Illegitimate Governance (2016)

© by Mark Dempsey

“You Yanks don’t consult the wisdom of democracy; you enable mobs.”--Australian planner

In compliance with (bad) State law, California’s local governments supposedly issue land use plans. You may know this as “zoning,” but Sacramento’s (and others’) version is “use-based planning.”

At its inception, a group of citizens debates where the community’s development needs to go. The question: Should a particular location should be a particular use? Commercial, or perhaps apartments, or maybe offices...or even light industrial.

These debates happen years, often decades, before any development occurs, and as you might imagine, things change between the time we make such plans and when someone builds something. Historically, use-based plans are like a stopped clock, correct only by coincidence.

A now-developed subdivision at Pecan and Greenback called “Brentwood Village” provides a perfect example. By my count, it could have followed any one of four plans: the Regional Blueprint, the County General Plan, a Community Plan, and a Special Planning Area (SPA). The SPA is a plan formulated for a specific location. It contains 35 pages of “planning” related to the specific parcel that surely embodied the work of a group of citizens for weeks or months.

So which plan guided the development built in Brentwood Village? None of the above(!). And that is not the exception. A local architect told me that at the height of the pre-Great Recession housing boom developers of 35,000 acres in the region proposed plan changes (not building according to the plan). Builders developed far fewer acres according to existing plans.

This means land use planning, a large part of local governments’ responsibilities, has been designed to fail for decades now. But who profits from such an obviously designed-to-fail system?

Land speculators reap an enormous benefit from a system that dissipates any public dissent by slowly grinding the public’s energies to dust with useless bureaucracy.  The speculators can buy outlying, agricultural properties cheaply, then re-sell them--after getting their zoning change--for 50 to 100 times what they paid. If they do it right, they don’t even pay income tax on that 5,000% - 10,000% profit!

So, as you might imagine, the speculators (let’s not call them “developers”) run the show. Your input is not welcome, and the courts are far too expensive to serve ordinary people, anyway.

Simple remedies exist. One is “form-based planning.” It specifies building sizes, and remains flexible about available uses, making a plan that could actually work, and one that helps infrastructure planners much more than use-based planning.

Another remedy would make speculators sell their ag land to the local government at the ag land price, then buy it back at the up-zoned price. This  would put an end to speculation, and really keep local taxes low without denying anyone services. German developers have to do this, and Germans have free tuition at their universities--even for foreigners!

So as the election approaches, ask your local governments’ candidates what the plan to do about designed-to-fail planning.

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Mark Dempsey is a former real estate broker, and former vice-chair of a Sacramento County Planning Advisory Council