(c) by Mark Dempsey
Part of a series:
Local "Planning" Follies, part 2 - Subsidizing Sprawl – North Natomas and the Environmentalists
Local "Planning" Follies, part 3 - The Public’s “Input”
Local "Planning" Follies, part 4 - WalMartLocal "Planning" Follies, part 5... Curitiba—The Third World Gets It
Local "Planning" Follies part 6 “Friends”—The Missing CommunityLocal "Planning" Follies - part 7 Some Conclusions
Local "Planning" Follies - part 8 - Alternatives to Sprawl“If the Grimm Brothers were summarizing the New Urbanist story, they might say something like this: “The communities of the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries, were friendly and safe. Neighbors knew each other and gathered together peacefully in public squares. Then came urban sprawl. The rush to ticky-tacky subdivisions tore apart the fabric of American communities and grew the congestion and environmental problems we face today. Building colonial-style houses on a small gridiron pattern - usually in a suburban environment - will bring us back to the good old days.”
On the downside: “walking encouraged by New Urbanist design was more associated with the poverty immigrants left behind than with their concept of an ideal city.”
Leonardo Vazquez, writing for www.planetizen.com
This is a story about land-use planning around Sacramento, California and how badly it has gone wrong. We can’t really blame national or even state policies, except in the most peripheral way, either, because the design and building of our cities is almost entirely the product of local decisions. Sadly, recent development has been misguided during one of the real growth spurts in modern California’s history, and the Sacramento region has more than shared the boom.
How we build our cities is enormously important too, not just for the locals, but on the larger global stage. Building cities designed to encourage long commutes is at the root of our appetite for petroleum, for example. And that appetite prompts us to meddle in the place where most of the petroleum lives—the Middle East.
After the disappointments of the Vietnam era, Watergate and Savings & Loan scandals, perhaps it’s no surprise to discover that governments, even our most “democratic,” or responsive ones—even little local governments where individuals should have the most influence—routinely favor moneyed interests and discourage public participation in important policy decisions. Nevertheless, that is what has been going on.
In Sacramento, private development interests have diligently sought opportunities for their personal profit. Meanwhile discovering what are the real costs or benefits of their proposals for the public at large remains difficult, or at least obscure. Governments in the region often have not been interested so much in refining and clarifying public “input” to empower the electorate as they are in public “offput” that essentially keeps the public off their backs.
This “offput” has been as insignificant as omitting any discussion of a policy’s consequences so the public’s advice is based on whatever fantastic imaginings the spin-meisters or conventional wisdom can produce. Another common offput strategy has been concealing a proposal’s consequences in a blizzard of distracting information. Consider Sacramento County’s General Plan—a document required by State law produced ostensibly to guide land use planning. For Sacramento County it is as thick as a phone book (remember those?), and about as readable.
The public can only guess what the mysterious “RD-5” zoning means, really, as a priesthood of planners assures them that the plan is working for the public benefit without specifics or real knowledge of its consequences. The truth: such zoning schemes do not, and could never work (see Why Bother Planning? below), but none of that is clear, on the face of it.
For contrast, consider Haussman’s 19th century plan to rebuild Paris. It consisted of six rather large pages. That’s six pages, not a phone book. And he got Paris!
Another common “offput” strategy: holding an endless series of meetings, postponing final judgment until “all the facts are in,” or all the opponents have been worn out. Lots of important decisions are made in the dead of night, at the end of such long meetings, even down at the County seat or City Hall. Whatever form it took, offput has been pervasive, even in the smaller local political scene.
So, to truly appreciate what we do in building our cities—local land-use planning—you must imagine a process that renders most discussions about the decisions made (ultimately) pointless; one that solicits “input” from people who know nothing about the available alternatives or consequences of the policy they're deciding, to produce a result that is seldom binding.
With that background, it is no surprise that the County of Sacramento has difficulty interesting citizens in becoming participants in the hearing process. Volunteers for the County’s Community Planning Advisory Council (CPAC) positions are scarce. That’s how I came to sit on a CPAC for several terms, even though we’re supposed to be limited to one.
This document is an attempt to redress the balance so people with public interests at heart, rather than private ones, at least have some idea of the consequences of our planning decisions. This writing also includes insights gleaned from many conversations with and presentations before the general public in the CPAC hearings. I do not claim scientific accuracy, but things are so out of whack, even approximately right is shocking enough.
Also: although I have some pretty strong conclusions, this is also not a particularly partisan document. Although the current “conservative” tilt of the Republicans is neither conserving nor justifiable, except to promote some corporate profit at the public’s expense, I’m not such a partisan that I can overlook the bankrupt public stewardship of local Democrats.
