The Smartest Person in Los Angeles

It’s been almost 20 years since I met the smartest person in Los Angeles, Cecilia Estolano. She was on the staff of Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, I was on Mayor Bradley’s staff. We were having one of the typical meetings you have in government — too many people who had nothing better to do, clogging up what should have been a smaller, shorter meeting with an excess of posturing. I don’t remember the subject, unfortunately, but it was something to do with the environment.

Suddenly, this voice piped in from the end of the table — a young woman’s. She spoke rapid-fire, impatiently, like a college student in a hot debate. In a few seconds, she summed up everything we needed to think about, framing the issue in macro terms while paying due respect to the many devilish details. For my purposes, at that point the meeting was over. There was nothing left to say.

Who are you? I remember asking her after the meeting was over since, characteristically, she had spoken her name and affiliation too fast for me to process it. She introduced herself with a firm handshake. She was new to Galanter’s staff. Friendly, but intensely focused. She really didn’t fit in at City Hall. It takes forever to get anything done, and most of the people there are unfriendly and unfocused. I figured the slow pace would cause her to spontaneously combust. But it didn’t. When I left the mayor’s office to begin my illustrious PR career, I recommended Cecilia to replace me.

Since then, Estolano has worked for the U.S. EPA, the city attorney’s office, and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Now she’s CEO of the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency. This week’s Downtown News has an interview with her. It’s the first one I’ve seen since she took the job about a year ago. Why the thoughts and plans of this dynamic new leader aren’t of more interest to the city’s more prominent media, I couldn’t tell you.

Two things are interesting about this interview: What it reveals about her management style, and the issues to which she’s directing her attention. Here are a couple of excerpts that illustrate what I mean, (with the key statements in bold letters):

Q: With a name like Community Redevelopment Agency, you would imagine that community building would have been the founding principle from the start. Why hasn’t it and how will you ensure it does?

A: I think in times past, the agency has looked at catalytic projects one by one, project by project, and we really are trying to look at, from a planning perspective, what are all of the different components that make a healthy community? Instead of just doing a one-off deal, we’re also looking at how does the fabric of the community work? Is it a healthy place for families to live, shop and work? What I wanted to do coming on board was set a very clear sense of what the mission of the agency was and communicate that consistently and repeatedly throughout and drive down those goals through every rank of the agency. And I think I’ve been somewhat successful at that. Our budget this year is aimed at reflecting those goals, so that means we’re adding capacity on workforce development, on local hiring, on affordable housing, on green urbanism. We really do want to reflect those values in our budgeting, in the way we measure our performance, in the way that we communicate with the community.

Q: What are the biggest obstacles to taking the agency where you want to take it?

A: I don’t really see a lot of obstacles, to be honest with you. I think it’s a matter of getting people the resources they need. We have an incredibly motivated staff here. It has to be one of the strongest mission-driven workforces I’ve ever been a part of. I compare it to when I worked at the EPA where people were very mission-driven about protecting the environment. I haven’t seen that level of commitment until this job. It’s really impressive. So, I don’t think of it as a challenge so much as an opportunity. The other thing we really want to look at is trying to track more private sector investment. We’re looking at a time when there is more private capital chasing urban in-fill deals than ever in history. And we have to find a way to pull that money into our project areas.

Q: Is your background as an environmental lawyer new for someone in your position? And how does it inform your decisions?

A: I think it’s an unusual package for a redevelopment executive director and it informs everything I do. It’s wonderful to be working for a board and a mayor and council members who see the value of sustainable urbanism. But when I came here I wanted to make sure that was a core value of the agency and so in every speech I gave, and every time I talked to staff members, I made it clear that I expected us to move into sustainable urbanism, that we would find a way to reform the agency’s internal practices as well as our relationship with developers to encourage that kind of activity.

And:

Q: Do you see red flags in Downtown’s boom and do those concerns play into your decision-making?

A: We have to try to maintain a balance of incomes in Downtown. We also have to be mindful of all the people living in the single room occupancy hotels and how precious that resource is as a reservoir of scarce housing. We have to deal with Skid Row; we have to deal with the homelessness problem. That is an enormous challenge that is going to take an extraordinary level of cooperation with the county. You asked me what the biggest challenge is; to me that is probably the single biggest challenge we face as a city – not just for Downtown but as a city – grappling with the homelessness problem and our inter-jurisdictional conflicts.

Q: How would you rate Downtown in terms of being a mixed-economic, mixed-income area?

A: Well, it’s funny you ask that question when we’ve just seen the survey come out from [the Downtown Center Business Improvement District] about the new residents and how they have a much higher median income than the rest of the city. I think it’s a challenge to keep it of a diverse economic background. Right now, we pretty much have a bipolar Downtown residential population. We have the homeless and the SRO dwellers and we have the folks that live in the lofts and there is a big gulf in between. That’s not a healthy community. We need to have more workforce housing; we need to have people who are the administrative assistants who live Downtown as well as the associates of law firms. We’re just happy to see that there is a residential development boom occurring in Downtown – we don’t want to put the skids to that – but we do want to make sure that we have more of an income mix.

The politics are thick and greasy downtown — especially now that so many more developers are making so much more money than before — but Cecilia’s intelligence, clarity and experience will hopefully act as a solvent. I like how she describes her leadership style — no wasted energy, focused on the big picture.

The story repeats a rumor that Estolano is considering a race for a westside City Council seat, a rumor she dismisses. It’s so tempting for intelligent people in public service to go that route, but I hope she doesn’t. It’s been proven over many decades that you don’t really need to be that smart to be a successful councilmember. But downtown LA needs a leader, and the timing of Cecilia’s emergence in this role is perfect.

(Hat tip: LA Observed.)

Thoughts on Downtown Growth and Traffic

As of this writing L.A.’s mayor and council continue to negotiate over whether to allow the city to sell “air rights” over the Convention Center to developers to “further downtown’s residential boom” by allowing taller residential projects than the zoning code currently allows.

This is quintessential “smart growth” as it is has been defined over the past 15 years in Los Angeles and other major metropolitan centers.  Because downtown isn’t the Westside or the San Fernando Valley, this particular smart growth initiative has blossomed in ways that others have not.  There are no homeowner groups eyeballing these new downtown projects from the competing philosophical perspective that growth is growth and growth is bad. 

One of the biggest assumptions behind the downtown residential boom is that these new people won’t use their cars as much.  Could be, although the parking situation downtown is a far cry from Manhattan’s.  In Manhattan and a few other urban centers with lots of residents, owning a car is a costly nuisance.  Urban planners in Los Angeles and elsewhere evidently hope this will eventually become the case in cities all over the country.  

This scenario is hard for me to imagine, I must admit.  Sure, there are lots of jobs downtown, but there are a lot more jobs not downtown.  Will every couple moving into one of these new downtown digs want to confine themselves to both working downtown in perpetuity?  Unlikely.  If a better gig opens up in Burbank or Santa Monica, then they just become another traffic-clogging commuter.   If their downtown employer subsidizes parking, isn’t it likely a downtown dweller would take advantage of it just the same way a commuter from Temecula would? 

Downtown is a lot cooler than it was, and in theory LA Live will make it cooler still.  But not cool enough to stay their all the time.  When I lived in New Jersey and drove into Manhattan to visit my carless friends, I don’t know who they were happier to see:  Me or my car.  My car meant they could catch up on their grocery shopping…or go to Connecticut to smell clean air and see real trees.

The expansion of residential options by building housing downtown is a fine justification for it.  L.A. has a housing shortage, and if downtown is where the homeowner-group-afflicted political system will tolerate new housing, then downtown is where it should go.  But beyond that, I don’t think policymakers should hope for much else to change.  Traffic congestion in Los Angeles is still awaiting a solution.

These thoughts are prompted by a new treatise in this month’s Reason, just posted online, whose title tells you what the writers, Sam Staley and Ted Balaker, think about city planners: “How Traffic Jams are Made in City Hall.”  The specific cases they discuss are in Minneapolis and Atlanta, but there are lots of correspondences with L.A.  The whole thing is worth reading, assuming you don’t get too upset when received wisdom is challenged.  An excerpt:

In 2005 the Urban Transportation Monitor, a biweekly industry newsletter, surveyed more than 600 transportation professionals to find out their thoughts on traffic congestion. About 19 percent responded. Of those, 45 percent thought the profession was “doing all it can do” to stop congestion. Half thought congestion was the result of too many people using their cars, and 45 percent attributed it primarily to the desire to live in low-density suburbs.

