by Stuart M. Flashman, Ph.D., J.D.
The environmental community, over the past ten or fifteen years, has adopted a new catch phrase: “smart growth”. It arose as environmentalists struggled to find an attractive alternative to the low-density auto-oriented development that had become standard in American’s suburbs. That latter kind of development is now often referred to (at least within the environmental community) as “suburban sprawl”.
What is smart growth? It is an attempt to allow growth while reducing its environmentally damaging effects. Thus, smart growth favors “infill” development (i.e., development within already urbanized areas) instead of development of previously undeveloped areas (“greenflields”). Smart growth attempts to promote transit-oriented rather than auto-oriented development – for example by focusing high-density development around public transit hubs. Perhaps most relevant to the following discussion, smart growth tries to minimize the increase in demand for limited resources, such as water, by promoting development that uses less of those resources (for example, apartment buildings that have minimal landscaped area and therefore use less water for irrigation).
Some environmental groups, perhaps most notably the Sierra Club, have provided strong political support for smart growth. The basic idea is that America has been foolishly squandering its environmental resources on inefficient forms of development. The campaign appears to be paying off. Legislatures and governmental agencies (at least in pro-environment states like California) have begun to enact laws and approve regulations that promote or require smart growth as a better way to accommodate expected increases in population. This trend has been particularly true in California, and nowhere more so than in the San Francisco Bay area.
Smart growth and carrying capacity
However, the success of the smart growth movement only serves to highlight what it has thus far failed to address – the larger, long-term question of how much growth a region can reasonably accommodate without causing major environmental impacts. This issue has often been referred to as regional carrying capacity.
While regional carrying capacity has many components, probably the single most obvious and most important is infrastructure – the various logistic components needed to keep a human population supplied and functional. Among the major modern infrastructure components are water supply, treatment and distribution, wastewater collection, treatment, and disposal, food supply and distribution, solid waste disposal, energy supply and distribution, roadways, and public mass transit. Other components include public education facilities, housing, public safety, and public park and recreational facilities.
Most of the current discussion of smart growth takes the projected amount of future growth as a given.[1] There is little discussion of what can or should be done to limit the amount of future population growth in a region. Yet, the amount of growth that will occur in a region is certainly affected by a variety of factors; most notably increased employment demand. This, in turn, is affected by multiple factors, including the local economy, cost of living, availability of housing, availability of a trained workforce, and availability of necessary infrastructure. The latter would seem to provide a feedback loop that would keep population growth in balance with infrastructure, but it does not appear to have worked very well.
The hiding of infrastructure limits
Part of the reason infrastructure limits have failed to control job growth may be that such limits are often hidden. Thus, for example, water agencies are usually required to issue “will serve” letters before a development project is built. These letters are supposed to ensure that the water agency has sufficient supply and facilities to serve the new development. However, water agencies routinely issue will serve letters based on supplies and facilities that are only projected. The same often holds true for wastewater treatment and disposal. Other infrastructure components, such as roads and public transit, do not require any kind of review and approval prior to development approval, other than the general discussion that occurs during the environmental review process. More often than not, this process is seen as just one more hoop to be jumped through to get to development approval. Thus, Environmental Impact Reports all too often contain flawed or cursory analyses of traffic (and other) impacts. Even such unavoidable infrastructure-related impacts as are identified are routinely accepted as undesirable but necessary consequences of the need to promote economic development.
As a result, development often ends up straining the capacity of the agencies responsible for infrastructure. Thus, development in the Santa Rosa area north of San Francisco has repeatedly outstripped sewage treatment capacity, resulting in overflows of raw sewage into the Russian River. Similarly, the inability of water supplies to keep pace with urban and suburban growth has contributed to California’s more and more frequent “water shortage emergencies”.[2]
Attempts to address infrastructure limiits
The California Legislature has made token efforts to acknowledge infrastructure limits during approval of major projects. The 2001 legislative session passed SB221 (Kuehl). That statute, for the first time, required that before a subdivision map or development agreement for a large-scale residential project was approved, the water agency proposed to supply the project had to verify that it had a sufficient water supply for the project. However, the bill did not address the need for long-term planning at the level of the general plan. (But see, Government Code §65302(d) and §65352.5 [providing for coordination between water agency and land use agency and discussion of the adequacy of water supply in the general plan conservation element].) Nor did it address the broader question of the overall adequacy of regional infrastructure. Further, the bill, as finally passed, contained numerous loopholes that have greatly limited its impact on regional planning. Nevertheless, it represented the first time the Legislature acknowledged the folly of cities and counties continuing to approve major development projects while closing their collective eyes to the inadequacy of infrastructure to support those projects.
It should be obvious from the above discussion that without consideration of carrying capacity, “smart growth” is little more than an exercise in Pollyanna planning, which will ignore the real impacts on the Bay Area over the next twenty years. Indeed, if these planning efforts continue as currently envisaged, the most likely result is that far before their build-out is complete, Bay Area development will grind to a halt, stymied by the inadequacy of available infrastructure. The economic cost of such an unplanned economic “train wreck” will be colossal — far greater than if state, regional, and local agencies had taken carrying capacity into account and planned a gradual transition to a steady-state regional population and economy.
[1] The discussion that follows does not address the much broader and, in the long term, even more serious Malthusian limits to growth. Needless to say, neither infrastructure improvements nor, for that matter, changes in development or immigration policies, will avert long-term catastrophe if population exceeds basic infrastructure components such as food supply.
[2] This is not to say that infrastructure limits are immovable. With sufficient capital input, infrastructure can often be expanded. For example, new highways, sewage treatment facilities, and public transit lines can be built. In coastal areas, desalinization is even an option. However, these initiatives can be prohibitively expensive. To take one example, Santa Barbara built a desalinization facility, but was forced to mothball it because of its excessive operating expense.