Neither party has been particularly interested in the truth, or service to the general public, when it comes to the design and building of Sacramento’s public realm. Both have certainly betrayed their stated principles when it comes to deciding between a political ally and those principles, and both have done precious little to change current practices. The only remedy I can imagine for such betrayals is the light of day, which is why I write.
II
Tip O'Niell said once: “All politics is local.” Yet a significant number of voting adults could not name their local city council member or county supervisor, much less tell you the public policies these local bodies create and implement.
Despite some recent close counts, it's still statistically more likely that you'll die in a fatal auto accident on the way to the polls than that your vote will make the deciding difference in a federal election. Not so, locally—or certainly not as much so. Nevertheless, most people don't know about local issues, or how to ask the questions to really discover where candidates stand, or even what alternatives are to proposed public policy. TV News coverage is not helpful; it is mostly about large, distant federal, or state issues, or about trivia or shock that has no impact beyond the emotion of the moment.
Politicians of all stripes, both local and national, have every incentive to conceal their true agendas. Any public promise they make limits the political deals they can strike to pursue that agenda. Because of all they conceal, politicians—even if they are benevolent—don’t need to go far look like opportunists who will say anything you want to hear just so you'll vote for them.
It goes without saying that people pleasing skills, and the ability to tell people anything they’d like to hear, are second nature to most politicians. Their skills in this area are often what prompt them to get into the business in the first place. Politicians are typically the very nicest people you can imagine, and Sacramento is no exception.
And woe to a politician who tries to address real problems, discuss real issues, or even challenge his or her audience to think differently! Such leaders often suffer the fate of Ralph Nader, and are harassed or marginalized by the interests seeking power, even if it is at the public's expense.
Voters are to blame too. They often even want to elect someone personable, rather than competent. Presumably they would worry less about personalities if they thought something more was at stake; for example, they might use different criteria when selecting a heart surgeon. For most people, competence would trump personality in other important decisions, but voting for a “good ol' boy” to run the county is a commonplace. Celebrity and star power, not intelligence or commitment to public benefit, weigh even more heavily in the political calculus of a winning candidate.
To top it off, even well-meaning politicians can bungle their policies because of unforeseen outcomes. Politics can also make an ass of a hero, and vice versa. Making laws and public policies are full of unintended consequences.
In short, most people are as interested in their local governments about as much as they are in what they flush down their toilet. Only when it raises a stink do they rush to try to fix it. This is, of course, the least effective way to run anything, much less something as complex as a county.
III
Every functioning market—even those we call “free”—requires a public policy referee: the legal framework that enforces contracts, puts thieves in jail, and makes commerce possible. And beyond the basic public framework within which private markets work, markets have “externalities”—real costs that don't appear in the bottom line. For example, until recently, the health costs of cigarettes did not appear in the price charged when smokers purchased them. That was outside the costs of growing tobacco and producing cigarettes. The best public policy not only referees, it tries to take account of those externalities to correct incentives that otherwise would misguide us in the information / feedback network we call “markets.”
In civic design, many externalities go beyond present costs, and if they are not anticipated by public policy, we pay for them later. One such large externality is related to the peak in U.S. domestic oil production that occurred in 1971 (pre-fracking, meanwhile demand has continued to rise, unabated). When we build sprawl, we design cities that require autos, and their petroleum fuel, even for short trips.
So, by building sprawl, we are setting our energy/petroleum demand literally in concrete—and that demand is at world record levels and rising. We've all heard that the U.S. uses 25% of the world's energy while it has less than 5% of the population, but more telling is that we spend twice the petroleum on transportation than on all other uses (heating, electricity generation, chemical feedstocks, etc.). In the rest of the world, that ratio is 1-to-2, not 2-to-1.
The externality unanticipated by both current petroleum prices and sprawl is that current prices do nothing to anticipate inevitable decline of petroleum production, or pay for the alternative infrastructure needed to replace the petroleum-oriented system we have built over the last 50 years.
The way we account for oil production only worsens this. We call it income rather than a withdrawal of natural capital. Imagine trying to borrow several times your net worth by telling the loan officer you had no income, but planned to pay the monthly payment out of your savings (only a portion of your net worth). The loan officer who took your application would call security to escort you from the building. Yet this is exactly the kind of thing we do in accounting for oil production.
The “peak oil” debate is beyond the scope of what is discussed here. Either those certain that the world's peak in oil production is happening now (http://www.peakoil.net/), or in the next twenty years (like the United States Geological Survey) could be right. In any case, we're going to run out some time, and the externality of the cost of future dislocations, or the funding for replacement alternatives has not come close to appearing in the price we pay for energy now.