The preferred solutions were predictable: 51 percent thought mass transit should be improved or expanded, and 50 percent thought the government should manage demand better by getting people to telecommute or carpool. Only 29 percent believed increased highway capacity could be a cost-effective way to reduce congestion significantly. (The survey did not ask whether new capacity should be provided if it were privately funded.)

Many believed the problem is simply too many cars. Fifty-one percent said one of “the main reasons for the high level of congestion in many metropolitan areas” is the desire “of many to use cars for all their trips.” Indeed, of the 11 options offered by the survey, that was the biggest vote getter. For traffic engineers, planners, and other transportation professionals, the solution to traffic jam is to keep us from using our automobiles.

The planning profession clings tenaciously to its foundational myths. Even as overwhelming evidence to the contrary piles up, planners keep claiming that cars are inefficient and socially destructive; that expanding road capacity isn’t practical; and, most fundamentally, that the government can determine how we choose to travel by planning where and how we live.

That last assumption is the logical conclusion of a rather sophisticated (if largely incorrect) way of looking at human behavior. It’s rooted in a common-sense observation: How we live influences how we travel. If we live on a farm, we are going to travel by car. Buses simply don’t go out to farms to pick people up and take them into town for work or to buy groceries. Trains don’t either. A neighbor might, but she would probably be driving a car and doing this as a service because you don’t have a car. School buses are the exception that proves the rule. They pick up a large number of kids, but only because they’re being delivered to one destination, the school building.

The flip side is the experience of the Manhattanite. If someone lives in the densest neighborhood of an American city, cars are costly, frustrating, and inefficient. Most Manhattan residents can get to their destination far more efficiently using the subway, taking a bus, or walking. Because parking is so costly, they also can get around fairly efficiently using taxis.

So people in dense urban areas have more choices, and personal automobiles are inefficient ways to get around town. Congestion, in fact, leads people to use alternative modes of transportation. Many regional planners, like those in Atlanta, conclude that the way a region develops dictates how people are likely to travel and what transportation strategies are most feasible. And the way to influence development patterns, they believe, is to carefully plan where and how much to invest in the transportation system. But proximity to work is only one of many factors people consider when finding a home; other criteria, such as price, neighborhood safety, and proximity to good schools, are often deemed more important than living close to the office.

Of course, Atlanta is not Manhattan. In fact, it’s virtually the opposite. At 1,783 people per square mile, Atlanta is the poster child for low-density residential development. The New York metropolitan area is three times as dense, with 5,309 people per square mile. Manhattan’s density is even higher: more than 50,000 people per square mile.

According to the Atlanta commission, “Land use is an important determinant of how people choose to travel. No other variable impacts [mobility] to a greater extent. The Regional Development Plan policies help shape future growth and protect existing stable areas by encouraging appropriate land use, transportation, and environmental decisions.”

To say this is an exaggeration would be charitable. While land use can influence travel behavior in small and crude ways, to claim that it is the biggest factor distorts the mainstream research on the subject. A 2004 study sponsored by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) cautioned against the tendency to “overemphasize vertically mixed uses such as ground-floor retail and upper-level residential.” In particular, it noted that “outside of dense urban locations, building mixed-use products in today’s marketplace can be a complex and risky proposition; few believe that being near a train station fundamentally changes this market reality.”

This isn’t to say that these developments can’t generate more transit riders. The FTA study found that those living near rail stations were five to six times more likely to commute using transit than other residents. While those seem like dramatic effects, the majority of commuters near transit stations (often two-thirds or more) still use cars to get to work. Moreover, many of the people living in these transit areas were transit users already. They just moved so they could be closer to transit.

Put differently, if 5 percent of a region commutes using transit-about the national average-then 25 or 30 percent of those living in a transit-oriented development will commute using transit. This is consistent with case studies of transit use in San Francisco and Chicago. (Incidentally, those results invariably come from studies of predominantly heavy rail commuter systems, such as subways. Light rail and buses are more fashionable in planning circles these days, but they’re also slower and carry fewer riders.)

To get such high use rates, densities have to be very high. The traditional American home with a private yard doesn’t fit this model. The typical new house in the United States is built on about one-fifth of an acre. A study in San Francisco found that doubling densities from 10 units per acre to 20 units per acre would increase transit’s commute share from 20 percent to 24 percent.

In short, even cramming four times more people into the typical U.S. subdivision of 4-5 units per acre would produce only a modest uptick in transit use. And it isn’t an uptick for the region. It’s an uptick for the neighborhood-those living within a quarter mile of a transit stop. There is virtually no effect beyond the immediate vicinity of the transit stop, regardless of density.

At these densities, Americans would literally have to give up any hope of having a decent-sized yard and most would have to live in townhouses. The land use pattern would have to fundamentally change, resembling the landscape more common in the carless 19th century than in the highly mobile and adaptable 21st century.

Forget, at least for the moment, whether the government should effect such a sweeping change. It almost certainly can’t. In a forthcoming report, Adrian Moore of the Reason Foundation (the nonprofit organization that publishes this magazine) and Randal O’Toole of the Thoreau Institute examine data from the National Personal Transportation Survey and find that doubling an urban area’s density would, at most, reduce the total number of car trips by 10 percent to 20 percent. No U.S. urban area has managed to double its density or to reduce car travel by such magnitudes.

Cycling in the Shallows

John Balzar is leaving the LA Times soon to go to work for the Humane Society in a PR position.  Balzar’s departure is sad on many levels; he was one of the Times’ best and most passionate writers, a last link to the Otis Chandler years.  His story today on Monica Howe, outreach coordinator for the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, could well be the last byline he has in the newspaper.

So I was frustrated after reading it to see that Balzar, of all people, wrote it.  I wanted to rip it to shreds as yet another example of the Times’ shallow reporting, and of the missed opportunity to expose its readers to the many fascinating and disruptive dimensions of the urban bicycling movement.   But, as is my usual habit, I read the byline last. 

“Aw nuts,” I said to myself.  “I really respect Balzar.”  I started making excuses for him.  Maybe it’s his editors’ fault.  Maybe the problem is the unimaginative approach of the Times’ website overseers.  And hey, it’s not the like story is bad, exactly.  It’s well-written and…  uh…

Okay, read Balzar’s story.  Do you see the words “Critical Mass” in there anywhere?  No?  In 1992, there was a massive traffic disruption in San Francisco, in which bicyclists dramatized their demands by clogging automotive traffic at rush hour.  It was called Critical Mass–a “visionary traffic jam.”  Critical Mass is now the name given to a monthly mass bike ride in major cities, in which bicycle and other self-propelled commuters take part.  According to the Critical Mass site dedicated to listing such events, Los Angeles, Long Beach and Newport Beach are among the cities that participate regularly.  It says here that the Los Angeles Critical Mass ride used to start at Sunset and Silver Lake, but recently moved to Wilshire and Western. It’s a local phenomenon as well as a global one. 

If you’re interested in what Critical Mass is all about, you can start with Wikipedia’s entry on the topic — a great read.  Critical Mass is many things: An environmental protest, a demand that cities do a better job of accomodating cyclists and ensuring their safety on public roadways, a celebration, an “organized coincidence” that demonstrates the viability of xerocracy – a benign form of anarchy, in which no one is in charge, but a mass event happens anyway.  Did you know that the Critical Mass phenomenon has led to a Rand Institute study of netwars? 

It’s possible, of course, that Monica Howe knows nothing about Critical Mass — unlikely, but possible.  But she certainly knows her own organization, and the specific public policy demands it has made.  Balzar describes Howe’s political positions this way:

She has thrown herself into the campaign to demand the stenciling of “sharrows” on city streets. A sharrow is a bicycle symbol with two chevrons that is meant to remind motorists to share the road and also to promote better lane positioning for those on bikes. Howe has rallied cyclists to demand safer streets. She has led efforts to support cyclists hit by cars. She has promoted group rides that bring residents in touch with unfamiliar neighborhoods. She hammers away on the idea that bicycles are the only zero-emission transit machines.

