A Long View, With a Plan

Sunny skies converged with the holiday exodus to display Southern California at its best on Christmas Day. From even a modest peak in Griffith Park, walkers could see all the way from snow-capped Mt. Baldy to the spired cranes of San Pedro’s harbor skyline. As remarkable as the sight was the absence of sound. The freeways lacing this grand landscape stood oddly empty, the thrum of traffic hushed for a day.

It may not be everyone’s idea of Christmas, but this paradise of crystalline views and unclogged freeways is for many of us the ideal Southern California. The test for Southern Californians is what to do when the ideal doesn’t match reality for much of the year.

The Southern California Assn. of Governments attempts to measure reality in its annual six-county state-of-the-region report. Charts and graphs plot changes in population, the economy, housing, the environment, transportation, education and public safety. Some of it is good news. Air quality, for example, may not be pristine every day but has improved in each of the four years the planning and research group has issued its report card.

The bad news is that freeways are jammed most days of the year, affordable homes aren’t available near jobs, schools continue to perform abysmally, per capita income remains below the national average and the divide between rich and poor grows ever wider. Worse, the fear underlying the bad news is that continued population growth will overwhelm efforts to find solutions and undermine what progress has been made.

For years the association has been warning that the 16 million people who call Southern California home will grow 6 million by 2025, which planners note is like adding two Chicagos. Some Southern Californians have tried to shut the door to growth by fighting any new construction, be it houses, roads or airport terminals. They hope that if conditions get crowded enough, people will stop coming, never mind that most of this population growth will be from natural increase--births exceeding deaths--rather than people moving here.

As boggling as the numbers are, the state-of-the-region report is a call to action, not fear, urging local governments to set planning priorities by need rather than by pressure from the loudest interest group, and to work together on regionwide issues.

By painting so clear a view, the report challenges Southern Californians to rethink the way they build housing and transportation as drastically as they changed how cars are built and factories operated and by doing so cleaned the air. The Christmas vista was proof that it can be done.