When public officials in states like Florida had to deal with the impact of explosive population growth, there was almost no historical precedent for growth-management in the United States and no controlling political principles, except for traditional concepts of land ownership and zoning methodology, which classified and segregated land to specific use categories.

Zoning addressed one aspect of development, property rights, but did not mitigate the more tangible issues of growth, such as open space, traffic congestion, outdated infrastructure, escalating costs of government, and the environmental consequences of new land uses.

Growth is not just about development. Another impact for which there was no clear compass is "redevelopment" that cuts across traditional land uses and traditional values of established communities. We are aware of that particular problem every day in Deerfield Beach.

Many states, including Florida, tried to develop post-zoning methodologies to manage growth. Florida set state-wide goals and required cities and counties to adopt consistent land-use plans. The primary goal of comprehensive planning was to control growth. Deerfield Beach in the mid- '70's imposed restrictions (height restrictions) on construction that was deemed fundamentally inconsistent with the "low-scape" of the community. Other coastal cities went further to protect their beach communities from the "excessive" development favored by some developers.

The model for this new methodology is "Smart Growth," in short, centralized planning. An alternative would have been market-oriented growth management, but states which adopted planning as the model for growth policy may not have had sufficient understanding of how a market-oriented policy would work to solve the major impacts of population growth, and some policy makers may even have been hostile to the idea of free markets as the controlling factor. There are, however, several deficiencies in the scheme of centralized planning, which could possibly be addressed more efficiently by a market-based approach:

1. Centralized planning substantially increases the power of public officials without any balancing principle. To put this another way, planning is not consistent with the values of liberal democracy unless it is market-oriented.

2. It requires planners to predict the future and forces local officials to make decisions based on prognostication rather than on hard data. In fact, the needs, preferences, and wants of communities tend to evolve over time and this makes it impossible to predict the long-terms needs of a community.

3. There is no inherent mechanism to mitigate the effects of poorly designed and implemented growth-management policies when goals are not well defined.

4. It politicizes the process of growth-management. Thus planning objectives can be stood on their head, to serve élite interests.

5. It wrongly assumes that a kind of utopia will be achieved at the end of the process.

Let's look at this deficiency first. In Deerfield Beach, the city chartered a Community Redevelopment Agency (an alias for the city commission) to steer future development in the beach area. The CRA (as distinguished from the city government) is empowered to spend tax increments, or TIFs, derived from rising property valuations, for the betterment of the community. But what is it that defines what is good for the community? This is the "vision for the beach," actually an imaginary picture of what the CRA area ought to look like in 20 or 30 years, formulated by city planners. Theoretically, this vision is the result of a process of public dialogue, but in this case a series of interrogations of prominent local residents and business persons by consultants served as the basis of the vision.

Judging from the results of elections held since the establishment of the CRA, in which redevelopment plans were the core issues, the vision derived in this manner did not accurately reflect the sense of the whole community, and especially it was not the consensus of the beach residents who are most directly impacted by these plans.

A visioning process is only going to succeed if it finds common values upon which a consensus can be developed. In truth, the controlling vision of beach redevelopment was designed to accommodate special interests which had no connection with what beach residents in general needed or wanted. The process would have had greater credibility if the goals for the CRA had been set by beach residents independently of any preconceived notions of city planners.

It is not surprising that most of the allocation of increment funds so far is for streetscapes. These are probably not the projects for the betterment of the community that would be most favored by CRA residents.

The objective of the CRA is commercial development to create a broader tax base for the city. But where do people live? Can current residents afford to live in the beach area with rising taxes? What new population is served by the construction of condo units priced in the millions? How will access of inland residents to the beach be affected? This is a flaw of centralized planning, that it directs the goal, without responding directly to the impacts.

Market economies focus on the consumer. They work better than central planning because they are more efficient in producing what people need and want. It is ultimately the consumer that decides what is produced or provided by what he buys. This is as true in the housing market as it is for products and services. Thus, the proper measure of success of redevelopment policy, in a market-oriented approach, is not the achievement of an abstract vision or politically directed goal, based on subjective values or special interests, but whether residents are satisfied with the houses and neighborhoods they end up with.