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Greenbelt Alliance In the News

August 25, 2002

Density will decide destiny for housing in the East Bay

Region has land to accommodate growth if it wishes

Most of them will be our children and grandchildren. The rest will arrive from elsewhere, swarming to new jobs like moths to the flame, lured by the promise of sunny California.

Contrary to the windshield-framed, bumper-to-bumper panorama burned into Bay Area commuters' eyeballs, we have ample room to house all 708,301 of them.

Less than a fifth of the land in Alameda, Solano and Contra Costa counties sprouts urban trappings. Subtract parks, steep-sloped parcels, water and other protected open space from urbanized acreage, and the region has nearly 1,400 square miles of developable land.

How much land do three-quarters of a million people need?

Imagine growth as a scoop of ice cream: How far it spreads depends on its temperature, or in the case of growth, its density.

If we house every new resident for the next 25 years in single-family subdivisions, it will consume nearly 100 square miles, equal to 51/2 towns the size of Danville.

If we build urban-style downtown housing instead, we can lodge everyone in less than 8 square miles, an area half of Danville's size.

Physically, the East Bay could use as little or as much land as it desires to provide a home for every new man, woman and child.

But the debate over how much, where or even if the region should grow has little to do with geography. It's about how we choose to live and how we perceive our obligation to the next generation.

Land for endangered kit foxes or enough homes for everyone? Tract homes as far as the eye can see or open space in perpetuity? The freedom to live where and how we choose or a government-mandated lifestyle?

Nature vs. housing

Growth clashes are not new here, of course. Anti-sprawl activism has raged in the region for more than 30 years as evidenced by its expansive parks, profusion of urban growth boundaries and a nationally recognized penchant for ballot-box planning.

Today, the debate over where and how to grow thunders in nearly every town, a chorus of wails about crowded schools, high housing costs, grueling commutes and the loss of open space.

Environmentalists wage war against conventional single-family housing subdivision proposals from Vacaville to Livermore. They argue that until cities restrict the supply of cheap ranch land, little incentive exists to build higher-density housing in downtowns or near transit.

"Ten thousand single-family houses have already been approved and not yet built in east Contra Costa alone," says Evelyn Stivers of the Greenbelt Alliance. "Are we going to keep going until we pave over every square inch?"

Homebuilders are fighting back. In dozens of publications and public hearings, they call it unconscionable elitism to raise the drawbridge on the American dream, a single-family home in suburbia. They say environmentalists would sentence new residents to apartment life when land remains available.

"Yes, we need to preserve the important wild places in the Bay Area," says Robert Nunn, a Brentwood native who farms, builds houses and serves on the board of Save Mount Diablo. "But we also need places for people to live. We need infill. We need transit villages. We need single-family detached homes. We need it all, and we have the land to do it."

Civic leaders, meanwhile, seek compromise in regional initiatives that pose the question, "If not here, then where?"

They fear that if we don't build houses somewhere, our children will have to move elsewhere and businesses will follow, taking jobs and the region's economic underpinnings with them.

"People are saying 'Close the borders and put guards at the gate!' which won't work," says Ernest Kimme, chairman of the Orderly Growth Committee of Solano County. "The real question is how can we bring housing and jobs closer together so that we can do something about congestion?"

Learning by example

What the East Bay is experiencing is a "huge educational process where everybody is learning about how to build better communities," said Stephen Wheeler, a UC Berkeley planning professor. "Ten years ago, the regional agencies weren't interested in smart growth and most towns weren't either, and that's changed."

Among the debates:

• Seven former Livermore mayors have launched a ballot drive that asks voters to halt a decades-long campaign to build 12,500 houses on ranch land north of town. Meanwhile, the city took the unprecedented step of hiring a renowned urban design firm to help plan a revitalized, denser downtown, an apparent contradiction of its recent rejection of a proposal to bring the planned new BART line off Interstate 580 into downtown.

• In the "Shaping Our Future" initiative, Contra Costa County and its towns have for the first time retained a consultant to help leaders decide where growth should go. It is part of a Bay Area-wide effort to help cities consider the regional impacts of local decisions. Critics say cities will never voluntarily act regionally if decisions conflict with local wishes.

• In November, the Greenbelt Alliance opened its first office in the relatively sparsely populated Solano County. People occupy only a tenth of its land, but Solano's expanding stature as a cupboard stocked with affordable housing for its job-rich neighbors has environmentalists worried.

• Danville has sued Contra Costa County over its approval of the 1,400-house Alamo Creek project east of town. The developer cites its proximity to thousands of jobs in a nearby business park, but city leaders say it will dump too much traffic onto local streets.

Public debate is normal and healthy, says a Portland-based urban planning consultant who has built a thriving business as a sort of psychiatrist for dysfunctional communities. He has helped write regional growth plans for sprawling regions such as Salt Lake City, Denver and Austin, Texas.

"Everyone starts with a philosophical point of view, but through study, dialogue and research, people come up with practical solutions," said John Fregonese, partner in Fregonese Calthorpe Associates. "But to get political consensus, you have to fulfill a lot of dreams."

Contra Costa has hired him for $600,000 to lead its 19 cities and the county to water. Can he make them drink?

Bridging the gulf

As in the rest of California, Contra Costa's city and county elected officials determine where developers build.

Communities vie for uses that produce sales tax dollars such as shopping centers and office parks. That's called fiscalization of land use.

But new housing -- much of it relatively affordable -- has been predominantly built on the urban fringe where bedroom communities view population growth as a means to attract jobs, upscale retail and road improvements.

It has produced a disastrous gulf between where people live, work and shop. Some workers spend two to three hours a day on clogged highways.

