As usual, our local columnist nails it.
Dan Walters: Can state truly tame its sprawl?
By Dan Walters - Bee Columnist
Published 12:00 am PDT Sunday, September 2, 2007
The issue that stalled approval of a state budget for so many weeks -- whether local governments and private firms can be sued for failing to take global warming into account in development plans -- is merely the most recent manifestation of a larger conflict over how California should accommodate tens of millions of new residents over the next half century.
While the conflict predates the recent angst over global warming by several decades, it has grown more intense with the state's much- heralded legislation aimed at reducing the state's emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to 1990 levels.
Simply put -- although specifics are anything but simple -- it's a conflict over California's long-standing pattern of low-density single-family development pushing outward from core urban areas. Environmental activists have decried that model for decades, saying it gobbles up irreplaceable farmland and makes Californians too dependent on automobiles. They see the concern over global warming as a new weapon to promote denser urban development and mass transit.
That philosophy, however, not only runs afoul of developers' preferences but Californians' historic bias for single-family homes -- property they can call their own -- over the vertical housing that's common in many cities of the eastern United States and Europe but largely confined in California to San Francisco. There is, too, a tinge of class and perhaps race in the issue. Economically and politically dominant white Californians, including most politicians and high-density enviros, already live in single-family homes….
… The Los Angeles Times recently conducted an in-depth review of whether the billions of dollars spent on mass transit and transit-centered housing had borne fruit and found that in the main, residents of the new housing were shunning transit and still using their cars. Sacramento's "blueprint," meanwhile, is more paper vision than day-to-day decisionmaking.
