My first answer: Get my head examined.

For 40 years, the state government and California voters have steadily reduced the revenues and limited the discretion of municipal governments; anyone who starts a new city in such conditions is insane by definition. Our newest cities—like Jurupa Valley and Menifee in Riverside County—have struggled to survive.

Then I reconsidered. No, I don’t believe in the advanced dream cities that technologists at Google parent Alphabet or startup accelerator Y Combinator want to conjure. But maybe you could form a workable California city—by exploiting California’s present-day realities, rather than bowing to them.

I certainly know how I wouldn’t start a new city: by electing a city government, building expensive housing, or hiring the police and firefighters whose salaries and retiree benefits swallow municipal budgets whole.

Instead, I’d start my California city—let’s call it Joeville—by bringing on board the most important person in any California city: the developer.

Spit out your coffee if you must, but cities thrive or wither by the quality of their developers. California laws on politics, open meetings, and open records so greatly restrict the power of our public officials that they often can’t talk freely and legally to each other. As a result, developers don’t just create projects—the good ones become the hubs of communication, the head coach through which all the players in a city talk and plan.

What would my developer develop first? Certainly not streets, houses, or businesses. Those can come later. If you want a great California city, you should start with a big research university.

It’s no accident that California’s most successful post-war city—Irvine—got a University of California campus in 1965, six years before the city incorporated in 1971. Or that Stanford started in 1891, three years before Palo Alto incorporated in 1894. Universities also can transform small and sleepy towns. Look at La Jolla: Once a retirement village for Navy people, it became an international center for research and technology after it got a UC campus.

Universities perform many roles in building community: They are economic engines, provide a look for the city, and attract talented people from around the world. The good ones work to address social challenges, too. And California needs more of them, given our shortage of college graduates.

If you doubt their impact on cities, consider San Bernardino and Riverside, as James and Deborah Fallows do in their terrific new book, Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America. “Riverside and San Bernardino were similar-sized cities with similar economic prospects at the end of World War II,” they write, but now Riverside is 50 percent bigger. “Their prospects began diverging in the 1960s—Riverside’s up, San Bernardino’s down—when Riverside was chosen as the site of a new University of California campus and San Bernardino was not.”

Only with a university would Joeville be viable. I’d put mine in the city center, not on the outskirts as was done, mistakenly, with the new UC campus in Merced. I’d also put my university in charge of the local school district—creating a teachers college in the process.

With the schools in place, the developer could turn to developing a tax base. Under California’s misbegotten tax system, the best-off cities often are those that collect the most sales taxes. That’s why retail-poor San Jose, despite having so many rich homeowners, has a weak city government, while the city of Cerritos, with its auto mall, is rich.

My city would be designed around two highly attractive retailers that produce huge sales and taxes: Costco and an Apple store. I’d attach the Apple store to a luxury hotel so that I could tax its rooms, too. And since those retailers pay well, many of their employees could become, along with the university students, my city’s first residents.

You probably think that, at this point, we’d establish a city government to set up services. Think again. Local officials in California are so weak as to be useless. Better to have citizens take the lead.

California’s preeminent expert on local participation, Pete Peterson, dean of Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy, offered a number of suggestions for Joeville. First, it should be a charter city with its own mission statement, drafted by citizens, that answers the questions: What are we for? Why are we doing this? These ideas would help the town form its own distinct identity. Joeville could have its own local holiday—Founding Day—in the town’s public square, called the zócalo (which happens to be the name of the media nonprofit where I work), at which the mission statement would be read.

Peterson suggests that since the citizens would be leading the governance of their city, residents should attend a multi-day “Citizens Academy” where they would learn the basics of municipal government, including budgeting. Then citizens would be asked to serve on government commissions and local nonprofits.

Peterson says that Joeville could increase citizen engagement through its design. To encourage neighbors to get to know each other, city code might require porches to be built on the fronts of houses, with no attached garages.

Once Joeville’s citizens are engaged, we’d be free to set up whatever municipal departments are required. Joeville wouldn’t be afraid to contract out services, especially police and fire, given the expense, so as to have more money for libraries, parks, and civic forums. In this, Joeville would be typical: Fewer than one-quarter of California cities are responsible for all of their own municipal services.

Now, by this point, you’re thinking that Joeville is fantasy. Wouldn’t Joeville be stopped in its tracks by California’s regulation and litigation? Yes, which is why we’d lobby state legislators to have the entire city declared to be a stadium—not for sports, but of civic experimentation. The state, you see, routinely gives environmental and regulatory exemptions to stadiums, if little else.

Of course, Joeville still needs to find financing. In the meantime, California’s nearly 500 cities, struggling with state restrictions on funding and governance, might adopt Joeville’s civic motto: “You’ll Never Win If You Play By California’s Rules.”

The post My Plan for Building the Perfect California City appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In an era of bitter neighbor-bites-neighbor fights against big developments, perhaps it’s fitting that an antidote should emerge from the Donner Pass. Tiny Truckee—a very snowy municipality of 16,300—has embraced a plan to double the size of its century-old downtown.

The Railyard Project—it’s being built on a 37-acre railyard—shows that communities can overcome NIMBYism, environmental litigation, and all the usual California obstacles in pursuit of transformational development. The project also shows just how difficult and complicated such transformations have become in a state once famous for dramatic change.

Truckee’s ambition is startling. First of all, it’s starting with affordable housing—usually the last type of housing to be added to a project, given the associated political and financial challenges. Second, the Railyard includes tricky rerouting of infrastructure in a state that resists infrastructure updating. And, finally, it’s big, including a multi-story, 100,000-square-foot building that mixes residential units and storefronts—exactly the sort of dense, urban development that has drawn fervent opposition in the state’s biggest cities.

While the project has drawn little notice outside the Sierra, that seems likely to change as construction continues. Truckee, after all, is a gateway to heavily visited Lake Tahoe. And the project has used innovative financing mechanisms, including dollars from the state’s cap-and-trade program. It also is likely to employ factory-made housing as a way of reducing the sky-high costs of construction. And the frontrunner in the governor’s race, Gavin Newsom, has praised Truckee for finding ways to support smart development despite obstacles.

For Truckee, the project is both a product of the town’s unusual history and a culmination of a quarter-century journey. While many California towns incorporated long ago, and then developed the infrastructure of a municipality later, Truckee did things the opposite way. Truckee, named for the Paiute Indian chief Tru-ki-zo, began as an unincorporated county outpost in the 1870s. Eighteen different special districts, providing services from parks to sanitation, are older than the town government, which only formed in 1993.

What eventually caused Truckee to incorporate was frustration with the poor quality of snow plowing (snowfall can exceed 200 inches a year in the “town that snow built”) on its more than 150 miles of roads. Residents of Truckee’s 34 square miles also wanted to take control over land-use planning after years of new house-building on its outskirts by Bay Area vacationers. The final straw was the county’s decision to impose a new K-Mart outside downtown, despite local objections to the traffic it would create.

The new town started by embarking on a new general plan for all of Truckee, including a plan specifically for downtown. Residents were asked to contribute ideas, and at meetings, several seized on a vision of a mountainous model of smart growth, with a bigger downtown offering more for year-round residents.

The obvious place for this was a Union Pacific railyard next to downtown. The town used $350,000 from a sustainable communities program run by the state treasurer’s office to create a master plan for the railyard site. It then took years to convince Union Pacific to sell the property—a difficult task, since Truckee serves as a vital rail connection in the West.

The town also collaborated with a high-powered Bay Area developer with ties to Truckee, Rick Holliday, who managed to buy the land and proved willing to stick with the project over many years.

