In this installment of our ongoing series on the state of the GMA after 20 years, we explore challenges in achieving one of the GMA’s central goals: encouraging urban growth.

The Urban Growth goal, concentrating growth in urban growth areas (UGAs),  is a cornerstone of the GMA.  The goal and associated GMA provisions require counties to draw boundaries for urban growth areas (UGAs) within which “urban growth” is allowed, and outside of which urban growth it is largely prohibited.  Over the last twenty years of GMA, each GMA-planning county has established tight UGA boundaries and most have policies in place that restrict the ability to expand the boundary.  At one level, jurisdictions are enacting tight boundary lines to contain growth and thus, many might suggest, they are “achieving” the GMA goal to concentrate growth in UGAs. 

This claim of success arguably is supported by statistics that suggest that the percentage of growth accommodated within UGAs has grown since the implementation of these tight boundaries.  For example, a 2008 buildable lands report showed that four of the six most populous counties west of the Cascades slightly increased the percentage of development occurring within the UGA between 2002 and 2007. 

Looking back even further, the percent of new development within urban areas within those six counties went from 77.8% in 1995 to 88% in 2007, suggesting that the GMA is making some progress towards the goal. 

However, some critics have raised concerns that limitations on urban growth through tightly-drawn UGAs may have inadvertent and undesirable consequences, particularly related to sprawl and affordable housing.  These critics argue that additional growth management regulations increase costs of housing in urban centers thereby pushing most growth (all but the high wage earners) into surrounding communities and accelerating gentrification of urban areas.    

The express language of the Urban Development goal may suggest a way to resolve these unintended consequences while still achieving the Urban Growth goal.  Specifically, local jurisdictions should be given the tools to encourage urban growth in urban areas, rather than simply requiring it.  Local jurisdictions could provide incentives to urban development that would, in turn, reduce costs associated with urban development and stimulate development precisely in those areas where GMA intends urban development to occur.  Several specific ideas have been proposed recently:

• Streamline the State Environmental Policy Act to make it more flexible for projects within a UGA.  The more general GMA planning requirements have made much of the SEPA project-specific analysis duplicative.  As a result several groups including the Governor’s Growth Management/Housing Task Force have proposed that the legislature could either exempt completely or create a new category of threshold determination with streamlined procedures for projects within a UGA that comply with the jurisdiction’s regulations. 
• Defer payment of impact fees until sale or occupancy, when the impact actually occurs.  This approach could reduce or eliminate carrying costs and financing complications.  Though changes to impact fees would restrict a source of revenue for the local jurisdictions, it would reduce costs for urban development and simultaneously encourage projects to move forward, ultimately creating jobs and tax revenues that will return money to state and local general funds.  
• Clarify and expand vesting laws to extend the benefits of vesting to earlier stages of the development approval process, including phased Planned Unit Developments and Master Planned Developments.  Additionally, vesting could include impact fees.  These approaches could eliminate costly uncertainties and encourage growth. 
• Provide incentives through public infrastructure funding.  The state can also create incentives by providing funding opportunities for public infrastructure when a local jurisdiction can demonstrate that certain growth management objectives are satisfied.

Concentrating urban growth, and focusing purely on statistical percentages of growth in the UGA, without addressing some of the related implications, such as cost of housing or inadequate public infrastructure in dense urban centers, falls short of achieving GMA’s intended objectives.