HAG is a founding member of the Accountable Development Coalirion. This Op Ed is from the 7/24/10 Press Democrat.
_______________________________
GUEST OPINION: Local prosperity is ADC's agenda
By DENNIS ROSATTI
and JACK BUCKHORN
The Accountable Development Coalition has been in the news lately, and we recognized the need to clarify who we are, and what we stand for.
The ADC was formed in 2006 as a coalition of environmental, land use, labor, housing and social justice organizations to represent community interests in the important land use and development decisions that shape the economic life and environmental quality of our community.
Three key concerns dominated the formation of the coalition:
We want the community to be involved in setting good public policy and to participate in the earliest stages of planning in order to develop great neighborhoods and communities.
For example, we received a grant from the Hewlett Foundation to engage the local community in creating Santa Rosa's Railroad Square Station Area Plan. The community spoke out and persuaded the city to approve a plan that will create a friendlier environment for pedestrians and bicyclists, support public transit users and provide more affordable housing near shops and incentives for better-paying jobs.
We've also advocated for green building standards, which is the wave of the future as we cope with climate change.
As a growing coalition of 14 diverse local organizations and committed professional members, we are big enough to attract the interest of developers. We offer to work in collaboration with developers to make better plans that meet more of the community's needs.
For example, we collaborated with Sonoma Mountain Village to improve a re-use project to create good local jobs and strengthen green building standards, while providing a better sense of community with a mix of housing types close to shops and work. Three years of working together is documented in a community benefits agreement that acknowledges our support.
The current Wall Street business model, favoring out-of-state, corporate-owned retail stores harms our local small business retailers.
We believe in community prosperity. We go to bat for locally owned businesses that are active in our community, support local charities and are the drivers of local economic development. We cannot support big-box stores that do not embrace smart growth principles, which pay low wages and minimal benefits to their workers and siphon money out of the local economy to pay their corporate executives millions.
We helped fight off an effort to rezone land designated for affordable housing for yet another unnecessary big-box store near Santa Rosa Avenue. This victory will help retain Friedman's Home Improvement, a family-owned local business that pays living wages, built a prominent community center and continues to be a leader supporting local charities.
The ADC established the following seven founding principles for accountable development to describe a sustainable and equitable development path that will serve the common good and create shared prosperity.
• Create and enforce community standards through development that meets local and regional needs.
• Build mixed-income neighborhoods through the inclusion of affordable housing for all incomes in all residential developments.
• Promote good jobs through family-supporting wages and benefits, job security, the right to organize, job training and local hire.
• Ensure community health and safety through accessible health care, safe working and housing conditions and a healthy neighborhood environment.
• Be environmentally sustainable through good community design, particularly through pedestrian and transit-oriented development, by using green building and environmentally conscious design.
• Build participation and encourage meaningful community involvement and representation in decisions about development.
• Be smart growth and transit-oriented by directing development toward existing communities, creating bike-able, walk-able neighborhoods and providing a range of transportation options.
This is the agenda of the ADC. We are part of a national movement of accountable development advocates that represents an evolutionary advance in public policy we hope to see implemented across the region.
Our goal is to create a policy platform that informs the next generation of public officials and planning staff and helps broaden civic discourse on public policy issues.
Dennis Rosatti, executive director of Sonoma County Conservation Action, and Jack Buckhorn, business manager of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 551, are co-chairmen of the Accountable Development Coalition.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Friday, July 9, 2010
Mayor Squashes Affordable Housing Agreement
Remember this when Newsom claims he supports affordable housing. He quashed an agreement between developers and affordable housing advocates that would have provided $50 million per year for From the 7/9/10 New York Times (Bay Area edition)...
THE BAY CITIZEN
Despite a Rare Pedigree, Plan for Affordable Housing Collapses
By ZUSHA ELINSON
Published: July 8, 2010
The deal was brokered recently in private by an unusual team of rivals, including one of San Francisco’s most prominent developers and a vociferous housing activist. The result, by all accounts, was unprecedented: an estimated $50 million for affordable housing in the city each year.
Enlarge This Image
Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen
Calvin Welch says politics was Mr. Newsom’s prime consideration.
A nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization providing local coverage of the San Francisco Bay Area for The New York Times.
Enlarge This Image
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Mayor Gavin Newsom scuttled a plan to provide money for affordable housing, saying it lacked broad support.
