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Greenbelt Alliance In the News

June 28, 2006

Make room for a million: Significant sprawl by 2020

Report: Bay Area has not done enough to protect open space, keep homes affordable

The region's leaders and city planners are doing just one-third of what must be done to adequately protect open space, reduce sprawl and make sure these new arrivals - and even some long-timers - can afford to buy a house, according to the alliance.

"We know we're going to grow. We know we've got major areas of land - about 400,000 acres - that are facing significant sprawl development," said Tom Steinbach, the alliance's director. "The idea that we're only doing a third to half of what we should be doing is alarming to us."

The report ranked city and county government efforts in areas including building local parks, creating affordable housing, increasing density and protecting open space. Of the 101 cities examined, only 17 earned even half the points possible on the group's scale.

One area where local governments generally excelled: Mixed-use development. Mixing residential and commercialdistricts encourages round-the-clock activity on local streets and puts residents closer to shops and jobs, creating, according to the Alliance, "safer, more vibrant and more complete neighborhoods."

But in many cases, cities lack even basic smart-growth policies to contain growth or promote transit-oriented, high-density living.

"The policies ... lay the groundwork," Steinbach said. "If the city doesn't have the policies, it's very unlikely it will grow responsibly."

Petaluma earned top rankings, with a score of 70 percent. San Jose - which built a reputation in the 1950s and '60s as a land of strip malls - was second with 69 percent.

At the bottom were wealthy cities. Tony Hillsborough in San Mateo County and Belvedere in Marin County earned zero points, affluent Atherton had 3 percent, Orinda in Contra Costa County had 10 percent and Piedmont in Alameda County had 12 percent.

Laurel Prevetti, San Jose's deputy planning director, said San Jose's leaders have spent 30 years turning around the city's image as a land of sprawl.

"It takes a long time to retrofit suburbs and mend those mistakes of the past," she said Tuesday.

The city, she added, aims some day to go from "being the poster child of sprawl to hopefully being the poster child for smart growth."

But "smart growth" - which often translates to in-fill condominiums - will not meet the region's housing and development needs by itself, cautioned Dennis Oliver, spokesman for the California Alliance for Jobs, which represents workers and contractors who pave the roads, bury in the pipes and build the infrastructure.

"You need to build a combination of housing types. The market is not going to embrace something that is rigidly one product," he said.

Advocates of smart growth look at density and transit use and assign a grade. Those buying the houses use an entirely different criteria, Oliver added.

"They're looking at how good the schools are," Oliver said.

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