REDWOOD NEEDLES
REDWOOD NEEDLESPresented by the Sierra Club Redwood Chapter Newsletter, The REDWOOD NEEDLES
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By Sherman Lewis
housing prices, infrastructure costs, air pollution, global warming, energy and water consumption, open space and farmland protection, purchasing power per person, resources for education, economic opportunity for disadvantaged residents, dislocation due to gentrification, . . .some of the connections are pretty obvious, others require a deeper understanding of how to reconcile prosperity, social justice, and environmental quality.
LESS GROWTH + SMART GROWTH = MORE SUSTAINABILITY
The Regional Agencies of the Bay Area consist of the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), the air and water quality control boards, and the Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC). The Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable Development consists of representatives of environment (including the Sierra Club, represented by Michele Perrault), equity, economy, and government and other groups.
The Regional Agencies and Bay Area Alliance are sponsoring a grass roots planning process next fall. You are invited! You will have a chance to participate in workshops in each county that will forge new directions in planning. Participants will be given a briefing book ahead of time and challenged to find a way to accommodate expected growth in housing and jobs. The meetings will split up into tables with big colored planning maps of your county. Your group will have information about existing land uses and a list of place types for development to place on your map.
The Bay Area Alliance has also drafted a compact for everyone to comment on. The easiest way is to log onto the website at www.BayAreaAlliance.org and follow the links to the compact and a questionnaire you can do on line.
The workshops and the compact are great opportunities for the Sierra Club, but also have some risks. Blind opposition to infill and denser growth may lead to more sprawl in the greenbelt. We can't stop growth, but we do not have to support all growth. What is the best balance?
How much growth do you want in your community?
The rest of this article presents my ideas for responsibly reducing the growth rate and thus move towards sustainability, in a way that benefits our region and others. The Regional Agencies emphasize the question of how we should grow and ignore the issue of how much we should grow. The range of housing units you are being asked to plan for is based on current trends PLUS various estimates of more houses for all the people predicted to work in the bay area by 2020, requiring significantly more houses even than current trends. The Bay Area would grow 20 percent more from 2000 to 2020.
More housing is needed but the solution is not hyper-growth, that is, all housing at any cost. We should not accommodate the hyper-growth of the official projections, which would degrade the environment. If you are concerned about how much growth is planned, you may say so at the workshop. Nobody wants to get into a debate about numbers, but there are some simple, clear principles involved.
The region can more easily become sustainable for future generations if we move toward a more stable population. This argument is not based on some scientific certainty, only that if we can find good ways to moderate our growth, solving many other problems also becomes easier. Those problems include: traffic congestion, housing prices, infrastructure costs, air pollution, global warming, energy and water consumption, open space and farmland protection, purchasing power per person, resources for education, economic opportunity for disadvantaged residents, dislocation due to gentrification, . . . Some of the connections are pretty obvious, others require a deeper understanding of how to reconcile prosperity, social justice, and environmental quality.
Certain principles lead to lower numbers for planning. If the principles below make sense, then less growth makes sense. The first step is to determine each county's growth responsibility, based on two principles:
One: Counties have a responsibility to accommodate their own natural increases in population. A county with low natural increase does not have a responsibility to provide housing for a county with a high rate of increase. The county with the high rate does not have a right to impose costs on its neighbors.
Two: Counties have a responsibility to provide enough housing, with one important exception, to take care of the people who work in that county. The exception is based on the ability of the transportation system to accommodate some imbalance of jobs and housing, and on the economic benefits of job concentrations such as downtown San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Other counties and the region can benefit from such concentrations, and supply workers to them. However, there are limits. Serious problems occurs when the imbalance is too great: housing prices soar, the freeways get jammed, and the air gets polluted.
Principle Two, then, requires that counties have a responsibility to provide enough housing so that people can get to work, in a reasonable distance, in a reasonable time, without causing too much congestion on the freeways, and using more transit. Counties with surplus employed residents do not have a responsibility to meet a housing need created by other counties. Primarily Silicon Valley and secondarily San Francisco have failed to meet their responsibility. They have created most of the housing/commuting/air pollution crisis of the whole region. They should build housing, adjusted for transportation capacity for commuters.
