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Greenbelt Alliance In the News

December 29, 2002

Solano County braces for deluge of development

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Virtually nothing Solano County can do will dam the human flood. The Bay Area's fastest growing county can expect a nearly 50 percent population increase by 2025, when it should be home to some 571,000 people, regional planners say.

Most will settle in cities straddling Interstate 80, drawn by new and relatively inexpensive housing in a major commute corridor.

The question confronting Solano County and other rapidly expanding Bay Area regions is not if they will grow, but how. Do nothing more than what is being done now, experts say, and quality of life will suffer.

Make poor decisions about where and how to house and employ newcomers, and communities will worsen traffic jams, increase housing costs, pave over farmland, hurt the environment and depress economic development, say civic officials, business leaders, land-use planners, and environmentalists.

Thus something must be done to accommodate the roughly 1.5 million more people expected to live in the Bay Area by 2025.

In Solano County, Vacaville alone will swell to a population of 133,000, about half again as populous as it is now, according to an Association of Bay Area Governments study. To make room for homes and businesses, city planners have proposed annexing and developing more than 4,000 acres within the next two decades.

The proposal would increase Vacaville's land area by almost a quarter and, critics say, largely perpetuate the status quo. It would turn the city into a larger bedroom community with too few jobs for residents, too little affordable housing, and even worse traffic, according to the Solano Orderly Growth Committee and an environmental organization.

"It's the same-old same-old, in the sense that it's massive expansion," says Greenbelt Alliance's Natalie DuMont. "Overall, it's more urban sprawl."

The Bay Area's five regional agencies, working together to change the course of development, have sounded a similar warning. Housing and other development will spread over some 83,000 acres of farm land, open space and other vacant land by 2020 if current trends continue, according to the agencies' analysis. That's about 130 square miles -- nearly three times the area of San Francisco -- and amounts to an 11 percent increase in the size of the urban Bay Area.

If freeway-dependent suburbs keep adding many houses but relatively few jobs, urban development will sprawl even farther, the agencies found. A housing shortfall within a jobs-rich Bay Area will require developing up to 45,500 acres outside the region to house up to 265,000 commuters and their families.

This kind of development will further clog Bay Area freeways and roads, according to East Bay counties' traffic forecasts for the next 20 years or so. It will worsen and create bottlenecks.
In Solano County, that means extra aggravation for commuters on more and longer stretches of Interstates 80 and 680 and Highways 12 and 37. Motorists also can expect new traffic quagmires on many thoroughfares, such as Peabody, Cordelia and Rockville roads.

Alameda County traffic planners expect jam-packed byways to get worse. Almost 39 percent of the county's roads, including freeways and highways, will be congested during the evening commute by 2025. The morning commute will be marginally better, with about 26 percent of roads congested.
Contra Costa County motorists will drive longer distances over more time and at slower speeds. Evening rush hour commuters, for instance, will travel about 40 percent more miles, spend almost twice as much time on the road, and poke along freeways at an average speed of just 42 miles per hour.

Much of the increased congestion will hit eastern Contra Costa County. "Even though it will have substantial job growth, they'll still be adding many more residents ... than jobs," said Brad Beck, senior transportation planner for the Contra Costa Transportation Authority. "Not surprisingly, we'll end up with a lot more traffic."

Not only is the Bay Area building too few houses too far from jobs, it is building far too little housing that lower-income families can afford, according to the Bay Area's regional agencies and others trying to change the course of development.

"Vacaville's job really should be to provide more employment opportunities and affordable housing," said Ernest Kimme, chairman of the Solano Orderly Growth Committee. "Those are the two big gaps that we are missing in our community."

That's largely because communities in Solano County and elsewhere in the Bay Area are adding relatively little multifamily housing -- condominiums, townhouses and apartments.

"If the status quo remains, I think we're going to be in a worse situation" in 20 or so years, said Lydia Tan, executive vice president of Bridge Housing Corporation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit affordable housing developer.

Just 16 percent of the region's housing will be affordable for people with low or very low incomes in 2020 if current trends continue, according to a study by the Bay Area's regional agencies. Another 22 percent will be affordable to moderate-income households. Most housing -- 62 percent -- will be affordable only to people making above-average incomes.

Another troubling trend is the relatively little public and private money available to help pay for the construction or leasing of affordable housing, Tan said. Until that changes, too many developers and property owners will find that it makes better financial sense to build or rent market-rate housing, Tan said. The continued production of mostly market-rate housing -- and conversion of subsidized housing to market rates -- will offset much of what little affordable housing is built.

"We're just swimming upstream," Tan said.

The dearth of low-cost housing and the high cost of housing overall is a worry not just for homebuyers. Anyone planning on working in the Bay Area in the next 20 years or so also should be concerned, business leaders say.

Expensive housing is the largest factor in the Bay Area's high cost of living, said Andrew Michael of the Bay Area Council, which promotes economic development. That cost undercuts business productivity and keeps the regional economy from performing as well as it could, he said.

"Since the (Bay Area's population) growth is going to come, the question is: Is there a way to deal with it that is not going to erode economic prosperity and quality of life but will actually improve it?" said Michael, the organization's vice president for sustainable development.

Escalating housing costs push up wages and make it difficult to attract and keep valuable employees. That makes some companies think twice about doing business in the region.

Biotechnology companies, for instance, warn that the housing crunch is slowing the industry's expansion, Michael said. Those companies cannot bring products to market if manufacturers cannot afford to set up shop.

"That's a whole growth component that the whole Bay Area could get on to," Michael said. "But we may lose out on that because of our cost of living and lack of housing near job centers."

Reach Dogen Hannah at 925-945-4794 or dhannah@cctimes.com.

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