Placemaking matters

Placemaking matters: 

After spending 8 years on a Community Planning Advisory Council, for Sacramento County, I feel qualified to say land use planning is the source of more local trouble than you can shake a stick at. The Placemaking link above has a very nice compendium of all the reasons getting land use right is a solution to many other problems. Samples from the link above: 

"For the last 75 years, we’ve been engaged in a Ponzi scheme of paying for the far-flung suburbs with money generated downtown, in compact neighborhoods, and from other levels of government. These sprawling bedroom communities, strip malls, and big boxes arranged in patterns where everyone needs a car are providing a negative return on investment. The roads, water, and sewer cost almost double for these dispersed places, while the return to city and private coffers pale in comparison. Compact neighborhoods return at least 10x more revenue per acre to the City, and often 1,000x more income per acre. At a time when less than half of our population doesn’t drive – because they’re too young, too old, too poor, or just choose not to – isn’t it about time that we change our zoning laws to make the sorts of places that will stop bankrupting our cities?

...Scott Doyon, has a much shorter version: If an 8 year old can safely get somewhere to buy a Popsicle, and then make it home before it melts, that’s the measure of a livable neighborhood. That’s the Popsicle test."

"The average white male living in a compact community weighs 10 pounds less than his counterpart in a low-density subdivision. (British Columbia School of Planning)"

"People living in walkable neighborhoods trust neighbors more, participate in community projects and volunteer more than in non-walkable areas. (University of New Hampshire, 2010)"

More at Suburbs impoverish a city. 

 

My 2¢:

The Silliest unfunded mandate: Sac's General Plan 9/21/2003

Sacramento County has begun soliciting citizen input to update the 1993 General Plan -- the document that supposedly guides land use and "zoning." State law mandates this review, but what it produces is so roundly ignored throughout the region that this review is just silly.

Whether inadvertently or by design, such "plans" produce little real civic guidance and less good development. What we get, by default, is more sprawl, increasing congestion, nonworking transit, and, not incidentally, increased dependence on imported oil.

Consistent with the surreal atmosphere of the review, the plan update's "input" process asks for no more than the cloud-cuckoo-land of the public's wishful thinking. These reviews seldom discuss fees or infrastructure costs -- things central to the real world of development.

One result: Although development using existing infrastructure (infill) is obviously cheaper for the county than outlying ("greenfield") development with new roads, schools, etc., nevertheless infill still costs developers more. Why, despite the county's much lower costs, is infill so much more expensive to develop than greenfield? Isn't this essentially an invitation to sprawl more?

Even psychics don't try to guess that: The General Plan review is doubly awful because what it produces would never work even if it were enforced. Consider zoning. As currently conceived, zoning tries to anticipate marketplace realities 10 years or more in the future -- something even psychic Miss Cleo would avoid.

So it's no surprise that our city councils and supervisors regularly revise zoning. What choice do they have when plans so consistently have no connection to economic reality? We even have a cottage industry of consultants and attorneys who wheedle rezones (plan changes) from local governments.

Rezones are enormously profitable, too. Speculators can buy agricultural land for $2,000 an acre and -- presto! -- a rezone makes it worth $40,000 an acre. What other retailer gets a 2,000 percent markup?

We could tax this rezone profit -- the Germans do -- but we don't. We apparently prefer short library hours and record county budget deficits -- in short, an impoverished public realm. In effect, we subsidize land speculation by cutting services like parks, education and healthcare.

How completely is planning (zoning) ignored? One sign might be the amount of land proposed for rezone -- currently an astonishing 30,000 acres in the region. Another indicator: Hearings proposing changes to the reviewed General Plan start as soon as the update is "final." It's more of a "General Suggestion" than a plan.

Try zoning by intensity, not use: Instead of basing zoning on uses ("residential," "commercial," "industrial," etc.) as we currently do, it would be much more sensible to design cities around building sizes ("big," "medium," "little") or development densities. Such plans already exist (see www.dpz.com/pdf/3000_Smartcode.pdf, for example).

Plans focused on size or intensity of development would produce neighborhoods that make sense; whether developers make offices, commerce or residences would depend on market conditions when they build. Such zoning could realistically prescribe what could be built, without rezones, even a decade in advance.

This would even make public works spending more efficient because the county could accurately anticipate transportation and infrastructure improvements -- things done haphazardly now.

Size-based zoning could also encourage transit- and pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use neighborhoods -- something we desperately need, but seldom build now. The results would look like anything from McKinley Park to Union Square. These are neighborhoods for which buyers pay premiums; in other words, the market likes them even better than sprawl.

A recipe for anger and sprawl: Meanwhile, current planning practices can only lead to more citizens angry that ad hoc rezones trump any prior planning agreement (by design!), and governments hamstrung by interminable rezone hearings full of angry citizens. Business-as-usual planning will also produce more pedestrian- and transit-unfriendly, single-use sprawl.

In sprawl, only auto trips connect residences, commerce, offices, etc., increasing congestion, pollution, ill health, and, not incidentally, maximizing our demand for petroleum.

Auto-dependent sprawl is at the root of most of our national appetite for petroleum. Transportation consumes roughly twice the petroleum of all other uses in the United States. In the rest of the world, the ratio is 1-to-2, not 2-to-1.

According to petroleum industry figures, U.S. domestic oil production began an inexorable decline in 1971, one that will continue even if we got all the oil projected to be offshore and in Alaska. Therefore we must have oil imports, and such imports are so essential that since 1971 every recession has coincided with an overseas oil shock. (Ever wonder why we're fighting in Iraq once a decade?)

If that's not enough, among Sacramento's current dubious distinctions is that we have the fifth-worst air quality in the nation (about a decade ago we were seventh). If we keep doing what we do now, we can expect these less-than-optimum trends to continue.

Considering the consequences of the last decade's inaction, do we really have the time to waste on ineffectual reviews?

A version of this originally appeared in the Sacramento Business Journal