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Greenbelt Alliance In the News

June 23, 2003

When Smart Growth is dumb

Is the new buzzword simply code for another attack on suburbia?

So here's a simple question: If Smart Growth is so smart, why isn't it making more headway?
Since the phrase caught fire in 1998, it's been touted as the cure to almost every conceivable urban ill. Politicians and developers embrace it; so does Smart Growth America, with members from the Sierra Club to the Bicycle Federation of Washington.

Closer to home, hundreds of housing units are proposed at BART stations in Union City, Millbrae and Walnut Creek. San Rafael has new apartments over shops on the city's main drag, Fourth Street. And five governmental agencies are mapping out how 20 years of projected growth could be eased into the Bay Area's existing cities.

Push past the anecdotes and buzz, though, and development looks about the same as ever. Most new suburban tracts consist of oversized houses clustered around cul de sacs. In older cities, growth opponents have honed naysaying into a self-righteous art. In Sacramento, ambitious planning bills tend to stall or die.

"The ideas have widespread support. The challenge is in the specific projects," says Victoria Eisen, a planner with the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) working on the 20-year "Smart Growth Strategy."

"It's change," Eisen adds. "And nobody likes change."

Undeniably true. Just as it was all the other times planners tried to reshape growth in places like the Bay Area. Which raises another question: Is Smart Growth a magic new weapon to finally block sprawl -- or a new spin on old attacks on the suburbs where most Americans now live?

Already huge patches of once green countryside have been turned into vast, smog-filled deserts that are neither city, suburb nor country. . . . You can't stop progress, they say, yet much more of this kind of progress and we shall have the paradox of prosperity lowering our real standard of living.
-- "Urban Sprawl," William H. Whyte Jr., 1957

At the heart of Smart Growth is an argument that critics of suburbia have made since ranch homes replaced ranches: There's got to be a better way. The notion that every family deserves a plot of land chews up our natural resources, they say. And if every pinprick of a town maps out a future that ignores neighbors and the larger region, then chaos -- traffic congestion, for starters -- is inevitable.
The solution of planners and environmental activists is to steer growth and rein it in.

As far back as 1970, ABAG called for "vertical expansion of existing communities." In 1983, the San Francisco-based People for Open Space (now the Greenbelt Alliance) argued in the environmental white paper "Room Enough" that "a new course based on compact, city-centered development policies . . . better fits the lifestyle and family needs of most of today's households."

"Room Enough" co-author Larry Orman, who now directs GreenInfo Network, which specializes in detailed environmental maps, says, "Smart Growth can mean anything. It gives people a rosy glow. It's a mushy word that development interests can take and run with."

But Orman likes how the Smart Growth approach avoids the tendency to stress single issues -- protecting farmland or building homes for lower-income people.

"It's a buzzword, but a good buzzword," Orman says.

Planning could keep large amounts of open space open by encouraging compact forms of development instead of the present scatteration. . . . A large proportion of the population increase could be concentrated in apartments built near express bus stops, and existing or proposed rapid-transit stations. . .
-- "Redoing America," Edmund Faltermayer, 1968

Whatever Smart Growth's lineage, it's a banner that people can rally around.

In the California Legislature, a Smart Growth Caucus has 38 members. Several bills this year follow "smart growth" themes. One would create a pilot program to share a new sales tax in the Sacramento region -- an antidote to the so-called "fiscalization of land use" that prompts cities and counties to push lucrative retail projects over needed housing.

Closer to home, there's the ambitious "Smart Growth Strategy." The sponsors include five regional agencies with a combined 25 initials and the Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable Development, which includes the pro-business Bay Area Council and Urban Habitat, a group dedicated to "social and environmental justice from a regional perspective."

The aim: to show how the Bay Area could add 675,000 housing units during the next 20 years in a way that makes existing communities more vibrant while keeping sprawl contained.

The results are being fine-tuned, along with possible legislation.

While this sounds dramatic, the study has no legal status. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission may use it as a guide in making funding decisions next year. Beyond that? The most recent public report promises "a multi- pronged, multi-year process to create a hospitable environment for this new way of growing."

It may not be easy.

The one Bay Area county not involved in the study is Contra Costa, which has a similar exercise under way called 'Shaping Our Future.' There were meetings in various parts of the county -- including the affluent older suburbs of Moraga, Lafayette and Orinda. The latter two cities have BART stations with parking lots, where smart growth (and common sense) would say new housing should be placed.

The catch: Many residents showed up to say the so-called semirural nature of their communities should not be messed with. "The predominant theme is that the Lamorinda community doesn't want any new development," Moraga's town manager told a local weekly.

In Berkeley, meanwhile, there's been a spate of new housing downtown.