But his focus seems to be mostly on Howe’s personality.  This is a personality profile, after all.  But how many stories does the Times run on the issues facing bicyclists in Los Angeles?  If not in this story, when is the Times going to tell its readers what the Los Angeles Bicycle Coalition is advocating?  Here is a flyer from CICLE (Cyclists Inciting Change through Live Exchange) that Howe’s coalition wants to distribute to motorists:

(I hope this is readable. It’s downloadable at the link above.) 

The most important thing to take away from this flyer is that bicycle activists believe bicyclists should be entitled to as much space on the road as a car.  They don’t use the sidewalk, and they shouldn’t be limited to the parking lane — those places are often too dangerous.  People in parked cars are wont to open their doors suddenly, placing a deadly obstacle in the path of a fast-moving bicyclist.  Also, sometimes bicyclists need to make left turns.  They are not breaking the law if they cut in front of you to do this.  They have a right to do this.

The organization is also joining a postcard-writing campaign aimed at Mayor Villaraigosa:

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa speaks about his efforts to make Los Angeles “the greenest and cleanest city in America”, yet his vision for a sustainable Los Angeles continues to neglect an emphasis on walking and bicycling as being part of this future.

Cities such as Portland, OR and San Francisco have quickly risen to the top of the list as the nation’s most sustainable cities. These cities have made significant efforts to encourage both bicycling and walking as clean and viable modes of transportation. C.I.C.L.E. believes that if Los Angeles is to become the “greenest and cleanest” city in the nation, then we too need to be incorporating strategies that encourage bicycling and walking as part of a sustainable solution for our transportation needs.

That’s news, isn’t it?  Not as sexy as the mayor’s battle over LAUSD, I grant, but if the Times is going to write a story about one of the city’s most influential bicyclist advocates, shouldn’t her involvement in a political protest of the mayor’s policies rate a mention?  Doesn’t it stand to reason that there ought to be — at least — a link to some of this information on the web? 

Believe me, I’m no expert on bicycling or bicycle activists.  I found all this information in about 10 minutes.  There is undoubtedly much, much more. The Web is one place where bicycle activists talk to each other–globally.

Bicyclist activism is a rich topic with massive implications for growth, the environment, transportation in Los Angeles — way more interesting stuff than anything SCAG has to say on those topics.  It is also a harbinger of the new forms that political activism will take, as the Harold Meyerson-approved model of deep-thinking, self-congratulatory conferences gives way to a new form of networking that, as you read further into it, could alter the balance of power in a dimension that conventional politics can’t access.

As far as it goes, John Balzar gives Monica Howe a nice profile.  I can just imagine the Westsiders who form the Times’ core readership reading it and nodding their heads approvingly.  Bicycles are just…so…wonderful!  Like puppies and rainbows. That’s just great that somebody is so passionate about it.  These readers might have had a different reaction if they understood the radicalism inherent in bicycle activism.

Urban Politics After the Bubble Pops

I just caught up with Joel Kotkin’s column of 8/27, which has bad news for cities that have spent, rather than hoarded, the spike in real estate tax receipts.  The softening of the real estate market is disproportionately hitting what he calls “high-priced, overhyped urban areas.”

Many of these markets are heavily influenced by speculators, who own as much as one-third of the condos for sale in downtown San Diego and more than four-fifths in Miami. These “flippers” are most likely to unload properties once they see the prospect of declining prices.

Many other big city condo buyers are nonresidents for whom their city apartment constitutes, if not pure speculation, a second or third residence. One New York real estate developer places the percentage of second homes in his buildings as high as 80 percent. Since the 1990s, the number of Manhattan residences serving as second homes has grown as much as threefold. Unlike year-round residents, many with families, this group seems unlikely to stick around to see a sharp reversal of fortunes.

There is simply less substance to the current urban “boom” than meets the eye. Over the past five years, job growth in many cities with the greatest home price inflation — New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston and San Francisco — has remained well below the national average. True, there has been a substantial growth in income among the highest end professionals and those who benefit from rising asset prices, but earnings for everyone else have been flat at best. Instead of the real estate tide lifting most boats, it is helping elevate only a few yachts.

The weakening of condominium prices — prices could fall 9 percent this year, Kotkin says – will also leave a lot of developers who committed to “smart growth” downtown projects out of luck.  Were those projects a trend, as it seemed for awhile, or just a fad?  The developers I knew about were more than happy to talk about transit-oriented development, bringing employees closer to their work and reviving urban street life–so long as they could expect $1 million bids for the luxury condos they were building.

Ironically, Kotkin says,

a significant correction in real estate prices — albeit painful for some, including speculators, developers and promoters — could contribute to a reorientation of urban priorities. Lower rents — partly supplied by developers who give up on selling — would provide incentives for middle- and working-class families to remain in the city. It could also allow artists, young professionals and others now being priced out of San Francisco a chance to re-enter the market.   

But is it really true that cities with underfunded pension obligations didn’t shore them up when the getting was good? Who do they think is going to bail them out?  

So what happens to cities once the property boom ends? One immediate effect will be to undermine the fiscal health of these cities, which are so dependent on real estate taxes.

Many cities may rue the day that they failed to address pressing city wage and pension issues when they had the chance. Unfortunately, mayors like San Francisco’s Gavin Newsom and New York’s Bloomberg — temporarily flush with unexpected property taxes — saw fit to grant hefty raises to city workers and refused to address the looming crisis posed by their enormous pension fund liabilities. In New York City, these amount to more than $50 billion.

Think about the California political impact if Kotkin’s prophecies bear out — long-term.  Newsom and LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa are presumed to be the two top contenders for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 2010 (since no one thinks there will be an incumbent named Angelides readying for re-election that year).  Both are mayors of cities that have benefited fiscally from the housing bubble.  By 2010, which mayor will have the bigger fiscal mess on his hands, and who is most likely to come out of it looking good?   It’ll be interesting to see who is more willing to accept some short-term grumbling by labor unions and clients for city services in order to better position themselves, and their cities, for the longer-term.

The whole column’s worth reading, particularly for Kotkin’s scathing descriptions of the kinds of cities real estate wealth creates.  

Pinkberry vs. the Parking Trolls

Two Los Angeles obsessions — dieting and parking — have collided with the fury of rutting mule deer in West Hollywood, according to Deborah Netburn of the Los Angeles Times.

Netburn’s story describes what happens when Hyekyung Hwang, a USC business school grad, bought a little storefront on Huntley Drive. She wanted it to be an English tea room with outdoor seating, and ran up against the local property owners’ group. Of course, under the City of West Hollywood’s rules (which are typical for Southern California cities), the neighbors had the right to tell her she couldn’t offer outdoor seating. Then she thought, what about serving something elegant like sherry? Using the liquor license laws, again the neighbors slapped her down.

This was, by the way, a store that previously had been a tattoo parlor and then a medical marijuana outlet. So it’s worth pondering what these homeowners thought would be so destructive of neighborhood values if instead of pot Hwang sold sherry. What’s probably the case is that the medical marijuana dealership and tattoo parlor operated under the regulatory radar, but Hwang needed a permit. In local politics, the need for a permit brings out the trolls under the bridge who demand payment to let you cross.

So what other kind of business could an entreprenuer slide into this slot without incurring the trolls’ wrath? Hwang settled on selling frozen yogurt made with her own recipe. Low-fat, but without artificial flavorings, served with fresh fruit on top. She called it Pinkberry.

By February 2005, one month after it opened, Pinkberry was already turning a profit. The lines started that summer. By that August, it was discovered by Daily Candy. By spring, Los Angeles had fallen hopelessly in love. The little store on Huntley where the tattoo parlor used to be now serves about 1,300 to 1,600 customers a day.

This, of course, was not exactly what the neighbors thought would happen. Hwang said when she first opened the store the neighbors were friendly and welcoming. “They were like, ‘Good luck, Asian lady’ and buy a yogurt,” she said. Now they are plagued with increasing traffic on their once sleepy street of million-dollar bungalows and people double parking “just for a minute” to run in for a quick Pinkberry (though with the long lines, there is no such thing as a quick Pinkberry any more).