One developer who participated in the negotiations, which took place over the last six weeks in a City Hall annex, described the agreement as a “once-every-50-years alignment of the planets.”
Last week, however, the ambitious deal — which would have provided financing for affordable-housing projects, and would also have helped developers by subsidizing an affordable-housing requirement — came apart after running into opposition from an unlikely source: Mayor Gavin Newsom, the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor.
The scuttled initiative, which has not been publicized, left a trail of bitterness and recrimination, much of it directed at Mr. Newsom, whose own aides had helped broker the deal. Three participants who were involved in the discussions said they understood that Mr. Newsom was reluctant to support what amounted to a new tax as he makes a run for statewide office.
“We came up with a plan that addressed a critical need,” said Calvin Welch, the housing advocate who helped broker the deal. “But the only thing that’s critical to Gavin Newsom is becoming lieutenant governor.”
Mr. Newsom, in an interview earlier this week, denied that politics played a role in his decision. The mayor said that he had tentatively supported the initiative, which would have been put before voters in November, as a “serious shift in the way we deal with affordable housing” but that proponents had failed to generate the kind of broad support necessary to gain approval.
“I’m just a convenient excuse right now,” Mr. Newsom said.
The crumbling of the innovative housing initiative underscores a tumultuous relationship between Mr. Newsom and the Board of Supervisors over several new tax measures its members have proposed — as Mr. Newsom campaigns for a statewide office, according to people who participated in meetings about the deal.
The talks, which were spurred by the recession’s crippling effect on new housing, began in May, several months after Mr. Newsom proposed a stimulus package to get development projects restarted.
Mr. Welch, the housing advocate known for his caustic criticism of gentrification, came to the negotiations seeking a fixed stream of financing for affordable housing, which has largely dried up during the recession.
One of city’s largest nonprofit developers, the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, has suspended four big projects for low-income families because of a lack of financing.
Oz Erickson, the chief executive of the Emerald Fund, one of the largest developers in San Francisco, came to the negotiations seeking a break from the city’s requirement that developers designate at least 15 percent of all new units to below-market-rate housing.
Mr. Erickson argued that the cost of “inclusionary zoning” — a policy he and Mr. Welch had hammered out in the 1990s, the last time they worked together on legislation — was too burdensome for builders in a recession.
“Right now, it’s terribly difficult to get any financing, and the affordable-housing component is a significant charge,” said Mr. Erickson, whose condominium projects include One Rincon Hill and the Bridgeview Tower.
During the meetings, according to several participants, Mr. Welch thundered about the urgent need for affordable housing, according to participants. As he held forth, Mr. Erickson continually worked his fingers over his ubiquitous HP 12c calculator, crunching the numbers.
Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of the San Francisco Urban Planning and Research Association, a moderate public policy institute, said negotiators reached “an agreement that would’ve solved both problems.”
The complicated deal would have substantially raised the transfer tax — the tax paid when property is bought or sold — for any building over $875,000. For example, the transfer tax on a home sold for $1.1 million is currently $8,250. With the proposed increase, it would have been $12,650.
That money would have gone into a permanent fund dedicated to affordable housing: Half would have been used for affordable-housing projects, and the other half would have gone to ease the burden on developers by subsidizing the affordable-housing requirement.
The mayor said it was a political rarity for these two rival factions to work together.
“These are strange bedfellows, and they don’t always agree,” Mr. Newsom said. “What was intriguing was that there was a willingness to work this through.”
The negotiations took place in the Mayor’s Office of Housing, two blocks from City Hall, and were mediated by Doug Shoemaker, the office’s director.
Mr. Newsom acknowledged that some of his top aides supported the deal. In the end, he said, he did not believe the measure had enough broad support to succeed. Notably, efforts to placate groups representing landlords and Realtors failed.
“Folks were so consumed with getting something on the ballot for November,” Mr. Newsom said. “But in order to do this we have to build a broad coalition, and, with respect to my friends in the room, they’re not the whole city.”
But Mr. Welch and others familiar with the negotiations said the politics of the moment also weighed heavily. Since announcing earlier this year his entry into the race for lieutenant governor, Mr. Newsom has continued to oppose raising taxes, most recently a series of measures put forward by progressive members of the Board of Supervisors.
Mr. Newsom’s electoral success in November — and perhaps beyond — will depend in part on his ability to broaden his appeal to voters outside San Francisco.
