Transbay Blog

Land use is famously about local controversies. Neighborhood groups, often brandishing long, unwieldy names like “Citizens For A More Responsible” something-or-other, fill up municipal legislative chambers demanding justice; other distinctly local personalities may also emerge into the forefront of the discussion. In addition, land use decisions are often based on a context made up of such fine microscopic detail that it would unproductive or impractical for the state or federal government, both presumably inexpert in those details, to intervene. A local government thus enjoys relatively complete autonomy over how land within its domain is used, subject to only limited requirements issued at the state or federal level.

But one major exception to that general rule is housing. The State of California requires that General Plans contain a set of elements, which lay out a blueprint and policy direction to guide future development. Among those elements, the Housing Element is singled out as special, in that it must be updated every five years in accordance with the Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA). The state Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) and ABAG will project the number of housing units that the Bay Area will need to accommodate for the next several years, at four income levels (very low, low, moderate, and above moderate), and then will assign a housing share to governments throughout the Bay Area, ensuring that the region, as a whole, meets the required total. Each local government then updates its Housing Element every five years, specifying how it will accommodate its share of the regional housing need. Cities throughout the Bay Area have been engaged in this process this year.

This process ensures that local governments plan to accommodate housing units that are accessible to a range of income levels. Without such a procedure in place, it’s easy to imagine what could happen. Many cities — whose elected officials might simply translate the parochial demands of a local NIMBY group into something resembling legislation — would shirk on their obligation to ensure the production of housing units, particularly affordable units. They might, for instance, amend the zoning code to contain a set of requirements that are a proxy for wealth, ensuring that only affluent citizens can afford to live there. Other cities might freeze growth altogether, thinking only of what will happen within their city limits and ignoring what the effect would be outside. The point is that without a state mandate prohibiting that sort of behavior, it would be difficult or impossible for California to accommodate, in a just and equitable fashion, a population that is projected to increase to 60 million by the year 2050. The state has an enormous interest in ensuring that all of its citizens, of all income levels, are safely housed; but accomplishing this goal requires the cooperation of local governments, who, after all, are empowered to control land use through zoning.

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Courtesy of the Guardian.

Two weeks ago, legislature Democrats approved a plan to address California’s budget woes through June 2010, accounting for $18 billion of the anticipated $41.6 billion shortfall. The plan included $7.3 billion of cuts and and $9.3 billion of general fund revenue — but $5.7 billion of that would be sourced from tax increases, so naturally, Governor Schwarzenegger announced his intention to block it, asserting that it would “punish” Californians. This came on the heels of another announcement from the Pooled Money Investment Board, stating that the state’s budget crisis required halting any lending to some 2,000 infrastructure projects statewide totalling to $16.2 billion. The budget legislation passed by Democrats included an exemption for eight specific transportation projects from the full demands of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), but it still required that Caltrans complete some environmental analysis. The Governor, however, refused to approve the legislation unless it was amended to include a significant relaxation of CEQA. CEQA requires state and local agencies in California to undergo thorough review of the environmental impacts their projects will cause, and to analyze alternatives to those projects. Arnold calls for some transportation projects, including freeway widening, to be exempt from these requirements. One particular point of contention is the widening of Highway 50 in Sacramento with carpool lanes between Watt Ave. and Sunrise Blvd., which did not appear on the legislature’s list of eight exempt projects. The Governor wants to bypass further review of this project; but this would fly in the face of a court ruling from this past summer, in which Judge Timothy Frawley found Caltrans’ environmental review of the widening to be inadequate and required Caltrans to carry out additional analysis. The underlying goal of the Governor’s demands is economic stimulus: if projects can skip through environmental review, they could be declared “shovel-ready” immediately, and thus would be eligible for federal stimulus money.

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Remember this past summer, when we ruminated about the Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s ongoing update to the Regional Transportation Plan (Transportation 2035)? Remember when we were peeved by MTC’s unwillingness to heed the sage advice of the Advisory Council, the body that encouraged MTC to reevaluate $191 billion worth of “committed” projects, including several billion dollars worth of freeway widening whose construction would be directly detrimental to achieving MTC’s supposed goals of planning for a more livable, transit-oriented Bay Area? Remember when we were frustrated by MTC’s insistence at overlooking the fact that widening freeways — even to create brand-new High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes — nonetheless creates wider freeways and induces demand, thus only promoting more automobile use in the long run? And because of this tendency to fund projects that promote automobile use, remember that we were highly skeptical of MTC’s stated commitment to uphold AB 32’s greenhouse gas emission mandates, dismissing said commitment as merely lip service?

