CAMBRIA, CA—Readers of this space will recall a dispatch from last October ("Mao-Maoing the GAO") concerning the report from the General Accounting Office that threw cold water on one of the favorite themes of the anti-sprawl crowd, i.e., that sprawl is massively "subsidized" by government. The GAO, you may recall, concluded that there was little evidence to support the "subsidy" hypothesis. Last week, two new items came over the transom offering fresh evidence that more of the central axioms of the anti-sprawl movement are all wet.

The first was an article by Anthony Downs of the Brookings Institution that appeared in Housing Policy Debate, the journal of the Fannie Mae Foundation. Downs is a critic of sprawl, but a scrupulously honest scholar, so when his findings contradict one of the cherished pillars of the anti-sprawl movement, it is worth sitting up and paying attention. In his Housing Policy Debate article, "Some Realities About Sprawl and Urban Decline," Downs reviews a massive statistical analysis and concludes that "there is no meaningful and significant statistical relationship between any of the specific traits of sprawl, or a sprawl index and…urban decline. This was very surprising to me and went against my belief that sprawl had contributed to concentrated poverty and therefore to urban decline."

The theme that suburban development is responsible for the decline of central cities has become one of the chief reasons cited in favor of containing the suburbs with strong new political controls on land and growth. But Downs concludes that even "compact development" would make little difference to our urban problems: "it is the basic traits of our growth and development process themselves that produce our most serious urban problems, not sprawl."

The other piece of jarring news comes from the Potemkin Village of enlightened planning, Portland, Oregon. Regional planning in Portland is held out as a model for the nation, where benevolent planners will wisely use their immense power with discretion in the public interest. Imagine the surprise, then, when the 100-year-old-United Methodist Church in Portland’s Sunnyside neighborhood received the decree from a regional planner that it must henceforth allow no more than 70 worshippers to attend Sunday services, even though the church seats 500. The regional planner who issued the edict, Elizabeth Normand, also required the church to shut down a meals program for homeless and working poor in the neighborhood that has fed up to 100 people a week for the last 16 years.

Ms. Normand has refused to defend her edict, telling the media that her job is "quasi-judicial" and therefore she is not required to explain decisions. But it seems the Sunnyside neighborhood, which has been going upscale in recent years, doesn’t like the traffic associated with Sunday morning services, and the "undesirables" who go to the church for a meal.

The episode reveals once again that "comprehensive growth planning" is a cover to deliver "quality of life" mostly for the rich and affluent chattering classes. As has been seen before, if you are poor or working class, don’t expect to find a welcome mat in Portland. The same holds true everywhere the anti-sprawl and no-growth elites are using a bogus issue to red-line working people out of town.

—By Steven Hayward