Local "Planning" Follies - part 7 Some Conclusions

Some Conclusions

(c) by Mark Dempsey 

Part of a series. See Local "Planning" Follies Part 1 - The state of play in land use planning for links to all posts.

Peaking oil production—or political turmoil that makes supplies unreliable— climate change, growing (and increasingly alienated) populations, water and power shortages, and a host of other intrusions of ecology into our economy are signs that we are reaching the limits of the physical environment’s ability to support our civilization. We must change how we live on or own or have change “forced on us with chaos and suffering by the inexorable laws of nature.” 

The biggest attraction of New Urbanist civic design is that it develops cities with lower environmental impacts than sprawl, and offers many advantages unavailable to sprawl residents. Since it promotes walking, and less pollution, it’s healthier too.

But what can we do now that will be effective to promote this return to the traditional way of building cities? With the understanding that change will not occur overnight, here are a few suggestions:

• Educate people about the 1970-71 peak in U.S. domestic oil production, and about how palliative fracking has been (wells play out faster). Without this education, complacent people are not motivated to support alternative civic design, or transportation infrastructure.

• Demand more intelligent management of the public realm from local governments—if only so our current, unintended subsidies don’t bankrupt our cities. Local governments hear you, as a constituent, much more than state or national officials do.

It's not possible to persuade people to abandon amenities like private yards if they can't trust the city or county to make public parks available. The required public policy change—actually informing the public so more intelligent decisions can be made—is what this writing promotes.

If we do not start doing these things, the deterioration of our communities will continue unabated. We will also lose whatever global advantage we might have had, and start down the slippery slope of the decline of empire.

Some Myths Debunked

Myth 1: The market will make a pleasant, moral, safe, efficient society, rather than vice-versa. The Truth: We cannot trust “the market” or any other form of automatic pilot to come up with intelligent public policy. Markets themselves require regulation to referee, provide safe places for them to occur, and to account for externalities.

Myth 2: The experts know best. The Truth: “Experts” got us sprawl. The amateurs built the really great cities like London and Paris.

Myth 3: We build villages because it takes a village to raise a child. The Truth: Currently, we build things that may be deceptively labelled “village,” but they are typically single-use, pedestrian-unfriendly sprawl. Sprawl does its best to maximize privacy at the expense of the neighborly concern, or the public spaces where it can be exercised.

Myth 4: Politeness and excuses from politicians are enough. No one is more polite than politicians, in my experience. And no one is better at making you feel like you’re “special.” The Truth: Not enough. Give me a rude leader who gets the right things done. We desperately need effective, imaginative public policy, not better excuses.

Myth 5: We are not interconnected, and can do without public policy “meddling.” The Truth: We’re so interconnected, the average person can’t even make a writing instrument (pencil, pen). We don’t grow our own food, treat our own water, or sewage; we don’t do our own mosquito abatement; we don’t produce our own vaccines, or electricity, or clothing. In short, we are very interdependent. If we do not manage that interdependence successfully, we will suffer as a civilization and individually.

Signs, Hopeful and Otherwise

In 1860, the capital city of Washington, with a population of 60,000, had unlighted streets, open sewers, and pigs roaming about its principal avenues. This condition was worse than the worst of our current cities. There is hope.—Andres Duany

Trends for the future are not all bleak. There are hopeful signs that local leaders are slowly waking up to the potential for better public policy. SACOG’s regional Blueprint process—a series of hearings and presentations to educate the public about land use—is one of the best new items on the horizon.

Why? The recent Blueprint process is one of the first local planning processes to actually educate the public about the costs and benefits of various alternatives. It is not nearly as educational as I would like, but it deserves a lot of credit for introducing something other than the cloud-cuckoo land of the public’s wishful thinking. In a refreshing change, the recent General Plan Update conducted by the County of Sacramento was similarly concerned with consequences—although it still discussed none of the financial implications of the alternatives discussed. 