Over the past decade, the plan has managed to survive blows that have killed other projects. A California Environmental Quality Act lawsuit against the plan—litigation that routinely blocks approval of developments around the state—failed. The Great Recession put the project on ice just as its master plan was being approved. Then, in 2011, Gov. Jerry Brown killed the redevelopment program that many cities relied on for improvements projects; Truckee and Holliday were intending to use redevelopment to finance the project.

Holliday was disappointed. He had a home in Truckee, his wife opened a gallery, and his children would live in the town too. Holliday, who had known Brown from his days as Oakland mayor, says he talked to the governor about the project, and Brown raised the possibility of cap-and-trade money. In 2014, Holliday applied and eventually secured more than $12 million—on the basis that the railyard would be the sort of affordable, infill, higher-density development that means people drive less, and produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions. With other cap-and-trade funds going to projects in more coastal and populated places, Truckee offered the possibility of a rare rural showcase for cap-and-trade in the Sierra.

In all, the town and Holliday cobbled together $30 million for infrastructure, including local and state public funds, the developer’s own money, and private financing.

The plan has been tweaked and updated repeatedly, in response to constant input by residents, many of whom have lived there since before incorporation and feel deeply invested in the project. “People really like to be involved in the decision-making up here,” says Holliday.

Construction is now underway. The operations of the railroad have been relocated, and roads, water and sewers have been put in. Construction on the affordable housing—in the form of artists’ lofts—begins this summer.

“This is the most strongly supported project that I’ve ever seen in this community,” said the longtime town manager Tony Lashbrook, who retired last year.

As it goes forward, the project faces questions that could resonate across the whole state. Can California communities really pull off a modern, high-intensity development next to a historic downtown and make it seamless, adding value to both? Will the mix of affordable and middle-class housing in the project work? How well does cap-and-trade perform as a financing mechanism? And will people really gravitate to more urban housing types in places that don’t meet the usual definition of urban?

Truckee has a good chance of finding positive answers to these questions. The town has produced workforce housing before with little public backlash, in part because such housing has been managed well. It also has the advantage of being a relatively new town that was incorporated precisely so that citizens could have more of a say in land use.

If the project succeeds, it could be a signal moment for California’s mountain communities, as they struggle to keep and attract new generations of residents. When your thin-blooded Angeleno columnist visited freezing Truckee this December, I was struck by the community enthusiasm, including from millennials who moved to Truckee because they like the outdoors and because their employers let them work remotely. “Isn’t it great that we’re in charge and getting what we want?” one local put it.

But others wondered whether people will have second thoughts when they see the four-story affordable housing building—tall for Truckee—go up. More recently, a grocery store that was supposed to be part of the railyard project pulled out after the town council approved a Raley’s outside downtown.

Still, it’s a good bet that the railyard will eventually put Truckee on the map for reasons beyond its tourism and snow.

The post Could California’s Coldest Place Blaze a Path to Better Development? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Whether that happens will be determined in Madera County, on the north side of the river from Fresno. There, a new city, consisting of multiple large planned communities, is finally under construction after decades of planning and litigation.

The city has no name and incorporation could be decades away. But within a generation, its population could grow to more than 100,000 people; by mid-century, it might double Madera County’s current population of 150,000.

And that is just on the Madera side of the river. On the Fresno side, the county is developing open space, the city of Fresno’s north side is growing, and the city of Clovis is expanding to its south and east. Rising together, the new Madera city, Fresno, and Clovis could come to constitute a tri-cities area in the center of California, offering a new model for the state’s long-neglected interior.

If the new Madera and expanded Fresno and Clovis cities could cohere into a stronger region by mid-century—and that’s an “if” as big as the Valley floor—greater Fresno could transform from a relatively poor backwater of 1 million-plus into California’s answer to Austin, an inland country metropolis of 2 million or more capable of spreading the Golden State’s coastal prosperity to its dusty interior.

Of course, such a transformation would require extensive regional planning of the sort that has been little seen in Fresno. It would require establishing new and more effective governance arrangements and funding for regional transportation, economic development, water management, recreation, and air quality. In short, it would require something just short of a revolution in California governance, and in thinking about what city governments do.

Transforming greater Fresno also would require collaboration between local governments that have spent decades using lawsuits to stall the growth of their neighbors. Madera County’s development has only recently gone forward after fights so bitter that the governor’s office intervened.

Indeed, the very structure of California, and its land-use planning, works against turning Fresno into a region, never mind a powerhouse. In our state, local jurisdictions are weak and have little power to raise their own revenues; they are incentivized to compete with other cities, often using questionable subsidies, in the chase for developments and the taxes they bring. In the Golden State, cooperating with neighboring municipalities is for saps.

The battles between the San Joaquin Valley’s cities have been especially hard-fought, since those municipalities are weak even by California’s diminished standards. (Madera County doesn’t even have a parks department.) The game is: support development that provides revenue for your city, while spreading the costs—in traffic, water and air quality—onto your neighbors.

That has inspired nearly constant litigation. To take just two examples: The city of Fresno sued Madera County to block the new river development plan until it got a tax-sharing agreement that would compensate it for impacts like traffic. In retaliation, Madera County sued Fresno to block a new shopping center, claiming it would siphon off shopping dollars and sales taxes that should go to Madera.

Most, but not all, of such litigation is now over, offering an opportunity to build together. Potential collaborations could include a stronger and more resilient water infrastructure (the new Madera developments tout their water efficiency), a joint powers authority that could raise revenue to improve access to the river itself, and a regional transportation network. That network ought to reach as far south as Visalia, and north, across the river into Madera, along both the Highway 41 and 99 corridors.

Another problem is the lack of local government brainpower. The area’s municipalities in particular need more personnel with training and experience in regional planning. The existing regional planning includes some collaboration on trails and water treatment, but it is still too irregular and unimaginative.

That’s why the big and bold development in Madera is so promising. The county on Fresno’s northwestern flank is saying via its big new developments that it doesn’t want to be small, poor, and isolated anymore. That’s the message all of greater Fresno needs to embrace.

Indeed, Madera County is pitching its new developments as a huge step forward for central California: master-planned communities with trails and schools and job centers and water facilities wrapped in, providing the greater density and smaller lots of more urban living.

The signature project, now under construction, is Riverstone, with acres of commercial space and nearly 6,600 homes of various sizes across six themed districts, along Highway 41, best known to most Californians as a road to Yosemite. “The new-home community of Riverstone,” boasts one brochure, “will be a celebration of California living where people of every generation can enjoy the relaxed and informal spirit of the Golden State.”

Other developments in the pipeline—with names like Tesoro Viejo and Gunner Ranch—are supposed to offer a similar approach, and county officials say they are likely to be incorporated one day as the county’s third city (after Madera city and Chowchilla). These developments are close to river-adjacent Fresno County projects—like a town-size development near Friant Dam.

“This is going to be a new town and we have this opportunity with a blank canvas to do it right,” Madera County Supervisor Brett Frazier recently told local television.

Much could go wrong. If the new river city doesn’t produce promised jobs and inspire better transit, the expanded development could fuel sprawl, add to air pollution, and turn Highway 41 into a traffic nightmare.

Successful regionalization will require outside help. The state’s climate change regime must prioritize infill development in central Fresno, so that the urban core isn’t weakened as people move to the new river city. The ongoing revival of Fresno’s downtown needs the added momentum of the state’s high-speed rail project, which is already under construction across Fresno County (a signature rail bridge is being built across the river, linking Madera and Fresno in another way).

Greater Fresno badly needs high-speed rail to provide connections to Northern California and Southern California, making it an affordable crossroads between two world-class regional economies.

And Fresno has a large population of undocumented immigrants who are desperate for legal status so they can advance themselves, and their region, economically.

You should not bet the farm on the grand project of turning greater Fresno into the next great region. But if Madera’s new development can inspire progress in that direction, the state would have reason to celebrate—and perhaps call the new river city Future Town, CA.

