Business Actors, Environmental Protection and Land-Use Control Policies, and Their Effects on Growth across U.S. Communities

This study questions the degree to which business actors influence communities’ environmental and growth control policies and levels of growth across the United States. While case studies explore this issue, our study is... [ view full abstract ]

This study questions the degree to which business actors influence communities’ environmental and growth control policies and levels of growth across the United States. While case studies explore this issue, our study is the first, to our knowledge, to address this complex question for both rural and urban communities across the United States.   Conceptually, we draw from the classic growth machine framework which asserts that localities’ agenda of growth is spearheaded by a coalition of local power actors (landowners, builders, real estate developers, and local businesses and utilities) whose primary aim is the pursuit of more intensive development of land.  Our study speaks to some of the puzzling findings by scholars in the growth machine tradition that policies ostensibly designed to stymie growth across places may actually promote it.  Our analysis is grounded in the quantitative tradition of large-sample studies and assesses localities across the nation using the empirical case of county governments.  Empirically, we examine: 1) the relationship between the influence of the growth machine’s business actors on county governments’ environmental and growth control policies; 2) the influence of these policies on local development; and 3) the extent to which all or part of business actors’ influence on growth is mediated by county governments’ policies.  We find that the involvement of local growth machine actors (the Chamber of Commerce, real estate industry, utilities, and other local businesses) in local government is significantly related to growth behavior as indicated by the number of building permits issued.  But intriguingly, we also find that local growth actors are associated with the greater use of both environmental and growth control policies; moreover, these policies have a positive rather than negative effect on growth.  Thus growth machine actors support policies that outwardly appear to constrict growth across places but that in practice do not.  The findings suggest that U.S. communities’ policies are carefully designed to provide leeway for growth machine interests and continued place-development.  Support for such policies allows growth machine actors to publicly signal support for managed local growth and environmental protection, although the reality of place-making on the ground remains business as usual.