Even experts most optimistic about future oil production say that additional production will come from sources like those around the Caspian Sea. The Caspian is a body of water surrounded by such pillars of political stability as Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq, Uzbekistan, and so on. In other words, never mind the climate catastrophe we get by burning more oil, pursuing the “get-more-oil” strategy puts the fate of our economy in the hands of some extremely unstable governments. New York Times editorial writer Thomas Friedman even says our oil dependency funds the current crop of terrorists.
This means we have a choice: we can either design our cities to require long commutes, and be increasingly dependent on imported oil, or discover some other alternative to oil (we haven't found one after a lot of looking, too, despite the brouhaha about the “Hydrogen Highway”)—or we can start conserving here at home by altering the way we live. This applies even if electric cars save our bacon.
The type of civic design outlined in the next post (Alternatives to Sprawl) does just that. Even without transit, this alternative conserves—and as a bonus also makes transit viable. When compared to autos, transit consumes about an eighth of the petroleum per passenger-mile. Basically, this alternative proposes we build cities so our daily trips from home to work or shop are within a convenient walk.
It also follows that, because traditional, pedestrian-friendly development encourages people to walk places, one place they can walk is a transit stop. Trying to make transit work in low-density sprawl that discourages pedestrian is a non-starter. Sprawl design means that not enough potential riders are within a walk of the stops in the first place, and that there are no pedestrian connections to those stops because sprawl street design accommodates autos, but not pedestrians.
Sprawl transit is the red-headed orphan stepchild of local governments. It is ineffective because it does not get commuters off the roads, and it requires immense subsidies because it is unsupported by land use. Sprawl transit essentially rolls around a lot of empty buses pretending to help whatever poor unfortunate can't ride his or her own car. Invariably the studies criticizing expensive transit are talking about transit trying to serve sprawl.
Having to own a car is the hallmark of sprawl. If you do not have a car, you are socially disenfranchised—you work or shop without driving. Some workplaces literally will not employ the carless. If you have no car in Sacramento, you must typically wait for a bus in a stop without shade, shelter, or bench. Many buses come no more often than once every three hours. A transit-using neighbor told me “It’s great if you have an extra three hours a day.”
Building sprawl also means that, by design, walking is not a regular part of daily life. Those sprawl inhabitants unwilling to even rise from their couch to change a channel, much less walk, suffer from the diseases of inactivity: diabetes, heart disease, arteriosclerosis, etc. A daily walk as short as ten minutes makes people healthier.
By contrast, in England all the roads—even little rural highways—have footpaths or sidewalks. Pedestrians can walk literally miles between towns and never be threatened by an auto, because they have a grade-separate sidewalk—a parallel path separate from the autos’ roadway. A recent study says that even with their unhealthy diet, the Brits are twice as healthy as the U.S. population.
In Sacramento's sprawl, by design, the boulevards discourage pedestrians, even though they have sidewalks. The sidewalks are typically next to the fast flow of traffic, and often terminate, disconnected from any destination. They segue to gravel shoulders, or simply terminate without connection to anything but the development they enfront.
So pedestrians are a necessary antidote to traffic congestion, pollution, overseas resource wars, and non-working transit. Pedestrians are just this side of a panacea. How to turn things around? And what are we doing now that is so discouraging to pedestrians? That is another point of this writing.
IV
I have not attended every single meeting of the Board of Supervisors, just tracked the news coverage and press releases issued by the County, so my opinion of their actions is necessarily limited. There certainly may be County positions I’ve not explored in the following.
Conclusions cited about the pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use New Urbanist policies discussed here are far less doubtful. These developments are market-tested, typically commanding premium prices because they are so much in demand. Besides being widely accepted by the public, my experience in dozens of CPAC hearings explaining them—even to those who generally oppose any development at all—is that even those opponents say “If you have to build something, then this is the way to do it.”
Opponents of this point of view—those who abhor New Urbanist neighborhoods with small lots—still exist. One accused me of promoting bad, unpopular development, even if the alternative has lower environmental impacts. Since I have heard from such opponents in a variety of public forums, including the Community Planning Advisory Council meetings described in The Local Advisory Council (CPAC) section below, my experience is that invariably these folks do not know that New Urbanism can apply to a variety of densities, with lots large and small, and they endorse it once they know concretely what it proposes. Whether it is popular, or in demand is, in more than this writer’s opinion, a non-issue. Ignorance, inertia, and a few disaffected egos are all that stand in the way of adopting the New Urbanist method of development that has lower environmental impacts.
But don’t take my word for it. Read for yourself and see whether you agree.
