36 ArchitectureBoston July/August 2004

Smart Talk on Smart Growth
Douglas Foy Talks With
Randolph Jones AIA, AICP

July/August 2004 ArchitectureBoston 37
DOUGLAS FOY is secretary of the Massachusetts Office for Commonwealth
Development, a new cabinet-level position created by Governor Mitt Romney in
2002 to coordinate the state’s environmental, transportation, and development
programs. He was previously the president of the Conservation Law Foundation
in Boston, a leading environmental-law advocacy organization. A member of the
1968 USA Olympic rowing team, he earned degrees in engineering and physics
from Princeton and Cambridge and is a graduate of Harvard Law School.
RANDOLPH JONES AIA, AICP, is a principal in The Jones Payne Group of
Boston, Providence and Monterey, where he heads the firm’s urban design
practice group. He served as the co-chair for the BSA’s Civic Initiative for a
Livable New England and the BSA’s 2003 national Density Conference. He
currently serves on the advisory group for the national AIA Regional and Urban
Design Committee (RUDC).

RANDOLPH JONES: The Massachusetts Office for
Commonwealth Development was created by Governor
Mitt Romney as a hybrid vehicle for linking smart growth
with transportation and the environment. It has been
getting very high marks for its innovative approach to
development. What makes OCD such a unique concept
for state government?
DOUGLAS FOY: The first thing that makes it unique is that
it has combined four different agencies to try to create a
much more coordinated, strategic approach. Transportation,
Environment, Housing, and Energy are now woven together
in OCD. I don’t think there’s any state that’s tried such a
comprehensive combination, and only a few European
countries that have combined housing and transportation.
The other special feature of OCD is that the governor has put
the full weight of his office behind the effort to break down
the barriers between the agencies. So it has the firepower and
the capacity to actually make things happen.
The third element that’s unusual is that it is an extremely
streamlined effort. We haven’t created a brand-new, large
bureaucracy. What we’ve done is gather people from various
agencies who work together as a sort of virtual agency under
the guidance of Commonwealth Development.
RANDOLPH JONES: Is the governor’s approach to smart growth
really an effort to address our Balkanized cities and towns, our
attitude that “all politics is local”?
DOUGLAS FOY: I think the governor’s interest in smart growth
grows out of a substantive concern about the Balkanization
and the fact that we were sprawling across our countryside
and chewing up a lot of our resources in ways that were
unnecessary and, in the long-term, damaging. I don’t think
there’s a political agenda here in the classic sense. We do have
a Republican governor and a Democratic legislature, but I
think there is uniform support for these smart-growth issues
on both sides of the aisle in the legislature, and between the
legislature and the governor.
Many of the major initiatives
that we’ve undertaken in the
first year were launched with
bipartisan support.
RANDOLPH JONES: Prior to joining
the Romney administration,
you served for 25 years as
president of the Conservation
Law Foundation, garnering
unanimous respect as one of
New England’s most formidable
environmental advocates.
The battles and your win-loss
record suggest that you spent
considerable time in the
political arena. What were the
lessons you learned there and
how have you applied them to
your new role at OCD?
DOUGLAS FOY: The role of an
advocate is essentially the practice
of the art of the pure. You
get to take pristine positions on issues, and then go to battle for
them. Over time, they get negotiated into the reality of what
can actually be accomplished in terms of legislation or court
proceedings or whatever. Government, on the other hand, is the
art of the possible. Now that I’m inside government, I’m even
more aware of the importance of advocacy organizations in both
helping to frame the issues and helping to bring the necessary
pressure on government to find the most thoughtful path.
RANDOLPH JONES: How are the old attitudes yielding to this
new coordinated, organizational, policy-making approach?
DOUGLAS FOY: One of the things that has helped make the
marriage more effective has been the physical and budgetary
challenges that the state faces. There is a premium placed on
efficiency, coordination, and strategic alignment, because with
it you get more bounce from the ounce. It might have been
more difficult to fashion this structure if there was a huge
budget surplus and no real incentive for anybody to climb
out of their silos and work together.
RANDOLPH JONES: You mentioned transportation. Of all the
public agencies, the Federal Highway Administration and to a
certain extent MassHighway [Massachusetts Highway Department]
have been particularly single-minded in their purpose
and mission. We have a number of add-a-lane proponents
who have had their way politically
despite the obvious adverse
effects that those investments
make on land capacity and
sprawl. How can you corral
transportation needs so that we
don’t promote sprawl through
our transportation investments?
