It is immensely frustrating to me to read about serious, controversial policy issues (like, say Iraq) that take one policy, dissect the problems with it and the sometimes stupid, incompetent, and venal behind it – and neglect to look at the problems with the alternatives and the sometimes stupid, incompetent and venal people who support them.<\/p>\n
In the LA Weekly last week, reporter David Zanheiser has three well-researched, intelligent, and deeply incomplete articles about growth in Los Angeles – “What’s Smart About Smart Growth<\/a>“, “Peddling Smart Growth<\/a>“, and “Do As We Say, Not As We Do<\/a>“.<\/p>\n Go over and read them to get a sense of the murky world of land-use politics in Los Angeles. Which are actually far worse than he sets out…the ‘iron ricebowl’ that local land-use provides in many cities where developers, homeowner groups, lobbyists and politicians all rely on a system that does very little real planning.Then stop and think for a moment. I don’t have the time to do a post that really does justice to the gaping holes in Zanheiser’s article, but let me do a quick introduction.<\/p>\n We live in a city and region that is growing in population (as most coastal cities really are). Growth in cities is usually a good thing, because the option tends to be collapse a la Detroit rather than the kind of benign stability I think everyone hoped for. If the population grows, you’ve got four axes on which you can grow – you can increase the density within the housing you have (doubling up, multigenerational families), you can increase the density of housing (building up), you can increase the size of the community field (building out), or you can try and throttle back on growth by allowing none of the above.<\/p>\n Each of those alternatives has costs and problems.<\/p>\n Most of these policies have been tried in different places, so we have experience we can look to.<\/p>\n Santa Barbara and Santa Barbara County have done a lot to throttle growth, using water connections as a limiting factor. They’ve done this for close to 30 years, and as a result housing prices in Santa Barbara are among the highest in the nation – and they also have terrible traffic problems<\/b>, as the people who work in Santa Barbara and increasingly can’t afford to live there commute further and further to get there.<\/p>\n I’m not suggesting that more density is in fact the best policy in Los Angeles (although I do think that it’s inevitable and that if managed well need not destroy the city). I am stating that Zanheiser did half a job by failing to put the policy into a framework of policy alternatives, their histories, and their impacts, and that it’s frustrating to see him fall into the easy narative of developers, greed, and craven politicians.<\/p>\n Cities face hard decisions; Los Angeles more than most, I believe. We’d be really well served with a local press that could understand, explain, and follow planning issues better than the one we have…I’m hoping this article is a step on that path. Let’s see what the next few look like. C’mon Jill…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Armed Liberal dings the LA Weekly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1445"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1445\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}