The Local Advisory Council (CPAC)
My first close encounter with local politics occurred when I volunteered to sit on a local Community Planning Advisory Council (CPAC) in the late 1980's and early '90s. I lived then in Rio Linda, a suburb north of Sacramento, where suburbanites and hobby ranchers chafed under the County's planning directives. Theoretically, this council provided local guidance for the County Supervisors as builders and land speculators proposed projects to urbanize this part of northern rural Sacramento County.
The CPAC seated seven County Supervisor-appointed locals who held hearings about planning and land-use applications and then sent their advisory votes to the County where final approval or disapproval would occur. The duties of CPAC members included researching the applications for commercial buildings, subdivision, lot splits and things like “accessory dwelling” (applications to build granny flats, or add mobile homes on existing parcels). Research meant visiting the neighborhood, eyeballing the proposed development, perhaps asking some neighbors what they thought.
What’s at stake: If current land use trends continue, the yellow on this map indicates the Sacramento region’s projected development. The splotch under the “0” in “2000” is Auburn—a little town about a half hour drive northeast from Sacramento. The large splotch is Sacramento / Roseville. The northwestern edge of that splotch is roughly where our CPAC operated. Source: SACOG Blueprint project.
Like many political devices, CPACs sound plausible. What could be more innocent than asking locals for their opinion? The trouble is that the County can ignore even a CPAC's unanimous rejection of a project. Citizens know how irrelevant CPAC deliberations are, this is why CPACs often have unfilled seats.
Land-use policy in Sacramento is therefore a government-directed monopoly, ultimately determined by the votes of the County Supervisors—only arbitrarily by any advisory council. This is at variance with a popular belief that somehow an objective entity—perhaps “the market”—determines civic design. In a sense, the market does determine what developers propose, but those proposals are always within the context of the County’s or City’s policies that have designated what is permitted, and how those permitted uses are connected.
The market certainly does not decide the specifics of street design, or the arrangement of different land uses. Public works standards for street design are the province of the traffic engineers at the local seat of government. Policies determining street standards are the remnants of concepts that embody the laws of unintended consequences, as we shall see (in The Road to Ruin: Street Design below). Land use planning determines the arrangement of homes, shops and offices, whether they are interspersed, or separate. Those too are government’s decision, not the market.
Conventional Developers Propose Sprawl, Avoid Risk
Development proposed to our CPAC was surprisingly conventional, and universally sprawl. Home builders would go to great lengths to avoid anything unusual, or anything that might imply they were taking a risk. This risk avoidance is not surprising, since even a small subdivision requires a considerable investment, and its success is subject to enormous uncertainty.
The uncertainty that accompanies commerce is common knowledge. Most new businesses fail every year. And that same kind of uncertainty accompanies most new building too.
If the rains come at the wrong time of year, builders must delay pouring foundations, even if they have pre-sold the home they are planning to build. If the interest rates change in an unfavorable direction, or even if they are descending and people are waiting for the bottom, sales can suffer. Of course these risks are on top of a host of others like changes in costs of building materials, unreliable subcontractors, theft from the construction site, and a bad cycle in the real estate market.
Therefore, it makes some sense that home builders and commercial tenants propose nothing much more than the suburban sprawl that has proliferated over the last 50-60 years—preferring to build something exactly like another that has been built elsewhere. Conventional financing dictates it too.
Even though I saw plenty of these proposals, and had been a real estate broker for years, when I first sat on the CPAC, I had no alternative, and without that contrasting alternative, I could not really appreciate what I saw in the CPAC meetings. That would all change in 1989.
The Alternative: Sprawl vs. New Urbanism
Andres Duany’s 1989 lecture in nearby Folsom roused me from my rubber-stamp CPAC complacency. Duany, one of the foremost proponents of New Urbanism, was invited by opponents of what was proposed then as Folsom’s general plan. His lecture was well attended, even drawing Angelo Tsakopoulos, one of Sacramento’s wealthiest, most successful land speculators.
In his lecture, Duany first suggested that citizens of the suburbs have been bamboozled by planning experts in the task of “place making,” noting that perhaps the greatest example is the planning document they produce—in Sacramento County, the “General Plan.” These documents are typically hundreds of pages long and are so obscure that they must be interpreted for the general public by professional planners. What we forget, said Duany, is that the great cities were planned simply, by amateurs, not by people with masters’ degrees in planning. Common sense ruled their designs, not planning jargon. Therefore, the design principles of such cities are not so lengthy. Haussman rebuilt Paris for Napoleon III with a plan only six pages long.
Citizens in modern sprawl cities experience more ill health, crime, pollution, and traffic jams precisely because of the “expert” advice public policy makers receive from their professional staffs. To actually improve cities, we need to return to the type of common-sense traditional neighborhood development that preceded modern sprawl.