“The mayor’s office sponsored the whole thing, and ultimately the mayor could have stepped up to make it happen,” said Lou Vasquez, a developer with Build, Incorporated, who was in the talks.
“The mechanics seemed to be working out,” Mr. Vasquez said, “but the politics seemed to get in the way.”
Last week, with Mr. Newsom still withholding his support, the deadline to place the affordable-housing measure on the November ballot passed quietly — with the public unaware of the potential deal.
There is now one other proposal from the Board of Supervisors intended to raise money for affordable housing, but it does not have the support of the mayor, the developers or their friends. Sponsored by Supervisor Chris Daly, who has been trying for years to get a permanent source of affordable-housing money, the measure is headed for the ballot in November.
Mr. Newsom said he hoped this idea for a permanent source of financing came back — whether or not he was in office.
“We were up against a deadline, and it wasn’t ready,” Mr. Newsom said. “This idea is not dead.”
His hopes were echoed by Mr. Metcalf, Mr. Welch and others who had tried to make the deal. But they said it had been a rare moment when everything seemed aligned: a recession hurting housing activists and developers enough to bring them both to the bargaining table.
“I personally will work to try to put this deal together again,” Mr. Metcalf said, “but you never know when your window of opportunity for social change will open, and you never know when it will close.”
THE BAY CITIZEN
Despite a Rare Pedigree, Plan for Affordable Housing Collapses
By ZUSHA ELINSON
Published: July 8, 2010
The deal was brokered recently in private by an unusual team of rivals, including one of San Francisco’s most prominent developers and a vociferous housing activist. The result, by all accounts, was unprecedented: an estimated $50 million for affordable housing in the city each year.
Enlarge This Image
Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen
Calvin Welch says politics was Mr. Newsom’s prime consideration.
A nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization providing local coverage of the San Francisco Bay Area for The New York Times.
Enlarge This Image
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Mayor Gavin Newsom scuttled a plan to provide money for affordable housing, saying it lacked broad support.
One developer who participated in the negotiations, which took place over the last six weeks in a City Hall annex, described the agreement as a “once-every-50-years alignment of the planets.”
Last week, however, the ambitious deal — which would have provided financing for affordable-housing projects, and would also have helped developers by subsidizing an affordable-housing requirement — came apart after running into opposition from an unlikely source: Mayor Gavin Newsom, the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor.
The scuttled initiative, which has not been publicized, left a trail of bitterness and recrimination, much of it directed at Mr. Newsom, whose own aides had helped broker the deal. Three participants who were involved in the discussions said they understood that Mr. Newsom was reluctant to support what amounted to a new tax as he makes a run for statewide office.
“We came up with a plan that addressed a critical need,” said Calvin Welch, the housing advocate who helped broker the deal. “But the only thing that’s critical to Gavin Newsom is becoming lieutenant governor.”
Mr. Newsom, in an interview earlier this week, denied that politics played a role in his decision. The mayor said that he had tentatively supported the initiative, which would have been put before voters in November, as a “serious shift in the way we deal with affordable housing” but that proponents had failed to generate the kind of broad support necessary to gain approval.
“I’m just a convenient excuse right now,” Mr. Newsom said.
The crumbling of the innovative housing initiative underscores a tumultuous relationship between Mr. Newsom and the Board of Supervisors over several new tax measures its members have proposed — as Mr. Newsom campaigns for a statewide office, according to people who participated in meetings about the deal.
The talks, which were spurred by the recession’s crippling effect on new housing, began in May, several months after Mr. Newsom proposed a stimulus package to get development projects restarted.
Mr. Welch, the housing advocate known for his caustic criticism of gentrification, came to the negotiations seeking a fixed stream of financing for affordable housing, which has largely dried up during the recession.
One of city’s largest nonprofit developers, the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, has suspended four big projects for low-income families because of a lack of financing.
Oz Erickson, the chief executive of the Emerald Fund, one of the largest developers in San Francisco, came to the negotiations seeking a break from the city’s requirement that developers designate at least 15 percent of all new units to below-market-rate housing.
Mr. Erickson argued that the cost of “inclusionary zoning” — a policy he and Mr. Welch had hammered out in the 1990s, the last time they worked together on legislation — was too burdensome for builders in a recession.
“Right now, it’s terribly difficult to get any financing, and the affordable-housing component is a significant charge,” said Mr. Erickson, whose condominium projects include One Rincon Hill and the Bridgeview Tower.