Guess what? Attorney General Jerry Brown agrees.

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September 30 at midnight is the deadline for the Governor to sign bills into law, and in light of the record-late budget, legislation has been stacking up. Amidst all the signed and vetoed bills, I am happy to report that SB 375 and AB 1358, two important pieces of “livability legislation” that we have been following, have both been signed into law. SB 375, the landmark bill that unites transportation, housing, and land use planning with CEQA reform, is an important step towards incentivizing the growth of transit-oriented neighborhoods as part of a multi-pronged effort to achieve AB 32’s greenhouse gas emission mandates. The other bill is AB 1358, the Complete Streets Act, which will require local governments to account for all users of the street (including pedestrians, cyclists, transit riders, and the disabled) when updating the circulation elements of their General Plans. When governments then turn to execute the updated directives in their General Plans, we can hope to see calmer, more walkable streets emerge all over the state of California. The combination of both bills point toward a brighter future — turning our back on the unchecked proliferation of residential subdivisions and strip malls, while embracing the growth of dense, compact, walkable neighborhoods. Now, if only we could manage to stop raiding the public transit fund every year.

At long last, a record 84 days into the fiscal year, California state leaders are settling into a budget, albeit one that is far from ideal. Par for the course, transit funding is taking a big hit: $952 million diverted, and possibly $100 million more, which would leave just $306-$406 million of transit funds. We have already discussed Arnold’s “Transit Termination” tactics in the past. And we get that something has to break somewhere — though, of course, never the sacrosanct highway funds. For now, we will just leave it at this: crafting legislation that encourages smart growth is laudable, but entirely insufficient in isolation. If (when) transit agencies are forced to slash service and increase fares because the State has redirected their already precious funding, and if those service cuts and fare hikes result in service that is neither frequent nor accessible enough to lure even transit-oriented choice riders away from their cars — then where we do find ourselves? It would be shameful not to capitalize on the increased demand for transit induced by gas prices, but those same rising fuel prices, combined with funding cuts, only aggravate the need for agencies to raise fares. The California Air Resources Board, in all its wisdom, opted to omit intercity and local transit from its master list of strategies to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but that in no way justifies this budget’s wholesale slashing of transit funds. If anything, it demonstrates the positively gaping hole that exists in Sacramento’s understanding of these issues. The whole premise of transit-oriented development is lost without the transit. And not just any transit — good transit, which SB 375 itself codifies as headways of 15 minutes or less at peak times. But in light of funding cuts, it will be increasingly difficult for transit agencies to even provide this level of service. When will state leaders recognize this fundamental mismatch and halt their continuous raid on transit funds? In this fiscal year’s budget, state leaders have attempted to address a financial crisis — but in so doing, they have wholly neglected the climate crisis.

Downtown Oakland, Courtesy Flickr user joshua aaron.

Earlier this week, we spent some time delving into SB 375, the landmark Senate Bill that recently passed through the legislature and, at the time of writing this post, awaits only the Governor’s signature. The bill unifies transportation and land use planning, housing, and global warming into one package, with the ultimate aim of encouraging dense growth near good transit. The bill would leverage transit oriented development as a crucial tool in the struggle to fulfill AB 32’s mandate to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020. The very brief two-sentence version of the bill: SB 375 requires that each region in California create a Sustainable Communities Strategy (SCS) that details where it makes sense to accommodate new growth near transit. If a new development, appropriately located, is classified as a Transit Priority Project (TPP) — meaning that it is sufficiently dense and close to a transit route that receives frequent service — that project would be exempt from studying certain environmental impacts under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). If you haven’t already done so, please read this earlier post for full details on SB 375.