The vision promoted by modern city planning experts—the “Conventional Suburban Design” (CSD) we commonly call “sprawl”—generates more auto traffic by design. CSD segregates stores, offices, homes and industry into single-use pods, connected only by “collector” streets. The pods are, in effect, cul-de-sacs disconnected from each other, so not only must commuters drive from home to work because home and work are in separate pods, they cannot take back streets. All must meet in the traffic jam on the arterial, or collector street.
Sprawl in schematic view. The paths from home, to school, to mall, to office demonstrate the extra mileage required just to get around. Notice how the only real connection between even adjacent uses is the collector street. Walking from the office to the mall to eat lunch in the food court is inconvenient, if not impossible even though offices and commercial (restaurant) may be adjacent uses.
The separation of different “uses”—like homes and offices or commerce, for example—is not universal in sprawl. A few homes are often next to a neighborhood shopping center, for example. Nevertheless, in typical sprawl design, even these few shopping center neighbors would have difficulty walking to shop because of the street design.
Sidewalks on streets connecting neighbors to shopping are often separated only by a narrow curb from the fast flowing traffic on the collector street. Walking in such an environment is undignified, and unsafe—roughly like walking on the shoulder of a freeway. Older neighborhoods, built before the sprawl fad, set sidewalks back from the street, shielding pedestrians from traffic with on-street parallel parking.
Sprawl sidewalks are also narrow—as little as three feet wide—and frequently do not connect to any neighboring sidewalks. Lighting on pedestrian-unfriendly streets is on poles so tall and is so blindingly bright that it makes pedestrians feel as though they're making a prison break. Especially in denser sprawl, the boring streetscape of garage door after garage door does nothing to make the street more inviting.
The Road to Ruin: Street Design
To give you an idea of how sacrosanct street design is, when the County updates its General Plan every decade, road design standards typically remain unchanged, even though road design standards are as important as zoning in shaping development.
Note: Some good news: The state of California recently passed a law requiring all new development have "Complete Streets" (streets that accomodate pedestrians an bicycles as well as autos).
Is street design important compared to, say, zoning? Houston, which has no zoning looks a lot like zoning-managed Sacramento. Both are sprawl cities, where suburbs, malls and office complexes are connected to each other by single-occupant auto trips on pedestrian-unfriendly roads. Why? Street design standards, minimum lot standards, and Houston’s developer deed restrictions do everything CSD zoning does. Zoning is not necessary to determine the form of cities. (See Why Bother Planning? below for more about zoning.)
How do streets influence city design? In sprawl, they are designed to discourage pedestrians, and provide the ultimate convenience for autos.
Consider the “little” 40-foot-wide sprawl street in front of my home that has two eight foot parking lanes and two twelve-foot travel lanes, flanked by three-foot-wide sidewalks separated from the street by a non-vertical curb.
A typical sprawl 40’ tertiary street in cross-section (approximately to scale) The street lights are tall enough (20 feet plus) and far enough apart that the lights are blinding to a pedestrian. These effectively eliminate night-time strolls in the neighborhood, even though that is the nicest time of day in Sacramento’s summer.
The twelve foot travel lanes are as wide as California's freeway lanes designed for 70-m.p.h. traffic. Because of their width, these wide sprawl streets are such an invitation to speeding that County standards when they were built required them to bend every 1,000 lineal feet. Otherwise speeding cars on tertiary residential streets would be mowing down the neighborhood kids.
In both Houston and Sacramento, wide sprawl neighborhood streets bend to slow the speeding their width otherwise invites—spaghetti streets are a safety measure. Wouldn't it be cheaper and more sensible just to build streets narrower in the first place?
In pedestrian-friendly streets, the curb radius at corners—the radius of the street corner quarter circle—is closer to three feet than 30' so cars have to slow down to turn and pedestrians do not have more asphalt to cross. Street lights are on 10' - 14' posts rather than, as in sprawl, 20' - 30' posts, so walking at night is dignified, rather than an encounter with a blinding street lamp.
A street corner
Pedestrian-friendly streets also form a connected network, rather than the disconnected cul-de-sac and loop pattern that offers essentially no alternative routes. Because pedestrian-friendly streets make networks or grids, alternative routes abound. Studies—and common sense—show such networks of alternate routes are far better congestion relievers than street widening. Widening streets only temporarily solves congestion problems; it eventually induces more traffic, and congestion returns.
Alternate Routes: Sprawl pods have no alternatives but the collector street, Grid Streets offer many alternative routes.
Sprawl street design is a purely government product, not something determined by markets. The market does not demand misguided street design any more than the voting public demands dishonest politicians.
So little does market demand influence this that the most valuable neighborhoods in the region—in price per square foot of improvements—are the older neighborhoods around Sacramento’s McKinley Park built with such pedestrian-friendly streets.
