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Greenbelt Alliance In the News

February 18, 2005

In Santa Clara County, smart growth is just that

Letter to the Editor

Santa Clara County has always been a growing place. A few decades ago, orchards churned out fruit from productive soils. Over time, the county's productivity stayed high, but the crop changed: The county started growing businesses and smart ideas.

But not all the growth was as smart as the ideas. For years, cities here expanded outward without much regard for open space protection or downtown-oriented growth. Eventually, that exacted a high cost from the valley and its residents, as open space disappeared under asphalt, and traffic slowed freeways to a crawl.

San Jose was ground zero for sprawl. Between 1950 and 1970, the city of San Jose mushroomed from 17 to 136 square miles, an astounding 800 percent increase in size. By the 1990s, 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 just kept springing up; and open space was a distant, disappearing mirage.

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. Urban growth boundaries can make cities more desirable places to live, surrounded as they are by protected greenbelt. But studies have found no effect of urban growth boundaries on housing prices. After all, South Bay housing prices have gone up everywhere -- in cities with and without urban growth boundaries.

And in fact, urban growth boundaries are just the first step. Our cities still need to change the way they build. We're all too aware of the Bay Area's affordable housing shortage. We clearly need to build many more homes than we're building now, and we need to build them in a smarter way. The way to do that is by putting 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? It's an investment in our human infrastructure too, when we make sure that people like teachers, nurses, firefighters, and retail workers can afford homes.

San Jose's proposed North First Street development is an example of this kind of smart investment. The city is proposing to transform a nondescript landscape of office parks and parking lots into a vibrant neighborhood with a lively mix of shops, jobs, and housing. The development will include 25,000 new homes near transit and services. This is a great example of a smart growth development. It takes advantage of our existing resources, rather than spending taxpayer dollars to support far-flung subdivisions that fill our roads with traffic.

Developments like North First Street will also help make the county's transit systems viable. When more people live near transit, more people ride it, and more fares support it. With more support, it becomes more frequent and reliable, so more people ride it. It's a positive feedback loop. It's something more cities should take advantage of, because it also means less traffic and more much-needed housing.

Plans like North First Street are a great start. But we need to encourage all our cities to do more. Santa Clara County will continue to grow, adding roughly 260,000 new residents in the next 15 years. By building new homes near transit in existing cities, we can accommodate new growth while preserving our region's high quality of life.

Now that's smart.

Michele Beasley is South Bay Field Representative, Greenbelt Alliance; Melissa Hippard is Director, Loma Prieta Chapter, Sierra Club

© 2005 American City Business Journals Inc.

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