The post Could a New River City Transform California? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The event—entitled “Are Housing Prices Destroying the California Dream?”—brought together a scholar, a politician, a leading journalist, the head of a nonprofit housing organization, and a national expert on housing to examine a crisis that the panelists said touches every person in every region of the state.

This problem “affects all ends of the economic distribution, and all ends of the age distribution,” said Gary Segura, dean of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, adding: “I am one of millions of Californians who cannot afford my house the day I retire.”

Moderator David Lesher, CEO and editor of the nonprofit media organization CALMatters, framed the conversation around three questions: “How big of a problem is housing? What’s the cause of the problem? And what are we going to do about it?”

The panelists said the housing crisis involves the intersection of many different problems: zoning, planning, taxation, environment, infrastructure, transportation, mental health, homelessness, demands on developers, financing, and Californians’ high expectations for the places where they live.

This complicated intersection makes the housing situation difficult to understand. One panelist, Kevin de León, president pro tem of the California State Senate, recalled a day he spent in downtown L.A. with a wide variety of people—from housing advocates to police and local officials—to learn more about housing and homelessness. “My conclusion was the following: The left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing,” he said.

But that can’t be an excuse, given how high the stakes are. “We have a housing crisis, and it’s a big driver without a doubt when it comes to poverty,” de León said. He cited the statistic that a Californian who makes minimum wage would need to work three full-time jobs to afford the average two-bedroom apartment.

Another panelist, AARP housing policy expert Rodney Harrell, said that affordable housing is a national crisis, but it’s even worse in California. An AARP survey, he noted, found that almost two-thirds of Californians have thought about leaving the state because of high housing costs.

He said the heart of the matter is a lack of supply, but fixing it is not just a matter of building more places to live. “There are not enough housing units of the types that people need”—affordable, near jobs or transit, and with designs for people who may have special needs because of their age or health. And high costs leave people very vulnerable. “The folks I worry about most are the people who have not planned for an emergency—something happens to your spouse, you have a health crisis, you lose a job” and then you can no longer afford your housing.

Segura, of UCLA, spoke of the need to reduce the costs that local governments put on developers, by demanding they widen streets, provide parking, or take on wage issues as a condition of building housing. Such demands add to the cost of housing and make “pulling a building permit the most expensive thing you can do in California.”

He also argued that linkage fees, which make developers pay for affordable housing, reflect attempts by local governments to make up for some of the control and revenue they lost under Proposition 13, the 1978 ballot initiative that limited property taxes. While noting that it’s unpopular to free up developers, he warned, “We cannot use developers and development to solve all issues.”

Lisa Hershey, executive director of the nonprofit Housing California, said that too much public money goes into tax subsidies for our homes—she mentioned the mortgage interest rate deduction—and not enough into infrastructure, transit, access to schools, and livable community policies that stabilize neighborhoods, and keep people in their homes. “The stability of home makes everything else possible” in terms of improving people’s lives, she said.

She also lamented how efforts to address the housing crisis—by building more transit and housing—can end up pushing out longstanding residents of certain neighborhoods, as land values, rents, and home prices rise. Many Californians are being pushed out of established neighborhoods to places far from jobs, creating longer commutes.

De León noted that a development in Boyle Heights, which is part of his Senate district, was blocked because of concerns about such displacement. “People are thinking, ‘If I’m going to be displaced, where am I going to live? My cultural identity, my linguistic identity—everything is in this neighborhood, this block,’” he said.

Hershey and de León both touted a package of 15 bills that the legislature passed in the just concluded session, and that Governor Jerry Brown signed into law. It includes a dedicated funding source for affordable housing, a housing bond that will go to voters, and legislation that should speed up permitting in localities. De León said that the push on housing would be enhanced by other new laws that promote road and infrastructure repair, boost transit, add parks, and reduce pollution.

“This package we’ve moved forward—I’m hoping it will be the first step of many steps,” he said.

De León also noted that the housing package—in combination with previously allocated state money for the homeless and mentally ill and local measures for funding housing and homeless programs—meant that an unprecedented amount of money is flowing to address housing issues. But that doesn’t guarantee that local leaders will find ways to turn money into housing that meets people’s needs.

“At a macro level we can move all the capital that is necessary to catalyze and attract money,” de León said. “But if at the local level, the leadership is lacking, it just takes a really bad problem and makes it even worse.”

During a question-and-answer session with the audience, one person asked why, if California is producing so little housing, she sees so much development as she drives around.

Harrell, of AARP, responded that “not all supply is created equal—just because a building is going up, it doesn’t mean it has enough units that folks can afford.” And UCLA’s Segura noted that the housing being built is simply not enough for a state that’s reaching a population of 40 million.

Hershey, of Housing California, called this “a historic moment,” with opportunities to address the housing crisis given the resources, the focus on the problem, and “a gubernatorial campaign with several candidates who are interested in housing.”

But she cautioned that such a complex problem won’t be solved quickly. “This is the long game,” she said.

At that, Harrell added, “We all need to take part.”

The post California’s Housing Crisis Is a Nasty Intersection of the State’s Worst Problems appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What do we do now, Nelson Rising?

I pose that question not just because this is a confusing and complicated era for California. And not just because no living Californian is better than Nelson Rising—a developer, lawyer, campaign manager, and civic leader from Los Angeles—at navigating our state’s complexities to create communities that endure.

“What do we do now?” is the question that concludes Rising’s one-and-only brush with Hollywood. After Rising ran the successful 1970 U.S. Senate campaign of John Tunney, he was a producer on the 1972 film The Candidate, in which Robert Redford plays an idealistic U.S. Senate candidate corrupted by the political process. When Redford wins an upset victory, he is so empty that in the final scene, he asks his campaign manager, “What do we do now?” The manager has no answer.

Fortunately, Rising, 75, has some reassuring answers about today’s California, as I learned during two recent long conversations. And if you’re a reader who doesn’t know the name Nelson Rising, don’t worry—that’s the point. Nelson Rising’s story is about all the big things you can get done in California if you’re willing to listen more than you talk. Over the years his impressive accomplishments have spoken for themselves, without much ballyhoo for the man himself.

When you tally up all the big things Rising has helped bring to California, there are simply too many for a short column. You could start with the tallest building in the state, the Library Tower (now the U.S. Bank Tower) in downtown L.A. You could throw in Grand Park, L.A.’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Metropolitan Water District buildings, and the Playa Vista development (now unofficial headquarters of Southern California’s Silicon Beach). You might add San Francisco’s Mission Bay, the largest mixed-use development in that city’s history, and, in San Diego, two mixed-use towers, next to the train station, that were part of the wave that transformed downtown into a thriving residential neighborhood.

But then you’d still be leaving out major developments like Rising’s first big project, Coto de Caza, the quintessential suburban Orange County planned community, made famous through reality television. (“He is to blame for The Real Housewives of Orange County,” says Rising’s son Chris).

And the buildings are just part of his legacy. In L.A., Rising managed the mayoral campaign of Tom Bradley, the city’s first African American mayor, who transformed the city into a far more international, educated, and inclusive place. During a stint up north, Rising was chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (where he navigated the disruption of the dot-com bust), chair of the Washington D.C.-based Real Estate Roundtable, chairman of the publicly traded real estate firm Catellus, and chair of the Bay Area Council, a vital business policy group. His sport coats have put the blue in countless blue-ribbon commissions, and he’s led efforts to remake policies on projects as varied as water, redevelopment, and L.A.’s Grand Avenue.

Rising’s remarkable career stands as a rejoinder to the maddening conventional wisdom of today’s California: that you can’t do big things in our state because everything is too complicated, regulated, and expensive. Any big project requires dealing with too many different constituencies. Who has time to talk with everyone, much less dig into all the details and accommodate all the interests that must be accommodated?

