by
Stuart M. Flashman, Ph.D., J.D.
Over the past several
years, a new catch phrase has sprung up in the environmental community: “smart
growth”. It arose as environmentalists
struggled to find an attractive alternative to the low-density auto-oriented
development that has become endemic to American suburban areas. The latter is often popularly referred to
(within the environmental community, at least) as “suburban sprawl”.
What is smart
growth? It is an attempt to direct
growth into less environmentally damaging avenues. Thus, smart growth favors “infill” development (i.e., development
within already urbanized areas) instead of development of previously
undeveloped areas (“greenflields”).
Smart growth attempts to promote transit-oriented rather than
auto-oriented development, for example by focusing high-density development
around public transit hubs. Perhaps
most relevant to the following discussion, smart growth tries to minimize the
increase in demand for limited resources, such as water, by promoting
development that uses less of those resources (for example, apartment buildings
that have minimal landscaped area and therefore use less water for irrigation).
Environmental groups,
most notably the Sierra Club, have launched a major campaign in support of
smart growth. The basic idea is that
America has been foolishly squandering its environmental resources on an
inefficient form of development. The
campaign appears to be paying off.
Governmental agencies have begun to discuss smart growth as a better way
to accommodate expected increases in population. This trend has been particularly true in California, and nowhere
more so than in the San Francisco Bay area.
However, the success of
the smart growth movement only serves to highlight what it fails to address –
the long-term question of how much growth a region can reasonably accommodate. This
issue has often been referred to as regional carrying capacity.
While regional carrying
capacity has many components, probably the single most obvious and most
important is infrastructure – the various logistic components needed to keep a
human population supplied and functional.
Among the major modern infrastructure components are water supply,
treatment and distribution, wastewater collection, treatment, and disposal,
solid waste disposal, energy supply and distribution, roadways, and public mass
transit. Other components that tend to
be less limiting, at least in terms of physical facilities, include education,
public safety, and recreational facilities.
Most of the current
discussion of smart growth takes the projected amount of future growth as a
given.[1] There is little discussion of what can or
should be done to limit the amount of future population growth in a
region. Yet, the amount of growth that
will occur in a region is certainly affected by a variety of factors; most
notably increased employment demand.
This, in turn, is affected by multiple factors, including the local
economy, cost of living, availability of trained workforce, and availability of
necessary infrastructure. The latter
would seem to provide a feedback loop that would keep population growth in
balance with infrastructure, but it does not appear to have worked very well,
at least in the short run.
Part of the reason
infrastructure limits have failed to control job growth may be that such limits
are often hidden. Thus, for example,
water agencies are usually required to issue “will serve” letters before a
development project is built. These
letters are supposed to ensure that the water agency has sufficient supply and
facilities to serve the new development.
However, water agencies routinely issue will serve letters based on
supplies and facilities that are only projected. The same often holds true for wastewater treatment and
disposal. Other infrastructure
components, such as roads and public transit, do not require any kind of review
and approval prior to development approval, other than the general discussion
that occurs during the environmental review process. More often than not, this process is seen as just one more hoop
to be jumped through to get to development approval. Thus, Environmental Impact Reports all too often contain flawed
or cursory analyses of traffic (and other) impacts. Even such unavoidable infrastructure-related impacts as are
identified are routinely accepted as undesirable but necessary consequences of
the need to promote economic development.
As a result, development
often ends up straining the capacity of the agencies responsible for
infrastructure. Thus, development in
the Santa Rosa area north of San Francisco has repeatedly outstripped sewage
treatment capacity, resulting in overflows of raw sewage into the Russian
River. Similarly, the inability of
water supplies to keep pace with urban and suburban growth has contributed to
California’s more and more frequent “water shortage emergencies”.[2]
The California
legislature has begun to acknowledge the need to address infrastructure before
projects are approved. The 2001
legislative session passed SB221 (Kuehl).
This statute, for the first time, requires that before a subdivision map
or development agreement for a large-scale residential project is approved, the
water agency proposed to supply the project verify that it has a sufficient
water supply for the project. This bill
does not address the need for long-term planning at the level of the general
plan. (But see, Government Code
§65302(d) and §65352.5 [providing for coordination between water agency and
land use agency and discussion of the adequacy of water supply in the general
plan conservation element].) Nor does
it address the broader question of the overall adequacy of regional
infrastructure. Further, the bill, as
it was finally passed, contains numerous loopholes that call into question its
ability to impact on regional planning.
Nevertheless, it represents the first time the legislature has
acknowledged the folly of cities and counties approving development projects
while closing their collective eyes to the inadequacy of infrastructure to
support those projects.
In the San Francisco Bay
area, the Association of Bay Area Governments (“ABAG”) has recently undertaken
a regional “smart growth” planning initiative.
The project expects to produce a coordinated set of county plans for the
region. These plans would aim to
accommodate the growth projected in local general plans, while minimizing the
conversion of “greenfields” to developed uses.
However, these plans include no consideration of the limits on available
regional infrastructure.
It should be obvious
from the above discussion that without consideration of carrying capacity, such
“smart growth” plans are little more than an exercise in Pollyanna planning,
with little connection to what really will happen in the Bay Area over the next
twenty years. Indeed, if these planning
efforts continue as currently envisaged, the most likely result is that far
before their build-out is complete, Bay Area development will grind to a halt,
stymied by the inadequacy of available infrastructure. The economic cost of such an unplanned
economic “train wreck” will be colossal -- far greater than if ABAG had taken
carrying capacity into account and planned a gradual transition to a
steady-state regional population and economy.
In short, ABAG’s current
smart growth initiative stands at a crossroads. If it continues on its current course, it will almost certainly
fail, providing ammunition to those who claim that smart growth is
unworkable. If, on the other hand, it
is modified to take into account the region’s long-term carrying capacity, it
could serve as a model for how to manage regional planning in a way that
addresses both economic vitality and the very real limits on growth.
[1] The discussion that follows does not address the much broader and, in the long term, even more serious Malthusian limits to growth. Needless to say, neither infrastructure improvements nor, for that matter, changes in development or immigration policies, will avert long-term catastrophe if population exceeds basic infrastructure components such as food supply.
[2] This is not to say that infrastructure limits are immovable. With sufficient capital input, infrastructure can often be expanded. For example, new highways, sewage treatment facilities, and public transit lines can be built. In coastal areas, desalinization is even an option. However, these initiatives can be prohibitively expensive. To take one example, Santa Barbara built a desalinization facility, but was forced to mothball it because of its excessive operating expense.
Last Updated June 10, 2002