"Smart Growth" Needs Brown as Well as Green.

Industry’s low rents mean that industrial enterprise will never qualify as what people in the real estate  business call, in a cunning turn of phrase, a property’s “highest and best use,” meaning whatever yields the most profit.

It follows that if urban industry is to survive, not to say thrive, it needs protection from market forces. What it gets from smart growth—where it generally appears as a form of blight, when it appears at all—is greater exposure, leading to a vicious cycle: treating industry as a relic justifies the conversion of industrial land to other uses, thereby further weakening the possibility of industrial revitalization. And like farmland, once lost, industrial land is gone forever. 

— Zelda Bronstein, in Dissent, "Industry and the Smart City" [PDF]

h/t Hal Davis