The city wants to encourage such projects by loosening some height limits. Critics responded with a ballot initiative to tighten them.

That farsighted tax-sharing bill for the Sacramento region? Hanging by a thread. And some say the three alternatives in the Smart Growth Strategy are all unrealistic about the amount of housing in older cities. "I don't know one person from the business community comfortable with the alternatives," says Sunne Wright McPeak, president of the Bay Area Council.

The most difficult obstacle . . . is the concern many people have in regard to any kind of development -- especially at moderate or higher densities -- and local government policies and plans that express and enforce those concerns.
-- "Room Enough," People for Open Space, 1983

Why the uphill climb for something that seems so logical? So . . . smart?

Supporters talk darkly of bad laws and pro-automobile bias and official inertia that maintains the status quo.

But the problem is also that support for change tends to be wide rather than deep. A few people care intensely about planning; most don't. Nor should Smart Growth advocates forget that by their nature, modern suburbs attract residents who want to own land in controlled surroundings. Think of it as homesteading -- with a 30-year mortgage and a three-car garage.

That's the view of Ed Church, director of the Liveable Communities Initiative of the East Bay Community Foundation. "We all reproduce our culture.

Asking any of us to step back and do things a different way isn't easy," he says. "This is something they know and like. Let's see if we can partner with them to change what comes next."

"Few people, if any, came to the workshops saying we should keep doing what we're doing," says Eisen. "That's not a future any of us would want to live in. "

We define smart growth as growth that is economically sound, environmentally friendly, and supportive of community livability -- growth that enhances our quality of life.

And Smart Growth America:

To achieve smart growth, communities should:

1. Mix land uses.
2. Take advantage of existing community assets.
3. Create a range of housing opportunities and choices.
4. Foster "walkable," close-knit neighborhoods.
5. Promote distinctive, attractive communities with a strong sense of place, including the rehabilitation and use of historic buildings.
6. Preserve open space, farmland, natural beauty, and critical environmental areas.
7. Strengthen and encourage growth in existing communities.
8. Provide a variety of transportation choices.
9. Make development decisions predictable, fair and cost-effective.
10. Encourage citizen and stakeholder participation in development decisions.
    

Hey, where's motherhood and apple pie?

Pros and Cons of Smart Growth

Suppose California was serious about taking a mature approach to the Golden State's future growth.

Here are a few basic things we'd need:

• Open minds. On both sides of the debate. Smart Growth fans need to realize that the "norm" is no longer a 1910 neighborhood of walk-up flats along a trolley line. It's the 'burbs -- so the challenge is to create subdivisions with a variety of housing types and roadways where walking and buses are attractive options.

For their part, people who stake out apocalyptic positions against development need to take a closer look at where they live. One example: There are apartments above storefronts in such downtowns as Mill Valley, Orinda and San Mateo. What's wrong with adding a few more in sharp three- or four-story buildings?

• Laws that make sense. Forget big steps like reforming Proposition 13 (about as likely as a Warriors threepeat). Too many cities that say they want downtown housing have zoning that dictates such low densities and high parking requirements that nothing creative can be built.
  

• A determined governor. From Parris Glendening in Maryland, who popularized the term Smart Growth, to Tom McCall, who led the crusade for Oregon's powerful land-use law in 1973, the key to breakthroughs in growth management has been governors who make the issue theirs. Gray Davis, by contrast, has mostly shown an interest in doling out transportation funds.
  

• Regional government. Even if our good Gray guv becomes a card-carrying member of the Greenbelt Alliance, he can only do so much when the Bay Area's 7 million residents are split among nine counties and 100 cities. One city pulls up the drawbridge, forcing growth elsewhere; another woos auto dealers from its neighbors, putting budgets in disarray.
  

Much better would be a regional government with power to craft a large- scale vision for the area -- and power over major projects that might make that vision succeed or fail. Not every zoning decision, mind you, but with clout when needed.

While this may sound utopian -- or terrifying -- it almost happened in 1974, when a bill to merge five Bay Area planning agencies passed the state Assembly and had then-Gov. Ronald Reagan's tacit support. But the state Senate balked. Another try failed in 1992 with the Bay Vision plan to merge three agencies, including the Association of Bay Area Governments and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission.

Conventional wisdom says the moment for strong regional government here has passed. Yet when the Field Poll asked Bay Area residents in April, "Should the state government require cities and counties . . . to create a joint regional plan on growth and land-use issues?," 73 percent called it a good idea. Maybe it's time to renew the battle.

E-mail John King at jking@sfchronicle.com. For more information on the Smart Growth Strategy, www.abag.ca.gov/planning/smartgrowth.

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