For neighbors, there is Pinkberry trash on their lawns, and sometimes Pinkberry customers too. The angriest of the neighbors stand outside at night to remind yogurt lovers that the street is all permit parking, and they will be ticketed if they park illegally. But even that doesn’t always work.

“The bottom line is the customers that go to Pinkberry don’t mind paying $68 for a tub of yogurt,” said Huntley Avenue resident Oliver Wilson, handily adding the price of a parking ticket to the $7.45 cost of a large yogurt. “It’s all Escalades and Mercedes and BMWs. You tell them, ‘Don’t park here,’ and they do. They can afford it.”

I love it!

“Permit parking.” If you’re not a well-off homeowner in certain parts of Los Angeles, West Hollywood, Santa Monica and other desireable locales near attractive commercial neighborhoods, this concept might be alien to you. Beginning about 20 years ago, such homeowners decided it wasn’t enough that they had a house with a driveway and a garage, and they could walk to stores, parks, pubs and other urban play areas. They wanted to own their street, or at least all its parking spaces. However, they didn’t want to have to pay for this additional valuable property. So someone came up with the brilliant idea of getting the city to give it to them, like a present.

So, if you own a house on Huntley Drive, or on one of the hundreds of streets like it, you get to park in front of your house, but no one else can, even though we’re all taxpayers, and we all paid for the street, the curb, the park strip and so on.

Huntley Drive runs right into busy Santa Monica Boulevard, which was a commercial street long ago. The little bit of Huntley that abuts the boulevard was also zoned for commercial. The homeowners weren’t blindfolded when they purchased their homes. In fact, proximity to Santa Monica Boulevard is, for some, an added attraction. Nonetheless, they feel they are entitled — entitled! — to enjoy the amenities of a suburban neighborhood ambience in which outsiders are unwelcome.

I worked in LA City Hall when the permit parking trend first took hold. I couldn’t believe such a thing was legal. I found it even harder to believe that a city political culture supposedly dedicated to equality thought the better-off residents who could afford to buy homes in pricey neighborhoods were deserving of a gift of public property that all taxpayers had paid to build and continue to pay to maintain.

But these homeowner groups were unbelievable. They depicted daily life in their cozy little neighborhoods as if everyone who parked there threw a week’s worth of garbage on their front lawn and then urinated on it. Every time a new permit parking zone was approved, the debate would be the same. The local councilmember would agree with these organized homeowners that it was a “crisis,” an “emergency,” from which only permit parking would save them.

I figured, if these people want to buy the parking rights in front of their home, fine. The city could use the revenue. Charge them market rates — in fact, have an auction, with the proceeds to fund additional police, more teachers, health clinics, the kinds of things government is supposed to do. But — it wasn’t my department. And I’m sure if I’d pushed this idea in City Hall, I would have been instructed, not so patiently, on who really runs the city. The 10-20 percent of those who vote in municipal elections are disproportionately property owners. So you do what they want, or you find yourself unelected.

All bad policies have a way of blowing up in someone’s face eventually. Well, the brilliant Hyekyung Hwang and her “frozen heroin juice” (as one fan calls it) did the deed. She created a yummy, low-fat product that wealthy people from another part of the Los Angeles area were willing to pay the price of a parking ticket to buy. Why can they afford to pay $68 for a yogurt, night after night? Oh, lots of reasons I suppose, but one of them must be that their homes have also risen in value and low-interest home equity loans can help pay their bills–including their parking tickets. Their homes probably are really nice, lots of amenities, big shady trees — and permit parking to keep the riff-raff away.

Meanwhile, Ms. Hwang, on behalf of the South Bay, I want to welcome you here with open arms whenever you’re ready to franchise your concoction. Permit parking is relatively rare, and there are lots of storefronts on PCH with ample parking out front. And we are just as obsessed about our waistlines down here as anyone in West LA.

“Could Not Have Been Forseen?”

“Clean Slate” is a Dana Carvey movie from about five years ago, about a private detective who wakes up every morning with total amnesia. “Memento” and “50 First Dates” had the same high-concept complications.

This kind of amnesia might be rare in the annals of medicine, but it is a great metaphor for public policy. This morning LA Times story about Santa Barbara illustrates the point. Beginning 30 years ago, the city and county began instituting strong growth controls, all justified by the universal desire to preserve the coastline. The familiar techniques to constrain growth were all implemented there. Don’t expand highways, because wider roads “attract” drivers. Open space is off limits. Severely limit the number of new housing units permitted.

So what happens? Housing becomes insanely expensive, unaffordable for middle class workers. They move away. UC Santa Barbara can’t recruit professors. Businesses leave. Traffic gets worse. The pent-up demand for housing sprawls northward to Santa Maria. The poor who remain in Santa Barbara live two or three families to a unit designed for one. The city’s median age skyrockets. The Montecito Fire Protection District has to buy three small homes to rent to firefighters, at a cost of $2.1 million. Otherwise, in an emergency, the wealthy of Montecito might find its firefighters are 90 minutes away.

Adam Smith figured out a long time ago that when something desireable becomes scarce, the price always goes up. This is not a controversial theory. And yet, here’s what the Times actually says after it lists Santa Barbara’s social and environmental ills:

Many of these ripple effects could not have been foreseen 30 years ago.

Sure they could have. And I’ll bet they were predicted. But, as Woody Allen said to rationalize a different kind of bad decision, “the heart wants what it wants.” Amnesia can be very convenient politics.

More Smart Growth Backlash

If “smart growth” were a client, she’d need a new public relations strategy. A story from last Friday’s North County Times, a suburban San Diego paper:

The “smart growth” philosophy of planning is not exactly winning a popularity contest around the region, county planning leaders said Thursday.

“Smart growth has gotten a really bad rap,” observed Pia Harris-Ebert, San Marcos vice mayor, during a lengthy,
free-wheeling discussion of the topic at the San Diego Association of Governments annual retreat Thursday.

While it means different things to different people, the association generally defines smart growth as promoting a wide range of housing, not just single-family homes, and a competitive public transportation system. It also means directing most growth to within existing cities and towns, and discouraging new subdivisions in the backcountry.

Association board member and Oceanside Deputy Mayor Shari Mackin agreed with Harris-Ebert.

“Whenever you say smart growth, people say, ‘Ah, density. Forget it!’ ” Mackin said.

(snip)

Some members felt it necessary to remind colleagues that San Diego County is still part of a free country.

“We’re not going to force people not to come here,” said Jerry Jones, a Lemon Grove councilman. “They’re going to come here whether we like it or not. They’re going to have an impact on our infrastructure whether we like it or not. We have no way of closing our borders.”

The retreat agenda states that the goal of the discussion was to generate ideas for bringing smart growth to the region. However, no specific suggestions were offered.

Ngh. There’s got to be a foundation somewhere that will underwrite a “smart growth” education campaign aimed at current residential property owners; the people who call the tune for local elected officials. If not, “smart growth” is going to die on the vine … and Southern California is going to start looking like a digital banana republic, with the propertied behind walls to keep the working class out after 5.

Post-Oil, an Alcohol Economy?

As I figured, Bush’s remarks about U.S. oil “addiction” led the coverage of Tuesday’s State of the Union address. The unintended consequences of his new position on energy will, I think, have a far more lasting effect on the nation’s future energy course than the vague policies to which he alluded. That unintended consequence is: Thinkers from across the ideological spectrum will now get much more attention as they conceptualize a post-oil economy.

Whether it’s because the world is running out of oil, or because global climate change leaves us no choice, or because of political explosions in the Middle East, an “oil shock” is coming. This is going to be one generation’s urgent business, sooner or later, so it might as well be sooner.

For years, the energy issue was cast as a morality play: The good environmentalists who favor wind and solar power and drive hybrids, vs. the bad oil industry and their political servants like Dick Cheney. An idea’s quality was seldom judged on its own merits but on its perceived good or bad intentions, or on which side of the political fence it fell. A political correctness had settled over an issue that, in the end, ought to be decided by the results of scientific inquiry and innovative engineering, not the purity of one’s soul.

Political correctness is seldom helpful in solving any societal problem. It usually makes me suspicious. The point of political correctness too frequently is to insulate wobbly ideas from debate. It’s the political version of “that’s my story and I’m sticking to it,” or “don’t confuse me with the facts.”

