decades, if not longer. Failing to consider how major moves affect the region risks investments made by the federal government. As the Post points out, there is a $10 billion federal investment in the D.C. Metro system. Moving thousands of workers away from the system is self-defeating.

State governments including Connecticut's also have added to sprawl over the years with displacement of workers to suburban office parks. However, Connecticut state agencies are required to follow the state Plan of Conservation and Development, and the current version of the plan manages growth wisely. By spearheading a similar plan for the Washington area, the federal government could become a force for smart growth.

President Bill Clinton issued an executive order in the mid-1990s urging federal agencies to try to locate in downtown areas. That still makes sense, though it apparently isn't being followed. The federal government claims to be worried about energy use, dependence on foreign oil and greenhouse gas emissions. Why is it making these problems worse in its own backyard?
A Smart Growth Election
Hartford Courant editorial
October 27, 2006

Without a big city like Boston or New York, a sunny climate or a cluster of major league sports teams, Connecticut competes on the national stage with its quality of life. Along with a skilled workforce and vibrant arts, we offer strong, compact communities set in a pleasant New England landscape of village centers and rolling hills.

But as this page has taken pains to point out over the past two years, that quality of life is being ruined by sprawl - poorly planned, car-oriented subdivisions and strip malls that increase driving and energy use; cause pollution; mar the characteristic Connecticut scenery; isolate the poor and seniors; and limit housing options for workers.

The Courant and a number of civic groups, from 1,000 Friends of Connecticut to the Archdiocese of Hartford's CenterEdge Coalition, have urged state leaders to counter the sprawl problem with an agenda that will encourage growth in town centers, job sites and transit corridors, and take pressure off the state's dwindling farms and forests.

Gov. M. Jodi Rell, though not an early advocate of "smart growth," as this approach is known, has nonetheless supported several elements of a smart growth plan, including a $3.5 billion investment in transportation infrastructure and the creation of a dedicated fund to support the protection of open space, farmland and historic sites, as well as the production of affordable housing.

On Oct. 6, she took the major step of creating a state office to control sprawl and promote sustainable growth. The new agency, the Office of Responsible Growth, is part of the state's Office of Policy and Management. It will bring together state agencies involved in land use to increase mass transit and transit-oriented development, and create incentives for sound regional planning and planning that protects natural resources.

A week later, Rell's Democratic challenger, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano, issued his own smart growth plan. It is more comprehensive than the governor's, befitting a longer familiarity with the subject. Mr. DeStefano was a co-chairman of the 2003 blue ribbon Commission on Property Tax Burdens and Smart Growth Initiatives.

Mr. DeStefano would direct state funds to targeted growth areas such as town centers to encourage private investment there. His plan makes a number of other key points. The governor must be in charge, if smart growth is to work. We need more transportation options right away.

Perhaps most important, Mr. DeStefano makes the connection between tax policy and bad land-use decisions. As long as towns need property tax revenue to pay for local schools, any green space not legally preserved is in danger of development. He calls for more state funding of local education and less reliance on local property taxes.

Smart growth is not a partisan issue. We hope that after the election, Gov. Rell or Gov. DeStefano will convene a session with legislative leaders, key commissioners and civic groups such as 1,000 Friends to take the best of the candidates' proposals, plus examples that work in other states, and put together a program that will do the job in Connecticut.

Smart growth is not no growth. It's encouraging growth in areas that build communities and preserve our vaunted quality of life. Sentiment for a Connecticut smart growth strategy has been growing for several years.

The time is now. 
Step Toward Smart Growth
Hartford Courant editorial
September 10, 2006
 
Connecticut has lagged behind most Northeastern states in fighting sprawl, resulting in poorly planned, low-density development in many of our suburban and rural towns. Sprawl has meant more traffic congestion and pollution, loss of farms and forests, higher costs for infrastructure and services and a loss of housing variety.

Let's hope that will change.