View of Nelson Rising Lane street sign at 4th Street in San Francisco. Photo by Liz Hafalia/The San Francisco Chronicle.

Nelson Rising makes the time.

Which is the secret of success in California. Rising argues that because so few try to do the big, complicated thing, those who are willing to do all the hard work¬—to talk with everybody, to accommodate every opponent, to sweat every detail—can still accomplish great things. In fact, Californians are so used to having their concerns ignored that the act of listening to and working with one’s opposition can be incredibly powerful.

“I enjoy communication, and the best part of communication is listening. Many people don’t do that,” says Rising. “I don’t think I can respond to people unless I know what I’m responding to. So I always start the conversation by asking, ‘What’s your concern? Why don’t you want me to do this development? And if I can figure out a way to solve your concern, will you be supportive of it?’”

Rising’s natural—if quite deliberate—modesty makes this approach particularly effective. In our recent conversations—at his downtown L.A. office and at the California Club—Rising deflected credit or understated his role, depicting himself as a coordinator of teams that did the real work. Colleagues interjected frequently to say he was being too modest.

But modesty suits the man, who might be the polar opposite of the real estate developer currently occupying the White House. Rising’s parents never attended college; he went from Glendale High to UCLA and later UCLA law school on a scholarship. He’s been married to the same woman for 53 years and lives in La Cañada-Flintridge, far from the fancy Westside precincts favored by other movers and shakers.

He credits his rise to good fortune, good co-workers, and the friendship of Warren Christopher, a colleague at the law firm of O’Melveny & Myers, who brought him into civic and political work, originally through an effort to rebuild the Democratic party after Ronald Reagan defeated Gov. Pat Brown in 1966. “A person cannot be truly accomplished unless they help others to accomplish,” was a Christopher maxim that Rising still recites.

Rising sees his own skill as building teams that help others accomplish, and that accomplishment comes from talking to one’s opponents. That may seem like very old wisdom, but it is revolutionary today, when civic and political contests are often about rallying one’s base of supporters, while discouraging the base of opponents. He says Tom Bradley succeeded because he visited every corner of the city and made a point of engaging people who were inclined to oppose him—over time, the constant reaching out made Angelenos comfortable with him.

There are similar stories of engagement—of embracing conversation and complexity—in Rising’s other successes. He made the Library Tower (and the neighboring Gas Company tower) happen by arranging a complex swap, in which the tower’s builders purchased the air rights to develop above L.A.’s Central Library, located across the street, and used them to increase the height of the towers. Revenue from the sale helped the library rebuild after a crippling fire.

Having developed the tallest building in the state, however, did not make Rising self-important. To win approval for the Playa Vista project, he went into living rooms to meet with homeowners in Westchester, who were angry about the vast amounts of multi-unit housing in his plan. He slowly wore down resistance with conversation and with a presentation that used two slide projectors—to show not only the before and after, but also attractive multi-unit housing in places like Savannah and Washington D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood.

The greatest example of the Rising method may be Mission Bay. As the CEO of the public real estate firm Catellus, he took over a development that faced opposition and remade it to satisfy the complaints of San Franciscans. His moves included adding 1,700 units of affordable housing, providing parking for Giants games, and donating 43 acres to UC San Francisco for their biotech campus. The development was ultimately approved without opposition; there wasn’t a single environmental lawsuit.

The feat was so impressive that San Francisco—a place where throngs chant “Beat L.A.” with little provocation— named a street in Mission Bay after the Los Angeles developer—Nelson Rising Lane. “You can walk all over Nelson Rising,” quips his longtime colleague David Herbst, “but you have to go to San Francisco to do it.”

Rising cops to plenty of failures, including twice flunking attempts at retirement. So now he’s building a business with his son Chris, who is named for Warren Christopher. They are raising a $300 million social impact fund for investments, and are focused on three things: Remaking buildings so they produce less carbon (“We’d like to show the real estate industry it doesn’t have to be the number one generator of carbon,” Chris says); making buildings healthier (with more light and air, and designs that are better for workers); and incorporating technology into older, restored places by taking all the copper out and replacing it with fiber networks. (Their revamping of One Bunker Hill in L.A. will include a signature public lobby with powerful Wi-Fi that they want schoolchildren to use to do their homework.)

Rising remains loyal to downtown L.A., and marvels at how the area, once almost entirely an employment hub, has surpassed all expectations by becoming a place to live. He praises the Wilshire Grand Center that, when it’s completed later this year, will supplant the Library Tower as the state’s tallest building.

Rising still works in the historic Beaux Arts PacMutual complex that he restored and then sold in 2015, reportedly at a record per-square-foot price for a downtown office building. His firm has since purchased 433 S. Spring, an Art Deco building where Rising began his career as an O’Melveny lawyer.

The firm is working in L.A., San Diego, and San Francisco, and eyeing Sacramento, where the Risings have been impressed with the growth of its downtown. He is critical of President Trump’s policies, but doesn’t think the new administration will be able to undermine California too much. “The state’s economy is poised to keep exceeding the country,” he says, as long as it keeps nurturing its diversity, raises its education levels, and rebuilds its infrastructure.

So what do we do now, California? We follow Rising’s singular example: Reach out to one another, listen—and recommit to doing the big things that will make a difference.

The post To Get Things Done in California, Listen More Than You Talk appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Just ask its princes and princesses—those fortunate enough to be able to afford to live and vote there. Most of the time, the nearly 900,000 residents can pretend that they live in the country, even though they’re part of greater Los Angeles. Parks or open space or farmland is almost always within easy walking or biking distance. The Santa Clara River, the least developed of Southern California’s waterways, is being protected. The Kingdom of Ventura’s cities remain separate and distinct developments on the landscape—they haven’t sprawled and melted into each other, like cities do elsewhere in Southern California.

Their secret? “No other county in the United States has more effective protections against urban sprawl,” says the web site of SOAR, aka Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources, a family of growth-controlling ballot measures.

Those SOAR protections have been fixed in the laws of the county and its cities for two decades. SOAR permits development only within certain urban cores in the county and makes no allowances for population growth. And if a developer wants to change the boundaries or develop open space outside the areas where growth is permitted, that developer can’t buy off the county supervisors or a city council. SOAR requires any development in protected open space be approved by the voters.

Ventura voters like the results so much they are moving to make them all but permanent this November, when they vote on county and city measures that would extend SOAR protections through 2050.

In practice, this has made the Kingdom a mighty fortress. Those sprawling suburban housing developments that fill up the San Fernando Valley to the east and the Santa Clarita Valley to the north? They stop at the county’s edge. It’s almost as if Ventura County has built a wall against growth along its border—and made neighboring Los Angeles pay for it.

All of which makes SOAR worth celebrating. But there is a problem with those walls, and within the Kingdom. And that problem is not the wonderful things that growth restrictions have done. It’s what the princes and princesses of the Kingdom have failed to do.

A group of SOAR volunteers in Ventura County.

Smart growth strategies like SOAR are not merely supposed to preserve open space. At their best, they are designed to promote smart growth—to drive more creative, dense, multi-family, and transit-oriented development in the urban cores where growth is still permitted. But the Kingdom has been far from welcoming to this type of development.

Yes, you can find smart, denser growth in the city of Ventura, particularly around its downtown. But infill development in Ventura County has lagged far behind what’s needed to serve the Kingdom’s growing population and its housing needs. The same citizens of the Kingdom who back SOAR also have opposed multifamily and denser developments (Thousand Oaks even passed a ballot measure limiting density), and resisted investments in public transit to connect their urban cores.

The results are as obvious as the choking traffic on the 101 Freeway and the astronomical housing prices. Ventura County is one of the 10 least affordable places to live in the United States. It’s been very difficult for middle-class people, much less lower-income people, to make their homes there, and that makes it hard for companies to locate there. Many service workers have to commute from outside the county.

