by Wayne Lusvardi
Those who promote Smart Growth must think everyone reading their propaganda is dumb. How are we to explain the gross twisting of geographic data that continues to pour out of the Smart Growther's think tanks and blogs other than it is agenda-driven propaganda? Like the backwards political slogan "Ignorance is Strength" in George Orwell's novel 1984, the Smart Growthers want to you to believe that "Smart Growth is Environmentally Sustainable" and vice versa. To Smart Growthers environmental reality is often twisted to be the opposite of what they portray.
Recent case in point is "How Smart Growth Protects Watersheds, and How Green Infrastructure Can Make It Even Better" by Kaid Benfield, Director of the National Resources Defense Council's Smart Growth Program in Washington, D.C., posted on his blog here:
http://us.mc514.mail.yahoo.com/mc/showMessage?.rand=451468603&fid=Inbox&mid=1_2117574_ALomvs4AAUNpScb93gmaU2qnzpg
Benfield presents a series of contrived maps and graphs that could serve as examples for Mark Monmonier's book How To Lie With Maps.
First, Benfield presents an "Imperviousness" map which shows how relatively little of coastal urban Seattle has of concrete hardscape and how much greater suburban Seattle has. His point is that high density urban areas manage water better than suburban areas because they supposedly have less concrete landscape. - see below: 
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Benfield advocates analyzing urban versus suburban areas on the basis of the whole watershed as opposed to efficient use of water on a per acre basis. So let's do what Benfield says and analyze the Seattle area on a regional watershed basis.
The above map is highly selective and omits the location of regional water resources. Most of suburban Seattle is concentrated proximate to more sustainable inland water resources while urban Seattle is farther from sustainable natural water resources as shown on this map: 
This geographic pattern of locating urban development far from natural water resources is not environmentally sustainable and results in higher generation of C02 as described further below.
Second, Benfield presents the graph below purportedly showing how higher density housing in cities results in less rainfall runoff per acre of land than that in suburbs.
The obvious problem with the above graph is that cities don't zone for only 8 houses per acre with a large amount of open space around it to absorb rainfall. And neither do suburbs just zone for one house per acre with 100% of concrete around it so that rainfall doesn't infiltrate into the ground. Instead what we typically find is that cities zone for very high density development with very little natural open space to capture rain water.
A more accurate graphic depiction of a high density city would be like this:
Conversely, a geographic depiction of a typical modern suburb would have a pattern of clustered homes surrounded by natural open space, as shown below:
Of course, Smart Growthers like Benfield would prefer to only show the clustered housing portion of the above graphic of suburbia and omit all the natural open space and water resources around it. This is sort of like not seeing the forest for the trees; only in this case it is not seeing the open space in suburbia and just focusing on only the concrete landscaped development.
The problem with Benfield's oversimplified sort of research is that its depiction of data is inadvertently distorting to only show half (or less) of environmental reality. Smart Growthers are good at presenting half truths as whole truths. Smart Growthers are not ecologists but halfologists.
Additionally, Smart Growthers often rely on statistics that do not take into account that a great amount of C02 is generated for electricity generation and water pumping. In Southern California, for example, electricity comes from power plants and water from reservoirs and pipelines hundreds of miles away from urban cities; both often from other states. It is estimated that the highest use of electricity in Southern California for example is for water pumping and treatment (about 19% of all electricity use).
Moreover, about 70% of suburban water use is for landscaping that absorbs C02. High density cities with greater proportions of multi-family housing would hypothetically have a lower proportion of natural landscaping per housing unit, and thus, would absorb less C02. Environmental reality is much more complex than Smart Growthers and environmentalists portray it.
Smart Growth apparently is a well-disguised social fiction meant to divert new development to cities to keep political constituencies intact in Blue coastal urban areas as opposed to Red suburban areas. It is difficult to see such Smart Growth as anything but Stalin-like attempts at politicized population engineering with a green veneer of environmentalism. Why else would Smart Growthers work so hard at attempting to distort environmental reality with half truths and lying with maps and graphs?
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