In an unusually passionate announcement last weekend, Gov. M. Jodi Rell said she's begun a national search for a deputy commissioner of the state Department of Transportation who will focus on mass transit and anti-sprawl measures.

"We need to combat sprawl," Mrs. Rell said. "Our goal is to create more attractive, livable, economically strong communities while protecting natural resources, and our battle to attain those goals must include mass transit." She spoke of bringing affordable housing and business to the areas around transit stops, to create "walkable, bikable neighborhoods."

The governor correctly observes that transit and transit-related planning "have been on the back burner for decades." To turn things around, the "state's economic development, environment, public health, energy and transportation policies need to be coordinated and balanced every step of the way."

Mrs. Rell framed the issue properly. But to succeed, she - or her successor - must oversee and support the effort. This editorial page argued that the DOT commissioner, not a deputy commissioner, should be the expert in transit and transit-oriented development. Nonetheless, the deputy commissioner can be a leader in fighting sprawl, with the strong support of the commissioner and the governor.

In addition, the governor needs to champion a legislative package that will create incentives to build in town centers and transit corridors, provide more help for regional planners and local land-use officials, and make a stronger commitment to farmland preservation.

The governor should initiate a statewide review of zoning legislation, because current zoning laws in many towns are outdated and work against smart growth.

Mrs. Rell has supported $3.5 billion in transportation improvements in the past two years. Her national search for a transit leader is another step toward reversing the helter-skelter development that is threatening the state's vaunted quality of life. With perseverance, these initiatives will grow into a solid smart-growth policy in Connecticut.
'Smart growth' is pretty stupid
Editorial, Norwich Bulletin
July 21, 2006

When conservationists talk about "saving" this and "protecting" that, a logical question might be: Saving it from whom? Protecting it from whom? And why should the government force what you want on someone else who obviously wants something different, or there would not be an issue in the first place?

After all, the Constitution says all citizens are entitled to the "equal protection of the laws."

Such questions almost never get asked. Nor do evidence or logic play much of a role in most conservation issues. Instead, we hear rhapsodies about "open space," sneers at "urban sprawl" and self-congratulatory phrases such as "smart growth."

Rhetoric has long since replaced reasons on this as on so many other issues.

The latest conservation crusade has been announced in the San Francisco Bay area -- putting an additional one million acres aside as "open space."

According to an official of the Peninsula Open Space Trust, the next couple of decades represent "the last chance" to "save" these million acres. The fashionable phrase is: "Once it's paved, it can't be saved."

Just to introduce a few facts into all these rhetorical flourishes, there are four and a half million acres of land in the San Francisco Bay Area. Less than one-sixth of this land has been developed. So we are not talking saving the last few patches of greenery from being paved over.

More than a million acres are already legally off-limits to development while less than three-quarters of a million acres are actually developed.

What then is the urgency about making another million acres of land legally off- limits to building anything? Because otherwise, more people will move into the area in time and, since they don't want to live outdoors, they will want to have housing.

That bothers the conservationists, who prefer trees to houses.

If they can't cut these other people off at the pass by making it illegal to build anything on an additional million acres, they can at least force those people to live in the kinds of housing that conservationists want to restrict them to, rather than the kinds of housing that these people prefer for themselves.

That's called "smart growth." What is smart about it is another question.

An international study of 26 urban areas with "severely unaffordable" housing found 23 of those 26 subject to strong "smart growth" policies. What is "smart" about causing skyrocketing housing prices by making it illegal to build anything on vast amounts of land?

It is smart if you already own a home and the astronomical costs of buying or renting are going to have to be paid by other people who move into the area. It may be especially smart if restrictions on building cause the value of the home you already own to go up by leaps and bounds.

Note:  Southwestern CT suburban communities have been missing the same demographic for decades!  Land values cause the problem.
How About Building Community?
Hartford Courant
Rick Green
December 22, 2006

Here's one for the detectives at the governor's new Office of Responsible Growth.