“We need to understand that there is an uncertain capacity within our urban boundaries to accommodate job growth,” Bruce Stenslie, president of the Economic Development Collaborative of Ventura County, said during a public conference earlier this year on SOAR. “Which doesn’t mean that we should tear down the urban boundaries, it means we need to be a little more mature about questions concerning in-fill development and higher density.”

Of course such immaturity about growth—and high housing prices and inequality and traffic—is not limited to Ventura County. What’s frustrating is that after 20 years, the Kingdom doesn’t seem to have learned its lesson. The current proposed renewal of SOAR doesn’t include any new flexibility to account for population growth—and it’s not linked to any broader effort to do more infill development in the cores.

This represents at best a missed opportunity—and at worst an example of mass public selfishness.

Matthew Fienup, an economist with Cal Lutheran University’s Center for Economic Research and Forecasting (who likes to talk about how much he loves living across the street from orchards), points out that there are myriad ways to require more regular analysis and adjustments of the boundaries, and to put management of the boundaries in the hands of planners, instead of the hands of people with the money to put questions to voters. Fienup suggests that the county would be better off establishing tradable development rights that would protect the same amount of land while bringing some flexibility to the boundaries.

But in its intransigence, Ventura is an example of the California disease—grab your piece of the Kingdom, and then keep out anyone who might come in after you. And few in Ventura seem to care that the county, like other urban coastal places in California, has seen such a decline in its number of children and young families that it might eventually resemble a well-off senior living community.

In California, local growth restrictions are only one small part of how the old block the young. State laws make housing development slow and costly. Prop 13 provisions keep their property taxes low, encouraging people to stay in their homes longer, which reduces the supply of homes on the market.

This local anti-growth bias is now a major statewide issue as California faces a crisis in housing affordability and availability—for anyone but the most affluent. To push back against anti-growth local communities, Gov. Brown is championing legislation that would exempt many urban housing developments from environmental or local government review.

Many localities have responded to this statewide push defiantly, via local ballot measures that block growth and housing, as the Voice of San Diego documented recently. The least responsible cities are going beyond growth boundaries to impose anti-density restrictions. The most reactionary of these ballot initiatives comes from Santa Monica, which was just connected to the L.A. rail system by L.A. county taxpayers. That rail connection should inspire denser, transit-oriented development. But anti-growth Santa Monicans want to derail all this by requiring a vote of the people on most developments taller than two stories.

The defense of those backing anti-growth measures is disingenuous: If you don’t like restrictions, you can go to the ballot. But that argument is an invitation for development to be determined by a showdown between NIMBY demagoguery and self-interested political money, as opposed to any rational long-range planning.

One lesson from Ventura County is that growth boundaries like SOAR shouldn’t be pursued in isolation. They need to be tied to rock-solid requirements for creating more housing, both for low-income and middle-income people. To put it another way, it’s great if your community wants to protect open space from development, but then you don’t get to block denser development, housing, and transit in your already developed spaces.

If Ventura County wants to wall off growth in its open areas until the end of time, fine. But it must be compelled to open gates in its walls big enough to bring much more progressive development into the Kingdom.

The post The Walls Are Too High in the Kingdom of Ventura appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Yet there was the city’s mayor, the state’s governor, the national legislature’s leader, and the country’s interim president all at the metro’s inauguration—a half-year late, way over budget, and only a week before the opening ceremony for the 2016 Games.

Michel Temer, the interim president standing in while elected president Dilma Rousseff faces impeachment, had flown in just to make the landmark ride. He stood among smiling faces as the sleek subway glided over 10 miles of fresh track from the line’s previous terminus at Rio’s famed Ipanema beach to the western suburb of Barra da Tijuca, which houses the main Olympic Park and Athletes’ Village—though those facilities are a full eight miles away from the last stop.

As his train screeched into the station, a youth orchestra struck up “The Girl From Ipanema,” perhaps in reference to how that tall and tan and young and lovely girl no longer has to go on walking, but can hop on the metro instead. In the press scrum, I asked a reporter why we hadn’t been allowed to ride the metro, too. She suggested it was because of the risk of lefty journalists chanting “Fora Temer!” (“Out Temer!). Most Brazilians want new elections, and the political instability continues to be a preoccupation for Brazil and Olympic organizers.

Inside the airy Jardim Oceânico station, Temer, who Brazilians are quick to note bears a striking resemblance to Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, took to a podium and promised that Rio would show “what it’s capable of.” In turn, the mayor, in his trademark jeans and untucked work shirt, and the governor, still weak from a recent cancer treatment but seemingly determined to be part of the hoopla, also heaped praise on the project. Their common message: the $3 billion transit project will unify disparate parts of Rio, just as the Olympics would unify a divided Brazil.

You don’t have to have been a Brazil correspondent for three years to recognize that overstatement. Moreso than forging unity, the rail project seems like yet another marker of Rio’s controversial, overhyped, and ultimately underwhelming haul toward hosting the first ever Olympics in South America.

Sure, it’s easy to hate on the Olympics. Predicting the myriad of things that will go wrong is an established tradition of the Games, as much of a ritual as the torch-lighting ceremony. In much of the media, the competition is fierce for the most dire prediction, the most alarming headline, the most damning criticism of “the disaster that is Rio.” The Athlete’s Village is not up to spec (it wasn’t in Sochi or London either). The military has taken over airport screening (again, as happened in London). The environmental pollution is alarming (as it was in Beijing, which was called the most polluted games ever). The doomsayers came out in force before the 2014 World Cup too, but were proven wrong when the tournament went off largely without a hitch.

Amid all the finger-wagging, it’s no wonder 60 percent of Brazilians believe the Olympics will do more harm than good—a far cry from 2009, when the bid was supported by 89 percent of the population.

But it’s still hard not to be cynical over the self-congratulatory glad-handing on full display during the inauguration of the new metro line. And perhaps the troubles surrounding this heralded project help explain the downbeat mood in Brazil right now. It’s just another of the scores of big promises made that have failed to come to fruition.

Built over six years by as many as 10,000 workers at any given time, Rio’s new Linha 4 line claims to be the largest modern urban infrastructure project in Latin America—a dubious claim, given it’s just 10 miles of track with five stations. It was originally targeted to open in January 2016, but construction repeatedly threatened to halt amid funding shortages from the cash-strapped state government, whose economic woes reflect the recession that rattled Brazil in recent years. Costs ran over. The federal government was forced to step in with an emergency aid package. The length of the line was halved. An investigation into contracts-related bribery was opened. And after all that, the line will only be open to Olympic ticket holders until September—so much for connecting the people.

Then there are questions about who this new metro will really serve when it opens later this fall. In contrast to public transportation projects in U.S. cities that are attacked for skirting wealthier neighborhoods exercising their NIMBY vetoes, the expensive metro expansion in Rio is being criticized for routing into more affluent neighborhoods at the expense of poorer ones. And it’s not even clear that the wealthy residents will take the metro. One transportation expert involved in the planning of Linha 4, Marcus Quintella at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, explained to me that changes to the original design, including the scratching of planned parking near the line’s final stop, mean that these more affluent residents may opt to stay in their cars.

Officials tend to sweep aside such criticisms. At an earlier metro station unveiling, I spoke with Rio’s state secretary of transportation Rodrigo Vieira, who was in charge of finishing the $3 billion legacy project. He said costs were on par with transportation projects elsewhere in the world. He also countered that the line connects people of all classes, including a new stop just outside the city’s largest favela and service that better connects poorer residents to the wealthy neighborhoods where many take service jobs. The upgrades will cut a commuter’s ride by up to two hours, meaning people “will have more time to be with their families, to work, to have pleasure, to live.”

“Of course it’s not cheap,” he added, “But it’s a way to change the lives and change the city.”

