New law aims to rein in CA’s sprawling growth patterns

While it was being debated last year, no one pitched AB857 as the one true initiative to reshape California’s haphazard growth management policies.

By JIM WASSERMAN, Associated Press Writer The Sacramento Bee

But as the state begins 2003 with the new law in place, its supporters hope it will provide the framework for a gradual, dramatic series of changes ahead. More, they hope it will help California erase its image as a national laggard in growth management as widespread sprawl continues to dominate its 155,000 square-mile landscape.

The new law makes a priority of infill development – rebuilding and reusing existing neighborhoods – as the state doles out billions of dollars worth of infrastructure spending.

Two more priorities would spare working farms from development and make suburban growth more efficient by squeezing more people onto fewer acres. Census reports show California’s post-1970 suburbs average about 1,600 fewer people per square mile than pre-1950’s neighborhoods.

While still a small step, the law written by Assemblywoman Patricia Wiggins, D-Santa Rosa, sets up new struggle between powerful establishments of "smart-growth" theorists and builders who operate in the hard realities of the marketplace. And it comes as California homebuilders forecast 124,000 new single-family homes this year – the highest number in a decade – primarily on empty land at the state’s booming suburban edges.

Now California "has actually set some priorities. It hadn’t been done, so it was a big deal," says Julie Spezia, state issues director of the California Futures Network, an 80-member coalition that sponsored the bill with California’s urban planners.

Backers consider the move toward strategic growth investments the biggest leap in a generation for a state government that routinely lets 58 counties and almost 500 cities decide how to accommodate roughly six million new residents a decade. The next five years California intends to spend $56 billion on colleges, highways, hospitals, courts and state buildings. Voters have approved billions more for local schools and housing in bond issues. The new law could push more of it toward existing neighborhoods instead of new ones.

The law also requires the state to fulfill a 1970 requirement – signed into law by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan – to prepare a long-range vision and strategy for the state’s growth. That was last done in 1978, when California had 13 million fewer people.

While modest compared to aggressive topdown planning undertaken by state governments in Oregon, Maryland and Washington, environmentalists, farmers, planners and urban activists view it as a beginning for California, a law they can muscle up in coming legislative sessions.

Across a wide spectrum of groups, they’re tailoring new proposals from growth management to tax policy to fit AB857’s new priorities.

Those priorities typically favor growth in established neighborhoods, downtowns and declining 1960s and 1970s suburbs that have streets, sewer lines and transit routes.

Supporters want the state to encourage more land-efficient ideas like Fresno’s two-story elementary schools that take up seven acres instead of 10 and Sacramento’s hundreds of new downtown residences, including its first new units above grocery stores and parking garages. Other favorites include reusing obsolete sites. In Anaheim, a homebuilder plans 36 townhouses and 20 single-family homes on a five-acre former truck yard near downtown.

Abel Avalos, who works for the developer for the Anaheim project, says buyers want to escape worsening commutes. While five decades of suburban growth has proved enormously popular in California, it has also brought some of the nation’s worst traffic.

"There’s pent up demand. It’s not really an issue of whether people will buy this," says Avalos, infill land acquisition manager for John Laing Homes.

The infill-type development stressed by the new law represents more than 30 percent of growth in Los Angeles, but only about five percent in fast-suburbanizing counties like Riverside and San Bernardino, says John Landis, professor of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Landis says a statewide 30 percent infill development rate could spare up to 2.5 million acres of open land from development in this century.

But for all the enthusiasm, the new law’s supporters have a fight on their hands. Much of the state’s growth machine – suburban builders, real estate agents, businesses and local governments – opposes state meddling in how cities and counties grow. Last year their lobbyists fought the bill in committee hearings, saying it could steer precious road and school money from popular hot-market suburbs to central cities where many families fear weak schools and don’t want to live.

Some legislators ridiculed AB857 in floor debate.

"This idea that something worthwhile is going to come of this is a dream," said Republican Assemblyman Tim Leslie of Tahoe City.

Even backers acknowledge that’s possible in a state where more than eight in 10 residents say their ideal is a single-family house with a back yard in a safe neighborhood. Suburban starter houses far from jobs also tend to be more affordable than city homes.

"It has great promise, but it could also be an empty gesture unless it’s implemented well," says Nick Bollman, head of the California Center for Regional Leadership.

In Maryland, where the state steers infrastructure funding for sewers, roads and schools toward already-built cities, Special Secretary for Smart Growth Harriet Tregoning calls AB857 "a very good idea, but it won’t work by itself.

"We have a full set of incentives we use to encourage growth in areas we want," she said. "It’s not enough to exhort growth to go to those areas. The infrastructure might be older. The land entitlement process is longer and community opposition is more vehement."

Indeed, Guy Bjerke, vice president of the Home Builders Association of Northern California, says, "It’s unfortunate this legislation got passed because it doesn’t recognize the significant costs of building infill."

Bjerke, who monitors infill and "edge" homebuilding in 12 Bay Area counties, says state infrastructure incentives aren’t enough to overcome builders’ uncertainty.

No one expects significant new financial incentives in a state with multibillion-dollar budget deficits. Yet AB857 backers take comfort in support from Gov. Gray Davis, who hails not from suburbia, but a 1,000 square-foot condominium in West Hollywood.

Tal Finney, director of the Gov.’s Office of Planning and Research, says the administration is serious about the three new growth priorities, and aims by year’s end to finish the state’s first long-range development vision in 25 years. He says both efforts will begin to align state investments with AB857 concepts widely known as "smart growth."

Says Finney, "More than ever, the dollars have to follow the policies."

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On the Net:

Read the text of AB857 from the 2001-2002 legislative session at http://www.assembly.ca.gov.

Visit the Gov.’s Office of Planning and Research at http://www.opr.ca.gov and the California Futures Network at http://www.calfutures.org.

Read about statewide housing issues at the California Building Industry Association at http://www.cbia.org.

http://www.sacbee.com/state_wire/story/5920732p-6882894c.html