More than 15 percent of the population of students in Regional School District 1 has vanished over the past six years. In the seven-school district, enrollment is down by 314 students since 2000.

Sure, we can ignore the alarming news from this tiny 1,973-student school district. At least it still looks like a Vermont postcard out there in Litchfield County.

Anyway you figure it, losing young families is bad news for a town unless you're a developer planning another one of those depressing over-55 retirement communities springing up all over.

Local officials believe that working parents - not the elite, who send their children to the private Hotchkiss, Kent, Salisbury or similar schools - are opting out. They are being replaced by Manhattanites eager to have a home in gentrified Litchfield County.

"If young people have a hard time, it does change the tenor of your community," said Canaan First Selectwoman Patricia Mechare. "What makes a community great is diversity. There are not too many homes in our area that you can get for a reasonable price."

This is another warning sign for a state that can't seem to respond to the forces reshaping us. Small towns have been losing their homegrown sons and daughters for years - isn't this as important as controlling sprawl and development?

When she created her Office of Responsible Growth, the buzzword was sprawl, but Gov. Rell also said that the goal is to "build livable, economically strong communities."

I called W. David LeVasseur, who is in charge of this office, to ask if driving middle-income families out of entire regions of the state is the sort of responsible growth we want.

"You need to have a variety of lifestyle and housing choices in a community and a state," he said. Communities need to worry less about "home rule" and more about regional cooperation to deal with housing, transportation and job creation.

In northwest Connecticut, folks are desperate for some housing leadership from Hartford. Local leaders are watching their towns become antique relics for the privileged - pretty old red barns and town centers with general stores where you can buy a $4 latte and The New York Times.

"You can turn into a museum pretty quick. It's the vitality of the town. You have to start looking at your town plans and make sure there are places for people to work" and live, said Gordon Ridgway, Cornwall's first selectman.

In Cornwall, a local housing corporation has been creating owner-occupied affordable homes for years.

"Children who were raised here can't afford to live here," said Jim Levy, director of the Cornwall Housing Corp., which has built 18 apartments and a dozen homes in a community where the median sales price of a one-family house is about $330,000. "It's very difficult for a young family to live here."

You can practically watch the young mothers and fathers flee the nine towns that make up the Northwestern Connecticut Council of Governments, said executive director Dan McGuinness.

The percentage of people aged 20 to 34 dropped by 32 percent during the 1990s. "Those are the prime ages when women are bearing children," McGuinness said.

It's no wonder, then, that there are so few kindergartners this year at Kellogg School in Falls Village.

Really, there's no mystery about what is happening to those children in the Northwest Corner. When there's no future, people leave.

Anti-Sprawl Tactic Mulled;   Avon Considers Shifting Development From Edges To The Center
By DANIEL P. JONES, Courant Staff Writer
January 15, 2007

AVON -- Avon could become the first Connecticut town to adopt a novel, anti-sprawl approach that lets developers acquire rights to build more housing near the village center in exchange for paying landowners in out-of-the-way sections to keep their property undeveloped.  The town planning and zoning commission is considering a change in its zoning rules that would allow for such programs.

"We're really looking at it as: Is this a way to channel smart growth, rather than just the standard planning regulations, by preserving some open space and increasing some [multi-family housing] density in areas that can handle it?" said Duane Starr, commission chairman.

State law allows towns to adopt transfer of development rights, or TDR, programs but no town has done so yet, according to Avon's town planner, Steve Kushner.  Towns, counties or regional commissions in several other states, including Massachusetts, Maryland, New York, New Jersey and Colorado, have been running the programs for several years.

"TDR programs are not for the faint of heart, in that they require municipalities to make some proactive decisions about conservation and about development," said Robert Pirani, director of environmental programs at the Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit planning organization in the Connecticut, New York and New Jersey metropolitan area.  But for towns that take on the challenge, he said, there are rewards: money for conservation and development in the right places.