Some of the public still wanted only rural development, and one said he was opposed to the County telling anyone how they could develop their land, apparently detecting the Stalinist flavor of planning as currently practiced.

Nevertheless, the tide appears to be turning. A recent speech from the Blueprint project’s chief—past directory of SACOG—Mike McKeever suggests re-prioritizing land use based on how it impacts our petroleum use. So some policy makers “get it.”

On the minus side, the rest of this writing documents many of the foibles of government as it tries to shovel public money into private pockets—often to the detriment of the common good. Pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use neighborhoods, particularly ones built more compactly, relies on active government participation—and not just in the development’s initial phases, either. Not only do residences with smaller yards demand parks, but they demand security, and the will to maintain the parks and safety they require.

The big question is whether we can trust local governments to be anything more than their misguided past. Can they actually practice enlightened, imaginative design, or are they destined to be mired in endless hearings designed to obscure rather than enlighten?

It’s become fashionable lately to deride government as something that can only meddle, and be unhelpful. This fashionable cynicism has blossomed into an industry where, as New York Times editorialist, Thomas Frank says “The true scoffer... can see that government is not merely susceptible to corruption; government is corruption, a vile profaning of the market-most-holy in which some groups contrive to swipe the property of other groups via taxation and regulation.”

To me, suggesting that a dislike for corruption means a dislike for government is throwing the baby out with the bath water. It’s still possible to have good governance that really does perform public service. Examples of shared responsibility for shared goods are too common to ignore (like Curitiba—The Third World Gets It in a previous post).

Conservative economist Milton Friedman observes that there are four ways to spend money.

• You can spend your money on yourself, which means you’ll get just what you want at a pretty good price.
• You can spend your money on others, which means they’ll get what you like, not necessarily what they like, and you won’t spend too much.
• You can spend someone else’s money on yourself. People get what they want, and spare no expense, so not at a bargain price.
• And you can spend other people’s money on other people, in which case, who cares what they get or whether it’s a good deal?

This last option is too often the mode of government spending. The remedy, obviously, is to remember that we’re spending our money on ourselves.

The temptation to dismiss all government efforts as futile remains strong. Given the performance of local governments documented here, or simply an encounter with government’s attempt to settle disputes in the courts, most people will say there could be nothing worse. The real question is whether we can set aside our cynicism, and adopt a clear vision of what public service really means.
Unfortunately, there is something worse: the un-governed alternative.

Epilogue: The Pressure Continues

Because of the subsidies and incentives offered sprawl builders, and because Sacramento’s growth continues, the pressure to develop even more outlying land is unrelenting. Sprawl is still very profitable, even if it is in floodplain behind weak levees. 

Therefore, I wrote the Supervisors recently to protest their move to change the Urban Service Boundary (the limit for sewer and water), and their acts to subsidize growth in floodplain. 

Then Supervisor Roger Dickinson replied. He wrote that the Supervisors were simply consulting with the City of Sacramento about how to “implement the Joint Vision for Natomas.” He added that I needn’t worry about the levees, he expected them to provide 200-year flood protection before any development occurred in this expansion to North Natomas development.

Here is my reply (slightly edited to fit in this context):

Dear Supervisor Dickinson,

Your reply to my letter protesting the expansion of the Urban Services Boundary reminds me of a previous encounter when a group of concerned parents at Rio Linda's West Side School were gathered to meet with you. We were worried that speeding cars would endanger the kids crossing West Second as they came to school (the danger had been bad for some time, but increased development was making it much worse).

West second is an old rural road that had been widened as part of the County's efforts to implement its street design standards when adjacent, new subdivisions were built. For internal streets in new subdivisions, these widths are such invitations to speeding that the County's design standards requires the streets to bend every 1,000 lineal feet (hence the “spaghetti streets” of suburbia). Widening an old rural road like West Second, which is straight as an arrow, is doubly bad: it invites faster auto speeds without any obstacle like the bends of spaghetti streets, and provides increased exposure to danger for crossing students because they spend more time crossing a wider street.

