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smaller homes closer to stores, private developers have

begun to respond.  The new urbanism movement promises, if

not to remake the entire settlement pattern of the United

States, at least to offer denser new development for those

who prefer it.28  Private developers have launched ambitious

plans, without government support, to develop "neotradition-

al" communities, including Playa Vista, California, which

will be developed by a group headed by film director Steven

Spielberg, and Celebration, Florida, which is being devel-

oped by the Disney Corporation.

In addition to such new, upper-middle-class communi-

ties, there is increasing evidence of a market-driven trend

to make new use of the older urban neighborhoods that HUD

was charged with restoring.  Inexpensive land in older

cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, and Chicago has enticed

developers to build new, suburban-style homes on once-vacant

lots and on the sites of homes that have been abandoned.29

The point is that, as land and property values hit "bottom,"

enterprising developers and buyers will find new uses for

them.  The cycle must be allowed to run its course.  Prop-

ping up neighborhoods with government dollars prevents them

from hitting "bottom" and in turn prevents the infusion of

real capital investments that would otherwise lead to real,

sustainable growth.

More broadly, encouraging capital investments in cer-

tain neighborhoods while denying them in others flies in the

face of the spontaneous, decentralized decisionmaking on

which cities and economic growth are actually built.  It was

Jane Jacobs who saw, behind the benign mask of such plan-

ning, a harsh, even authoritarian paternalism, what she

termed "monopoly planning" or "the suppression of all plans

but the planners'."30  The helter-skelter development of

cities has always offended the reform sensibility, which

attempts to impose order on chaos.  That impulse, descended

from the views of such thinkers as Ebenezer Howard (creator

of what he called the garden city concept) and urban critic

Lewis Mumford, sought somehow to compartmentalize and other-

wise order urban life.  Without doubt, steps can be taken to

ameliorate the problems of traffic and unsafe construction

that can accompany economic growth.  But attempts to ordain

where certain types of development should go, and attempts

to use the financial power of the federal government to

enforce such decisions, fly in the face of the quirky,

individualized character of the economic decisionmaking that

builds cities.