"I think it's exciting that Avon's taken the lead in thinking about this," Pirani said. "I think many Connecticut towns have the planning sophistication and the need to think about conservation and development in this way."

No one is talking about making a change that would bring large-scale housing developments to Avon center, the area near the town green and the intersection of routes 10 and 44.  Housing developments under the voluntary program would still be modest, in keeping with the scale and character of the center.  By the same token, the acreage that would be preserved as open space would also be modest, according to Kushner.  But even small gains in preserving open space would be a benefit, he said.

At the state level, Connecticut has a program to purchase development rights to keep farms from being developed. Farm owners receive money for the value of their land.  Under transfer of development rights programs, towns can channel growth into suitable areas - where roads, utilities, sewers and commercial buildings already exist - and can preserve other areas such as farms, drinking-water aquifers, wetlands, ridges, river valleys and open space.

Rather than simply adopting rules to control or restrict development, towns can adopt the transfer rules to encourage open space preservation and smart growth through economic incentives, advocates say.  Developers who buy the development rights in an area targeted for preservation receive a density bonus in another area.

In Avon, the easy part is deciding where to encourage open space preservation, Starr said. The planning and zoning commission is considering adopting a program that would focus on three areas for preservation: two large agricultural properties along West Avon Road and the area near Avon Old Farms School on Old Farms Road, he said.

"The more difficult part is, where would we be willing to allow more density?" Starr said.  So far, the proposal is focusing on the so-called village area or Avon center.

"We've got some built-in infrastructure, utilities, bus routes and we might be able to put in smaller multi-family development in there," he said.

"We don't have the unanimous decision among the commissioners yet. So it's not going to happen overnight. It probably would take a year for us to get this through."

Main point for planners here.
After the great recession, could New York be the city of the future?
NTPOST
By KYLE SMITH
Last Updated: 5:02 AM, April 18, 2010
Posted: 12:42 AM, April 18, 2010

Today the great housing-banking crisis of 2008 doesn’t look so much like the collapse of capitalism. What if it wasn’t a lasting blow, either? Better: What if it wasn’t even a temporary setback?

What if the Wall Street meltdown was, when considered as the catalyst in a new system, a good thing?

Such is the thesis of Richard Florida’s enticingly contrarian new book "The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity" (Harper). Other recent books, such as Gregg Easterbrook’s "Sonic Boom," have argued that American dynamism can overcome big shocks, but Florida goes out on a limb in arguing that recent events have provided exciting opportunities to strengthen American socioecomic might.

And he isn’t talking about (or at least not primarily about) the Rahm Emanuel credo in which crisis serves as a useful pretext for enlarging the reach of government. "Government spending can’t be the solution in the long run," Florida says. "Though government can fill in gaps for a while, it simply lacks the resources to generate the enormous level of demand needed to power sustained growth."

That ought to be obvious, but at least we know we’re not dealing with yet another diehard central planner.

In the post-bust era, Florida envisions more and more Americans opting not to take on car and mortgage payments, choosing the flexibility of renting and the less stressful commutes of mass transit to free up funds for more culture, more experiences, less living space but more ways to express themselves.

In other words, America might be ready to take on more of the qualities of another country entirely: New York City.

There is a limit to the attractiveness of catchphrase social science — see anything Thomas Friedman has written in the last 10 years — and Florida’s heavy reliance on the terms "Great Reset" and another coinage he uses ad nauseam, "spatial fix," can be grating. But Florida, who previously wrote "The Rise of the Creative Class," raises interesting points about how the latest economic shock plays off some surprising trends.

One big takeaway from his book is that geography matters — the urban theorist Jane Jacobs is a constant presence — and it never matters more than in times of economic calamity. After the Panic of 1873 (farmers moved to cities) and the Crash of 1929 (city folk spread out into suburbs), the American map was redesigned, and Florida thinks that is already happening again.

