Economy to Muffle Slow-Growth Moves, Expert Says
California’s burgeoning slow-growth movement faces an uphill struggle, a prominent Northern California economist said Thursday, because the California economy is so strong that more jobs and more people will continue to be attracted to the state despite growth-control sentiment.
“This is an incredibly strong economy; you are dealing with incredibly strong forces,” Steven Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, told a growth-management conference in Manhattan Beach sponsored by UCLA Extension’s public policy program.
‘Hottest Trade Corridor’
“California sits in the fastest and hottest trade corridor in the world,” Levy said, referring to trade between the Pacific Coast and Asia. “You couldn’t stop (the California economy) with a 10-foot pole, and if you try to stop it, you’ll screw it up.”
He said that California’s population will grow from its present 28 million to about 32 million by 1995 and that, at most, 25% of that increase could be affected by growth controls, no matter how stringent and no matter how effectively they might be enforced.
About half of the projected population increase--2 million people or so--will result from more births than deaths between now and 1995, Levy said. Another 1 million new residents will be migrants from other states and countries drawn by the “strong pull of the California economy.”
“So we are arguing about 1 million people or less, in a population of 32 million,” the economist said, calling this “an argument at the margin.”
Daniel Garcia, president of the Los Angeles city Planning Commission, told the 400 conferees the “ ‘no-growth’ label is absurd” because Los Angeles area population has been increasing by an average of 2% a year “and will continue to do so.”
“The only question to ask is how do we intelligently plan for the growth that’s going to occur?” Garcia said.
Carlyle Hall, co-director of the Center for Law in the Public Interest, said in an interview that “there’s some truth in” Levy’s contention that growth controls would not affect much of California’s projected population increase.
But, he said, “there’s still a pretty big number” that could be affected by controls that would relieve traffic congestion and improve air quality, water and sewer capacity and the other problems that have led to the emergence of the slow-growth movement.
“We may not be able to stop growth, but we certainly can plan it much better than we’re doing,” Hall said.
Lennie Roberts, president of the San Mateo County conservation group called Save Our Coast, said local growth-control initiatives come about because “government is not doing the job the citizens expect it to be doing.”
“There is a high level of frustration” caused by the need to attend “endless meetings” and the “perceived deal-making” that goes on among elected officials and builders and developers, she said.
Gary Patton, a member of the Board of Supervisors in Santa Cruz County, where growth controls have been in effect for several years, said the movement is “an effort to impose political and social control now to achieve what we want later on.”
Referring to the recently defeated Orange County slow-growth initiative, Patton said, “The growth-control movement is not going to go away because Orange County developers outspent local activists.”
But Donald Steffensen, president of the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California, criticized “arbitrary growth controls” as “regressive policies” that often “impede solutions to problems.”
Steffensen said prospective developers of large, master-planned communities cannot afford to pay for roads, sewers and other necessary “infrastructure” if they cannot be sure they will be allowed to build enough units to make a profit.
Regional Solutions
Several speakers stressed the need for regional solutions to the problems that slow growth seeks to address.
Levy said most growth-control measures deal with a single city or in a few cases a single county, but the problems are regional, if not statewide.
“People can protect themselves through local actions, but nobody knows what the regional impact will be,” he said. If the Orange County initiative had been approved, “would that have pushed growth into Riverside and San Bernardino counties? We just don’t know.”
The two-day conference is an unusual gathering of both supporters and opponents of growth controls, meeting in an effort to cool the bitter feelings over slow-growth initiatives that marked the Orange County vote. Similar initiatives will be decided in November in Riverside County and the city of San Diego, among many other places.
