Streetsblog Los Angeles

Smart growth could increase Fresno’s tax revenue by 45 percent per acre. In Champaign, Illinois, it could save 23 percent per year on city services. Study after study has demonstrated: Walkable, mixed-use development is a much better deal for municipalities than car-oriented suburban development.

Smart Growth America recently conducted an analysis of research examining the impact of efficient development patterns on municipal bottom lines. The authors looked at 17 case studies, from California to Maryland, and, taken together, they say the findings clearly illustrate how walkable development leads to healthier city budgets than drivable sprawl.

For starters, smart growth is cheaper to build. On average, municipalities save about 38 percent on infrastructure costs like roads and sewers when serving compact development instead of large-lot subdivisions. Furthermore, SGA researchers say, “this figure is conservative, and many communities could save even more.” In the case studies, these upfront cost savings ranged from 20 percent to 50 percent.

The public savings don’t stop once projects get built. Mixed-use projects also reduce ongoing costs to municipalities for services like police, fire and trash. Smart Growth America estimates the average savings at almost 10 percent.

“Many services — fire, police, school buses, snow plowing — all require vehicles,” said William Fulton, vice president of policy development and implementation at Smart Growth America. “The fewer miles those vehicles have to travel, the lower the costs will be. If you apply smart growth across the board, you can also reduce the amount of cars and trucks that you need.”

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Poverty is no longer a predominantly urban problem — and the suburbs are no longer the refuge of the upper classes. There are now almost 3 million more poor people living in suburbs than in cities, according to a new book, “Confronting Suburban Poverty in America,” by Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube of the Brookings Institution. While cities still have a much higher poverty rate, poverty in the suburbs is growing twice as fast: Between 2000 and 2011, the suburban poor population grew by 64 percent, compared to 29 percent in cities.

That means more people living without cars in places designed exclusively for cars. In the suburbs, destinations are farther apart and getting to many places involves traveling on wide, high-speed roads where walking or biking is especially dangerous. Transit access is spotty and infrequent, where it exists at all. And providing transportation services to the poor in spread-out areas is less efficient and more expensive than in compact cities.

“Overall, in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, 700,000 households do not have a vehicle and are not served by public transit of any kind, and 95 percent of those households are suburban,” the authors write.

Kneebone and Berube tell the story of Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, which used to be a middle-class bedroom community for workers at the Westinghouse Electric Company and other thriving businesses in the Pittsburgh area. Diminished employment opportunities have reduced the population by more than a quarter and increased the poverty rate from 8 to 11 percent:

Low-income residents of Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, often can't afford to buy or maintain cars -- and the community lacks effective transit service. Photo: City-data

Among the more pressing problems facing the growing low-income population in Penn Hills is access to transportation. The suburb covers nineteen square miles, has more than twenty distinct neighborhoods, and is traversed by an interstate highway, a few major state roads, and a series of local roads with only a few sidewalks that wind their way up and down the hilly terrain. Infrastructure in some parts of the township resembles that of a rural community more than a major metropolitan suburb. More often now, residents must navigate these byways without a car. By 2008–10, almost one in ten (about 1,700) Penn Hills households lacked access to a vehicle, notably more than three decades earlier, when the local population was much larger.

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When the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) passed its 2050 Regional Transportation Plan/Sustainable Communities Strategy, it declared a major victory over Greenhouse Gas emissions.  The plan was the first plan written to adhere to a 2008 law mandating that long-term transportation plans show a commitment to reducing air pollutants linked to global warming and a slew of public health problems.

However, it didn’t take long for the plan to be challenged in court be environmental groups for not going far enough, a legal battle that could have implications throughout the state.  A local environmental group known as the Cleveland National Forest Foundation launched a lawsuit against the plan that most observers dismissed as having little chance of winning.  Then, the CNFF was joined by other environmental groups, even the California Sierra Club.  Then, the Attorney General, Kamala Harris, weighed in.  Now, the SANDAG plan, once considered an important test of environmental planning, is also opposed by the Environmental Caucus of the California Democratic Party.  The Caucus passed a resolution condemning the SANDAG plan at their February meeting.

“As the first regional government in California to develop a land use plan under the State’s strict new climate change laws, SANDAG has a responsibility to set a path toward a sustainable future,” said Tony L. Hale, Chair of the Environmental Caucus of the California Democratic Party. “Instead, SANDAG’s plan calls for more of the same: sprawl, air pollution, and an increase in dangerous greenhouse gas emissions.”