Though suburbs, McMansions and car culture are here to stay, hybrid city-suburbs are sprouting up from coast to coast. Population density is scaling up quickly around mass-transit stations in places like Silver Spring, Md. Tysons Corner, Va., a suburb synonymous with sprawl, has a plan to transform itself into a pedestrian-friendly community organized around a rail line.

In Phoenix, a development project has plucked a series of small homes out of foreclosure along a rail line that offers a quick link to downtown. The developer hopes to create a community that will attract young workers tired of long commutes to their exurbs who want a place where they can give their cars a rest and walk to cafés and shopping.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, spending on housing and cars doubled from 22% to 44% of the average family’s budget. Now the word is out that houses aren’t necessarily a great investment. Yet they rarely have been: The runup in housing values between 1890 and 1990 barely outpaced inflation. Moreover, being anchored to a home becomes an increasingly important factor in an economy in which workers are expected to change jobs, even careers, with ever-increasing velocity. Next year’s job might be far from this year’s.

The switch from owning to renting gives you geographic flexibility. One of the big problems in the Detroit area — where the 35-year-old Pontiac Silverdome recently sold at auction for the price of a small one-bedroom on the Upper West Side — is that people can’t move to where the jobs are because they can’t sell their worthless homes. In a recent auction, many seized properties listed in a phonebook-sized directory drew no bids whatsoever.

A study in Europe found that a 10% increase in homeownership correlated with a 2% increase in unemployment. "We could well look back on this moment in history as a time when people lived like indentured servants, with their own homes as lord and master," Florida writes. Homeownership levels have subsided from their all-time highs in the wake of the crash. That’s been a source of short-term upheaval, but in the long run several studies report that owners are no happier than renters. Homeowners also complain of higher levels of stress. "There’s a reason people refer to their houses as ’money pits,’ " Florida says. "They are time pits as well."

A similar "Great Reset," Florida suggests, may be happening with respect to another big expense, cars. A J.D. Power survey of blogging and Tweets shows a fascinating shift in tastes. Young adults are far less car-focused than their parents and grandparents. They worry about the cost, the environmental effects, even the image of being a car owner. What’s really cool to them is exotic kayaking trips, DIY vegetable gardens, new restaurants — opportunities to brand themselves and text the news back to their friends.

All of this sort of consumption can and does thrive when other sectors of the economy are depressed. Call it Miami Beach Syndrome: Empty condos overlook full bars. Elsewhere, in some of the towns where the real-estate bubble disappeared with a particularly loud pop, some minty-fresh housing developments are being bulldozed because vacant houses attract squatters. A foolhardy era is getting plowed under.

Cities may be expensive, but they deliver value. A headline in the Wall Street Journal last year read, "Cities Grow at Suburbs’ Expense." Such inflows support urban housing prices, which declined far less in cities and inner-ring suburbs than in distant suburbs and exurbs. That cities make for increasingly desirable homesteads is reflected by the changing demographics of their populations. By 2008, incomes of residents of Seattle and San Francisco exceeded those of the metro area average by 20%. A generation earlier, both cities’ incomes were outpaced by their surrounding areas. Even last year, in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis that helped kill more than 100,000 of our jobs, New York City was still rated the No. 1 destination for college grads looking for jobs, Florida says.

And cities are ecologically correct. Thanks to writers like David Owen, author of "Green Metropolis," understanding of that fact is beginning to overturn the centuries-old image of cities as infested with dark Satanic mills, cloaked in foul air and streaked with mucky rivers. Owen ranks New York City as the single greenest place in the United States. New Yorkers generate 30% less greenhouse gas per capita than the average American. We drive less, produce less waste and live in the most energy-efficient housing on earth: apartment buildings. All of this is down to population density (800 times the US average and even 30 times the average of Los Angeles).