As we spoke, trains rumbled through the station conducting test rides, seats still covered in plastic wrap. The station itself was still unfinished: equipment needed to be installed at the ticketing counter, an emergency closet lacked its fire hose, and the ceiling-mounted security camera boxes had yet to be equipped with actual cameras. Vieira brushed off these concerns too.

“We will operate with all the security and safety that the Rio de Janeiro subway is known for all over the world,” he said, though it isn’t clear that the small metro system has any reputation outside Brazil, and the city’s not exactly known for safety.

The statement stands in contrast to a feeling of insecurity that seems to be permeating Rio right now. After the inauguration ceremony, I rode the newly inaugurated metro back to Ipanema with Mateus Araujo, the conductor of the youth orchestra that had played “The Girl From Ipanema.” He said they would likely use the new line during the Olympics to perform at venues around the city, but he was concerned about safety. He’s been robbed at gunpoint twice over the past two years, and kids in his orchestra sometimes miss practice because it’s not safe to leave their homes in favelas riven by gang violence and police reprisals.

It’s not limited to poorer neighborhoods either. To maintain security during the Olympics, some 85,000 military and police personnel have descended upon the city. Helmet-wearing commandos patrol the beaches and streets with their fingers ready on the trigger. Despite this, a gang was filmed last week pulling a man from his car and emptying his pockets within blocks of the governor’s palace. Tellingly, the government of France has issued an advisory to tourists suggesting they have a banknote ready to appease potential attackers, suggesting that in Brazil security is not a matter of avoiding robbery, but coping with it. The arrest of 12 suspects in an ISIS-pledged terrorist cell also did nothing to quell a city already on edge.

For residents and tourists alike, the first concern isn’t even about where the metro goes, but about getting there safely in the first place.

In this way, the Linha 4 line seems to underscore Brazil’s tendency to put the cart before the horse. Looking back, it’s clear that the 2009 host bid was made amid the hype of the country’s future prospects, but with no real plans for how to accomplish everything the investment promised to bring.

The city’s crime is down, but serious safety concerns remain because thousands of extra security units aren’t enough to combat deep-rooted violence. The bay remains horribly polluted with raw sewage because pledged water treatment infrastructure never appeared. Foreign capital is coming in, but won’t necessarily turn the tide of an economic crisis.

The new metro tracks were laid, but the city will remain disjointed.

Perhaps the best one can say is that at least the train runs. Given the country’s unexpected downturn and political upheaval, it is arguably a feat that Rio accomplished what it did. Sure, it’s disappointing—but maybe it was doomed to be.

The train will run, the Games will go on, and the country will likely get a boost. But will Brazilians be more united after their Olympic moment?

The post Even “The Girl From Ipanema” Can’t Save Rio’s Olympic Train appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

So let’s retire the old query, and turn it upside down to pose a new and urgent question: How can South Los Angeles save us?

South L.A. is no longer a place apart. Today, it sits in the center of the California story, embodying some of our greatest possibilities and our greatest struggles. And in a particularly nasty and anxious time in the United States, when pessimism and angry nonsense spread faster than Western wildfires, the South L.A. of 2016 offers a tough-minded but optimistic narrative that ought to remind us just how much can be achieved—beyond mere survival—through gritty determination and small, steady improvements.

South L.A. is both the closest thing we have to an urban success story, and the furthest thing from a fairy tale. In today’s South L.A., crime, despite recent upticks, is less than one-third of what it was a quarter century ago, access to health care is improving, there are more and better schools, housing prices and home ownership are up, transportation and arts and food options are multiplying. And major new developments are arriving—with all their promise and peril.

Of course, it is dangerous to generalize about a place so large and diverse. South L.A. consists of about 30 very different neighborhoods, from pristine suburban-style historic tract to industrial precincts to college-town enclave to narrow boulevard-based corridors. South Los Angeles is comparable in size to San Francisco, California’s fourth largest city. Both are nearly 50 square miles and have populations of 850,000.

But today’s South L.A. is more often described as Los Angeles’ version of Oakland. It’s a poorer place that is being changed, for better and for worse, both by the work of its residents and by proximity to the wealth and spillover housing demand of Los Angeles’ booming downtown and Westside.

South L.A. has not shed its older challenges, particularly around poverty and jobs, while its gains have created new challenges. In particular: How do South L.A.’s people and businesses make sure they don’t become exiles from their own success, driven away by a higher cost of living?

That poignant question resonates across the state. South Los Angeles is the largest working-class place left in coastal California. If it can figure out a way to remain such, it could provide a crucial model of success for a state with a dwindling middle and a widening divide between its affluent and America’s largest population of poor people.

Part of South L.A.’s importance lies in its relative openness to new approaches in addressing this conundrum. There’s less of the NIMBYism that’s epidemic elsewhere in the state. I recently heard community planners call South Los Angeles “L.A.’s L.A.” They meant that in two ways. First, in the sense meant by Tom Bradley, modern L.A.’s greatest mayor and a longtime South L.A. resident, who once said that people come to L.A. “looking for a place where they can be free, where they can do things they couldn’t do anywhere else.” And second, in the technical sense: while so much of L.A.’s planning and zoning has already been settled, with overlays and districts for different areas, South L.A.’s plans remain relatively free of such obstacles.

So how can South L.A.’s example save us? The region has become a popular proving place for new initiatives.

It’s already the site of some of L.A’s most significant cultural investments these days—in Exposition Park alone, the Coliseum is being renovated, a new soccer stadium is scheduled to be built, the Natural History Museum has been recently renovated, and the Space Shuttle Endeavour now resides at the California Science Center.

Many of South L.A.’s bigger developments come with “community benefits agreements” and local hiring promises that are all the rage among labor unions and local economic development wise men. But it remains to be seen whether such agreements lead to enduring improvements, or whether this one-deal-at-a-time approach undermines efforts at more thoughtful and comprehensive planning and development. USC’s The Village, which combines student housing with a new Target and South L.A.’s first Trader Joe’s, opens next year and is being closely watched because it comes with some of the strongest community benefits in the city’s history, including hiring for disadvantaged people, local business assistance, $15 to $20 million for a new affordable housing fund, and the creation of a legal clinic to assist local tenants. A proposed $1 billion expansion of the Washington Boulevard high-rise for creative firms and artists known as The Reef, to include new housing units, retail, and a hotel, faces skepticism about its feasibility and opposition from neighbors who fear it could further drive up rents in the area.

In an L.A. where it’s hard to build housing, South L.A. is a relative hotbed of new homes—often fashionably close to transit and retail—but it’s far from clear whether it is affordable enough to serve local residents. Recent efforts to improve access to health care are being closely watched, notably Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital, located south of the 105 Freeway, which recently reopened in conjunction with expanding local health clinics. The just-completed Expo Metro rail line (which connects South L.A. with downtown and Santa Monica) as well as the forthcoming Crenshaw line will make South L.A. a key test of whether highly touted transit investments can improve neighborhoods.

And South L.A. is home to dozens of charter schools, billions of dollars worth of new and improved school facilities, and various other educational innovations, including the Partnership schools, a district within a district. So far, some of these school experiments are showing strong results, while others lag.

South L.A. is a fertile ground for experimentation, from efforts to help local businesses embrace technology, to a new approach in sidewalk repair. The city’s new trash franchise is supposed to curb illegal dumping in South L.A. and establish recycling facilities in the area. Private and nonprofit efforts to provide healthy and locally grown food are targeting South L.A. And if high-profile efforts to boost voter registration and turnout are to succeed, they’ll have to gain traction in South L.A., where people vote less frequently than in other Southern California communities with similar population profiles.