With that preamble, here’s a link to an essay in The American Enterprise by engineer and author Robert Zubrin. I’ll quote two chunks. First, here is how Zubrin sees the problem:

Using portions of the hundreds of billions of petrodollars they are annually draining from our economy, Middle Easterners have established training centers for terrorists, paid bounties to the families of suicide bombers, and funded the purchase of weapons and explosives. Oil revenues underwrite new media outlets that propagandize hatefully against the United States and the West. They pay for more than 10,000 radical madrassahs set up around the world to indoctrinate young boys with the idea that the way to paradise is to murder Christians, Jews, and Hindus. It was men energized by oil-revenue resources who killed 3,000 American civilians on September 11, 2001, and who have continued to kill large numbers of Westerners in Iraq and elsewhere. We are thus subsidizing acts of war against ourselves.

And we have not yet reached the culmination of the process. Iran and other states are now using petroleum lucre to underwrite the development of nuclear weapons, and insulate themselves from the economic sanctions that could result. Once produced, these nuclear weapons could be used directly or made available to terrorists to attack U.S., European, or Israeli cities and military forces. This is one of the gravest threats to the next generation—and, again, we are paying for it ourselves with oil revenue.

Our responses to these provocations have been muted and hapless. Why? Because any forceful action on our part against nations like Iran and Saudi Arabia could result in the disruption of oil supplies that the world economy is completely dependent upon. We can’t stand up to our enemies because we rely upon them for the fuel that is our own lifeblood.

And the situation is even worse below the surface. In addition to financing terror directly and indirectly, oil exporters are using their wealth to corrupt our political system. Important Washington, D.C. law firms and lobbying organizations have been put on the payroll of Arab nations to blunt any attempts at retaliation for their promotion of terrorism. Arab investors have made enormous buys in media organizations that could allow them to influence U.S. public opinion.

All this, however, is mere prologue. China and India are rapidly industrializing, and within a decade or two the number of cars in the world will double or triple. If the world remains on the oil standard, the income streams of many noxious oil exporters will soar. We will be impoverished to the same degree they are enriched. The vast sums transferred will not only finance global jihad and dangerous weapons development in the Middle East, but also increase potential for manipulation of the U.S. and Western economies. At currently projected rates of consumption, by the year 2020 over 90 percent of the world’s remaining petroleum reserves will be in the Middle East, controlled by people whose religion obligates them to subjugate us.

In light of these realities, current U.S. energy policy is a scandal.

Zubrin fires invective in every direction. He attacks “environmental absolutists” as well as “the charlatans who are promoting hydrogen as a solution to our energy woes” for “doing the nation an immense disservice.” Wind, solar, hydroelectric and nuclear power, which get the most focus as energy alternatives are somewhat beside the point because

The key to energy independence, rather, is liquid fuel to power cars, trucks, trains, ships, and airplanes. These vehicles are not mere conveniences; they are the sinews of our economy and the fundamental instruments of our military strength. Our civilization cannot be sustained without efficient liquid fuels, and there is no foreseeable prospect whatsoever of cost effective, large-scale generation of liquid fuels from wind, solar, hydroelectric, or nuclear sources.

To address the need for a new, more sustainable liquid fuel, Zubrin recommends “taking the world off the petroleum standard and putting it on an alcohol standard.”

This may sound like a huge and impossible task, but with gasoline prices well over $2 per gallon, the means to accomplish it are now at hand. Congress could make an enormous step toward American energy independence within a decade or so if it would simply pass a law stating that all new cars sold in the U.S.A. must be flexible-fuel vehicles capable of burning any combination of gasoline and alcohol. The alcohols so employed could be either methanol or ethanol.

The largest producers of both ethanol and methanol are all in the western hemisphere, with the United States having by far the greatest production potential for both. Ethanol is made from agricultural products. Methanol can also be made from biomass, as well as from natural gas or coal. American coal reserves alone are sufficient to power every car in the country on methanol for more than 500 years.

Ethanol can currently be produced for about $1.50 per gallon, and methanol is selling for $0.90 per gallon. With gasoline having roughly doubled in price recently, and with little likelihood of a substantial price retreat in the future, high alcohol-to-gasoline fuel mixtures are suddenly practical. Cars capable of burning such fuel are no futuristic dream. This year, Detroit will offer some two dozen models of standard cars with a flex-fuel option available for purchase. The engineering difference is in one sensor and a computer chip that controls the fuel-air mixture, and the employment of a corrosion-resistant fuel system. The difference in price from standard units ranges from $100 to $800.

I’ve excerpted a lot, but there’s much more; well worth reading the whole thing. His explanation of why hydrogen is such a dead-end will make you wonder why so many hopes were placed in it to begin with.

Methanol twice before has been crowned the fuel of the future. When I was in Mayor Bradley’s administration, I commissioned a report on flexible-fuel and methanol vehicles for the City of LA’s own use, and oversaw some fleet conversion. I don’t know for sure, but there might still be a methanol fuel pump in City Hall. Our primary rationale was to reduce air pollution emissions. Beginning in the early 1990s, however, methanol seemed to fall out of favor, and electric vehicles became the vogue.

We can’t keep running energy and environmental policy on fashion.

Whatever direction is taken to establish the post-oil economy will require a significant public and private investment. If today’s good answer is tomorrow’s embarassment — as too often happens in environmental policymaking — there will be no investment, and things will simply continue as before, unsustainably. The default fuel for American society is oil, because the infrastructure is already in place. If we’re ever going to replace it, the debate over “with what” has to move into a new, decisive phase — without fear or favor.

THIS is What’s Wrong with the LA Times

I disagree with Hugh Hewitt, Patterico, Michelle Malkin and other conservative bloggers who say the Los Angeles Times would recover from its circulation woes if its editors took it in a less liberal direction. I don’t think adding more conservatives on the op-ed page or instructing news editors to be friendlier to George W. Bush would add a single subscriber, and might alienate liberals who already believe the news media is over-correcting its past liberal bias to their detriment.

However, I do think the Times needs to stop running articles about industries that its writers obviously know nothing about. Subject-matter ignorance alienates far more readers than political bias, in my opinion.

Today’s example is a story about Mayor Villaraigosa’s press conference at LAX, where he discussed the need for a “regional solution” to the expected doubling of air passenger traffic in Southern California by 2030:

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on Tuesday outlined his vision for the region’s air traffic system, calling for airlines to concentrate international flights at LAX while shifting some new domestic travel, particularly short-haul flights, to other airports.

Los Angeles faces many obstacles in clearing its air traffic jams, however. Efforts at regionalizing air transportation already have failed three times in recent years.

Airlines prefer big-city airports, and airport directors cannot force carriers to redistribute flights to airports far from the population concentration in and around Los Angeles.

But at the news Tuesday that a record number of international passengers used Los Angeles International Airport in 2005, Villaraigosa said other airports in Southern California must begin handling some of the increasing demand for air travel.

So far, so good. The Times’s reporters (Jennifer Oldham and Patrick McGreevy) tell us what the mayor is asking for has been asked for before, without success. As a matter of history, Villaraigosa’s two predecessors expended tremendous political capital on losing battles to reconfigure airline traffic at LAX and other airports in just the way Villaraigosa is talking about.

“LAX is the international facility for this region,” Lydia Kennard, executive director of Los Angeles World Airports, said Tuesday. “And we are very positive about expanding international service here. But what we are really clear about is that does not mean growth, and we are not promoting growth, in the domestic arena.”

The role of LAX as a hub of international travel was confirmed Tuesday when the city released its passenger counts for 2005 showing record international volume at LAX.

“That’s exactly what we see for our future at LAX — to be the dominant international facility — and other airports need to take up domestic short- and long-haul service,” Kennard said.

This is Ms. Kennard’s second stint at the head of Los Angeles World Airports. She along with all her predecessors and successors since at least the mid-1990s have stood next to Los Angeles elected officials and repeated this strategy.

The story also quotes Westchester-area Councilman Bill Rosendahl, Mark Pisano, long-time executive director of the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), and Alan Rothenberg, the president of the city’s Airport Commission, who all endorse the mayor’s regional strategy.

Aren’t you kind of curious by now? If this is such a great idea, and everybody in charge of LAX is behind it, why hasn’t it happened already?

