Smarter Ways to Grow
Two developments in Northern California offer new hope that the notion of “smart growth” is belatedly taking hold in the state.
Deal No. 1, between the city of Sacramento and Sacramento County, would allow development of 10,000 acres of county farmland east of Sacramento International Airport while another 10,000 acres surrounding the airport and along the Sacramento River would remain in the county and be preserved as open space. The developed area would be annexed to the city, and the open space would remain under county control.
If consummated, the tentative deal would end years of city-county bickering over the future of the undeveloped area, about a third the size of San Francisco.
A critical point is that the city would share with the county the sales taxes it collects from businesses in the developed area. Development fees on homes for 60,000 people would be used to buy the land to be saved as open space.
The agreement is notable because Sacramento County has a reputation for poor planning and sprawl. But Supervisor Roger Dickinson, who helped negotiate the pact, said, “We didn’t want to become an urban blob.”
Now, as the governments work out the details, they might consider the good planning example of a development called Rivermark on 157 acres that had been part of the old Agnews State Hospital in Santa Clara, Calif., at the south end of San Francisco Bay. Planners call it “new urbanism,” a suburb with houses on smaller lots within walking distance of schools, shopping areas, parks and public transportation. It’s across the street from a new Sun Microsystems campus. All this is the antithesis of the auto-reliant California suburban pattern.
Rivermark is similar to the model created by planner-developer James Rouse in Columbia, Md., in the 1960s and copied with varying degrees of success, including at Los Angeles’ Playa Vista development. Rob Steuteville, the editor of New Urban News, says California has been pretty good at redevelopment in the cities but not so adept at making the suburbs better.
The state has been notoriously absent in the area of land-use planning and in allowing revenue-sharing among local governments. Two bills before the Legislature would make progress in this respect.
AB 680, by Assemblyman Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), would test the idea of sales tax revenue-sharing in a five-county region around Sacramento. SB 1521, by Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica), would require the state to establish model planning practices and policies that local government could follow but would not have to. The Steinberg bill was stalled this week, but the idea should not be allowed to die.
Both measures are extremely modest steps in the right direction.