The superstition that passes for modern traffic engineering, and the formidable asphalt lobby are responsible for our current sprawl-inducing “improvements” to traditional, sensible road design standards.
The alternative to sprawl described by Duany was what he called “Traditional Neighborhoods.” It's since been called neo-traditional development, New Urbanism, and even “Smart Growth”—although this last term is so ambiguous it can be misunderstood. In Sacramento, the term of art is “Transit-Oriented Development,” or TOD.
Sacramento County’s Transit-Oriented Development (TOD)
New Urbanism is an alternative type of development with lower impacts, and a more satisfying and profitable result than conventional sprawl. The unsustainable sprawl pattern of development makes for more auto trips, and more pollution. Sprawl is at the root of the U.S. petroleum addiction. By simply re-arranging the way we build our homes, offices and stores, and in a way the market prefers, we can cut traffic dramatically. This inspired our CPAC, and others, to press the County to include these design standards in its General Plan which was then being revised.
Probably the most politically effective impetus for including pedestrian-friendly mixed use in that plan, however, was Laguna West—a development proposed in south Sacramento County by Phil Angiledes, a Tsakopoulos protege, and then candidate for governor. Although Angiledes already had the “entitlements” (the approval) for a CSD development in this location, he courageously hired New Urbanist designer Peter Calthorpe to redesign it as a pedestrian-friendly mixed use development. The County also hired Calthorpe to consult about design standards for the General Plan.
When the County finally adopted TOD guidelines our CPAC felt vindicated. According to the 1993 General Plan, all development in excess of 20 acres would have to consider standards the County labelled Transit-Oriented Development (TOD – in other words: pedestrian-friendly mixed-use development).
Besides saving gas, encouraging pedestrians and transit, why build Transit-Oriented Development?:
- Friendlier neighborhoods—Neighbors do not have to drive to the mall for a pleasant walk. They can do so in their own parks and neighborhoods.
- Benefits for children and the elderly—Because they could walk, non-driving elderly and children would be empowered to use neighborhood amenities, instead of having to wait for a chauffeur. Transit would also be at least potentially viable, preventing the forced warehousing of the elderly in “old folks homes.”
- Culture—Because the public spaces would be inhabited not just on special occasions, we could anticipate street music, theater, and other collective entertainment—or just conversation in sidewalk cafes.
- Better health—People who walk, even a little bit, as part of their daily routine are significantly healthier than people who only drive everywhere.
- Non-commercial public space—Public space could be public rather than the (private) Mall. People could assemble without being bombarded by messages that their only purpose in life is to buy things.
- World peace—We could have some leverage with our overseas oil suppliers, rather than relying on military might, and our abject dependence, to bring them around to giving us the oil we need.
This was so good, the CPAC members felt we had made a positive contribution to the improvement of our County and the larger world. Little did we know what would really happen next.
CPAC Meets Reality
Once the County adopted Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) standards, the first development of any consequence our CPAC heard was proposed by Bill Mazza, a home builder who also happened to be the president of the California Building Industry Association (CBIA).
Our CPAC examined Mazza’s 88-lot subdivision (“Elkhorn Manor”) with some skepticism. He was proposing single-use, pedestrian-unfriendly conventional sprawl and nothing else. He even proposed to build this on land already zoned for commerce and apartments—something that could at least potentially follow the mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly TOD guidelines. At the time, no apartment financing could be found, so he proposed re-zone to a less-dense housing mix than current zoning designated. He was trying to sell the downzone as a community benefit (after all, don’t lower densities mean lower impacts, like less traffic? They do in sprawl).
Because of he needed a zoning change Mazza had to consult the CPAC. A few highlights of our council’s reaction:
- If this wasn’t an appropriate location for the mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly TOD we’ve been promoting, what was? It was within a quarter mile—a short walk—of shopping, an office, a church and transit stop.
- The single outlet for its streets meant that it increased congestion on the collector street. It was not proposing a network of streets with alternative routes, but a “pod”—in effect, a cul-de-sac.
- The design was so auto-centric that the streetscape was dominated by garage door. (The proposed design meant a pedestrian would walk past 24’ of garage, 7 1/2’ of house entry, then 6’ of yard before the next house). Not only would pedestrians be discouraged because of narrow sidewalks, they would find nothing of interest on the street because that streetscape would be primarily garage doors.
- It follows that the street would be less safe for neighbors and pedestrians, because rather than “eyes on the street,” this subdivision would create a street largely unobserved.
- It included none of the upgraded pedestrian amenities—wider, set-back sidewalks, lower street lights, etc.—of TOD, and its design included all of the sad and sorry sprawl amenities for people walking to nearby destinations.