During the meetings, according to several participants, Mr. Welch thundered about the urgent need for affordable housing, according to participants. As he held forth, Mr. Erickson continually worked his fingers over his ubiquitous HP 12c calculator, crunching the numbers.
Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of the San Francisco Urban Planning and Research Association, a moderate public policy institute, said negotiators reached “an agreement that would’ve solved both problems.”
The complicated deal would have substantially raised the transfer tax — the tax paid when property is bought or sold — for any building over $875,000. For example, the transfer tax on a home sold for $1.1 million is currently $8,250. With the proposed increase, it would have been $12,650.
That money would have gone into a permanent fund dedicated to affordable housing: Half would have been used for affordable-housing projects, and the other half would have gone to ease the burden on developers by subsidizing the affordable-housing requirement.
The mayor said it was a political rarity for these two rival factions to work together.
“These are strange bedfellows, and they don’t always agree,” Mr. Newsom said. “What was intriguing was that there was a willingness to work this through.”
The negotiations took place in the Mayor’s Office of Housing, two blocks from City Hall, and were mediated by Doug Shoemaker, the office’s director.
Mr. Newsom acknowledged that some of his top aides supported the deal. In the end, he said, he did not believe the measure had enough broad support to succeed. Notably, efforts to placate groups representing landlords and Realtors failed.
“Folks were so consumed with getting something on the ballot for November,” Mr. Newsom said. “But in order to do this we have to build a broad coalition, and, with respect to my friends in the room, they’re not the whole city.”
But Mr. Welch and others familiar with the negotiations said the politics of the moment also weighed heavily. Since announcing earlier this year his entry into the race for lieutenant governor, Mr. Newsom has continued to oppose raising taxes, most recently a series of measures put forward by progressive members of the Board of Supervisors.
Mr. Newsom’s electoral success in November — and perhaps beyond — will depend in part on his ability to broaden his appeal to voters outside San Francisco.
“The mayor’s office sponsored the whole thing, and ultimately the mayor could have stepped up to make it happen,” said Lou Vasquez, a developer with Build, Incorporated, who was in the talks.
“The mechanics seemed to be working out,” Mr. Vasquez said, “but the politics seemed to get in the way.”
Last week, with Mr. Newsom still withholding his support, the deadline to place the affordable-housing measure on the November ballot passed quietly — with the public unaware of the potential deal.
There is now one other proposal from the Board of Supervisors intended to raise money for affordable housing, but it does not have the support of the mayor, the developers or their friends. Sponsored by Supervisor Chris Daly, who has been trying for years to get a permanent source of affordable-housing money, the measure is headed for the ballot in November.
Mr. Newsom said he hoped this idea for a permanent source of financing came back — whether or not he was in office.
“We were up against a deadline, and it wasn’t ready,” Mr. Newsom said. “This idea is not dead.”
His hopes were echoed by Mr. Metcalf, Mr. Welch and others who had tried to make the deal. But they said it had been a rare moment when everything seemed aligned: a recession hurting housing activists and developers enough to bring them both to the bargaining table.
“I personally will work to try to put this deal together again,” Mr. Metcalf said, “but you never know when your window of opportunity for social change will open, and you never know when it will close.”
Thursday, July 8, 2010
YES IN MY BACK YARD! (From Mother Jones)
ONE OF THE hottest pieces of real estate in the San Francisco Bay Area is a 1,500-acre expanse of concrete, landfill, and asbestos-stuffed warehouses. Shuttered since 1997, the Alameda Naval Air Station occupies one-third of Alameda, an island next door to downtown Oakland known as a time warp to 1950s architecture and Kiwanis Club folksiness. For nearly a decade, the well-heeled enclave has had its eyes on the old air base, now dubbed Alameda Point. And why not? It's smack on the eastern edge of the bay, with spectacular views of the San Francisco skyline, and just minutes from the cities to which suburbanites commute for an hour or more. It's a developer's dream—all the more so because building there would displace little more than a gigantic monthly flea market.
In 2007, developers announced a billion-dollar-plus plan to rebuild Alameda Point. SunCal Companies envisioned a complex featuring 1,000 detached single-family homes, 2,000 townhomes, and 1,000 condos in three-story buildings built with the latest in energy-efficient design: passive solar, geothermal heat pumps, and gray-water systems. Historic buildings would be preserved, and 25 percent of the units would be set aside as affordable housing. There would be 150 acres of parks, miles of trails, shops, and offices, and dedicated ferry and bus lines to Oakland and San Francisco. The local chapter of the Greenbelt Alliance endorsed it, calling it "the epitome of smart growth."
