by Ron Beitler

Spent time in Washington DC attending the Smart Growth America Local Leaders Council Policy summit. The conference paired 60 members of the national bi-partisan council of elected officials with responsible smart growth developers. (LOCUS) Issues such as project development and financing, transit oriented development and revitalization were topics of individual seminars.

For me, after six months as a newly elected official, what’s been most frustrating is our current crop of local developers. (The usual suspects…) The ones who do most of the mega greenfield projects in the area. There is so much inertia for status quo. Many developers are unwilling to or offer nothing but resistance to building innovative projects. Or worse they package typical cookie-cutter sprawl with whatever the current smart growth buzzword is in a misleading fashion. The result is projects sold under somewhat false pretenses. Locally a recent example would be the Allen Organ “dual use zone”. (Words have meanings)

The challenge for us is to attract developers who not only have experience building and marketing successful smart growth projects but more importantly genuinely want to. This is precisely the innovative approach of the Local Leaders Council and LOCUS. If we try to force developers who want to turn cornfields into dollars as quickly as possible regardless of the impact to build better projects we’ll get more mediocrity. We can’t regulate developers into building good projects. Nor should we try.

Instead we must attract the ones who understand the market for these projects, have a tract record of success and genuinely want to be responsible developers. A market for places combining the best of suburbia with the best of new urbanism design has been demonstrated nationwide. Lower Macungie must either compete or fall behind. I want to compete.

To help address this, Smart Growth America has provided an online tool local leaders can use to connect with responsible developers with demonstrated success in delivering mixed-use, multimodal smart growth projects. LOCUS developers are investors and businesspeople whose business model is based on smart growth and are interested in promoting the model nationwide.