When the assembled parents first asked you to do something about West Second, you replied that there must be a thousand project requests like this throughout the County, and they typically took six years to get approved. 

I remember thinking then: “What would Roger say to a pharmacist who told him his child's medicine would be ready in six years, with one chance in a thousand that he'd get it even then?...I mean I wonder what he would say after he vaulted over the counter to strangle the pharmacist threatening his child's health?...”

In a triumph of retail politics—and possibly because I suggested it—you managed to get the County to narrow the road in front of West Side School.

But retail, transaction-by-transaction public policy is not the complaint I had about the County then, nor is it why I wrote to protest changes to the Urban Service Boundary.

My beef is that the County's public policy is, let's just say, less-than-optimum; it manages transactions without vision. 

The County still mandates, and developers still build, wider roads exactly like those on West Second. According to planning staff, the County has no plans to change its murderous street design standards even when it holds hearings for the General Plan update. [Update: The State of California now requires "Complete Streets" of all new development. These streets accommodate pedestrians, transit, cyclists as well as autos... So good news!]

That's bad public policy. The County continues to build more such street problems with each new development, and I'm guessing that the six-year chance-in-a-thousand hasn't improved much either. This ignores the law of holes: To get out of the hole, first stop digging.

As for the subject of my original e-mail: No matter how you slice it, rezoning more North Natomas land would hand the land speculators another gigantic payday. You may have some tiny triumph in the negotiations, but it's very, very bad public policy to do this kind of thing. (And what happened to that ordinance about handing special favors to individuals?)

I don't care if it's to “implement the Joint Vision for Natomas”—your words—or to provide a home for the Easter Bunny. It's bad public policy to, in effect, subsidize outlying development that lengthens commutes in floodplain surrounded by weak levees. Excuses, even fine “joint vision” excuses, don't make it any better.

The Dutch, by the way, have 10,000 year flood protection. That's what good public policy looks like.
Another good public policy example: When rezoning, the Germans require developers to sell the land to the County at the current zoning's price, then before they can build, the developers must buy it back when it's rezoned (at the higher, rezoned price). All the profits stay with the County which, by any measurement, is their source anyway. There is no “unearned increment” subsidizing the worst kind of development, and providing huge paydays for land speculators.

An alternative good policy was the Romans'. They financed their famous roads by increasing taxes on adjacent land when public amenities (like the road) made the land more valuable. This would at least diminish the subsidy and pay for the amenity.

We have neither the German nor the Roman strategy. Sacramento County's strategy, if it can be called that, is to shovel as much public money as possible out the door to the oligarchy of land speculators and commercial interests, even if we have a deficit so bad Head Start kids can't get dental care (true!). At the height of the recent building boom, the County budget deficit was “the worst in living memory” said Illa Collin.

Yet Former Supervisor Collin believes taxing rezones “politically impossible,” and former County Supervisor Roberta MacGlashan says she thinks it's “illegal” (this after hearing some truly outrageous, self-contradictory public policy suggestions in a public meeting, and protesting none of them).

The negotiated proposal to subsidize the basketball arena is similarly awful, by the way. Any deal that would be bettered by gifting the arena to the team's owners is at least awful, and you know it. And yes, I've read that the profits from developing the old arena's land would mitigate this disaster, but I'm not even buying that. Why isn't the County (and the public) profiting from the rest of North Natomas where we effectively handed a many-thousands percent profit to the land speculators? How is this any different than the “hand-the-money-to-the-oligarchs” strategy?

By your reply, all I can deduce is that the County is consistent. This is not reassuring in the slightest. It's certainly not the policy consistency I've been looking for.

Someone once told me that you either get the desired result or the excuses. Therefore, I'd like to nominate Sacramento County as the World's champion maker of excuses. Terrific at retail politics, but when it comes to real public policy: We've got the finest excuses money can buy.
Shameful, really.