Yet despite its green bona fides—and the promise of adding desperately needed affordable housing in the heart of the Bay Area—environmental activists, the local historic preservation society, and even Alameda's mayor came out against the plan. They argued that the deal gave the developer too much power, could release toxic chemicals, and would "change the character of Alameda." Driving his BMW past the naval base's peeling hangars, David Howard, a 41-year-old Internet marketer and the head of Save Our City! Alameda, stressed that he's "not anti-everything about high density." But he felt that the Alameda Point project didn't go far enough environmentally. Instead, he envisioned transforming the base into a "green technolopolis" that would invent a silver-bullet solution to the climate crisis. His plan didn't include any housing, but there'd be a wind farm, a solar power plant, a factory for the electric carmaker Tesla Motors, and an "ecobranch" of the cash-strapped University of California. "It's a wonderful location," he concluded. "It's a problem that needs to be solved. Why not do it here, in Alameda?"
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The Alameda Point project also brushed up against a nearly 40-year-old density ban, which the Oakland Tribune has called "the 'third rail' of Alameda politics." The popular measure, which effectively caps growth on the island, has helped preserve the city's small-town feel; its population has hovered around 75,000 for decades. To get built, Alameda Point would need an exemption. When the matter was put before Alameda voters this February, an overwhelming 85 percent rejected it.
More than just another triumph of NIMBYism, the failure of Alameda Point is also a lesson in how fighting local growth can undermine the larger environmental values that many NIMBYs believe in. By 2050, the United States can expect to add as many as 200 million people. Demographers predict that they'll require 90 million houses and 140 billion square feet of office and other nonresidential space—the equivalent of replacing all the country's existing buildings. If we keep building in the way we do now, suburbs will gobble up a New Mexico-size amount of open space in the next 40 years. More suburbs mean more freeways and more cars, which means that by mid-century, Americans will clock 7 trillion miles per year—twice as much mileage as we do now. The alternative to this metastasizing, car-dependent sprawl is population density. And that means squeezing more people into cities and inner suburbs like Alameda. According to the Greenbelt Alliance, the Bay Area could absorb another 2 million residents by 2035 without expanding its physical footprint.
Cities are also essential to stemming climate change. As Kaid Benfield, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Smart Growth program explains, "The city is inherently energy efficient. Even the greenest household in an outlying location can't match an ordinary household downtown." Heating an apartment uses as much as 20 percent less energy than heating a single-family home of the same size. Promoting infill development—the practice of filling empty urban space or replacing older buildings with bigger ones—instead of building more subdivisions could effectively conserve the amount of energy produced by 2,800 power plants and could prevent some 26 trillion miles of driving. All told, if the United States focuses on increasing urban density, our greenhouse gas emissions in 2050 could be as much as 20 percent lower than they'd be in the sprawl scenario.
Yet infill development is often rejected by environmental and sustainability advocates. The chief opponent of a proposal to build taller buildings in downtown Berkeley also heads a group that urges cities "to take real action to address the causes of global warming." The San Francisco Board of Supervisors' hyperliberal wing recently proposed banning new high rises downtown—never mind that these mixed-use buildings would help finance a new public transit hub and a park that the same supervisors support. Last year, wealthy Seattle residents allied with an affordable-housing advocate to scuttle a plan to build new housing next to a light-rail line. Such knee-jerk NIMBYism isn't limited to the West Coast: New York's Long Island Pine Barrens Society is opposing a plan to build a compact, $4 billion "mini-city" on unused hospital grounds that would preserve one-third of its 460 acres as open space.
Walking the anti-density, pro-environment line can be tricky. "Our group is not the most progressive group out there in terms of promoting infill development," concedes Kent Lewandowski, chair of the Northern Alameda County Group of the Sierra Club, which declined to support Alameda Point. "But our group does get it in terms of climate change and the impact of sprawl. It's like we want everything. There is definitely—I won't say hypocrisy—but there is a contradiction of sorts."
