The State : Riverside Experiments With a Smart-Growth Approach

Every month, in a quiet meeting room in the Riverside Art Museum, representatives of major real estate and environmental organizations sit down and talk about the future of their region. Occasionally, they are joined by top officials of Riverside County. During the development boom of the late 1980s, when Riverside County led Southern California and the nation in new housing construction, these organizations regularly faced off at public hearings and in courtrooms. Today, as suburban development again marches across the landscape, these rival interests are trying a new approach. If they succeed, it may change forever the way land-use politics and policy are determined in California.

Across the country, and especially in the growth-intensive Sunbelt, the new focus is on “smart growth”: an amalgam of policies aimed at producing better land-use planning, clearer environmental requirements, improved design and higher-quality physical development. These issues were first addressed comprehensively in California almost 22 years ago, when Gov. Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown’s Office of Planning and Research released a report titled “An Urban Strategy for California,” containing specific guidelines for more effective local land-use regulation. Until Riverside County embarked on its development-policy experiment, there had been no systematic attempt to implement the components of such a new urban-planning paradigm. If the Riverside negotiations unite smart-growth policies in the county’s new general plan, theory will be transformed into reality.

What is driving the smart-growth movement is an increasingly mutual realization among real estate and conservation interests that the old head-butting approach to development resulted in spotty gains and frequently irrational outcomes for all concerned. Nowhere is this movement more evident than in Southern California, and particularly in Riverside County, which combines one of the highest residential-development rates in the nation with some of the most complex environmental and planning issues.

The catalyst in Riverside County is the need to prepare a new general plan to guide land-use decisions for the next generation. Leading environmental organizations, including the Endangered Habitats League, Sierra Club and Audubon Society, some of which sued the county over its current general plan, agreed to sit down with representatives of the real estate industry, including the Building Industry Assn., Property Owners Assn. and California Farm Bureau Federation, to negotiate a set of principles that would underpin the new plan. The environmental side is led by Daniel Silver, executive director of the Endangered Habitats League. His developer counterpart is William Warkentin, past president of the Building Industry Assn. in Riverside County. A new majority on the county Board of Supervisors and an open-minded planning director have endorsed and encouraged the talks.

At the outset, all participants agreed that the amount of land being consumed by each new resident in the county should be reduced, and that land should be set aside for public use and conservation purposes. Attaining these goals, it was further agreed, would require as much reliance upon market-based incentives as upon regulatory mandates. In evaluating this process, all parties had to be satisfied that the bargained outcomes matched expectations.

Priority was given to new development near already-developed areas, existing urban infrastructure or areas previously designated for growth by cities in the county. A plan for satisfying state and federal environmental laws, particularly those protecting endangered animal and plant species, was to be included in the overall plan.

After six months of meetings, this unusual coalition of environmentalists and developers made public its set of principles to guide the new general plan. The proposals are not revolutionary. What is revolutionary is that a broad array of organizations with no history of cooperation produced the principles and then jointly presented them to the Board of Supervisors. Seeking to capitalize on the momentum, the county set the wheels in motion to engage consultants and commence work on the new general plan.

The coalition is now working on specific positions and is well on its way to submitting them to the Board of Supervisors. There is a substantial consensus that regional cooperation should be promoted on transportation, air-quality and watershed-management problems that defy local solutions; land-use controls should be reevaluated to facilitate more compact, less sprawling development; and enough developable land should be designated to accommodate future growth. These are hardly novel ideas. But once the specifics are agreed to, the chances of the proposals being implemented are far greater than usual because the parties that might contest them are already in agreement.

To be sure, there is an element of risk for all participating interests. As always, the devil is in the details, and many of the details will only be worked out as the general plan is formulated. A critical aspect of the process, consequently, is to ensure that none of the participants are embarrassed by its outcomes, thereby undercutting their incentive to participate in similar efforts in the future or diminishing the value of work already done.

For all the talk of smart growth, it is far from a fixed concept. The policies being formulated, and perhaps soon to be adopted officially in Riverside County, make sense for that region. Most of them make equal sense for the rest of Southern California and, for that matter, any other urbanizing area. At the very least, they provide a solid foundation for formulating land-use principles and programs suitable for other localities. After it adopts a new general plan, Riverside County will have to secure cooperation from incorporated cities within the county in implementing the plan.

Statewide, land-use decisions increasingly are driven by shortsighted opposition to growth, often in the form of the referendum and the initiative. But as the Riverside experience indicates, with the right encouragement, developers and landowners will take long-range environmental goals into account, and environmentalists will accommodate population growth that will continue in any event. Building on that, we may come to recognize the Riverside County approach as the first landmark of land-use policy in the new millennium.*