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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 Silicon Valley, greenbelt leader PROTECTED LANDS GROWING, BUT SOME SPOTS FACE SPRAWL By Paul RogersFor nearly half a century, Silicon Valley has shouldered a reputation as Northern California's poster child for urban sprawl -- a region that paved over thousands of acres of orchards for freeways, shopping malls and subdivisions. But an extensive study scheduled for release this morning shows a much greener reality: Santa Clara County has become a Bay Area leader in open-space preservation. From 2000 to 2005, Santa Clara County added 54,000 acres of protected open space -- more than any other Bay Area county over the same period. Perhaps more notable, Santa Clara County has passed Marin County for having the most protected open space of any county in the Bay Area: 201,800 acres, compared with 178,000 for Marin. Those are the conclusions of a detailed survey of all nine Bay Area counties by the non-profit Greenbelt Alliance, based in San Francisco. Santa Clara County is the second-largest county in the Bay Area, behind Sonoma County. Ranked by percentage of land protected as open space, Santa Clara comes in third with 24 percent, compared with 53 percent of Marin County and 37 percent of San Mateo County. Although the orchards that once defined "The Valley of Heart's Delight" are long gone, there are thousands of acres of open hillsides, forests and ranch lands remaining around Silicon Valley. They've been protected in recent years by a number of means: Land trusts and government agencies bought new parks and development rights, particularly in the southern end of the county around Henry Coe State Park and Calero Reservoir. At the same time, San Jose, Santa Clara County, Gilroy and other South Bay governments passed tougher zoning rules. Also, environmentalists have submitted signatures to qualify a new measure for the November ballot that would further restrict development across Santa Clara County on hillsides, ranches and farmland. "When I was a kid, I used to pick cherries in orchards here. I never thought about what might happen to them. Now almost all of those areas are gone," said Patrick Congdon, general manager of the Santa Clara County Open Space Authority. "We've learned from our mistakes," he said. "We are doing a lot now to protect agriculture and to protect our natural resources and set aside land for new parks. But there are still a lot of development pressures." Congdon's agency alone has preserved 11,000 acres since 1999, opening several new parks and open space preserves with funding from property taxes. Last year, the Santa Clara County Parks Department also opened the 4,595-acre Coyote Lake-Harvey Bear Ranch County Park, a former ranch near Morgan Hill. Overall, the Bay Area has made significant progress slowing sprawl, the report shows. Since 2000, the region has added 213,200 acres of protected open space -- an area nearly seven times the size of San Francisco. That's a 27 percent increase in five years. Nearly one-quarter of all the land in the region is now off-limits to development. No other major urban area in America has protected so much open space. In the same time period, Santa Clara County grew its protected open space areas by 37 percent, outpacing the Bay Area average. Meanwhile, the amount of urban land in the Bay Area grew by only 2 percent in the region and just 1 percent in Santa Clara County. There is now more protected open space in the Bay Area and in Santa Clara County than there is developed land. Nevertheless, the report still found parts of the Bay Area face major development pressure, with about 9 percent of the total land area at medium to high risk for sprawl. The hot spots are: • The Highway 101 corridor south of San Jose, from Coyote Valley to Gilroy. • The I-80 corridor in Solano County through Vallejo, Vacaville, Fairfield and Dixon. • Eastern Contra Costa County, particularly in Antioch and Brentwood. • Santa Rosa to Petaluma. • Livermore and Dublin in Alameda County. "The good news is that we're seeing the region work hard to try and reduce sprawl development pressure," said Tom Steinbach, executive director of Greenbelt Alliance. "The bad news is that we still have a tremendous amount of land at risk for sprawl." Building industry leaders, however, said many of the sites declared "at risk" by the Greenbelt Alliance should be used to construct homes. "They are trying to manufacture a crisis here," said Joseph Perkins, chief executive of the Home Builders Association of Northern California, based in San Ramon. "The Bay Area is not about to be paved over. You would think they would be celebrating that only 16 percent of the Bay Area is urban development and the greenbelt is growing." Perkins said the Bay Area's high housing prices are due to a shortage of buildable land and housing. But Steinbach said other forces, such as a hot national housing market and the Bay Area's weather and economy, are more to blame. The report, which the Greenbelt Alliance releases every six years, used complex GIS mapping software and a county-by-county survey of planning records. It classified 125,200 acres of Bay Area land as at "high risk" for sprawl, meaning in most cases that development plans have been approved or submitted for farms, ranches and other open space for projects that could be built in 10 years. It classified another 276,200 acres as "medium risk," meaning projects could be approved within 30 years. Those areas total 401,500 acres of the total 4.4 million in the Bay Area. The Bay Area is expected to add 1.7 million people in the next 25 years. Steinbach said that as population continues to grow, the region will need more high-density development near existing towns and cities to preserve open space for wildlife, agriculture, water quality and recreation. However, Perkins said that will not be enough. "We should have more infill development," Perkins said. "But that won't do it by itself. We have got to continue to build in suburbia, not to mention the fact that consumers still prefer the single-family lifestyle."
IF YOU'RE INTERESTED See the report at www. greenbelt.org .
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