Archive for the ‘Tri-Valley’ Category
Jerry Brown to Pleasanton: Housing and Climate Change Are Connected
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.
On Walkability, Density, and Transit Villages
It’s official: according to the WalkScore.com rankings, San Francisco has been determined to be America’s most walkable city, as reported by the Chronicle. Our fair city’s score of 86 out of 100 just edged out New York’s 83, Boston’s 79, Chicago’s 76, and Philadelphia’s 74. The WalkScore algorithm does have some shortcomings (which the site frankly admits) — pedestrian conditions on Stockton Street in SF’s Chinatown could be much better than they are now, but that did not stop Chinatown from receiving a top score of 99 out of 100, a score largely based on the high density of a large variety of shops and services in a very compact area. But for anyone who has strolled through San Francisco’s downtown or neighborhood commercial districts, this news does not really come as too much of a surprise. Check out the complete listing of neighborhood scores here.
But the most revealing part of the article was not the part glorifying San Francisco, but rather, the part indicating that the Bay Area, taken as a whole, could be much more walkable than it is now. The Bay Area region fell in third place, “well below the greater Washington, D.C., and Boston regions,” according to the Chron. This reflects the fact that while the Washington, D.C. area has allowed Metro to shape dense land use patterns near stations (even for stations outside of the central core), the Bay Area has been slower to allow BART to have the same effect. We should be careful about discussing density and walkability in the same breath, as they are not equivalent. An older suburban downtown whose buildings front directly onto the street is quite walkable, if not particularly dense, and on the flip side, high-rises alone cannot make a neighborhood truly walkable if the street level fails to provide safety and amenities for pedestrians. But well-planned density that is sensitive to the street provides the extra bodies that make a walkable district that much more bustling and successful.
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| Courtesy Beyond DC. |
Consider Bethesda, Maryland, pictured at right. Located on the D.C. Metro Red Line, Bethesda is a great example of how dense, walkable districts can bloom around rail nodes, even in an otherwise suburban setting. (Check out this Google satellite map of Bethesda. It shows how the densely urbanized streets that are within easy access of a Metro station are very clearly delineated from the suburban neighborhoods further from the line.) The Bay Area, by contrast, is adamantly low-rise, not just in the suburbs, but also in most neighborhoods in San Francisco and Oakland. In general, only the urban downtown districts make any attempt to reach for the sky — so we have not truly leveraged the potential inherent in most of the rail nodes scattered around the Bay Area. The idea of mid-rises or even shorter high-rises at places like San Leandro and Millbrae BART stations might seem unthinkable — but the Bay Area’s conception of cities, walking, and transit would be quite different if even suburban cities had permitted miniature skylines to sprout at their rail stations. It is also interesting to note that the different development patterns have given rise to contrasting effects on transit ridership. Both BART and Metro are slightly over 100 miles long, and the two systems are of comparable age (Metro is just a few years younger). And yet, while BART reported an average of 367,570 daily riders last quarter, Metrorail set a record last Friday, July 11 of 854,638 riders — a higher ridership than BART can even support as long as its service patterns require operation of four routes through a single transbay tube. What explains the pronounced difference? The fact that Metro has twice the number of stations as BART for approximately the same amount of track certainly goes a long way toward making the system accessible to more people. But another factor (though certainly not the only other factor) that explains the difference must be that Metro has helped give rise to dense, walkable cities, which feed the system with a natural ridership base that is largely missing from BART because the land use around BART stations (already too few to begin with) is often not that intense.
June 2008 Election: State Legislature Roundup
This post will provide some information on the Democratic primary for the California legislature campaigns. The blurbs that follow are essentially endorsements, but I hesitate to use the word “endorsement” here, because to my mind, use of that word ought to be supported by a fuller discussion, drawing on a large range of issues. Because this blog has a relatively narrow topical focus, I wasn’t sure what the interest level would be outside of that focus; in any case, there did not turn out to be time to put together a more complete discussion.
It probably goes without saying that my that my opinions about these these candidates are based on more than just their records on transit and planning issues — in fact, that may have only been a small part of the equation. But I figured that if you are reading this blog, you are probably interested in the candidates’ perspectives on these topics — particularly because in campaigning, these issues often get lost in the shuffle, even though some of us find them to be extremely important. So that is the focus of these blurbs, as a starting point; readers are of course encouraged to research other issues they care about. This post does not pretend to be a thorough or equal discussion of all candidates campaigning for the same position — nor is this a complete list of all races. Candidates are after the jump.
