The U.S. Department of Transportation’s five-year strategic plan was released recently and is open for comment. It has straightforward goals around safety, environmental stewardship, and organizational excellence that don’t appear to be too much of a departure from the current plan. Yet a new set of strategies around the plan’s Livable Communities chapter has generated a fair share of commentary—and some controversy.

For the most part, the elements of the Livable Communities strategy are clear and focused: coordinated planning, demand management, transportation choices. These are not dissimilar to recent recommendations from two national transportation commissions.

The controversy seems centered around two main concerns: the ambiguity of the term ‘livability’ and the question about whether or not the plan proposes too doctrinaire a role for the federal government in how this nation grows and develops.

The first concern is legitimate; livability is a vague term and is likely to remain so. Yet this nation is too big and diverse, has such unique traditions, and is facing wildly divergent growth patterns to expect a lot of clarity. Terms like ‘public interest,’ ‘green building,’ ‘mixed-use’, and even ‘infrastructure’ have been criticized for being similarly vague but are now part of our daily lexicon.

Adding to the challenge, our recent State of Metropolitan America report showed that even previously predictable metropolitan growth trends—from in-migration to Florida to out-migration in Pittsburgh—reversed since 2000. The collapse of fast-developing suburban housing markets meant primary cities and inner, dense suburbs saw growth tick upward at the expense of outer suburbs and exurbs.