Photo By Jymi Bolden

The Sierra Club's Glen Brand calls Wendell Cox an "itinerant anti-public transportation gun-for-hire." Cox heads Monday's "Preserving the American Dream" conference downtown and says "what we need to do is essentially make peace with the automobile."

A year after Hamilton County voters defeated a bold light rail and bus hub plan, national and local critics of public transit and controlled development convene in Cincinnati. Their mission: Defend the "American dream."

That dream "has to do with home ownership, largely," says anti-smart growth guru Wendell Cox. "It has to do with all people being able to achieve a standard of middle-class affluence."

Cox is the opening keynote speaker for a conference called "Preserving the American Dream" that opens Monday at the Montgomery Inn Conference Center downtown. The conference features panels exploring such issues as home ownership, mobility, economic development and "hope, opportunity and freedom."

The day-long conference targets business leaders, government policy makers and community leaders, according to the conference brochure. It's sponsored by the Community Growth Institute, of which the Homebuilders Association of Greater Cincinnati is a founding member.

The panel lineups read like a who's who of local conservative elected officials -- U.S. Reps. Steve Chabot, Rob Portman and Mike Turner; Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell; Hamilton County Commissioner Phil Heimlich; and Hamilton County Auditor Dusty Rhodes. Chabot and Rhodes co-chaired the organization that helped defeat the county's pro-transit Issue 7 last fall.

Major developers like Bill Butler, president of Corporex; a representative of the federal Fannie Mae program; and local media representatives such as Cincinnati Enquirer columnist Peter Bronson and WCPO-TV's Katherine Nero round out the panels.

The conference follows a similar "American Dream" gathering held in February in Washington, D.C. At least one other is being planned.

Defeating terrorism with sprawl
Glen Brand, Midwest representative for the Sierra Club and local light rail advocate, says such discussions "show no balance at all."

Brand says conference organizers asked him to participate but refused his request to be moved from a panel on home ownership to the "American Dream of Mobility" panel on transportation that features Cox.

Liz Blume, associate director of Xavier University's Community Building Institute, approached the American Planning Association (APA) about participating in the conference but says the organization didn't think it would be productive. She says the APA has an "interest in making sure that when you talk about growth and development you're presenting as clear a picture on all sides of the issue as possible."

Blume was Cincinnati's planning director until the city eliminated her office in last December's budget cuts.

Smart growth recognizes the connections between development and quality of life. It's "more town-centered, transit- and pedestrian-oriented and has a greater mix of housing, commercial and retail values while preserving open space and other environmental amenities," according to the Smart Growth Network's Web site. Advocates question the economic and social costs of unfettered development known as sprawl.

Cox says smart growth proponents practice a "naíve civic religion" that's anti-affluent, anti-growth and anti-automobile, and he draws a strong a correlation between personal mobility and income. He calls public transportation a welfare service that deserves to be subsidized, but nothing more.

"(Transit) does a good job of getting people downtown and serving the low-income poor moving around the core, but it can't do any more than that," Cox says.

He considers light rail "an absolute waste of money" and says public transit can't serve the needs of the suburbs. Rather than limiting sprawl, he says, "the key to minimizing traffic congestion is to allow the city to continue to expand based on market demand.

"The principal role of planners should be to get the traffic moving," Cox says. "What it is that's made the urban area largely congestion-free in the United States is the fact that we have developed low density."

Cox considers smart growth and community planning to be threats to personal liberty and barriers to home ownership, "the core of wealth creation as regards middle-income people. What we need to do is essentially make peace with the automobile."

Cox says he owns three cars.

Brand says Cox is compensated handsomely by private special interests that have long enjoyed the subsidies associated with sprawl.

Donors to the St. Louis-based Heartland Institute -- where Cox is the Sprawl and Urban Transit Senior Fellow -- include the American Highway Users Alliance, the American Petroleum Institute, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, Exxon Mobil, General Motors, the Pennsylvania AAA Federation and the Texas Farm Bureau, according to its Web site.

Cox is nothing more than an "itinerant anti-public transportation gun-for-hire," Brand says.

"Preserving the American Dream" reunites Cox with keynote speakers and infamous light rail critics Randal O'Toole, executive director of the American Dream Coalition, and Sam Staley, president of the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions. O'Toole is also a senior economist for the Thoreau Institute, whose Web site announces a "Preserving the American Dream" conference to take place in Portland, Ore., in April 2004.

The Thoreau Institute's site also features a link to "Vanishing Auto Updates." Update No. 19 asks, "Is Sprawl a Defense Against Terrorism?" According to the site, "the real lesson of the terrorist attacks is, 'Don't bunch up.' "

Another update asks, "Is Smart Growth a United Nations Conspiracy?"

"Shameless" is how Brand describes the conference's attempt to "appropriate patriotism to justify the very things that degrade the quality of life for Americans. The twist is that they're claiming to defend the American dream when in fact what they're hoping to justify is part of the American nightmare they helped to create and which they profit from.

"Once they've wrapped themselves in the flag with sprawl and highways-only transportation, they think they're in the position to call public transportation the thin edge of socialism."

'Borders on intellectual dishonesty'
Brand is quick to point out that smart growth isn't a left/right issue. Tommy G. Thompson, former Republican governor of Wisconsin, praised conservative authors Paul Weyrich and Bill Lind's study "Conservatives and Mass Transit: Is It Time for a New Look?" in its foreword for the study's "sound, conservative reasons to support public transit, when public transit is done right."

In fact, it's not conservatism but extremism that marks the anti-transit, pro-sprawl "zealots," Brand says.

"The major characteristic of these folks is intellectual dishonesty and ideological extremism," he says.

Brand isn't alone in criticizing their scholarship. Haynes Goddard, professor of economics at the University of Cincinnati, has published several papers sharply critical of Cox's methods, which he describes in last year's "The 'New Clothes' of the Libertarian Critics of Light Rail Transit" as "an endless list of data ... but never with an explicit analytical framework. Most of their writing reflects either an intellectual incapacity to formulate and reason from explicit analytical models, or in some cases where the training of the authors (some with Ph.D.s) ought to permit this, the writing borders on intellectual dishonesty."

The local politicians who purport to represent the mainstream but lend their office's name to the conference reveal their own extremism, Brand says.

"Public officials should be ashamed of themselves for participating and lending any credibility at all to this discredited movement," he says. "It's not like the public will show up for this. It's really for their own crowd. Part of this is the out-of-town wingnuts doing their thing, but it has a local impact."

Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist says he's considering coming to Cincinnati to expose Cox and his colleagues, who "make it sound like highways are free when they cost enormous amounts of money." Norquist knows Cox well, having served with him on an Amtrak reform council.

"I think Wendell Cox is one of the biggest advocates of big spending I've ever encountered in my 28-year political career," he says.