DOUGLAS FOY: There is no doubt
that transportation investments
by the Commonwealth —
including roads and transit lines
— have an enormous impact on
how and where we grow. If you
build a new road to a cornfield,
there will be new structures built
in that cornfield; there’s simply
no way around it. If you don’t
build a road there and the
cornfield remains relatively
inaccessible, the growth will go
somewhere else. Clearly, targeting
transportation investments
to reinforce growth in town and
city centers and places where we have already built is enormously
important as a policy agenda. That has been a fundamental
element of this administration from the day we took office.
In fact, the first press conference the governor held with the
OCD was to announce the “fix it first” policy of transportation,
which is a commitment to reinforce the existing transportation
network we already have — rebuilding the bridges that are
broken and the transit lines that need to be upgraded — rather
than expanding into new places. We could spend virtually all
of our transportation dollars over the foreseeable future simply
restoring what we already have. We won’t — we’ll add some
new capacity, mostly in transit.
RANDOLPH JONES: You’ve been labeled a smart-growth advocate,
pursuing the benefits of more compact growth. Do you feel
that the phrase “smart growth” somehow politicizes the
agenda? Is there an issue in calling it that?
38 ArchitectureBoston July/August 2004
Some of our finest models of towns
and small cities are not reproducible
today because zoning forbids them
— a Concord or Newburyport or
Nantucket Town or Wellesley or
Pittsfield or Northampton could not
have been built under current zoning.
And that’s a huge problem. We
need to be able to reproduce the
best of the “paradigm towns” with
modern zoning. — Douglas Foy
DOUGLAS FOY: I actually like the term, and I think most people
catch the idea pretty quickly. No one’s really in favor of dumb
growth, and there are a lot of really dumb things that you can
do with state investments that everyone recognizes as stupid.
What it means to me is wise investing. If you set schools
aside, almost everything else that the Commonwealth spends
capital dollars on is built by the four agencies that report to
me — roads, bridges, transit, sewers, water systems, park
systems, open-space acquisition for protection purposes,
housing, energy systems. And investing that money wisely —
about $5 billion a year — to reinforce sustainable growth
patterns is what I think
smart growth is all about.
It typically favors compact
development over sprawl,
primarily because sprawl
is much more expensive to
service. And if you’re trying
to be a wise investor, you
want to invest your infrastructure
dollars in a way
that gives you the most
return per dollar.
We’re not telling people
that they should build
“back-to-the-future”-type
New England villages. We
are saying that the New
England village is a more
sustainable pattern and also one that most people prefer. But
what and where you choose to build often depend upon where
we decide to invest state and federal dollars. For us, smart
growth is defined as the wise investment of limited capital.
RANDOLPH JONES: Do we need land-use reform in the
Commonwealth?
DOUGLAS FOY: We certainly need zoning reform, whether
we pursue it through a statewide legislative approach or work
on a town-by-town, city-by-city basis. One of the reasons we
have such a housing problem is that there’s not enough land
zoned for appropriate housing development, particularly
compact and multi-family housing. Some of our finest
models of towns and small cities are not reproducible today
because zoning forbids them — a Concord or Newburyport
or Nantucket Town or Wellesley or Pittsfield or Northampton
could not have been built under current zoning. And that’s
a huge problem. We need to be able to reproduce the best
of the “paradigm towns” with modern zoning. There are a
lot of towns that are now pursuing town-centered zoning —
efforts to bring multi-family, mixed-use development into
their town centers in order to rebuild the classic village
center, and then use it to help solve our housing problem.
RANDOLPH JONES: And what do we do about each community
relying on its own tax revenue?
DOUGLAS FOY: Because the towns are so dependent on property
taxes, there’s no doubt that there is a certain pressure to
grow and even to sprawl as a means of generating revenue.
And again, this is why zoning reform is so important. If
you’re a town and you’re
trying to grow to generate
revenue to solve your
property-tax problem,
you have two options.
You can grow by sprawling
across your landscape
and actually increasing
your net long-term costs
because of all the new
infrastructure you have.
Or you can grow by concentrating
on places that
are already developed,
by rehabilitating existing
buildings, or by reclaiming
land in infill sites in
the center of your town.
And in that case, you can
actually generate revenue gains, because you won’t spend a
lot of money on infrastructure.
RANDOLPH JONES: The Commonwealth has recently unveiled
a number of smart-growth initiatives. You have mentioned
transit-oriented development [TOD] — the idea that new
development should be directed toward areas around transit
nodes. What has the response been and how are the politics
playing out in terms of the locations that have been selected
for your demonstration projects?
DOUGLAS FOY: I think the TOD program has enormous
promise. That was one of the programs that was rolled out
in a bipartisan way, so from a political point of view, TOD
is very much a bipartisan issue. We have identified at least
30 very interesting locations in the MBTA system alone.