The story gives one, unattributed line to answer this question:

Aviation experts say the city can expect roadblocks ahead, including carriers’ preference for using big-city airports that are patronized by corporate clients.

That’s it? Why might this be? There are corporate offices all over Southern California, only a few of which are near LAX. Are corporate executives all masochists? They like to drive on the 405 and the 10 during peak traffic hours?

The airline/corporation nexus is not the problem, which is why the Times couldn’t find anyone from the airline industry to go on the record saying so.

I’m no “aviation expert” but like almost every other PR person in Los Angeles, I put my time into working for LAX on its Master Plan, and learned a few tidbits. The most relevant piece of information is this: The airlines don’t think you can separate international long-haul flights from short-haul domestic flights — which is the essence of what the mayor wants to do.

As Mayor Villaraigosa says, LAX is an “international hub.” Think about the meaning of those words. A “hub” is an airport where passengers are fed into one location to catch a connecting flight. Not everyone who flies United out of Chicago comes from Chicago. Likewise, not everyone who flies an international carrier out of LAX is from the LA area. They are also from other cities that don’t have the volume of international flights that LAX, uniquely, has.

How do these passengers get to LAX? Via a short-haul or domestic flight. From San Francisco, say. Or Arizona. Maybe even Kansas City or Newark. If you want to go to South Korea, Japan, Australia or Chile from anywhere in North America, there’s a high likelihood you’ll get there via LAX.

The international carriers don’t think they can make money if a significant portion of their market can’t fly into LAX. They believe their passengers won’t like the idea of flying into Ontario or Palmdale, and then taking a shuttle bus to LAX to catch the international flight. They’d have to get their baggage, take a ride that would last two hours easy, and then recheck baggage. No thanks.

Losing that increment of unwilling two-hour shuttle-bus riders can be the difference between a profitable flight and an unprofitable one. The commercial airline business runs on thin margins as it is.

That’s not the only problem. The most popular alternative airports to LAX — Burbank, Long Beach and John Wayne — are all politically constrained by local governments from growing to what their markets would bear. Ontario serves a growing Inland Empire market, but Palmdale has been a bust because it’s too far away, too hard to get too and too hot much of the year (another factor the airlines don’t like.) So if the mayor wants to distribute some of LAX’s demand elsewhere, his choices are extremely limited.

However the mayor shapes the future of LAX — both through policy and its unintended consequences — will make a big difference in the future of Southern California’s economy, which is highly dependent on trade and tourism.

It seems important enough to me that, if I ran the Times, I wouldn’t assign City Hall beat reporters who are more comfortable talking about politics to cover this story. I’d hire someone who’d made a serious study of the airline business.

It would help the mayor — who can’t be expected to know the airline industry along with everything else he needs to know — if the region’s one big newspaper could do better than just adding colorful detail to his own press releases. The Times could add value by enlightening the mayor, other policymakers and voters about these complicated issues. That way, the Times could become a “must-read,” rather than the source of annoyance it is too often today.

It’s not about bias. It’s about facts. The Times doesn’t run enough of them. If it did, more people would buy it, no matter how liberal its editorials are.

UPDATE 2/1/06: On the general subject of the financial health of newspapers, this post on Powerline is worth reading. It links to stories in USA Today and the Financial Times on how newspapers are fighting back. Experimention, but also forcing content aggregators like Google to pay. Hmm.

Parallel-Universe Parking

There’s a neat Web 2.0 experiment just now underway that Southern Californians should follow and participate in. CarHarbor is a blog with a mission: To create a network in which people utilize the large-scale cooperative capability of the Internet to find individual solutions to “the everyday frustrations we all face when it comes to parking our cars.”

A fascinating troika of advisors oversees CarHarbor: Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist; Jim Lazarus, currently public affairs director for the SF Chamber, and a longtime SF City Hall figure who is close to Mayor Newsom; and Scott Rafer, a pioneering web entrepreneur who was behind Feedster and is now chairman of Wireless Ink.

Here’s an example of the kind of thinking CarHarbor wants to promote:

Virtually all schools, especially those located in urban areas, have parking problems. I’m learning a lot by talking to San Francisco principals and headmasters. Parents and other visitors get frustrated that they can never find a spot anywhere near the school, causing them to be late for important events and meetings. Traffic congestion is always an issue during drop-off and pick-up periods. Teachers and other staff often find it difficult to find a spot for the day, or have to move their cars periodically throughout the day. It’s energizing to contemplate how our tools, now under development, can resolve these issues.

There are also opportunities to take space controlled by a school and make it available to third parties for parking during off-hours or over the summer. Some schools will inevitably find themselves strategically positioned in the path of valuable parking revenue. We want to show them the way.

At this pre-launch stage, CarHarbor takes the form of a blog — demonstrating that blogging is more than just a soapbox. They don’t pretend to have all the ideas. They want yours. I don’t get the sense CarHarbor is limited to San Franciscans, although that’s where it’s based.

Just think: One day, the Metropolitan Transportation Agency will be doing this sort of thing. Wouldn’t it be cool if they weren’t the last to know?

(Hat tip to Tech Crunch for finding this.)

“Smart Growth,” the Backlash

The concept of “smart growth” that encourages developments which combine opportunities to live, work, shop and obtain services like education in a compact area, with environmental sustainability designed in, gets applause when discussed in the abstract.

Clearly, such a land use pattern is better than the endless sprawl we have now. Why should everyone have to start their car engine to buy a bottle of milk? Why can’t more of our kids walk to school like in the good old days? Why can’t we bring back the basic family value of eating dinner together by putting job opportunities near homes and condos, perhaps close enough where clean-fueled public transit or even bicycling makes sense for more commuters?

Why, it’s obvious, we need more “smart growth” … until a developer proposes it. Then it becomes a fiendish plot, a trick, a con game. At least that’s what Ellen Brennan of the South Beach Neighborhood Association said in this week’s Santa Monica Mirror:

Whenever you hear the term “smart growth,” you’d do well to suspect you’re being scammed. The term was coined by people who intended to create reasonable, partial solutions to air pollution by bringing people and resident-serving businesses together, eliminating the need for car trips. The concept has been hi-jacked by the development community who now preach it for reasons far from its original intent.

The religious fervor the development community brings to their pumping for “smart growth,” is the result of its becoming a politically correct synonym for “big profits.”

(snip)

Those preaching smart growth have solved no problems. They’ve made parking, traffic and congestion worse instead of better, and they’ve received financial benefits for doing so. They’ll likely hype “smart growth” through the entire land use process and it will serve us well if we begin to understand exactly what it means. It means higher profits for developers, larger development fees for the planning department. and greater tax revenues for’ the Redevelopment Agency. It means taller buildings completely out of harmony with this beach community. It means density, congestion, height, and ugliness and devotees purposefully making traffic worse. Unless you value profit or dogma over quality of life, today’s brand of smart growth is no longer a solution to anything. You’d do well to be very suspicious when you hear it used.

Brennan goes onto say that “smart growth” concepts are “yesterday’s partial solution,” no longer necessary because of alternative fuel vehicles that run on batteries, ethanol and and, “believe it or not, on fuel made from vegetables.” Following her logic, the widespread adoption of alternative fuel vehicles means sprawl is okay again.

“Smart growth” ideas have tremendous merit and should be the standard for new development. But developers who thought smart growth was a good political solution to NIMBYism, it’s time to sober up. The homeowner groups used environmental rhetoric to make new developments go away. Now that developers use the same environmental talking points to promote their projects, the homeowners want none of it.

It’s all about the money. Current homeowners in areas that have experienced the biggest housing price gains don’t want more of any kind of growth that might in some hypothetical way reduce the value of their property. They’re going to retire on the wealth they’ve accumulated and intend to accumulate in the future, by just sitting on their property.

These are the 21st Century’s landed gentry. Housing shortages don’t concern these people. In fact, it’s Econ 101 — scarcity is good news for “them that got.”

To take a cynical view: The long-term solution to Southern California’s crisis of housing affordability and the environmental damage wreaked by sprawl will ultimately come down to paying off existing property owners to make way for new neighbors — offensive as that Robin-Hood-in-reverse concept might sound. I don’t know how to make it fair, and I don’t know who pays or how, but money is the real issue.

Who You Gonna Call? Pat Brown!