SB 375 is a pretty exciting piece of legislation, but we still have a lot of work to do. Certain individuals who occupy seats in the California legislature — McClintock, we are looking at you — are eternally captivated by the suburban non-planning of the 1950s, opining that:

Most people don’t want to live in dense urban cores. Most people want a little elbow room – they want a yard for their children to play in. They want a little grass, a little garden, a little breathing room they can call their own. And who the hell are you to tell people they can’t?

Based on McClintock’s remark, you might think SB 375 is all about burning single-family homes to the ground and replacing them with high-rises. This is of course completely untrue: suburbs are not going anywhere. Rather than thinking of this as removing the option of the traditional suburb, SB 375 is properly viewed as adding a new option, by making the increasingly desirable transit-oriented lifestyle more widely available. But the trick lies in lining up the commitment to implement it.

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Mt. Diablo, courtesy Flickr user qf8.

In August 2006, the California legislature passed the Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32), and the Governor approved it one month later, on September 27, 2006. AB 32 aims to transform California into a global leader in the climate change battle, requiring that greenhouse gas emissions levels be reduced to 1990 levels by the year 2020. AB 32 charges the California Air Resources Board (CARB) with several tasks, including: (1) adopt and enforce regulations that require the reporting of emissions; (2) create a scoping plan to provide a strategy for reducing emissions; and (3) adopt and enforce regulations that achieve AB 32’s emission reduction mandates. AB 32 requires that CARB adopt such regulations via an open public process. It further requires CARB to consult other state agencies, particularly the Energy Commission and the Public Utilities Commission, and it encourages CARB to study other emissions reductions programs, both domestic and foreign, when crafting its own plan.

We will need to implement a varied array of programs to achieve AB 32’s targets, but transportation accounts for over 40% of greenhouse gas emissions statewide, and almost 30% of emissions come from automobiles and light trucks — so reducing transportation emissions is a major piece of the puzzle. Of particular interest here is how smart land use and transportation planning can be implemented to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the face of California’s projected population growth. Legal challenges will provide the mechanism by which CARB’s AB 32 regulations can be enforced, so the momentum has been building to enact state legislation that will strengthen the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) to make it a more effective tool for enforcing AB 32.

Enter SB 375, authored by Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento). First introduced in February 2007 and passed just last week by the state legislature, SB 375 now awaits the Governor’s signature. SB 375 is a complicated, multifaceted bill, but its overall message could not be clearer: transportation, housing, and land use — although traditionally placed in different thought boxes — are, in fact, closely intertwined, and the intersection area should be leveraged as a powerful tool to protect the environment and reduce emissions. In that sense, SB 375 is rightly hailed as a landmark piece of legislation.

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UPDATE (25 August 2008): The bill that is the subject of this post, AB 2558, was withdrawn by Assemblymember Huffman, and will be replaced later by another proposal.

I know there has been a lot of statewide material on this site lately — more local coverage will resume soon, but I did not want this one last morsel to get lost in the furor over AB 3034 and high-speed rail. Earlier this year, the bill AB 2744 died in the Assembly Transportation Committee; but, had it passed through the legislature and into law, it would have authorized the Metropolitan Transportation Commission to levy a fee on each gallon of gas purchased to generate an additional pile of money to be used for transit and programs related to climate change. The motor vehicle fuel fee didn’t work out, but how about charging a greenhouse gas emission fee instead? AB 2558, which just passed last week through the State Senate Appropriations Committee and which will be heard soon by the full Senate, aims to do essentially that. The bill is a joint Northern and Southern California product, co-authored by Mike Feuer (D-Los Angeles) and Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael), who also authored the aborted AB 2744.

AB 2558 would authorize both the Bay Area’s MTC and the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to assess a climate change mitigation fee in their jurisdictions, and then apply the funds that are collected to implementing a plan that is specifically geared towards reducing or at least limiting global warming. The mitigation fee could take one of two forms:

• A fee on fuel for motor vehicles, not to exceed 3% of fuel sales price at the time the plan is adopted; or
• An annual fee assessed for each registered vehicle; the fee would vary based on the carbon emissions of each individual vehicle, but is not to exceed $90.

