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Home Resource Center In the News Home Greenbelt Alliance in the News |
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Greenbelt Alliance In the News
May 25, 2006 Fewer acres at risk than 5 years ago, study says Subheading By Kiley RussellMore than 400,000 acres in the Bay Area are at risk of being covered with strip malls and tract homes, according to a report released today by an environmental group dedicated to protecting open space. While that seems like a lot of threatened open space, it is a large improvement from five years ago, when 62,600 additional acres were available for potential development, according to the Greenbelt Alliance report, "At Risk: The Bay Area Greenbelt." The report looks at the areas facing development pressure in all nine of the region's counties. "Every five years we check to see how we're doing and what the prognosis looks like," said David Reid, the group's East Bay representative. "We're getting better, but we've got a long way to go." The report labels some counties as "sprawlers," including Solano, with 93,300 at-risk acres; Contra Costa, with 82,200 acres; Sonoma, with 88,300 acres; and Santa Clara, with 75,300. The area along Interstate 80 in Solano County, much of Eastern Contra Costa County, southern Santa Clara County and areas along Highway 101 through Sonoma County are listed as "sprawl hot spots" in the report. Identified as "savers" are San Mateo County, which has 10,200 threatened acres and Marin County, with 3,800 acres. Alameda County, with 26,100 vulnerable acres, and Napa County, with 22,300, are labeled "intermediate" on the Greenbelt Alliance's risk spectrum. San Francisco County's entire 30,600 acres are considered either low risk, permanently protected or already urbanized. In every county, however, less land is considered at risk now than in 2000, when the alliance released its last report. Some of the lands identified five years ago as threatened by development were indeed built out and are now considered urbanized, and thus no longer "at risk." But the majority of the acres were removed from that category by land-use policy changes intended to stop sprawl, Reid said. For example, Alameda and Contra Costa counties either created new urban growth boundaries or expanded existing ones to exclude more land from development. The report finds a hostile audience in the home-building community. Joseph Perkins, president of the Home Builders Association of Northern California, said it is part of a sensationalist campaign to stop growth. "The Association of Bay Area Governments says that over the next 25 years this region is gong to add 600,000 new households, 1.6 million new jobs. The question is, where are those people going to be housed," he said. "If we fully exploited all the infill opportunities in the Bay Area, at best it would accommodate one quarter of the growth we can expect." A report released in March by UC Berkeley's Institute of Urban and Regional Design, known as the Landis report, says that the state has 1 million to 1.5 million infill parcels that are realistic candidates for redevelopment. "Yes, we need infill, but the idea that there should be absolutely no suburban home building, I think, is just myopic," Perkins said. The alliance and their "confederates" promote land-use policies that limit the supply of buildable land and drive up the cost of home prices, he said. The Greenbelt Alliance, however, does not suggest that the region should somehow halt all suburban development, Reid said. "The reality is that one in 10 acres in the Bay Area is threatened by development within the next 30 years. We're not saying that none of those acres should be built," he said. "It's not to say we shouldn't build new homes, it's to be smarter about how and where we do build."
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