A full copy of the Caucus’ resolution can be found at the end of this article. Read more…

“A leading voice for better urban design for the sake of good health.” “A public health/social justice hero.” Dr. Richard Jackson, chair of environmental health at UCLA, is a leading voice for transportation reform whose work has linked America’s sprawl to the nation’s high rates of obesity.

The former director of the Center for Disease Control’s Environment Health Department will take to the airwaves Tuesday in an interview with PBS’s Tavis Smiley. The interview will run in coordination with Dr. Jackson’s four-hour documentary series, Designing Healthy Communities (check local listings).

Dr. Jackson spent years researching public health epidemics and zeroed in on car dependence and sprawl as leading factors in America’s diabetes and obesity epidemics.

“We have built America in a way that is, I believe, is fundamentally unhealthy,” Dr. Jackson says. “It prevents us from walking. It inhibits us from socializing. It removes trees and the things that make our air quality better. We could not have designed an environment that is more difficult for people’s well being at this point.”

He adds: “Two percent of the United States’ gross domestic product goes to the treatment of diabetes. This is a crushing economic impact.”

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Despite the anti-tax rhetoric of this round of elections, there’s been a little flurry of support for raising the gas tax lately. Two senators just proposed bumping it by 25 cents to replenish the highway trust fund. And the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform included a gas tax hike in its proposal for reducing the deficit by $3.8 trillion. Their proposal [PDF] is simple.

Gradually increase gas tax to fund transportation spending

• Raise gas tax gradually by 15 cents beginning in 2013
• Dedicate funds toward fully funding the transportation trust funds and therefore eliminating the need for further general fund bailouts

Well, that’s clear enough. Highways cost money. You gotta pay to pave, and Americans aren’t paying.

Bloomberg quotes leaders on both sides of the aisle who lambasted the report. “Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the targeting of Social Security and Medicare ‘simply unacceptable,’ and Republican Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas expressed opposition to proposals to raise taxes.” Everyone from AARP to the AFL-CIO lined up to slam the plan.

The co-chairs of the Commission even joke about the unpopularity of their proposals. “We have harpooned every whale in the ocean and some of the minnows,” said Republican former Wyoming senator Alan Simpson. Erskine Bowles, former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, joked that they’d have to enter a “witness protection program.”

They also proposed eliminating the tax deduction for mortgage interest payments – or at least restricting the tax breaks so that second homes, expensive homes, and home equity loans weren’t eligible.

The mortgage tax break is a sprawl-inducer, encouraging people to buy “more house” for their money. Besides, home ownership rates are higher in the suburbs, since urbanites are more likely to rent. By removing the tax break, as the deficit commission recommends, they would require people to pay the full cost of the house they buy – and stop subsidizing the choice to live in the suburbs instead of cities.

Which brings us back to the gas tax. Politicians cower when drivers complain about paying more at the pump, so instead they just let the highway trust fund run dry and then raid the general fund to replenish it – meaning we’re all paying for their refusal to cover the cost of highways.

Imagine two drivers leaving downtown to head home. Each of them sits in traffic for the first ten miles of the commute but at that point, their paths diverge. The first one has reached home. The second has another twenty miles to drive, though luckily for her, the roads are clear and congestion doesn’t slow her down. Who’s got a better commute?

Shockingly, the standard method for measuring traffic congestion implies that the second driver has it better. The Texas Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Report (UMR) only studies how congestion slows down drivers from hypothetical maximum speeds, completely ignoring how long it takes to actually get where you’re going. The result is an incessant call for more highway lanes from newspapers across the country.

An important new report from CEOs for Cities, though, has laid out major problems with the UMR. It shows how commuters in compact regions, whose daily trips look hellish based on the UMR, actually spend far less time in the car than residents of sprawling metro areas.

The misleading metrics in the UMR are a convenient bludgeon for the highway lobby. According to report author Joe Cortright, the UMR serves as “a drumbeat saying we need to spend a lot more on expanding capacity. It gets used in political speeches, it’s used in lobbying.” Read more…

Earlier this month, the Board of the Southern California Association of Governments (S.C.A.G.) rejected the long-term clean air targets for Southern California requested by the Air Resources Board and recommended by their own staff.  While today’s Metro Board Meeting featured good news for cyclists and bad news for bus riders, there was another hot debate over what goals for reducing Greenhouse Gas should be set for Southern California.  You can read the motion here.