Fregonese believes that Contra Costa can bring jobs and housing closer, ease congestion and reduce the pressure to use open spaces with a smart mix of strategies:

• Redevelop blighted downtowns, strip malls and dilapidated neighborhoods. The county has 3,000 to 4,000 such acres that can accommodate higher densities, he says.

• Build on vacant land inside cities, commonly referred to as infill development. In most cases, the land is near existing public services such as streets, water and sewers.

• Erect transit villages with homes, shops and offices near bus and train lines. If transit is more convenient, more people will take it.

These strategies will not eliminate the need to build houses in open space. But they have the potential to significantly curtail the amount of land needed for growth, Fregonese says.

"You can cut back on your consumption of vacant land but you can't eliminate it entirely," he says. "Just increasing density (inside cities) is not always the solution. If you increase it in the wrong places, you get more congestion and come up against natural resource issues."

The county has enough vacant land inside its urban limit line -- roughly 23 square miles -- for most of its estimated household growth in the next 20 years without boosting densities or violating county law, according to his analysis.

If housing sprouts on every vacant parcel inside the boundary, the county would grow from 28 percent urbanized to 31 percent. County law, at least until 2010 when it expires, restricts urban development to 35 percent.

New models wanted

Practically speaking, much of this vacant land is in east Contra Costa on the outskirts of a string of towns along the hyper-congested Highway 4, or in Lamorinda, a hilly region largely unsuited for intense development. Strong coalitions oppose housing in either area.

Which leads, again, to the question: If not on vacant land inside the growth boundary, then where?

"To answer that, we need a new development model," said Donna Gerber, a Contra Costa County supervisor and state Assembly candidate. "Eighty percent of our general plans are still based on the 1940s-era suburban model where you put the houses here and the offices there and malls over there and you link them with a lot of big roads."

Gerber points to Antioch where a major fight brews over the Sand Creek Specific Plan, a proposal to build 4,800 senior and upscale houses, a business park, shops and a golf course on four square miles of ranch land southwest of town.

The land is within city limits and the county's growth boundary but the project is old-style sprawl gussied up with a new bow, Gerber says.

Advocates say its large senior component means fewer cars and that its luxury homes will attract CEOs who will relocate their businesses to job-hungry Antioch. Developer-paid traffic and school fees will help fund needed improvements.

"It's a lie to tell the public that more sprawl is going to make things better," Gerber said. "It won't and they know it won't. It's the definition of insanity to keep using the same model and somehow expect to get different results."

Instead, she says, Antioch and its neighbors should turn to the "smart growth" strategies that Fregonese and others advocate. East County, for example, could revive transit along an abandoned railroad line that snakes through its towns and plan transit villages along the route.

Cities' visions diverge

Cities such as Concord, Walnut Creek, Emeryville and Pleasant Hill have endorsed downtown housing and transit villages as a means to bring people and jobs into the heart of their communities.

Transit villages and infill are all fine and good, but in Antioch, at least, it won't be enough to keep up with demand, counters city planning director Victor Carniglia.

Antioch builds more houses than any other East Bay city except Brentwood -- nearly 1,000 a year on average since 1997. Put another way, one of every five houses erected in the county was in "River City."

To replace even 40 percent of the houses proposed for Sand Creek, Antioch would have to bulldoze its downtown and cover it with three-story apartment buildings, Carniglia said.

"Even if you had a developer interested in doing it, what is the market for people who want to live in an apartment in downtown Antioch?" Carniglia asks. "Infill is not really a solution unless the market is there for the product or the public is willing to heavily subsidize it."

Livermore, on the other hand, may take the opposite tack.

At the ballot box and in its choice of City Council members, the public has repeatedly and emphatically said no to a series of housing plans for 10,000 acres of ranch land north of town.

Yet voters may be ready to embrace growth downtown if it attracts amenities such as theaters, restaurants and more diverse housing, says city planning commissioner Marj Leider.

It's still early in the study process, but Leider envisions tasteful rowhouses around a square and apartments over shops and restaurants, both with easy access to transit and cultural facilities.

"When I came here 45 years ago, most of the people here were young families who needed a big house," Leider says. "Now, we have a lot of young single people who don't want a big house and older people who want to downsize but they don't want to leave town.

"I think people will support higher densities once they see the benefits."

How much is enough?

The problem with that theory, counter critics, is that people don't come to town bearing only money to spend in restaurants or shop in local stores.

Growth always comes with tradeoffs, says Assemblyman Joe Canciamilla, D-Pittsburg, a veteran of Contra Costa's growth wars as a former supervisor and Pittsburg mayor.

They drive cars. They bear children who need a school and a teacher. Some will commit crimes and others will seek food stamps. They will demand nice parks and drinking water.

Someday, he says, the East Bay must decide when enough is enough.

In some places, it's already happening.

Anti-growth activists have successfully cut back or killed plans for tens of thousands of houses in places such as the Tassajara Valley, Cowell Ranch and North Livermore.

A backlash against the smart-growth movement and its prescription for higher densities in older communities is gaining speed, too. Outraged neighborhood groups say proponents gloss over local impacts in the quest to find regional traffic relief.

But if we say no on the edge and we say no in the cities, where will those 708,301 people expected to join the East Bay population live?

Much like the pioneers of the 19th century, maybe they'll have to hit the trail in search of a new frontier.

"Will building all these houses make our lives better? I don't think they will," Canciamilla says. "What good does it do our children if we destroy the qualities that make the Bay Area a great place to live?

"At some point, you have to say 'We have reached the maximum ability to serve this population.' We're looking for a miracle but there are no easy answers here."

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Lisa Vorderbrueggen covers land-use and transportation. Reach her at 925-945-4773 or lvorderb@cctimes.com.

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