The presentation was a success for those opposing sprawl. One CPAC member (a lender, hoping for a business connection) abstained, but the rest of the CPAC voted to reject the project. The crowd at the hearing was also large and enthusiastic in supporting the rejection.
The Supervisor Intervenes
When we voted to deny Mazza’s project, the CPAC had already held numerous hearings to discuss TOD and get public comment, our Supervisor, the late Grantland Johnson had already spent time encouraging our interest in TOD, and the Board of Supervisors had spent thousands of dollars getting TOD design advice from Peter Calthorpe, the architect of Laguna West.
Since the home of our CPAC, Rio Linda / Elverta, was a pair of anti-growth rural communities, it may be surprising to hear that citizens endorsed TOD too. The worst comment from the locals: “I don’t like growth, but if you are going to have it, TOD is how to do it.” In other words, even the anti-growth locals were TOD supporters.
To see if he could bridge the gap between the sprawl builder (Mazza) and the CPAC, Supervisor Johnson invited the committee members and Mazza to his office. I was the only CPAC representative who attended; Mazza and his engineer were there.
As was typical for risk-averse builders, Mazza made the case that a traditional, mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly neighborhood was too “far out”—a radical departure from standard sprawl home building conventions. He also claimed it would be too expensive for him to do anything but what he proposed, which, coincidentally, he’d built elsewhere. Mazza’s engineer chimed in, saying he’d heard that the Laguna West TOD’s parcels cost $10,000 more than neighboring sprawl lots to develop.
The answers that came from both me and Grantland Johnson:
- Far from being new designs, the alternative the CPAC suggested were traditional designs that, even in modern times, got premium prices for resales.
- The additional expense to make Laguna West lots was less than $500, and that expense only occurred because Laguna West did some nicer landscaping for the access roads.
- Buyers paid $10,000 more for Laguna West lots, that was not a cost. In other words unimproved lots would be $9,500 more profitable even if Mazza did extra-nice landscaping.
I was angry that Mazza and his Engineer were so misinformed, or purposely deceptive, but Supervisor Johnson concurred in all answers to their misinformation, so I calmed down. “This is great,” I thought. “At last we’re going to get some better design out of the County.”
Mazza had no answer for any of the our answers, except to declare that, while he “respected” Peter Calthorpe and TOD guidelines, he didn’t plan to use them. I left the meeting feeling encouraged. We had Grantland Johnson on our side.
Mazza turned around as we were leaving the meeting to return to the Supervisor’s office, and I remember thinking “Why is he going back?...”
That was the last I saw of Bill Mazza. I didn’t even bother to attend the Board of Supervisors meeting when they voted on his proposal.
The CPAC got the word later: Elkhorn Manor’s rezone requests had been approved by a unanimous vote of the Supervisors—including Grantland Johnson.
To say I was floored is an understatement. This was a mix of politics and betrayal I had not come close to anticipating. And a little inquiry made it clear that this was a decision the Supervisors had no intention of undoing, too. I resigned the CPAC soon after this.
So Mazza’s development, Elkhorn Manor was built—or at least partly built. The models were constructed and the sales began. This was during a real estate slump that followed the first Gulf War, so it didn’t do well.
Then I heard that Mazza died. The subdivision had been such a failure that his widow sold the remaining lots.
Shortly thereafter, the California Building Industry Association voted to issue the “Mazza Prize” for excellence in subdivision design. Supervisor Johnson retired, and was saluted in a farewell editorial by the Sacramento Bee as an “enlightened planner.”
I resigned from the CPAC.
Why Bother Planning?
The County’s duplicity—encouraging our CPAC’s endorsement of New Urbanism or TOD, then pulling the rug out from under it when it came to implementing this new vision—was hurtful and disappointing, but not something new. It was just new to us.
When the County solicits citizen input to update the General Plan—the document that supposedly guides land use and “zoning”—as it does every decade, or when it proposes transportation projects, the seeds of this kind of betrayal are there for all to see. You just have to know what to look for.
Oddly enough, California State law mandates local governments plan development, and update their plans, but that law does not require these governments follow the plans. What such plans and their updates produce are roundly ignored throughout the region.
Whether inadvertently or by design, such development plans produce little real civic guidance and less good development. What we get, in addition to the waste of money spent on staff revising these documents and hearings, 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.
Even psychics don't try this kind of planning
Because of its built-in contradictions, 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—demand for housing, commerce, offices, and so on—a decade or more in the future, something even psychic Miss Cleo would avoid.
So it's no surprise that the governing bodies in our cities and counties 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 whose professional purpose is to wheedle rezones (plan changes) from local governments.
