A Planner's Nightmare in Plano. A City's Nightmare Too.
Plano, Texas has a problem.
Aerial view of Dallas-Fort Worth at night. Image source.
Actually, all of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex has a problem. America's Growth Ponzi Scheme is written into the region's DNA: for decades it has grown its population and economy through mind-bogglingly rapid outward expansion, juiced and incentivized by the building of innumerable highways and stroads. Each generation of new subdivisions and shopping plazas fails to actually produce enough revenue to maintain its own public infrastructure, leading to mounting maintenance backlogs and eye-popping projections of future budgetary needs.
The situation is as stark in North Texas as just about anywhere in North America, both in the rosy visions of endless growth, and the dire financial straits that will befall these cities if that growth ever slows or stalls.
Plano, the largest city in suburban Collin County, has filled up much of its land with single-family subdivisions and low-rise, parking-heavy commercial plazas, and no longer has room to grow outward. Before its maintenance bills come due, Plano will need to either "thicken up" existing neighborhoods, making more productive use of their infrastructure, or scale back the city’s infrastructure and service commitments (a painful prospect that few residents likely savor).
A few years ago, the City of Plano, partially in recognition of this problem, produced the first update to its comprehensive plan in 30 years. The plan was not perfect, but it went through a long period of public engagement, and it contained some good faith efforts to address Plano's looming fiscal crisis.
A citizen revolt, however, driven by the hostility of some vocal activists to increased density and infill development, has now succeeded in quashing the plan, sending Plano back to the drawing board. And back, for now, to its comprehensive plan from 1986, a governing document wildly out of step with current needs, created when everything about Plano and North Texas was utterly different from today. (For one thing, the city’s population was barely a third of its current level.)
It's easy to read this as a story of NIMBYism gone wild. But it should be a reminder that putting the brakes on the Suburban Experiment isn't a technical planning exercise. It's a political challenge, and an extremely difficult one at that.
Read More on Strong Towns and North Texas
Peter Simek, writing two years ago for D Magazine, explains the parts of the Plano Tomorrow plan that drew furor:
In 2013, the city set out to update its 27-year-old comprehensive plan so as to accommodate this growth and change. The result was the Plano Tomorrow Comprehensive Plan, a forward-thinking policy document that re-imagines the ur-suburb as an emerging city. The plan protects some single-family neighborhoods, but it also looks to zones like transit corridors and four-corner retail strip centers as opportunities for denser, urban-style growth. Looking to the success of the Legacy development, the Plano Tomorrow Comprehensive Plan envisioned a suburban community punctuated with pockets of urban life, denser neighborhoods of mixed-use developments.
Almost immediately after its passage, a group of Plano activists led by resident Beth Carruth petitioned for a voter referendum to repeal it. By Texas law, as well as Plano's city charter, any local legislation other than a tax can be put to a referendum and repealed by a majority vote of the public. But the City of Plano refused to put the referendum on the ballot, insisting that a comprehensive plan, because it must go through a specific and involved process of public engagement prior to approval, is not subject to voter referendum. The activists sued, and after several rounds in court, they won on July 22nd in the state’s Fifth District Court of Appeals. The full ruling can be read here.
A 2015 video explains how the Plano Tomorrow plan was to be implemented.
The court argued that “the process to create the Plan has already occurred, and that process, no matter how complicated, is not implicated here. That public officials may have to develop a new plan that survives voter hostility is inherent in the exercise of the power reserved to the people.”
The court's logic dramatically favors activists who would preserve the status quo, establishing a sort of asymmetric warfare. A comprehensive plan is a massively complicated undertaking involving years of public engagement, research and data collection on the part of city planners. Throwing out all of that work, on the other hand, requires a simple ballot referendum and majority vote—a prospect which has led to no small amount of gnashing of teeth among planners reading the news from Plano. It does not require a viable alternative vision of how the city should evolve and meet its challenges, merely a chorus of “No!”
In Plano's case, the repeal won't even need to go to a vote, because the city council, whose composition has changed since the Plano Tomorrow plan's passage, opted to scrap it preemptively amid the perception of widespread citizen opposition to the plan's direction. Whether there actually is widespread opposition is an open question. 4,000 people signed the repeal petition; Plano's population is almost 300,000. It's not at all clear that those signatories represent the will of the community, let alone the smaller group of hardline anti-density activists who led the petition drive. And, as Simek writes in D Magazine, there has been no shortage of misinformation and rancor surrounding the plan:
[S]ome Plano residents…. fought the adoption of the plan through the courts while waging a disinformation campaign that drudged up tired clichés about density and urban life.
These attacks represented parochial NIMBYism at best, and thinly veiled endemic racism at worst. The anti-Plano Tomorrow crowd often repeated erroneous claims that the master plan would overcrowd schools and allow “high density, multi-family residential development on every-four corner intersection,” as the Dallas Morning News reports. Another Plano resident once accused Plano Mayor Harry LaRosiliere of trying to turn “Plano into Harlem.”
“In Council meetings, in their rhetoric, when people say, ‘Those kids shouldn’t be in school with our kids. People in apartments will cause crime.’ The racial undertones have been very clear,” LaRosiliere told me in 2018.
And yet, a rational observer might acknowledge that there is a decent chance, even without such charged, bad-faith rhetoric, that a popular vote would have succeeded in overturning the Plano Tomorrow plan. For existing Plano homeowners who chose the community for the privacy, exclusivity, and elbow room promised by the lifestyle of a bedroom community, the notion that Plano can no longer be a bedroom community—that it already is, and its fiscal future requires it to be, a growing, changing, full-fledged city unto itself—is a bitter pill to swallow. There is a basic Prisoner’s Dilemma problem in car-centric suburbia in that every resident, while they might enjoy the benefits of regional growth, would prefer that growth (and its attendant traffic and increased school enrollment) not occur anywhere near their own neighborhood. Put simply, if you own a home in Plano (and are not deeply attuned to the city’s looming fiscal problems) your rational incentive is to be a NIMBY.
Plano skyline. Image source.
Regardless of the merits of the opposition, this outcome is a strike against the idea of comprehensive planning as a tool to achieve what really needs to be a broad cultural shift, not merely a technocratic one. The Plano Tomorrow plan was not able to withstand citizen outrage, nor a changing of the guard at the city council. It’s an inconvenient reality that most plans up to the task of changing what needs to change about America’s growth model would face a similar fate right now if put to a vote. Popular understanding of the problem simply isn’t there. Yet.
It’s no small task to tell someone who’s used to getting something on the cheap—in this case, a big house with a big yard, smooth roads, ample parking, and uncrowded, high-quality schools and parks—that it never really was that cheap and it’s going to cost a lot more going forward.
The time for Strong Towns advocates to start insisting on that tough conversation in your own places is yesterday. But barring that, it’s now. Plano’s problems aren’t going away, but the can has now been kicked years further down the road.
Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is a founding member of the Strong Towns movement. He is the co-author of Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis, with Charles Marohn. Daniel now works as the Policy Director at the Parking Reform Network, an organization which seeks to accelerate the reform of harmful parking policies by educating the public about these policies and serving as a connecting hub for advocates and policy makers. Daniel’s work reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota.