Planning for planning
We recently had the opportunity to play host to three Chinese
executives for the weekend. They were part of a group of graduate
students from San Francisco State University who came to San Benito
County for a few days to see how land-use decisions are made at
Ground Zero.
Planning for planning
We recently had the opportunity to play host to three Chinese executives for the weekend. They were part of a group of graduate students from San Francisco State University who came to San Benito County for a few days to see how land-use decisions are made at Ground Zero.
The group is here for a year. All are studying English and economic systems, with time for them to pursue other classes that best fit their interests. They were drawn from China’s intellectual elite. One engineer has 2,000 people reporting to him and works for a company that builds China’s largest highways. Another is vice-president for a securities trading firm. Others come from the consular corps and regional government levels.
Their interest in the messy process we call land-use planning was intense, and their questions incisive. A group of local people with long histories in land-use policy issues met for two evenings with the group. They learned many things, but I’m certain I learned more.
There’s nothing like trying to explain something to uncover gaps and inconsistencies in one’s own thinking.
Striking differences in the way we think about land and policy quickly emerged. Chinese do not legally own their land. They own the right to occupy it, to improve it, to will their rights to heirs, to sell their rights. Of course, we own our land, until such time as we stop paying our property taxes. That’s when “our” land becomes our government’s land.
We all came to understand that the key difference was one only of understanding, not substance. The land may be ours to use, but ownership is a little cloudy on both sides of the Pacific.
The next difference is as substantive as the former is not. Land-use decisions in China follow a clear path up the bureaucracy chain. Small decisions are made at the local level. As projects grow, they move to regional and national decision-making levels.
Here, land-use policy is set at the most local level. Cities control what goes on within their borders, counties within theirs, and a few regional or state agencies lurk around the fringes of decision making.
It’s a profound difference, and one likely rooted in the cultures of China and the American West. In China, the individual is subsumed by the greater good. Here, the rights of the individual reign.
Think about it: a single individual in California can object to approval of the largest project and get an official government hearing. Anyone can speak at a public hearing or comment on a project during its review period. Everyone who cares to has a voice.
If you’re a product of the American West, you probably think that’s a good thing. We tend to pride ourselves on our individuality.
But the local agency brand of planning that we have contains its own unique problems, problems that are growing as California grows. As the Bay Area metastasizes into a single megacity stretching from Santa Rosa to Salinas to Sacramento some of these problems threaten to destroy what brought us here in the first place. The problem lies in the inequalities inherent in a patchwork quilt of inconsistent policies and regulations.
With each petty bureaucracy concentrating on its small segment of a larger community, pretending that the larger community does not exist, regional problems go begging for solutions.
Nearly every candidate I’ve interviewed over the last 25 years has the same solution to many of our ills: balanced growth. With that old chestnut, they’re not breaking sod on virgin prairie, so why aren’t jobs accompanying the housing?
Back to local planning. Job growth over the last couple decades has come from Santa Clara County’s technology centers. Business development is attractive to government, because it does not demand the level of government service that housing tracts do. So the places that had jobs did everything they could to encourage more, while actively working to shunt housing growth off to outlying areas.
Forget that moving workers farther and farther away from their jobs comes at great cost; those bills will be paid from someone else’s account. Expanding clogged highways and cleaning fouled air are someone else’s job, not the responsibility of the cities that benefited most from the technology boom.
And the well-being of the individual that our planning is supposed to value above all else? Not even on the radar.
As California lurches toward 40 million inhabitants, perhaps it’s time to reconsider how we’re doing things. We need a new manifesto.
If anyone volunteered me to serve as Dictator for a Day, I’d adopt a regional approach first. Ironically, I think it might better serve the interests of the individual that our planning system was supposed to consider in the first place.
Of course, the problem with a regional approach is familiar to all of us in the small communities of our area. The urban big dogs may continue to indulge themselves at the public trough, leaving precious little for the rest of us. But we’re dealing with what ought to be, not what is, and if the needs of individuals drove decision-making, we’d find much in common with our city cousins.
What do we want from our landscape? I think most of us would come up with the same short list – affordable housing, access to open space and recreation, and proximity to our work, so we’ll have enough time left over each day to enjoy that open space.
A regional approach will mean that no one gets everything he or she wants. That’s a lesson most of us have learned and need to keep learning. The minivan will have to do for now, because the budget won’t cover the payments on the new Corvette.
No wonder the Chinese delegation was confused. The nature of our process is confusing. Near the end of our discussion, one of the local people asked the leader of the student group if he thought he had learned many things he would try to implement in China.
The Chinese gentleman was too polite to reply.