ENVIRONMENTALISTS have long had an uneasy relationship with urban density. In what may be the first screed against infill development, Henry David Thoreau wrote, "Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens are cemeteries. The soil is blanched and accursed there." The Sierra Club was born of a desire to escape what John Muir called "the death exhalations that brood in the broad towns in which we so fondly compact ourselves," where "we are sickly, and never come to know ourselves." That ethos fueled the "back to the land" movement, but a less-crunchy variation of it also drove the explosion of commuter suburbs that environmentalists love to hate. A postwar ad for a New York suburb invited buyers to "escape from cities too big, too polluted, too crowded, too strident to call home."
Determined to make cities more livable, environmentalists have promoted parks and public transit, fought freeways and factories, and portrayed developers as the ultimate bad guys. But these well-intentioned efforts to curb the Robert Moses-style excesses of urban development had unintended consequences. Strict limits on building height and attempts to squeeze ever-larger concessions from urban developers (but not suburban ones) drove up the cost of housing in many cities—sending builders and home buyers looking for open space. "It's a situation that has unfairly favored sprawl," says NRDC's Benfield. SunCal developer Pat Keliher says that many of his colleagues simply avoid the cost of battling urban skeptics by building on out-of-town farmland: "It's the old adage—cows don't talk."
Filling in cities instead of building suburbs could save the amount
of energy produced by 2,800 power plants and could prevent 26 TRILLION
miles of driving.
In the early '90s, a new movement of architects and planners known as the New Urbanism targeted sprawl by recognizing that cities should grow—but smartly and sustainably. In an effort to bridge the divide between developers and environmentalists, they replaced parking lots and tract houses with compact apartments and pedestrian-friendly streets. Yet some of the most vocal critics of sprawl have been reluctant to embrace this vision. Mike Davis, the author of City of Quartz and the Jeremiah of suburban Los Angeles, says, "What the New Urbanists tend to produce are projects that lack one of the pivotal elements of their whole philosophy—that there is no minority, or there is no economic heterogeneity, or there's no mass transit, or there are no jobs."
Holding infill projects to impossibly high standards is an easy way to block them. But NIMBYs' feel-good environmental objections to development can be proxies for less politically correct fears about traffic, low-income neighbors, and falling property values, says Jeremy Madsen, executive director of the Greenbelt Alliance. In the case of Alameda Point, he adds, "That's frankly why we wanted to come out with a strong statement of support."
Still, some cities and states have begun to recognize that urban development—even when it's imperfect—is inherently better than the alternative. Since 2007, California Attorney General Jerry Brown has sued or sent warnings to 45 cities for not following a law requiring them to account for their development plans' carbon footprints. He's forced San Bernardino County to mitigate its sprawl with green building technologies and gotten the Bay Area suburb of Pleasanton to lift a cap on new housing. In 2008, California passed a landmark law that provides incentives for municipal planners to promote climate-friendly land uses such as building apartments around transit stops. A two-tier permitting system that encourages building in more densely developed areas while increasing oversight on the suburban fringe is in use in Florida, Cape Cod, and Portland, Oregon. New York City now requires its planning commission to approve or deny new buildings in less than seven months, preventing costly, protracted showdowns.
"If true environmentalists do not reject the NIMBYs that are preventing the densification and building of cities," says Andres Duany, the architect who designed Seaside, Florida, a project credited with launching the New Urbanism, "environmentalism itself is going to become questionable." Ultimately, the challenge is figuring out how to address NIMBYs' legitimate local concerns while encouraging them to see the bigger picture. "People have seen such crappy development for so many decades now that they have every right to demand that new development be as sensitive and green as possible," says Benfield. "But I do think the opposition is often misplaced."
By the time David Howard and I wrapped up our tour of the naval base, his green technolopolis pitch had given way to a sort of greatest hits of anti-development arguments: Alameda Point would increase crime and block views. It would displace the rabbits who live by the runway. It was racist, because increased traffic on the island would blow exhaust into minority neighborhoods on the mainland. Not to mention that the whole thing might be wiped out by a New Orleans-style deluge precipitated by our carbon-intensive lifestyle. The polar ice caps are melting, he explained, threatening low-lying areas like Alameda Point. "All the people in there—the low-income people—they're gonna be flooded out!"
Josh Harkinson is a staff reporter at Mother Jones.