AB 2558 requires that any such plan allocate at least two-thirds of the collected funds to transit. Other than that, the requirements for the funded plan are rather general — but the remaining one-third or less of funds are to be applied to programs that accomplish “regional environmental and transportation needs,” including new infrastructure that encourages biking and walking, as well as programs that maximize efficiency of current freeway infrastructure (e.g. high occupancy vehicle lanes) without building new freeways.

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We have discussed here before, or at least introduced, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s Transportation 2035 Plan, which is the latest update to the Regional Transportation Plan. The RTP provides a strategy for how to use the $223 billion of transportation funding that MTC expects will become available to the Bay Area over the next 25 years. Of that money, $191 billion is “committed,” leaving $32 billion of discretionary funding. The vast majority of this money (in the 80-90% range, depending on how the discretionary money is allocated) is earmarked for maintaining current road and transit infrastructure, and in fact, the bulk of the system expansion funds (about 80%) are to be applied to transit, not to roads. But not even all of the transit expansion projects are maximally intelligent, and there are still a lot of roadway expansion projects. I have already expressed dissatisfaction with MTC’s insistence at allocating funds for freeway expansion and then protecting them into perpetuity by sticking them into the “committed” status lockbox. But the last time we picked up this story, the Advisory Council offered several suggestions, one of which was to re-evaluate even the “committed” projects in light of AB 32, the bill which requires that California greenhouse gas emissions be reduced to 1990 levels by the year 2020.

Unsurprisingly, MTC chose to ignore this suggestion by the time of last week’s July 23 meeting. The Chron duly reported on the Commission’s approval to move forward with a regional network of High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes, which I plan to discuss more in a future post. But the Chron neglected to point out the other part of the story — namely, that the financially constrained portion of the Transportation 2035 Plan was also approved, and, pursuant to Resolution 3869, the Plan and four alternatives will move onto the EIR phase that will occupy the next several months. MTC is required by law to undergo environmental review of both the Plan and a range of feasible alternatives that could mitigate environmental impacts of the Plan. With the exception of the required “No Project” alternative, all other alternatives offer different perspectives on how to spend the $32 billion of discretionary funds, but they maintain the same base of “committed” projects — and it is here that the freeway expansion monies lie. Many of the freeway expansion projects are relatively small, and others still are planned as part of the HOT lane network, where they are at least partially justifiable. But not all the money is earmarked for HOT lanes, and the total still amounts to some $6 billion to be spent on expanding the reach of Bay Area pavement.

But times change. Global warming is not only an environmental issue — it is increasingly a legal issue, as well, and a valid ground on which to challenge the adequacy of a governmental agency’s efforts at environmental review. Governing bodies can no longer sweep this issue under the rug. Even the current U.S. Supreme Court, in last year’s landmark case Massachusetts v. EPA, managed to recognize the importance of legal recourse as a means of addressing the climate change crisis. Meanwhile, also just last year, here in California, current Attorney General and former California Governor & Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown filed a challenge under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) against Inland Empire San Bernardino County’s updated General Plan, asserting that it did not adequately address greenhouse gas emissions in light of the County’s projected growth — although the plan did discuss measures to reduce emissions and traffic. The case settled quickly, but it sent a clear signal to California governments and agencies that they may not ignore greenhouse gas emissions when studying the environmental impacts that result from new projects and plans. Both this and AB 32 are more recent developments that MTC did not have to contend with the last time it prepared an update to the RTP.

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Sidebar Addition: Current Gas Prices. Although rising fuel prices are forcing transit agencies to look yet again to fare hikes, I cannot help but to be pretty excited about the prospect of higher gas prices encouraging  a paradigm shift from driving to transit. With gas prices approaching $5 per gallon here in the Bay Area, we are seeing increased ridership: BART, for instance, reported an average of 367,570 daily exits at its stations between April and June 2008, more than a 5% increase over the preceding quarter. Still more riders will join the party if gas costs $7 by the year 2010. In celebration, you might say — and as a reminder of the better alternative — a photo of current gas station prices has been added to the sidebar, to be updated periodically. The photo posted right now comes from the Chevron at 19th & Irving in San Francisco. Please drop me an email or write in the comments if you know a gas station with even higher prices that should be posted — provided, of course, that the gas station is accessible by transit.