Statewide efforts to increase park access in poorer communities are being tested in South L.A., which has seen the opening of many small parks but has struggled to establish the mid-sized community parks it desperately lacks. South L.A.’s long street corridors are ripe for the redesigns promised by the “Great Streets” movement, which aims to make streets friendlier for bicyclists, pedestrians, and community gatherings.

In all these initiatives, the stakes are high. If any of these ideas can show results in reputedly hardscrabble South L.A., they are likely to find a receptive audience in struggling urban areas around the country.

Of course, the two most profound changes South L.A. needs involve not physical, but human, capital.

First, South L.A. stands to benefit tremendously from statewide efforts to ease re-entry into communities for people who have served time, as well as from efforts to help people clean up their criminal records by expunging or reducing non-violent felony convictions. Nonprofit groups are collaborating to make it easier for people with records to get hired and become eligible for housing and student benefits.

Second, there may be no greater advertisement for long overdue immigration reform than to spend time in South L.A. And if the undocumented workers and entrepreneurs behind so many small or home-based businesses had the legal status to come out of the shadows, South L.A., as both an economy and a community, would be unstoppable.

South L.A.’s reputation, particularly in mainstream media, hasn’t yet caught up with its new, improved, and more complicated reality. Its success has come too slowly and steadily, without a sole catalyst, and so it’s not easily told.

But that may be about to change. Two high-profile political campaigns could bring media scrutiny to South L.A. Steve Barr, founder of a charter school network with many South L.A. campuses, is challenging the incumbent mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, in 2017. And if former mayor Antonio Villaraigosa makes a strong run for governor in 2018, Californians should hear a lot about South L.A., the setting for the most significant policy initiatives of his eight years in office.

South L.A.’s people and institutions are understandably reluctant to tell their turnaround story, given the remaining challenges. And progress can have its costs. South L.A. was turned down at first for a federal Promise Zone designation, which brings all kinds of resources to the neediest neighborhoods, largely because it wasn’t poor enough to meet the program’s standards. But, in a demonstration of their collaboration and sophistication, South L.A.’s officials and nonprofits rallied, suggested changes to the program’s standards, and won the designation.

An updated narrative of South L.A. is vital to the region’s ability to protect itself and its people from developments and changes that might threaten its progress, or displace its people. Vast and diverse South L.A. is on the rise, and we shouldn’t let anything get in the way of the example being built there.

Because if South L.A. can make it, there’s hope for all of us.

The post South L.A. Doesn’t Need Saving appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Later this summer — if things go according to schedule— bulldozers and demolition crews will rumble down South Los Angeles’ Alameda Street corridor, turn into Jordan Downs, and begin demolishing some of the 700-plus cinderblock houses lined up like dominoes ready to fall for the $1 billion-plus redevelopment project. Roughly 1,410 mixed-income housing units, new businesses, green spaces, a new restaurant, and a supermarket are expected to emerge from the rubble.

The redevelopment has already been 10 years in the making, and could take another decade to complete. And when the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently gave a thumbs-up to the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA) and the master developer team of The Michaels Organization and BRIDGE Housing to begin work, the reaction by many was a mixed-bag—relief that the project will finally start tempered by troubling questions that remain unanswered.

Circumspection may be appropriate, given how similar efforts to transform other housing projects around the country have been marred by unexpected costs, delays, and disputes. The federal government’s rising ambitions—to transform older housing projects mired in poverty into sustainable and mixed-use neighborhoods where the haves and have-nots live shoulder-to-shoulder—make big housing projects even more complicated. And in reshaping public housing from previous generations, like Jordan Downs, you’re not only replacing people’s homes, you’re replacing history.

Jordan Downs was built in the 1940s as a temporary base to house workers who moved to Los Angeles during World War II. It was appropriated for public housing in the 1950s. But the difficulties in kick-starting its redevelopment can’t be explained by a lack of community interest in the project, or in improving Watts, where needs for a better quality of life are obvious.

The Health Atlas for the City of Los Angeles shows that residents in the wider Watts area live on average 12 years less than those in the affluent community of Bel-Air, and have the highest rates of asthma, mortality from stroke, and low-birth weight babies in the city. Of the roughly 2,714 Jordan Downs residents, 24 percent of adults are unemployed. The state’s unemployment average is 6.3 percent. Eighty-eight percent of people residing at Jordan Downs live below twice the federal poverty level.

In recent years, the area around Jordan Downs has been the focus of notable business, governmental, and philanthropic investments. School facilities have been improved. The Watts Gang Task Force, which brought together police and the policed, has made huge strides in improving safety in and around Jordan Downs. All kinds of grassroots initiatives, from work-training programs to Project Fatherhood, which forges closer bonds between the fathers and sons of Jordan Downs, have shown success.

Nor have elected officials dragged their feet. Mayors, council members, and congressional figures have taken turns championing Jordan Downs over the years, with many seeking to expedite the redevelopment. And residents have largely echoed their “what’s taking so long” sentiments. The Housing Authority’s agreement with the developer requires that 30 percent of people hired on the project are from Jordan Downs. Some residents have already begun training for work on the demolition and subsequent construction.

So, why has the project taken so long to launch, and why have many people expressed reservations about the redevelopment as a whole?

Bureaucratic blunders and the Housing Authority’s inability to secure valuable grant funding provide some of the answers. Twice Jordan Downs has been turned down for a HUD Choice Neighborhood Initiative (CNI) grant, which would funnel a possible $30 million towards the redevelopment. Last year, the application was submitted with errors and missing documents. This year’s CNI application has just been drafted.

But a bigger issue has involved the discovery of a toxic footprint in and around Jordan Downs.

News of contamination at Jordan Downs first drew my interest there as a journalist back in 2014. I’ve followed cleanup efforts since, watching as the redevelopment lifted a veil on the sheer scale of the environmental problems. Toxic hotspots include an Exxon pipeline breach at the northeast tip of Jordan Downs, and multiple lead and arsenic cleanups in recent years at Jordan High, on the southeast corner of the housing project.

Though steps have been taken to mitigate known contaminated sites, questions hang over the past and the future: whether residents were adequately protected from toxic exposure, whether enough is being done to protect residents as the redevelopment rumbles forward, and whether environmental racism has swayed key decisions.

Recent contamination concerns have focused on the “factory” site—a now empty plot of land nestled in the very heart of Jordan Downs, immediately abutting homes. A steel mill operated there up until 2000; the site has also been used for trucking operations and waste storage. These activities leached a toxic inventory including engine oil and engine waste, diesel and gasoline, paint thinners, solvents, and chemicals found in electric transformers into the soil and groundwater. Lead was detected there at levels as high as 22,000 parts per million (ppm). The safe threshold for residential soil lead levels in California is 80 ppm.

The water crisis in Flint, Michigan, has focused attention to the seriousness of lead exposure, especially for young children. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention finds no safe blood lead level in children, nor can the effects of exposure to lead, a neurotoxin, be reversed. More than half of those who live in Jordan Downs are children under the age of 18. Recent studies have suggested that lead contamination extends well beyond the factory perimeter, and residents fear that they may have been exposed to lead-entrenched soils from their gardens, community areas, and playgrounds for years.

A 2009 Housing Authority interoffice memo stated that the residential portions of Jordan Downs could suffer from environmental contamination and “might require remediation.” But it wasn’t until a full five years later that California’s Department of Toxic Substance Control conducted soil tests around the perimeter wall of the factory site, to gauge whether lead had migrated into residential areas.

Though the tests returned elevated lead levels in roughly half of the samples, the DTSC made a No Further Action (NFA) determination not to test further out into the community—a decision questioned by local residents and their advocates, who conducted their own tests earlier this year. A coalition of environmental justice groups hired an X-ray fluorescence analyzer to take more than 100 soil samples in and around the homes. Fifty-one of the samples screened above the 80 ppm 
threshold for lead. Thirty-three of those 51 samples had lead levels ranging between 105.25 ppm and 346.04 
ppm.

