Grass Roots Are No Place for Growth Control : Environment: Bad air, growth and gridlock do not yield to single-issue agencies. California needs regional management authorities.

Los Angelization, they call it. The term requires no explanation; in urban regions nationwide, the specter of Los Angeles is raised to galvanize aggressive growth management. “We love to ridicule L.A.,” said John Eells, transportation planning coordinator for Marin County, “but metropolitan America is imitating L.A. in every respect.”

Eells refers to the increasing suburbanization of home and workplace, the multiple crises caused by failure to manage growth. Dozens of dedicated agencies paddle furiously against the currents of air pollution, traffic congestion and energy consumption. These issues, usually handled by separate agencies, in fact demand coordinated management; they are inseparable from one another.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District has already recognized that it cannot achieve its goals without addressing both transportation and growth management issues. Hence its plan relies on Southern California Assn. of Governments’ Growth Management and Transportation Task Force to propose a regional plan, released in an interim report last month.

If Proposition 111 passes on the June ballot, AB 471, linking transit planning to land-use planning, will become law. AB 471 requires that counties and larger cities, as a condition for state funds, submit local growth-management plans consistent with regional goals. More, in January the Assembly Office of Research recommended that growth issues be managed on a regional level.

Good growth management does not yield to simple pro-growth/no-growth debate. No plan can stop people from being born and living longer, nor can it reduce the collective appetite for economic growth.

Yet growth itself has prevented single-issue agencies from success. Proposed mass-transit systems, for example, are key elements in plans to reduce traffic congestion, energy consumption and air pollution. Given a suburb-to-city commute pattern, mass transit systems are utilized: 50% of the commuters to San Francisco use mass transit; 400,000 jobs are located within walking distance of three BART stations, along with stores, restaurants and services.

But two-thirds of suburban commuters travel from suburb to suburb, often to work at a sprawling, landscaped industrial complex where the only people on foot don running shoes for a daily workout. The complex may be miles from the nearest restaurant, store, dentist, cleaners or residence.

Surveys show that the people who shun mass transit want to do shopping and errands at lunch or en route to work. And those workers travel ever-increasing distances as they move farther from the city core to find affordable housing in uncongested areas.

Two thirds of all jobs created between 1960 and 1980 were created in the suburbs. The trend has since accelerated. Attracted by cheaper land, among other factors, business has moved to the previously undeveloped countryside, followed by residential developments and sometimes shopping centers.

Suburban centers blossom like skin rashes, created by uncoordinated decisions among developers, industry and planners.

The aggregate regional impact of such unrelated decisions is not forecast as each development is approved. Most centers exacerbate traffic and air-quality problems for a number of reasons. Nearby housing is not affordable for the majority of workers employed in the offices and malls. They must, in turn, commute from less expensive residential areas. Some suburban areas lack the critical mass of employment and residents to support services--shops, restaurants and medical centers. Others may have more density than existing roadways can bear, but not enough to support mass transit.

The Growth Management and Transportation Task Force report states that reducing vehicle-miles traveled “through job/housing balance should be the major focus of growth management measures.”

The December, 1989, report by the California Assembly Office of Research, “Getting Ahead of the Growth Curve,” questions growth management by agencies that depend on the cooperation of numerous local governments and single-issue agencies. A January news release states that “existing regional agencies lack the authority, are too narrowly focused on single issues and are too often captured by the interests of their local government members who sit as their directors.”

The report recommends that California growth and related issues be linked and managed on a regional level: “The consequences of unmanaged growth have become increasingly regional--extending beyond city and county boundaries--but the fiscal and organizational resources to address those problems have remained under local control.” No local government, acting independently, has the authority or money to solve growth problems.

Eells believes that local pressure prohibits local elected officials from putting regional goals ahead of local interests: “Ever since Proposition 13, the primary fund-raising focus of local government has become the pursuit of revenue-producing commercial and office development.” Elected officials, he claims, adopt this strategy “to be responsive to constituents who do not want services cut or taxes raised.”

“No local official,” Eells continued, “will stay in office by supporting high-density affordable housing. We have suburban sprawl because people want it. Suburban sprawl is the cumulative effect of incremental decisions on low-density development.”

If growth-spawned problems are to be reduced or even held at present levels, management must come from an agency with authority that transcends political boundaries and single issues.

Its strategies must:

Provide incentives for developers and industry to locate low-salaried job growth near existing affordable housing and in declining, underutilized inner-city areas served by mass transit.

Link transportation and land-use planning. Redirect low-density office and commercial development to high-density development along mass transit routes and high-capacity arterials. Encourage development of high-density affordable housing in close proximity.

Eliminate sprawling, isolated auto-dependent industrial complexes. As a condition of commercial development, require high-density affordable housing in close proximity, with facilities for a range of service establishments and child-care centers.

Distribute responsibility for providing services and mitigating environmental impact, rather than targeting a specific group such as developers.

In previously undeveloped countryside, encourage any new development to take the form of planned, self-sufficient communities with a mix of office and commercial development, and a nearby range of homes and rental units to accommodate both affluent and low-income workers.

The proposed Porter Ranch project in the San Fernando Valley incorporates some of those features. Mayor Tom Bradley requested that a percentage of residential units be designated for low- to moderate-income residents and senior citizens. By providing for density in advance, planners can avoid residents’ objections to increasing density in a previously low-density neighborhood.

Any regional agency will need citizen support. The common denominator of growth problems--cause and cure--is people. We all want what we want, and what we want is everything--money, cars, clean air, low density, low taxes and high levels of services. No one can outrun environmental problems by leapfrogging out to the countryside. The problems follow them out, along the way engulfing all the communities in their path.