New York City competes on a global playing field, but the salient fact about our overseas financial-industry competitors is that none of them (except London and possibly Hong Kong) offers the full Gotham menu of advantages. Shanghai has desperately been trying to get itself ranked among the major centers of finance, and it has succeeded, if you consider 36th place success. (It’s on a par with the Bahamas for financial activity.) Mainland China’s disparaging attitude toward basic freedoms (not to mention its sickening air quality) hampers its efforts to draw top talent. China won’t even allow its currency to be freely traded.

Moreover, for all of China’s vaunted progress (one analysis quoted by Florida says it may seize the title of world’s largest economy by 2015), it ranks only 30th on the Davos Competitiveness Index, 81st on the U.N. Development Index and 36th on Florida’s Global Creativity Index, a measure of openness, innovation and competitiveness. Few of the best baseball players want to play in Kansas City, few of the financial masters of the universe want to live in Shanghai.

Singapore, Hong Kong and Zurich all saw their rankings in the Global Financial Centres Index plummet following the crash. Tokyo dropped from seventh to 15th, and unlike the robustly polyethnic New York, London and Hong Kong, where a zesty mix of people creates busy marketplaces of ideas, Japan remains a relatively closed society hostile to outsiders. Just 1% of its workforce consists of foreigners. "Economic growth is increasingly powered not just by the places that have the most raw materials, the biggest ports or even the best factories but by those with the richest clustering of people," Florida says.

Unfortunately, Florida’s major big-government idea is a wretched one: High-speed rail, an outlandishly expensive pet scheme of the Obama administration that appears destined to be one of history’s great money furnaces, though President Obama’s Mission to Mars promises to offer stiff competition.

Ride the sad, lonely LA subway system sometime and you’ll see how effective mass transit is in getting people out of their cars in even medium (not low) density areas. Calling the LA subway system underused is like calling Antarctica underpopulated.

Why should L.A. have all the fun? Obama’s rail plan typifies his blend of nose-to-the-skies Harvard dreaminess and his canny grasp of the levers of the Chicago machine that produces gold-plated union jobs.

Acknowledging that a fully built-out high-speed rail system would cost somewhere between $140 billion and $500 billion, and quoting a New York Times blogger who loves the way Obama thinks but figures that a Houston-to-Dallas high-speed train would lose $400 to $500 million a year, Florida is nevertheless a cheerleader. Get a wonk talking about trains and his glasses are likely to steam up with excitement. We’re talking about mad lust, the kind that knows no reason.

But only the Northeast has the kind of population density that lends passenger rail any kind of potential. Florida says a high-speed link could take you from Philadelphia to New York in half an hour (good news for Philly, I suppose, but who in our city foresees great benefit in a daily delivery of a few thousand Eagles fans?). Such a rail link could never make any kind of sense in terms of cost, though. That means a subsidy sinkhole, an Amtrak-like agency, would have to run the supertrains. So on your commute from UPenn to Penn Station, just go ahead and factor in one of those legendary unexplained Amtrak delays. Bring a good pair of sneakers in case you have to walk.

Florida thinks high-speed rail would amount to picking up every city in the rusty, fragile post-industrial Midwest and moving it closer to the northeast corridor. But whereas Philadelphia may someday live up to all those prophecies and claim its place as New York’s unofficial sixth borough, all the magical trains in the world aren’t going to make Detroit the seventh.

Notwithstanding Florida’s call for vigorous subsidies of fancy trains, he is not unaware of the folly of a tax system that continues to encourage us to buy our residences, and the administration has shoved bailouts into both housing finance and the auto industry.

Florida’s vision of a more New Yorkified America is highly congenial to the average liberal, and yet making it happen depends on a more laissez-faire federal government. Florida is prepared to wait, though. He says the effects of the two previous "Great Resets" in 1873 and 1929 took decades to ripple through the country. One problem with futurism is that it dates quickly. One benefit is that you always stand a chance of being proven right — someday.