Uncertainty about contamination has been fueled by the fact that the DTSC scientist who determined that no further testing was needed was recently embroiled in a racism scandal, where he and another senior department scientist shared emails containing racial epithets such as “injun badge,” “crackho hooker,” and “Chop-chop Hop Sing.” The emails were exposed in response to a public records request I made as part of an ongoing investigation into institutionalized racism within the DTSC.

Confronted with the emails, the DTSC promised to review their decision to take no further action. When that review might be completed is unknown.

Lead isn’t the only concern at Jordan Downs. A plume of trichloroethylene (TCE), an industrial solvent that can be especially dangerous for pregnant women and developing fetuses, has been discovered in the groundwater beneath residential portions of Jordan Downs. The DTSC conducted soil, vapor intrusion, and groundwater tests last year, the results of which, they say, indicate that TCE vapor intrusion isn’t a threat to the existing housing. However, the full reach of the plume has never been fully delineated, nor has the source of the contamination been identified.

To get a clearer picture of how those who live at Jordan Downs are impacted by the myriad sources of contamination, Physicians for Social Responsibility—a nonprofit health and environmental advocacy group—is conducting an assessment of the community’s health in July and holding a health fair at Jordan High School, offering residents medical services and lead tests.

As the redevelopment nears its launch date, contamination fears are joined by different concerns: that today’s Jordan Downs tenants might not have a home at Jordan Downs when construction is over. Such skepticism is grounded in a long history of displacement and evictions in South L.A., and in redeveloped housing projects around the country.

Jordan Downs is supposed to be different. As currently envisioned, the redevelopment is designed to progress in piece-meal fashion, with new housing being built first on the empty factory lot, creating an over-flow for the initial batch of residents to move into while their homes are demolished, and so on. The Housing Authority recently distributed “Right to Retain Tenancy” certificates.

But the nonprofit L.A. Community Action Network alleges that low-income residents are already being removed to pave the way for wealthier ones, and is documenting evictions it says are tied to the redevelopment. The Housing Authority says otherwise. Figures the Housing Authority provided show evictions at Jordan Downs have fluctuated year-by-year, between 2011 and 2015, during which time 100 separate families have been evicted. Though the annual eviction rate per unit was slightly lower than that at two nearby housing developments.

Displacement fears are inevitable in a county with an estimated half-a-million fewer rental units than are needed. The people of Los Angeles simply cannot afford to lose what affordable housing remains, even for a short time. Which is why delays are better than getting Jordan Downs wrong. Here come the bulldozers.

The post What’s Holding Jordan Downs Back? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

2016 threatens to become the Year of Rent Control, with the topic white-hot in the Bay Area, home to California’s most expensive housing. Rent control refers to laws that put limits on how much landlords may raise rents; such laws often include provisions requiring landlords to produce specific causes before evicting tenants.

Last summer, Richmond became the first city in California in 30 years to pass a new control law (the law was later suspended, and the issue will likely be decided at the ballot). This touched off similar legislation and ballot measures to establish or strengthen rent control in other Northern California cities, including Alameda and Santa Rosa.

And in recent months, rent control has become a top issue in the state’s biggest cities.

In San Jose, multiple proposals to tighten rent controls, perhaps by tying them to inflation, have been debated in the city council, and some could go to the ballot. A ballot initiative to cap rent increases was just filed in Oakland. Los Angeles is considering a new registry of rents and a crackdown on landlord efforts to skirt existing rent control laws. And in San Diego, a tenants’ movement and an online petition are building momentum to establish new controls. In all these places, landlords have countered with their own legislation or possible ballot measures.

The attention to rent control is understandable, given the costs of housing, but unhelpful. Rent control is a policy that, as libraries full of research and California’s own experience demonstrates, doesn’t do much to accomplish its avowed purpose: to make more affordable housing available. The last thing California needs is a costly and time-consuming fight over rent control.

As the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office made clear in a 2015 report, the heart of California’s housing problem is that we Californians have long failed to build anywhere close to enough new housing to accommodate the number of people who live here. The office said we’d need an additional 100,000 units a year, on top of the 100,000 units we’re building, to mitigate the problem. As a result, housing prices and rents have long been higher than in any other state. And the problem has been getting worse, even in this era of slower population growth. In 1970, the gap between California home prices and the rest of the country was 30 percent; today, home prices are 250 percent more expensive than the American average.

The shortage is strongest in the urban coastal counties where people most want to live, creating a wave of people who push inland in search of housing. So Californians devote more of their incomes to housing, live in more crowded spaces, and commute further to jobs. In a Sacramento speech last fall, Roger Sanders, former finance director for the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, noted that, from 2010 through 2014, “the state population increased by 1.55 million, while throughout all of California only 312,000 permits for new housing were approved, or one unit for every five new residents.” Significantly, the urban counties (10 northern counties and seven southern counties) approved only 200,000 units, or only one for approximately eight new residents.”

The reasons for the lack of building are many and related: community resistance, environmental policies, high costs of construction, a lack of fiscal incentives for local governments to approve housing, regulatory constraints on development, and the high cost of land. This is such a wickedly complex problem that it’s laughable to see rent controls as a cure.

Since housing markets are regional, it’s especially hard to see how local rent control in one city or another could ever make any impact. To the contrary, one reason for California’s sprawl is the way that cities within regions compete with each other to claim the most desirable businesses and housing for themselves, while sticking their neighbors with needier people.

And if rent control really works to control prices and produce stability, as its supporters claim, why are the cities with rent control—among them Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, Palm Springs, San Francisco, Santa Monica, San Jose, Thousand Oaks, and West Hollywood—so expensive? And on the other side of the question, opponents of rent control sound ridiculous when they warn that it will discourage new construction, especially since state law has exempted new construction from rent control laws since 1995. All but about 15 cities in California have no rent control—and they have housing shortages, too.

The real import of the rent control debate is as a reminder of California’s civic disease: our long history of embracing complicated formulas as ways to dodge the hard work of democratically solving tough problems. Rent control laws often include complicated formulas for allowing rents to be raised by different percentages or in different ways depending on a host of conditions (like whether a landlord has made capital improvements or had made previous rent increases).

It’s instructive that rent control’s California history is deeply intertwined with the ultimate dodgy California formula, Proposition 13. That constitutional amendment, approved by voters in 1978, provided the foundation—via its limits on property tax increases and supermajorities for state and local taxation—upon which two generations of other fiscal formulas have been built.

One false promise of Prop. 13 was that saving property owners money on their taxes would lead to lower home prices and rents. So when home prices and rents soared after the amendment passed, liberal cities began to install rent control ordinances that, like Prop. 13, didn’t lower rents or housing prices either.

Rent control has been—and will be, if it expands in the near future—just another complication in a housing world that already has too many such kludges. And it’s a particularly counterproductive one since, just as Prop. 13 keeps taxes lower the longer you stay in your home, rent control grants special privileges to the older and more stable among us, regardless of their actual financial need.

That is the peculiar tragedy of 21st-century California: A place that once cherished and defined the new is now organized around the imperative of favoring the old and the established. It is infuriating, and odd, that people who think of themselves as progressives defend, and even seek to extend, such fundamentally conservative policies.

The people who need protection in California are poor people who cycle through housing. The best approach here is not more housing incentives—decades of housing incentives both to developers and renters have produced very little housing here—but developing robust support structures (via transportation, health, child care, jobs, and cash) that follow poor people wherever they can find opportunity. And, of course, more housing.

In a state devoted to anti-tax formulas that don’t keep taxes low and education funding guarantees that don’t guarantee much money for education, it’s no surprise that rent control laws don’t make housing affordable. So let’s not pretend that rent control is anything other than just another way of pretending to address our housing problems.

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