The Regional Agencies are not considering these principles of responsibility. They could easily quantify, but so far have not, how much housing a city needs based on the two principles above. Instead, ABAG makes up a fairly arbitrary "housing needs determination" which mostly ignores responsibility and ignores the problem of supply and demand.
Trends and hyper-growth assumptions should not determine our destiny. Ethical principles should determine the housing numbers a county should plan for. As an environmentalist, these ideas may seem painfully obvious to you. But the Agencies will not take them seriously unless many people ask them to.
Now we get to another issue: policies to moderate unsustainable trends. There are three policies, two for the long run and one for the short run.
In the long run, the greatest potential for both sustainability and prosperity lies in improving the productivity of those who are now less productive than they could be: the disadvantaged and under-educated, and even many middle class people who need some training for the new economy. Investment in this human capital would help them compete for the jobs our economy is creating. It would reduce unsustainable growth that occurs when people from outside the region get jobs here that locals could qualify for.
In the long run, we also need to improve the status of women. An enormous share of increased income and wealth over the last fifty years has come from increasing the participation and productivity of women in the labor force. Their contribution, like men's, is based on education and, unlike men's, on access to family planning services. Despite our success for most women in the bay area, there is a surprisingly large under-served population, especially girls and women lacking in income, education, and English. Social equity requires that we help them get services the middle class takes for granted. Planned Parenthood Golden Gate has excellent programs and details about what is needed. Improving family planning, health care, and education also helps women and their children contribute to the economy. And in the long run, smaller family size helps sustainability by moderating population growth.
In the short run, we need to have a job-creation moratorium on a few cities until they stop imposing costs on the region that outweigh the value of the jobs they are creating. The first rule of holes is to stop digging. New jobs are not the problem, it is their location where it creates unacceptable costs to the region. The moratorium would apply to city decisions about land development and new construction that create new jobs; it would not affect existing land use. Such a moratorium would allow housing to catch up with jobs. Otherwise we are on an endless treadmill, building ever more housing to try to catch up with ever more jobs until prices are so outrageous and freeways so congested that the economy stops growing. The current policy of anarchy is both unwise and costly. These ideas are pretty obvious to objective observers, but new to the political debate, and much education is needed.
Similarly, major new job increases must be linked to enough increase in housing supply so that we begin to solve the problem, not just chase our tail. Job developments should be linked to housing increases, or be held up until the market builds enough housing. The problem of supply and demand for affordable housing cannot be solved by looking only at the supply side.
Now we are ready for a small discussion of a big issue: What happens to the economy?
Managing jobs as suggested above is going to slow economic growth&endash;sounds like a bad idea. Aggregate growth alone, however, does not help people. Only increases in income per household can do that, which depends over the long term on increasing worker productivity. And policies for human capital and for women mentioned above are going to improve their productivity. In short, we can best increase household income by improving the earning power of the people already here, especially the disadvantaged.
Even better, as housing catches up with demand, the price will fall relative to income, dramatically improving effective income and housing affordability. We can begin to reverse the growing gulf between the affluent of the new economy and the low to moderate income of the lower-skilled workers who service it.
Success will have its temptations&endash;to import more low skill, low pay workers to meet a "labor shortage." We should resist this temptation and, instead, allow high wages to be an incentive for the productivity gains that are the only firm basis for a sustainable prosperity. And we can let some of those jobs go to areas that are worse off than we are, need the growth, and have adequate housing and shorter commutes. Our investment in talent will keep us competitive.
If you have better ideas, please let us know right away. And if you don't speak up, we may get more traffic and more sprawl.
Sherman Lewis
2787 Hillcrest Ave.
Hayward CA 94542
510-538-3692 v; /-3693 fax; slewis@csuhayward.edu
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