Longtime Davidson town commissioner Margo Williams is retiring after eight terms on the commission. David Boraks of DavidsonNews.net provides this glowing review of her 16 years on the commission. According to the article, Williams is proud of Davidson's "smart growth" land-use plans that ban big box stores and drive-through restaurants. She is also proud of the planning policies that require developers to conform to restrictive and expensive policies such as paying for greenways and public parks.

Glowing profiles of smart-growth policies rarely provide any hard evidence that they work and almost always leave out negative consequences of restrictive land-use policies. Let's look at some of the evidence.

For the most part, smart-growth policies are made by town commissioners who serve the wealthy elite to the determent of middle- and low-income citizens, especially minorities and newcomers. Census data show that over the last 20 years Davidson has become a place where only high-income people can afford to live. In 1990 the median value of owner-occupied housing in Davidson was $188,200, adjusted for inflation. By 2010 home values increased by about 123 percent to an incredible $419,700. During the same period, North Carolina home values increased only about 24 percent. Since Davidson experienced rapid growth over the last 20 years, housing prices skyrocketed largely because the town's smart-growth policies restricted the supply of housing at a time of increased demand. (See Planning Penalties and Johnston County's Dumb Growth Plan.)

Thus housing prices were driven up artificially, making homes unaffordable for low- and middle-income families. On the other hand, if you were a longtime homeowner, such as the town commissioners who passed the policies, the smart-growth restrictions were a financial bonanza because those policies more than doubled the value of your home.

What do town commissioners who are blinded by smart-growth ideology do when their town undergoes such drastic changes? In Davidson, commissioners combat the high housing prices that they created with policies that, in Williams's words, promote "economic and social justice." In other words, the town commissioners passed ideologically driven "affordable" housing policies that they believed would not only reduce housing prices, but also promote racial and economic diversity.

The town's "affordable" housing policy is one of the most coercive, and possibly illegal, in the state. The town requires any new development to have 12.5 percent of the housing units sold at federally defined prices that are below the market price. Again, ideologically driven town commissioners see only what they want to see. They ignore the fact that developers, for the most part, pass the extra costs to the new homebuyers, which contributes to the $419,700 median home value. In other words, the town commission has passed a hidden tax imposed on all new homebuyers in Davidson.

Have the town's efforts to improve racial diversity through affordable housing policies worked? Census data show that in 1990 the town was about 82 percent white. Now the town is 88 percent white. This transformation has come during a time when the state became more, not less, racially diverse, going from about 76 percent to 68 percent white. In other words, town commissioners give lip service to improving racial diversity while their policies encourage racial and economic segregation.

Perhaps Davidson's town commissioners should heed the words of John Adams when he defended British soldiers after the 1770 Boston massacre. "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."

The next time you drive through Davidson, please take note of what you don't see; minorities, low-income families, and affordable houses. Their absence is the inevitable and entirely predictable result of Davidson's ideologically driven policies.

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