There are also a variety of locations on regional transit
systems. Over the course of the next couple of years you’ll
see dozens of really significant projects around these locations.
Some of them will be in suburban locations — such as
Ashland, Newburyport, or Kingston. A number of them will
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be in existing neighborhoods in urban settings, like Quincy
or Revere. And some of them will be in relatively undeveloped
urban settings, like Assembly Square in Somerville. All of
them are very viable with a lot of interest among the development
community.
RANDOLPH JONES: You’ve espoused a practical approach to
achieving your goals. Can you give some examples of this
approach?
DOUGLAS FOY: There are a number of initiatives that are
underway that I suppose you could call practical. For example,
the state owns a lot of surplus land. How we dispose of it —
how it is sold, to whom, and for what purpose — has signifi-
cant growth implications, not to mention revenue implications.
So we are now working very hard on the surplus-lands
process for the state — identifying where these lands are,
what the development possibilities are, what the best uses
would be, and how we can streamline the process.
A good recent example is surplus land near North Station in
Boston that we are transferring to Massachusetts General
Hospital. MGH has desperate needs and not much space around
it. It’s not going to move to Alabama, or even to Sturbridge; it’s
going to stay right where it is, in the heart of the city. It’s an
enormous economic engine for the city and the state, so it’s very
important to help it continue to thrive and to solve its problems
in ways that help it and help us. It makes sense to allow MGH to
expand in its current location, with the Red Line transit stop next
door and North Station nearby.
RANDOLPH JONES: You’re a person who votes with his feet,
literally and figuratively, living an active, urban lifestyle.
Recently, obesity and suburban traffic deaths have been on
the rise, dramatically so. Compact development that supports
walking and biking to work is increasingly in demand. But
for decades, our suburban growth patterns have reflected an
American dream that is counter to what the Centers for
Disease Control says we should be doing.
DOUGLAS FOY: It’s an interesting point. The CDC has very
clear data now that correlate a walking lifestyle, even a modest
20-minute-a-day walk from the train to the office, with a
reduction in obesity and a reduction in overall healthcare
costs. Have you heard the rule of four? In this country last
year, there were 4,000 pedestrian deaths — people hit by cars.
There were 40,000 deaths in motor vehicles. There was $40
billion spent on obesity costs nationwide. There’s something
interesting in that pattern. We’re killing a lot of people with
cars, we’re killing a lot of people in cars, and we’re killing a lot
of people who are always in cars and not walking.
On the other hand, we can’t get too preachy about it. We
have built a landscape that makes it virtually impossible for
people to do anything other than drive everywhere. I don’t
think the soccer moms want to spend all their time in their
vans all day shuttling the kids around town. Ask those
folks whether they think that’s a fun lifestyle. They like
living in their towns, they like raising their children there.
And they hate the traffic congestion and the time they
spend in their vehicles.
All of which feeds back to the notion that with obesity a
rampant health issue in our country and a huge part of our
healthcare costs, building our communities in more walkable
ways will bring us all manner of benefits. Are people starting
to recognize that? I think so. We see the trend of parents
moving back into the city after their kids go off to college.
We see enormous interest in living and working in town
centers, in being able to walk to the train, in being able
to get out of your car. There’s only so much we can do to
solve traffic congestion. The long-term solutions are transit
solutions, and walking and biking solutions, that give people
alternatives to the car.
RANDOLPH JONES: What kind of role can architects and other
design professionals play in encouraging that shift?
DOUGLAS FOY: I’d like to throw kudos to the BSA, because in
my experience it has offered an interesting amalgam of technically
sophisticated advisors and advocacy. It’s a very elegant,
thoughtful form of advocacy for the whole notion of smarter
growth and more thoughtful design.
RANDOLPH JONES: Are you getting any support from the
federal government?
DOUGLAS FOY: The federal government doesn’t really pay
attention to any of this stuff on the ground. But that’s OK.
It does a certain amount of the important regulatory work.
To a degree, it just sends money. It would be nice if it sent
more money. But in terms of land-use, growth, and development,
the federal government is really not a player. The state
has an enormous role. The towns have an enormous role.
One of the interesting things about Massachusetts is that
we’re missing the middle tier of government, which many
states have in the form of county government or regional
government. Here we have regional-planning organizations
such as metropolitan planning organizations and regional
transit authorities. And because there’s no regional entity,
the state plays a big role. The whole ballgame here depends
upon local control, state investment, and state policy. Which
means the state has to be really smart. 
40 ArchitectureBoston July/August 2004