People will continue, as they have for thousands of years, to want to live in the suburban areas of towns for the same reasons even most advocates of urban density living choose to, less crime, more space.
Dan Walters: California growth will lead to more development conflicts
By Dan Walters - dwalters@sacbee.com
Published 12:00 am PDT Sunday, April 6, 2008
California's housing meltdown is wreaking economic and personal havoc, but it won't last forever.
The state's ever-growing population will soak up the now-vacant housing units in a year or two, and home building will resume, driven by the inexorable demand.
Generally speaking, California needs about 200,000 units of new housing – single-family homes, apartments, condos or mobile homes – each year.
During the development lull, however, there's a great debate under way in a variety of venues, from the Capitol to local city councils to academic conferences, over what kind of housing it should be.
Will it be a resumption of the horizontal development that California has traditionally embraced, with new single-family subdivisions creeping outward from core cities and reached by automobile? Or will it be higher-density vertical development like that of Eastern cities (and San Francisco), served by mass transit?
The debate is not new but has gained volume because the advocates of vertical development – what Attorney General Jerry Brown describes as "elegant density" – have a new political lever in global warming.
Brown is waging a crusade for his development vision, something of a throwback to the "small is beautiful" credo he sometimes espoused as governor three decades ago – although his personal commitment is somewhat suspect since he and his wife, citing crime fears, moved from an urban loft in Oakland to a comfortable home in the Oakland hills after he took office last year.