In 2007, developers announced a billion-dollar-plus plan to rebuild Alameda Point. SunCal Companies envisioned a complex featuring 1,000 detached single-family homes, 2,000 townhomes, and 1,000 condos in three-story buildings built with the latest in energy-efficient design: passive solar, geothermal heat pumps, and gray-water systems. Historic buildings would be preserved, and 25 percent of the units would be set aside as affordable housing. There would be 150 acres of parks, miles of trails, shops, and offices, and dedicated ferry and bus lines to Oakland and San Francisco. The local chapter of the Greenbelt Alliance endorsed it, calling it "the epitome of smart growth."
Yet despite its green bona fides—and the promise of adding desperately needed affordable housing in the heart of the Bay Area—environmental activists, the local historic preservation society, and even Alameda's mayor came out against the plan. They argued that the deal gave the developer too much power, could release toxic chemicals, and would "change the character of Alameda." Driving his BMW past the naval base's peeling hangars, David Howard, a 41-year-old Internet marketer and the head of Save Our City! Alameda, stressed that he's "not anti-everything about high density." But he felt that the Alameda Point project didn't go far enough environmentally. Instead, he envisioned transforming the base into a "green technolopolis" that would invent a silver-bullet solution to the climate crisis. His plan didn't include any housing, but there'd be a wind farm, a solar power plant, a factory for the electric carmaker Tesla Motors, and an "ecobranch" of the cash-strapped University of California. "It's a wonderful location," he concluded. "It's a problem that needs to be solved. Why not do it here, in Alameda?"
Advertise on MotherJones.com
The Alameda Point project also brushed up against a nearly 40-year-old density ban, which the Oakland Tribune has called "the 'third rail' of Alameda politics." The popular measure, which effectively caps growth on the island, has helped preserve the city's small-town feel; its population has hovered around 75,000 for decades. To get built, Alameda Point would need an exemption. When the matter was put before Alameda voters this February, an overwhelming 85 percent rejected it.
More than just another triumph of NIMBYism, the failure of Alameda Point is also a lesson in how fighting local growth can undermine the larger environmental values that many NIMBYs believe in. By 2050, the United States can expect to add as many as 200 million people. Demographers predict that they'll require 90 million houses and 140 billion square feet of office and other nonresidential space—the equivalent of replacing all the country's existing buildings. If we keep building in the way we do now, suburbs will gobble up a New Mexico-size amount of open space in the next 40 years. More suburbs mean more freeways and more cars, which means that by mid-century, Americans will clock 7 trillion miles per year—twice as much mileage as we do now. The alternative to this metastasizing, car-dependent sprawl is population density. And that means squeezing more people into cities and inner suburbs like Alameda. According to the Greenbelt Alliance, the Bay Area could absorb another 2 million residents by 2035 without expanding its physical footprint.
Cities are also essential to stemming climate change. As Kaid Benfield, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Smart Growth program explains, "The city is inherently energy efficient. Even the greenest household in an outlying location can't match an ordinary household downtown." Heating an apartment uses as much as 20 percent less energy than heating a single-family home of the same size. Promoting infill development—the practice of filling empty urban space or replacing older buildings with bigger ones—instead of building more subdivisions could effectively conserve the amount of energy produced by 2,800 power plants and could prevent some 26 trillion miles of driving. All told, if the United States focuses on increasing urban density, our greenhouse gas emissions in 2050 could be as much as 20 percent lower than they'd be in the sprawl scenario.
Yet infill development is often rejected by environmental and sustainability advocates. The chief opponent of a proposal to build taller buildings in downtown Berkeley also heads a group that urges cities "to take real action to address the causes of global warming." The San Francisco Board of Supervisors' hyperliberal wing recently proposed banning new high rises downtown—never mind that these mixed-use buildings would help finance a new public transit hub and a park that the same supervisors support. Last year, wealthy Seattle residents allied with an affordable-housing advocate to scuttle a plan to build new housing next to a light-rail line. Such knee-jerk NIMBYism isn't limited to the West Coast: New York's Long Island Pine Barrens Society is opposing a plan to build a compact, $4 billion "mini-city" on unused hospital grounds that would preserve one-third of its 460 acres as open space.
Walking the anti-density, pro-environment line can be tricky. "Our group is not the most progressive group out there in terms of promoting infill development," concedes Kent Lewandowski, chair of the Northern Alameda County Group of the Sierra Club, which declined to support Alameda Point. "But our group does get it in terms of climate change and the impact of sprawl. It's like we want everything. There is definitely—I won't say hypocrisy—but there is a contradiction of sorts."