Gov. Schwarzenegger introduced himself to Californians as a politician by saying it was Richard Nixon who made him a Republican. Ironically, in his State of the State address, he embraced the politics of Nixon’s 1962 opponent for governor, Pat Brown.

Edmund G. Brown, Sr. is to California politicians what Harry S Truman is for presidents — a magical incantation that is supposed to make all political problems go away. Democrats and Republicans alike have invoked his name and the public works projects with which he is associated as a tonic for whatever ails us — and them. To be a builder like Pat Brown places you above politics. You are looking toward the future! You are planning for our children! You are handing out big contracts for massive amounts of blueprints, concrete and wires! To politicians, proposing a “Pat Brown-style” program is like writing yourself a love letter.

Here’s another irony. The first, and most astute critic of the Pat Brown legacy was his own son, Gov. Jerry Brown with his “era of limits,” “small is beautiful” ethic. Jerry Brown was ridiculed for saying these things, but he captured what Californians in his day (1974-82) were thinking: We’ve grown enough. If you pour more concrete, that will just bring more people. Let’s live within our (infrastructural) means, and maybe we can preserve some of California’s original specialness, its landscape and environment. To a large degree, this is still how many Californians feel, which is why the upgrade and expansion of highways, electricity transmission lines and airports has lagged so far behind the population curve.

No question that much of what Arnold has proposed in the way of public works improvements is utterly necessary. We need to act like adults in California and recognize that growth has happened, even though neither the economy nor public services has kept up. You can’t constrain growth by letting everything slowly go to rot.

But when Sacramento Bee political columnist Dan Weintraub said this the other day, he hit the bulls-eye:

…I can’t help thinking (Schwarzenegger) is a bit tone deaf on one very important point. He seems to think that today’s Californians have the same can-do spirit that Pat Brown tapped into, back in the day when some people were actually excited that we had passed New York as the most populous state in the union. But Californians today are much more leery of growth, and most are downright hostile to it. (snip) He’d be far more successful selling the plan as a way to catch up with the growth we’ve already absorbed, improving the quality of life for those who are here now and are tired of dealing with overcrowded schools and roads and vulnerable levees and suspect water supplies. I don’t think most voters are eager to spend money to make life easier for the those who will be here tomorrow.

State Treasurer Phil Angelides yesterday harshly attacked Arnold’s proposals, largely on budgetary grounds. But Angelides is one political figure who has embraced “smart growth” — and as an ex-developer, might have some idea of how to define and sell the concept politically. Whether by design or by accident, heading into his campaign to replace Schwarzenegger as governor, Angelides is in a good position to triangulate between the go-go-growth ideas Schwarzenegger is pushing, and the no-growth ethic that has dominated local and state politics for too many years.

Energy and hurricanes

Last August, at the height of this year’s hurricane season but before Katrina, MIT meteorologist Professor Kerry Emanuel published in Nature his findings that the intensity of hurricanes — their “total energy consumption” — had increased, and that this increase tracked with the increase in global temperature. In fact, the increases in hurricane duration and power exceeded what global warming theory and computer models suggested, the professor found.

Emanuel’s prior reputation as a scientist who approached global warming theories cautiously seemed primed to assure his findings more attention. However, Katrina was such a dramatic, horrific event, and then such a politicized one, that the notion of “global warming causing Katrina” became grist for the same political mill as “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.”

Maybe now Emanuel’s findings can get a more sober hearing. Here is the key exchange from a New York Times interview with Emanuel this morning:

Q. Because last year’s hurricane season was so intense, many people declared: “Ah, ha! Global warming!” Were they right?

A. My answer is, Not so fast. That may have been a contributor. But the fact we had such a bad season was mostly a matter of chance. On the other hand, though the number of storms globally remained nearly constant, the frequency of Atlantic storms has been rising in concert with tropical ocean temperature, probably because of global warming.

There is no doubt that in the last 20 years, the earth has been warming up. And it’s warming up much too fast to ascribe to any natural process we know about.

We still don’t have a good grasp of how clouds and water vapor, the two big feedbacks in the climate system, will respond to global warming. What we are seeing is a modest increase in the intensity of hurricanes.

At some point, the debate over global warming’s validity will end, and the discussion will finally turn to what we should do about it. Are we, as a global society, capable of reaching a consensus on a course of action that could be very expensive and challenging? Will advances in energy technology bail us out, and if so, how do we insure their universal application? Or will we decide, collectively, to ride it out, and focus on adapting to a world with climate and storm patterns that might be dramatically different than those on which our population dispersion and economy are based?

Emanuel seems to be banking on technology, but his answer illustrates the difficulty of the challenge:

It’s always struck me as odd that this country hasn’t put far more resources into research on alternative energy. Europeans are. France has managed to go 85 percent nuclear in its electrical generation. And the Europeans have gotten together to fund a major nuclear fusion project. It almost offends my pride as a U.S. scientist that we’ve fallen down so badly in this competition.

I don’t see any evidence that the environmental community is gearing up to embrace nuclear power. In fact, the reverse. They’d like to see the words “alternative energy” apply to sustainable or very clean technologies like hydrogen fuel cells. I think the environmentalists are going to win that argument. The inability of this country to site even one nuclear waste facility means it would be irresponsible to create more of it.

Most environmentally-preferred alternatives are far away from being ready or affordable for universal application as a replacement for the energy resources we use now. Ironically, the one clean, sustainable alternative that is now within reach economically — wind power — is being heavily constrained by wealthy, influential NIMBYs with sterling environmental credentials. So…at least for the next decade or two, our policy will be to ride it out and hope for better things down the road. Heckuva job, everybody.

Design-Build or Die!

Did you get an e-mail from the Mobility 21 Coalition Friday afternoon, urging you to “Please call your state senator now and urge him or her to support SB 1026?”

If you are even marginally involved in public policy in California you probably did. (And I’m about as marginally involved as anyone could be.) Aside from arriving a tad late to do much good (the bill will be heard Monday), the call to action is a little obscure:

On Monday, January 9, the California State Senate will consider SB 1026 (Kuehl), which will help bring relief to one of our nation’s most heavily congested corridors–the 405 Freeway. SB 1026 will allow the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority–in close conjunction with Caltrans–to use the design-build contracting method for the HOV lane on the 405 Freeway. Mobility 21 needs your help to secure this bill’s passage!

I’d be glad to help, of course, but I didn’t understand what the “design-build contracting method” is, and why I should join the march on Sacramento to demand it. On first blush, it’s not a concept that gets the blood flowing.

Mobility 21’s website isn’t enlightening. The Legislative Alert on SB 1026 helps you contact Sacramento with just a few mouse-clicks, but doesn’t explain why you should. “Design-build” doesn’t even rate a mention in the release about the Fourth Annual Mobility 21 Transportation Summit, which only took place in November. It does, however, announce some important recommendations to “overcome the region’s crushing traffic congestion,” including:

Develop a Quality of Life Index that reflects a contextural shift in the paradigm of decision-making for major transportation corridor studies and infrastructure investments. Minimum indicators would include Environment, Equity and Economy as key indicators for determining the value of proposed improvements/investments.

Develop indicators that measure the quality of participation, process and education in public outreach and education programs associated with major transportation corridor studies. Use these indicators to establish a threshold for community based support.

Wow! Can’t wait for that!

I didn’t want to leave you hanging, so I did my own research on “design-build.” There is a Design-Build Institute of America, and its website has a link called “What is Design-Build?” Great! So I clicked it and was taken to a page that promises “a concise, easy to understand overview of the design-build process,” and then six more links. I clicked the one that said “An Introduction to Design-Build.” That seemed promising. Here’s what I found:

A Classical Notion of Single Source Responsibility:
Design-Build is a process that has been embraced by the world’s Great civilizations. In ancient Mesopotamia, the Code of Hammurabi (1800 BC) fixed absolute accountability upon master builders for both design and construction. In the succeeding millennia, cathedrals and cable-stayed bridges, cloisters and corporate headquarters, have been conceived and constructed using the paradigm of design-build.

Return to the time-honored approach of the Master Builder, where a single source has absolute accountability for both design and construction.

When the citizens of classical Greece envisioned their great temples, public buildings and civil works, master builders were engaged to both design and construct these monumental structures. Master builders accepted full responsibility for integrating conceptual design with functional performance. To assume anything less than complete accountability for delivering a project was unthinkable.

