 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||
|
|||||||||||||
|
Home Resource Center In the News Home Greenbelt Alliance in the News |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
|
Greenbelt Alliance In the News
September 17, 2004 Greenbelt needed
for future growth
Opinion BylineNot so long ago, the Santa Clara Valley was an agricultural powerhouse. Orchards stretched as far as the eye could see, and trucks rolled away laden with fruit for the market. Then the valley began to change. Local businesses began exporting computer chips instead of produce. The valley became a new kind of powerhouse, and its economy was booming. This economic expansion was accompanied by a less beneficial kind of growth: sprawl development. Cities in the Santa Clara Valley began to expand outward without much regard for open space protection or downtown-oriented growth. Ultimately, this came at a high cost to the valley and its residents, as open space disappeared under asphalt, and traffic ballooned. San Jose was ground zero for sprawl. Between 1950 and 1970, the city of San Jose mushroomed from 17 square miles to 136 square miles, an astounding 800 percent increase in size. By the 1990's, city residents were tired of the consequences of uncontrolled growth: you had to get in your car for every errand, traffic was getting worse, identical strip malls and subdivisions kept springing up, and open space was a distant, disappearing destination. In 1996, San Jose voters reined in the sprawl, establishing an urban growth boundary. This "greenline" put the city on a land budget. It protected the greenbelt, the farmland, hillsides, and forests outside the line for future generations to enjoy. Twenty-two of the Bay Area's cities now have urban growth boundaries. Some critics charge that these boundaries send housing prices higher. Protected greenbelts probably do make cities more desirable places to live. But studies have found no effect of greenbelts on housing prices. After all, South Bay housing prices have gone up everywhere in cities with and without protected greenbelts. And, in fact, urban growth boundaries are just the first step. Our cities still need to change the way they build. We need our cities to put new homes in our downtowns, near jobs, schools, stores, buses and rail lines. The infrastructure is already there; why not take advantage of the investment we've already made? We can invest in our human infrastructure too, by making sure that people like teachers, nurses, firefighters and retail workers can afford homes in our cities. Cities like San Jose and Mountain View are already building new homes in their downtowns, near transit. Milpitas and East Palo Alto require that a percentage of all new homes are affordable. We need to encourage our cities to do even more. The Santa Clara Valley will continue to grow. By building new homes in our existing cities and towns, we can accommodate new growth while preserving our region's high quality of life. Written by Kyle Simpson, South Bay program coordinator for Greenbelt
Alliance in San Jose, which promotes livable communities in the Bay Area.
You can reach him at ksimpson@greenbelt.org. To send a letter to the editor
e-mail rascierto@svbizink.com. Reprinted by permission of Biz Ink. ### |
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