A quick bit of history.  After the passage of S.B. 375 in 2008, the landmark legislation that tied greenhouse gas emissions to land use and planning, the state’s Air Resource Board was charged with coming up with a plan to reduce emissions statewide through better planning and reducing vehicle miles traveled.  After a lengthy outreach and research plan, the ARB recommended that the SCAG region, which includes L.A. County, the Inland Empire, Orange County, Riverside County, and San Bernadino County, set goals of an 8% reduction in Greenhouse Gases by 2020 and 13% reduction by 2035 (i.e. the 8/13 standard.)  However, the SCAG Board chose much lower standards, 8% reduction by 2035 and a 6% reduction by 2020 (i.e. the 6/8 standard.)

But those standards weren’t good enough for a Metro Board that is quite a bit more progressive than their colleagues at SCAG.  Metro’s Ad-Hoc sustainability committee recommended that the Metro Board endorse the 8/13 reduction standards and after a brief debate earlier today, the Metro Board passed that recommendation. Read more…

Last May, I had the chance to sit down with Michael Woo, the former Los Angeles City Councilman and Mayoral Candidate, urban planner, USC Professor and Climate Change activist.  Woo expressed hope that the Southern California Association of Governments would set the bar for other regions when deciding how to follow new state laws by setting high targets for emissions reductions.  The reductions are a state requirement after the passage of California’s internationally lauded Smart Growth Law in 2008, SB 375.

Yesterday, SCAG took a pass on history and sided with the sprawl lobby in endorsing reduced targets for the region which includes Los Angeles County as well as the Inland Empire, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernadino Counties.  Instead of setting the goal of reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 8% in 2020 and 13% in 2035 as recommended by the state’s Air Resource Board after a lengthy public process, SCAG chose to set goals of 6% reduction in 2020 and 8% in 2035.  The 8/13 targets were rejected by a 21 to 29 vote.

Unfortunately, this means that design standards and community plans throughout the region will have less density, encourage fewer transportation options, and create less vibrant communities with less open space over the next twenty five years than they would have if SCAG would have followed the state board’s recommendations.

This rejection marks a victory for the Building Industry Association which lobbied for a 5% reduction target and distributed misinformation far and wide to preserve Southern Californians right to sprawl.  The BIA claimed the rejected benchmarks would push gas prices to $9, would cripple the economy, and were completely unrealistic anyway.  That independent reviews showed that a plan to meet the 8/13 benchmarks would increase gas costs by two cents a gallon over twenty five years, would save the average working family save $3,600 annually on transportation costs, would create design standards that would encourage growth and calls for lower reductions than the ones passed in the Sacramento and Bay regions somehow didn’t make the B.I.A.’s “hysteria sheet.”

And that the SCAG Board chose to believe these phony statistics, without a methodology showing how they came to be, over the hard work of their own staff tells us a lot about the SCAG Board.

After the vote, the BIA was crowing.  Richard Lambros, the executive director of the association told the Associated Press:

They made a decision that is both aggressive and achievable and will make a significant reduction in emissions while still protecting California’s economy.

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(The SCAG Joint Policy Committees & Regional Council meets tomorrow, Thursday, Sept. 2 from 11:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M. If you want a seat, get there by 10:30 and feel free to bring a lunch. This isn't Metro or City Hall, you can eat in the hearing room The meeting is held at S.C.A.G. headquarters, 818 W. 7th Street, 12th Floor, Board Room, across the street from the Metro 7th Street Station.)

Back in July, Matthew Roth summarized the goals of California's groundbreaking S.B. 375, the first piece of legislation in the country to tie sprawl development to declining air quality and quality of life. Roth, quoting work done by NRDC's Amanda Eaken, noted that there are a lot of great things that S.B. 375 would accomplish if properly enacted by state Metropolitan Planning Organizations (M.P.O's), but that the local politics of the M.P.O. could prevent Californians from seeing the benefits provided by Smart Growth and proper transportation planning.

At a meeting tomorrow in Downtown Los Angeles, Southern California will have its chance to show that it can put the long-term health of the state over provincial politics. The Southern California Association of Governments Joint Policy and Regional Council will consider a proposal from the state's Air Resources Board to set targets for Greenhouse Gas reduction in the region. The ARB wants to see an 8% reduction in the next ten years and a 13% reduction in the next 25.

That's a complicated way of saying that tomorrow, regional leaders will decide whether or not they want to clean the air to meet state law or not. Eaken lays out what's at stake in more simple terms:

Thursday, SCAG has the opportunity to adopt ambitious 13% targets that will deliver significant co-benefits of better transit, improved air quality and public health, and reduce household transportation costs for Southern California residents. Across California, there's a shifting market demand embodied by SB 375 that is already pushing in the direction of more walkable, transit oriented communities-exactly the kind of growth needed to help Southern California achieve emission reduction targets and create sustainable communities.

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