So it turns out we’re talking about much more than merely making some improvements to the freeways. No, we’re talking about revival of the Code of Hammurabi! Do you know what that is? For those of you fluent in Old Babylonian, here’s the original:

They had quite a system in the days when Mesopotamia was “the cradle of civilization.” The laws, literally “written in stone,” were hard to change–not even a king could do it. Also, according to Wikipedia, “the laws do not accept excuses or explanations for mistakes or fault: the Code was openly displayed for all to see, so no man could plead ignorance of the law as an excuse. Few people, however, could read in that era (literacy mainly being the domain of scribes)”

Harsh! But perhaps necessary to get traffic flowing again on the 405.

So, by all means, call your state senator to support SB 1026. I’m sure their voice-mail will be working all weekend. Tell them you want the LA County MTA to bring back the good old days when citizens were tenants of the gods, when fathers purchased brides for their sons, and when the same people who designed carpool lanes were expected to build them, too.

P.S. And while you’re at it, ask them why “design-build” is illegal in the first place.

Sprawling Thru the Wreckage

Instapundit pointed me to a review by the Chicago Sun-Times’ architecture critic Kevin Nance of Sprawl: A Compact History, by Robert Bruegmann.  The point of the book, I gather, is “everything you know is wrong” — a popular theme for non-fiction books. 

For example, we know that sprawl leads to lengthier (and lengthier) commutes.  And that’s wrong. Er, no, actually that’s right. It’s our current transportation system that’s wrong:

 ”The problem is that we have an old-fashioned 19th-century technology, the internal combustion engine using fossil fuels. Let’s solve that problem — maybe by creating small, fuel-efficient vehicles — and stop talking about putting the city back into its 19th-century state to make mass transit work. Instead, let’s see what people want to do, then see how the city can be built around them.”

Probably isn’t fair for me to comment without reading the book, but…are we supposed to take this seriously?  Cars today are far more efficient, and less polluting, than they were 40 years ago, but those gains have been largely offset by the vast increase in numbers of vehicles trying to reach regional centers of commerce, and the increasing distance they have to travel to reach them.  

Sprawl is a matter of degree. The more miles between home and work, the worse its effects are.  As each ring of suburbs is added, the challenge to serve those far-flung areas becomes less feasible and more expensive.  The miles of new roadway will never catch up with the increased population of vehicles.  Mass transit systems cannot affordably be designed to serve all those new areas, and voters in the unserved areas become–understandably–unwilling to fund a system that doesn’t directly benefit them.  And what’s true about transportation systems is also true about the other basic services: water, electricity, sewage.

It’s not just the environmental effects that have made sprawl such a nemesis.  So many households in far-flung suburbs are structured like this: Dad works full-time, and is away from home between the hours of 5 a.m. and 8 p.m.  Mom’s doing the same. Nannies or older relatives have to come in to get the kids to and from school. As the kids get older, they take on this role for themselves. They come home from school to a fridge, a TV, a computer, and a stern note from Mom to stay in the house until a parent arrives home. 

Eventually, a parent shows up–utterly exhausted from a day at the office plus four hours of driving. No time to prepare dinner?  Fast food. No time to help with homework? Oh well.  No way to get them to Little League or soccer practice?  They can play video games. Kids taking drugs, or having sex, in these empty houses?  Gee, I never knew, I didn’t notice anything had changed.  

I wish I could be like Mr. Bruegmann, and snap my fingers to create a solution to all these problems as facile as “creating small, fuel-efficient vehicles.”

Sprawl is so ingrained in our lifestyles in Southern California–and all over the country–that it will take generations to transform it into something more sustainable. And that assumes developers and home buyers are ever convinced to stop fostering it. So, perhaps books like Bruegmann’s are helpful in beginning to conceive how America can cope with the problems of its own device. But the cheerleading seems misplaced.    

I’m Palmdale, Fly Me

Los Angeles is now on its fourth attempt to expand and modernize Los Angeles International Airport to accomodate the surging traffic in air passengers and cargo–especially international–that wants access to one of the world’s largest concentrations of people. Beginning in about 1998, a fantasy element started to creep into how city officials discussed this project. Instead of simply making LAX bigger and more convenient, they said we’re going to upgrade it somewhat but also pursue “a regional approach.” 

What this means is, assume the growth in traffic predicted for LAX is like the contents of a pinata. Break it open, and let all the kids share.  Give some of it to Palmdale, some of it to Ontario, some of it to Long Beach, some of it to John Wayne, and some of it to a new commercial airport at the former El Toro Marine Base.

This strategy defies how the commercial air business works.  You can’t just assign it where you’d like it to go.

Ontario is a successful, growing airport, but it still fails to deliver international service. Long Beach is in a great location, but its neighbors have gotten that city to constrain it.  Ditto John Wayne. The notion of turning El Toro into a commercial airport tore Orange County apart politically, and the idea is now pretty decisively dead.

That leaves Palmdale Regional Airport, a massive, 5800-acre piece of property in the Mojave Desert, purchased by the City of Los Angeles because back in the 1960s, the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) predicted (prayed?) northern LA County’s population was where would grow. That population would be serviced by “Palmdale Intercontinental Airport.”

SCAG still thinks Palmdale will handle 12.8 million passengers per year in 25 years.  But today, one airline runs flights out of Palmdale, Scenic Airlines. It has one route, to North Las Vegas. And, according to news reports, Scenic is about to pull the plug:

Scenic was the first company to fly out of Palmdale Regional since April 1998, when United Express ended five years of shuttling people from Palmdale to connecting flights at Los Angeles International Airport.

Aaron A. Goerlich, an attorney representing Scenic Airlines, filed a 90-day notice of the company’s intention to terminate service with the U.S. Department of Transportation on Dec. 13, records show.

Paul Haney, spokesman for Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA), which owns Palmdale Regional, said agency officials “are disappointed” with Scenic’s filing.

“We hope (Scenic) will change its plans before service ends. We believe the Antelope Valley is a growing and attractive market for airline service,” Haney said.

Palmdale Regional “will play a crucial role in the regional solution to accommodate the growing demand for air service in Southern California,” he said.

To meet that demand, “We will intensify marketing efforts and explore new ways to make the business case for airlines to schedule flights there, particularly regional jet service that would link Palmdale with major airline hubs,” Haney said. 

Mitzi Daines, Scenic’s director of business development, said the reason for ending service was a shortage of passengers.

Mr. Haney’s talking point about a “regional solution” is really all about LAWA someday getting permission to do what must be done to LAX. The more LAWA acts like they’re serious about developing Palmdale into a big, successful airport that will divert traffic from LAX, the better the politics becomes for the needed LAX expansion. That’s been the theory; I’m skeptical. The airlines don’t believe there’s a market in Palmdale that they can’t more profitably serve at LAX or Ontario. LA County residents outside of the Antelope Valley think Palmdale’s too far away. 

Nonetheless, the city family continues to talk like Palmdale will eventually become a major airport, and plans to spend a lot of money (from where?) on more roads and mass transit to make Palmdale seem closer:

“This is a symptom of the past, not of the future,” said Los Angeles City Councilman Bill Rosendahl, whose district includes LAX and who is working to find a way to distribute flights around the region.

“We need to do more with Palmdale to make it more attractive.”

When I worked in City Hall, I used to say you had to live the life span of Methuselah to see anything finished. Seeing Palmdale become a major airport will test even those limits.

As a PR consultant, I was part of the LAX Master Plan team from 1994-98. The rationale for the project was one thing: Demand. The community acted as if the people who ran LAX were a bunch of greedy developers, when in fact they were essentially just traffic engineers saying “here’s what’s coming.” Los Angeles was the nation’s international hub. What Dallas-Ft. Worth is to American Airlines, LAX is to many foreign carriers from Asia, the Pacific Islands region, Latin America and Australia/New Zealand.

At some point. the inability to grow LAX to meet demand will cause that demand to shift elsewhere.  I’d love to see an update of the demand forecast we used in the 90s. I suspect it will show traffic already adjusting to the political realities of Los Angeles–not by moving to Palmdale, but by moving to Dallas, Denver, Chicago, Las Vegas, San Francisco and Phoenix.