ENVIRONMENTALISTS have long had an uneasy relationship with urban density. In what may be the first screed against infill development, Henry David Thoreau wrote, "Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens are cemeteries. The soil is blanched and accursed there." The Sierra Club was born of a desire to escape what John Muir called "the death exhalations that brood in the broad towns in which we so fondly compact ourselves," where "we are sickly, and never come to know ourselves." That ethos fueled the "back to the land" movement, but a less-crunchy variation of it also drove the explosion of commuter suburbs that environmentalists love to hate. A postwar ad for a New York suburb invited buyers to "escape from cities too big, too polluted, too crowded, too strident to call home."
Determined to make cities more livable, environmentalists have promoted parks and public transit, fought freeways and factories, and portrayed developers as the ultimate bad guys. But these well-intentioned efforts to curb the Robert Moses-style excesses of urban development had unintended consequences. Strict limits on building height and attempts to squeeze ever-larger concessions from urban developers (but not suburban ones) drove up the cost of housing in many cities—sending builders and home buyers looking for open space. "It's a situation that has unfairly favored sprawl," says NRDC's Benfield. SunCal developer Pat Keliher says that many of his colleagues simply avoid the cost of battling urban skeptics by building on out-of-town farmland: "It's the old adage—cows don't talk."
Filling in cities instead of building suburbs could save the amount
of energy produced by 2,800 power plants and could prevent 26 TRILLION
miles of driving.
In the early '90s, a new movement of architects and planners known as the New Urbanism targeted sprawl by recognizing that cities should grow—but smartly and sustainably. In an effort to bridge the divide between developers and environmentalists, they replaced parking lots and tract houses with compact apartments and pedestrian-friendly streets. Yet some of the most vocal critics of sprawl have been reluctant to embrace this vision. Mike Davis, the author of City of Quartz and the Jeremiah of suburban Los Angeles, says, "What the New Urbanists tend to produce are projects that lack one of the pivotal elements of their whole philosophy—that there is no minority, or there is no economic heterogeneity, or there's no mass transit, or there are no jobs."
Holding infill projects to impossibly high standards is an easy way to block them. But NIMBYs' feel-good environmental objections to development can be proxies for less politically correct fears about traffic, low-income neighbors, and falling property values, says Jeremy Madsen, executive director of the Greenbelt Alliance. In the case of Alameda Point, he adds, "That's frankly why we wanted to come out with a strong statement of support."
Still, some cities and states have begun to recognize that urban development—even when it's imperfect—is inherently better than the alternative. Since 2007, California Attorney General Jerry Brown has sued or sent warnings to 45 cities for not following a law requiring them to account for their development plans' carbon footprints. He's forced San Bernardino County to mitigate its sprawl with green building technologies and gotten the Bay Area suburb of Pleasanton to lift a cap on new housing. In 2008, California passed a landmark law that provides incentives for municipal planners to promote climate-friendly land uses such as building apartments around transit stops. A two-tier permitting system that encourages building in more densely developed areas while increasing oversight on the suburban fringe is in use in Florida, Cape Cod, and Portland, Oregon. New York City now requires its planning commission to approve or deny new buildings in less than seven months, preventing costly, protracted showdowns.
"If true environmentalists do not reject the NIMBYs that are preventing the densification and building of cities," says Andres Duany, the architect who designed Seaside, Florida, a project credited with launching the New Urbanism, "environmentalism itself is going to become questionable." Ultimately, the challenge is figuring out how to address NIMBYs' legitimate local concerns while encouraging them to see the bigger picture. "People have seen such crappy development for so many decades now that they have every right to demand that new development be as sensitive and green as possible," says Benfield. "But I do think the opposition is often misplaced."
By the time David Howard and I wrapped up our tour of the naval base, his green technolopolis pitch had given way to a sort of greatest hits of anti-development arguments: Alameda Point would increase crime and block views. It would displace the rabbits who live by the runway. It was racist, because increased traffic on the island would blow exhaust into minority neighborhoods on the mainland. Not to mention that the whole thing might be wiped out by a New Orleans-style deluge precipitated by our carbon-intensive lifestyle. The polar ice caps are melting, he explained, threatening low-lying areas like Alameda Point. "All the people in there—the low-income people—they're gonna be flooded out!"
Josh Harkinson is a staff reporter at Mother Jones.
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