Altamont Bypassed
This is a post I started to write a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, a couple weeks of illness and the general pandemonium of the holidays prevented me from finishing it in a timely fashion, but better late than never, right? Somehow, this blog has been running for a few months now, with barely a single mention of the California High-Speed Rail project, but a most disheartening piece of news from a few weeks ago presents a good excuse to jumpstart the discussion here
Well-established is that this critically important project, estimated to cost around $40 billion, would link cities across California with a high-speed rail system in which trains would travel, in a little over two-and-a-half hours, between Union Station in Los Angeles and a newly reconstructed Transbay Transit Center in San Francisco. It would bring the different corners of this state closer together and is a tremendous economic benefit for California. It also provides a sustainable way of transporting a population that is projected to swell to an excess of 50 million in the next couple of decades. One point, which should not be underestimated (particularly in the growing but auto-centric Central Valley) is that the high-speed route provides a clear guide indicating where future development across the state should be carried out, with high-density uses in most cases focused at stations and in downtowns located along the route. At long last, with high-speed rail, we will have a legitimate alternative to airplanes and freeways for travel within California — an alternative we will appreciate even more when both of those current systems exceed capacity, at which time the realization will set in that high-speed rail would not only have helped curb congestion, it would also have cost less than extensive freeway expansions. At long last, we will develop and modernize our rail system to make it slightly less of a laughing stock when compared to the extensive rail networks found in many other countries around the world.
Or will we?
Hefty Development Proposed for Dublin
Dublin is a suburb in the outer East Bay that in the past has not shied away from development, but if a new project proposed by Pleasanton-based developer Charter Properties is built, the town could finally be placed on the map. Sources on this project seem slightly contradictory and could just be reporting two different versions of the plan. An article in the Contra Costa Times described four towers, ranging in height from 16 to 21 stories. On the other hand, a staff report posted on Dublin’s city planning website reports three residential towers and a low- to mid-rise podium of four buildings, once again citing a 21-story maximum height for one tower. In either case, this project — consisting of 675 residential units, 181,000 square feet of office space, and 76,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space — is large, especially given Dublin’s location as an outer ring suburb.
The list of East Bay highrises is currently dominated mostly by Oakland (whose 404-foot Ordway Building remains the tallest occupied building in the Bay Area outside of San Francisco) and to a lesser extent, Emeryville. Walnut Creek — referred to as an “edge city” to acknowledge the denser, quasi-urban development that it has encouraged downtown for the past decade — is probably one of the region’s most successful examples of downtown revitalization, but new construction is capped at 89 feet, or roughly six stories of office — development there is relatively active, but remains low-rise in nature. Other nearby cities have similar height limits in place. For sure, the Dublin towers would definitely stick out conspicuously above the surrounding landscape, but they could also help to define a new neighborhood.
Some areas of the country, like Washington, D.C., have embraced the idea that denser and taller development in suburbs can work. The Bay Area has been slower to catch up in this regard. To be sure, the Dublin proposal has sparked some community opposition — and even if the project is approved, my guess is that tower heights will probably be reduced — but the fact that some are even being open-minded about the project is encouraging, and it marks an interesting paradigm shift for the Bay Area, which admits high-rise developments in urban downtowns, but refuses taller buildings outside of those few concentrated locations. A few taller buildings are located along the Peninsula and in Emeryville, but these sites have excellent freeway access and poor transit access, making them direct counterexamples of smart growth.
The problem with this Dublin proposal is that it, too, is another such counterexample. The proposed site (near the crossing of Tassajara Road and Interstate 580) has easy freeway access, but it cannot be considered truly transit-oriented, as it is not convenient to the BART terminus at Dublin/Pleasanton, nor is it convenient to the infill West Dublin/Pleasanton station which just began construction. Although this was not the case even rather recently, Dublin is now an established suburb, so I would prefer we develop here (only a couple miles from the BART line), rather than in, say, Tracy. While I remain encouraged by the more open-minded vision shown by Dublin planners, this site is bound to create more car traffic and would make more sense within walking distance of a BART station.
