Right before Gov. Deval Patrick took office, Harvard University’s David Luberoff gave him some advice about “smart growth” policies in the pages of CommonWealth.

Luberoff posed a simple question:

…should Massachusetts follow Oregon’s “big stick” approach of forcing localities to follow state guidelines when deciding where growth should and should not occur? Or should the Commonwealth follow former Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening’s approach of using carrots, notably state capital spending, to encourage desired development patterns — while rarely, if ever, using the stick of forcing localities to comply with state mandates concerning growth?

Luberoff wrote that the Oregon approach was likely to achieve smart growth goals (for better or worse) but was too “politically controversial,” while the Maryland focus on financial incentives to local governments (which continues to be the Bay State’s general approach) seemed to have only “modest impacts.”

Last week the University of Maryland’s National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education seemed to validate Luberoff’s concerns, releasing a report that said a decade of smart growth policies in Maryland have “fallen short of expectations,” for reasons that may sound familiar to those following local politics in Massachusetts.

The researchers found that about 75 percent of the lots taken over by single-family homes during the past decade were outside of designated smart-growth areas, essentially duplicating the development patterns of the previous decade.

The Washington Post‘s Lisa Rein summarized the conclusions:

“There is no evidence after ten years that [smart-growth laws] have had any effect on development patterns,” concludes the study, which appears in the current issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association.

State planners have failed to prod local governments, which wield enormous control over land use, to approve dense projects in smart-growth areas, the study says. Maryland officials have authorized dozens of exceptions to the law, and many projects in the pipeline in 1998 were allowed to be built. And toll roads, including the Intercounty Connector underway outside the Capital Beltway, are exempt from smart-growth restrictions….

“What makes incentives so politically attractive is that governments and individuals can choose to ignore them if they wish,” said Gerrit Knaap, the smart-growth center’s executive director and the study’s lead author. “Unfortunately, in Maryland over the last decade, that’s exactly what many have been doing.”

The report concludes that state governments wishing to use the “carrot” approach to getting localities to approve smart-growth projects must “ensure that funds are spent appropriately and that the level of state spending is large enough to make a difference.” These days, however, the second part of that prescription (more spending) seems as politically untenable as taking away the power of local governments to stop bulldozers.