Rezones are enormously profitable, too. Speculators can buy agricultural land for a few thousand dollars an acre and—presto!—rezoning makes it worth tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars an acre. Who else gets a such a huge markup handed to them by government?
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 health care.
How completely is planning (zoning) ignored? One sign might be the amount of land proposed for rezone. In the year 2000 roughly 30,000 acres in the Sacramento region were proposed for rezone. Development that followed current planning would not be so large.
In other words: more acreage proposed changes than accepted current zoning. One local developer even told me she needed to do rezones because they were so profitable. She couldn’t afford the competitive disadvantage of developing land according to plan.
How futile are current zoning practices? Hearings proposing changes to the updated General Plan start as soon as the update is “final.” It's more of a “General Suggestion” than a plan.
The alternative: 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 forms, or sizes (“big,” “medium,” “little”) or development densities. Such plans already exist in Hercules, CA, McKinney TX, and elsewhere.
Plans focused on size or intensity of development would produce neighborhoods that make sense; whether developers made offices, commerce or residences would depend on market conditions when they built. The County could ensure connections between uses rather than trying to guide what would be built.
Such “form-based” zoning could realistically prescribe what could be built, without rezones, even a decade in advance.This would also make public works spending more efficient because the county could accurately anticipate transportation and infrastructure improvements — things done haphazardly now.
Form-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 Sacramento’s McKinley Park to San Francisco’s 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 produce angry citizens who feel betrayed because ad hoc rezones trump any prior planning agreement (by design!), and as a result, produces governments hamstrung by interminable rezone hearings full of these same angry citizens. As we have seen, business-as-usual planning also produces nothing more than pedestrian- and transit-unfriendly, single-use sprawl.
Transportation Project Modelling Fraud
Another deceptive planning practice is selling transportation projects to the public based on their projected benefits—benefits calculated in isolation from their effect on land use. Roads and land-use are obviously related; transportation planning provides the access for development—in effect, the armature for civic design. Cities are built around their mobility, and auto- and petroleum-dependence is essentially a by-product of building neighborhoods friendly to autos but not pedestrians.
[Newman, P. and J. Kenworthy in Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence. Washington, DC, USA: Island Press, 1999 say “The biggest force still driving the Auto City to … accommodate the automobile rather than providing other options is the standard 'black box' transportation/ land use model for calculating benefit-cost ratios on road projects. These are based on how a new or widened road will save time, reduce fuel, and lower emissions and road accidents. … [T]hese benefits are illusory due primarily to 'induced traffic.'”— Cited in Of Mice and Elephants, by planner Stuart Ramsey in the ITE Journal, September 2005 who provided most of the heavy lifting and subsequent quotes for the planning described in the following paragraphs.]
For example the public benefits of a bridge to an island served only by a ferry might be calculated based on developing homes on the island. Of course no such development would occur if no bridge were built.
By contrast, a non-“fantasy island” approach focused on land use rather than road building: it proposed building Vancouver B.C. densely (like its core) rather than sprawling with additional freeway development. This study also included the benefit of serving the denser city with dedicated bus lanes. New, adjacent development would be limited to about 30 percent of presently developed land in the city. Projections for total future regional population and employment remained unchanged.
The savings calculated ($50 billion) were orders of magnitude greater than the projected benefits of a typical major transportation-only project. Because land use changes would be built gradually through development, no net new construction costs had to be associated with the compressed urban area (leading to a theoretically infinite benefit/cost ratio because the $50 billion in benefits would have been achieved at no additional cost).
“Looking in more detail, the compressed urban area scenario achieved a mode split of 65 percent for sustainable modes (transit, bike and walk), compared with 27 percent in the base case[—conventional sprawl]. Total vehicle-kilometers declined by 56 percent and emissions by 53 percent...
“Roads to suburbs foster low-density sprawl in the outlying areas. A proposal to widen Vancouver’s highway to eight lanes over a length of 40 kilometers was proposed....Analysis of this same project that included the inevitable ever-increasing shifts of population out to the presently undeveloped land made more accessible by the highway project, reduced the societal benefits of the project by 50 percent if only 60,000 people (only 2 percent of the projected total population of the region, or 7 percent of the new population) moved to outlying development.
“Project benefits are therefore very sensitive to future land use patterns. For many transportation projects, a 50-percent reduction in benefits would render the project unviable. This analysis found that the shifted land use patterns themselves would produce an increase of more than 1 billion kilograms of harmful emissions.”
Reaping the benefits of reduced travel times, operating costs and accidents are therefore likelier to occur through land use proposals rather than through roads alone. In any event, the case for transportation investments needs to include land use, or the projected benefits are questionable at best.
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