Hard Times or Not, Growth to Continue
Woe is us. Despite a modest national recovery, California lingers in the slough of recession. Aerospace employment is shrinking, Sacramento is awash in red ink, and impressed by the recent local anarchy, tourists are squeamish.
Sunk in economic woes as bad as any in decades, it’s easy to forget what the future inevitably holds for this state. What’s ahead are more people.
“We still foresee substantial numerical growth, as does nearly everybody else that does these things,” says Stephen Levy, director of the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy. He figures on 40 million Californians--an increase of about a third--by 2010.
This implies economic growth too, but it will happen even if the economy isn’t much good, because the increase will be due mainly to in-state births and to newcomers from foreign countries. Levy says the latter usually come from places so bad off that a stagnant California looks good by comparison.
So, despite all the gloom, managing growth will continue to be a big challenge for California in the years ahead. The problem is how to do it. A new study by a UC Berkeley professor of city and regional planning sheds some light on what may or may not help.
In “Do Growth Controls Work?,” John D. Landis examined seven small California cities--Camarillo, Livermore, Lodi, Redlands, San Luis Obispo, Thousand Oaks and Walnut Creek--with strong growth-control restrictions. In each instance, he also scrutinized a neighboring community that didn’t adopt growth-control measures. His findings are startling.
First, strict local growth-control measures didn’t much limit population growth and housing development. In fact, some of the anti-growth cities grew faster than their pro-growth counterparts. So the short answer to the question posed by the title seems to be, no.
Second, although we all know that limiting supply and adding regulations is supposed to raise prices, housing prices didn’t rise any faster in the anti-growth cities than in their laissez-faire twins. Some of the growth-control cities even got cheaper.
Third, communities that don’t grow are supposed to run short of money to pay for services, yet in Landis’ anti-growth cities, revenue grew faster in relation to expenditures than in the pro-growth communities. (He figures that this is because growth-controlling cities tended to have better local governments in the first place.)
His conclusion? “Over a 10-year period, local growth-control programs--of the type adopted in seven mid-sized California cities during the early 1980s--have generally been irrelevant.”
Landis’ study, perhaps the first systematic look at whether local growth controls work, is important because so many places in California are trying to control growth. His study notes that in 1975 only three California cities or counties had adopted such measures. By 1988 the number was 93. Another study found that more than 60% of California’s 500 cities and counties have adopted some form of growth management.
But Landis says that even stringent local growth controls tend to be riddled with loopholes, and that perhaps more important than the laws are the people who enforce them.
Local growth controls can backfire too. In Lodi, Landis found, controls forced developers to fill in empty lots rather than build outward. Downtown became more vibrant, making Lodi even more attractive to newcomers. Growth controls, in other words, can increase the pressure to grow.
On the other hand, counties and cities working in unison have succeeded in limiting growth locally--but the growth only crops up elsewhere. Landis says Ventura County’s success in slowing growth is one big reason the Antelope Valley has boomed in recent years. What’s really needed is a comprehensive state policy--not to control growth but to manage it.
And in a sense, the state of the economy today is irrelevant. William Fulton, publisher of the California Planning and Development Report, a newsletter, observes that California has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs since May, 1990, even as it added 1 million residents.
Looking ahead, Landis predicts that “the growth patterns of the 1980s will recur in the mid-1990s.” But he’s optimistic that, with some effort, we can handle it: “Can all these people fit? Absolutely. We just have to decide not to fight this stupid battle over whether growth is good or bad.”
A follow-up: Remember that expedition to Mt. Everest launched by Daniel N. Larson, president of Kaiser Steel Resources, and two other Southern California executives?
Well, it’s over. The good news is, they made it back alive. The bad news: They didn’t reach the summit.
The expedition got as far as 27,000 feet up the mountain’s North Ridge, just 2,028 feet short of the peak, but three separate summit bids were stymied by snowstorms and winds exceeding 100 m.p.h. The group’s climbing leader was felled early on by amoebic dysentery, and three Sherpa guides were sidelined, two by ulcers.
Back on the job in Rancho Cucamonga, Larson, a veteran climber, says he isn’t sure if he’ll try again. Meanwhile, he’s working on his weight.
Normally more than 170 pounds, he dropped to about 150 on the mountain. Says Larson: “I’m eating my way back to civilization.”
