Dan Walters has an interesting column in today’s SacBee on SB 375 and the shift away from sprawl. His argument is that it may be the landmark moment in a shift away from locally-controlled land use policies favoring sprawl toward state-controlled policies favoring density – but that this could cause a political backlash.

He’s not entirely wrong about this, but neither is he entirely right. Before we assess land use policy and its utterly central role in California politics we need to understand just what it is we’re talking about – otherwise our political actions may wind up changing little.

Walters writes:

Although critics frequently denounced the model as wasteful and inefficient “sprawl” that encouraged cultural and racial segregation, it appealed to newcomers because it offered opportunity to acquire real estate they could call their own.

Cultural and racial segregation were important factors in the production of sprawl. Many who moved there already owned property in the urban cores. It’s not that they needed property of their own – but that they wanted a community of “their own” – as in white and middle class. If segregation wasn’t so central to the suburban project then why were so many suburban developments off-limits to people of color? Why did Californians reject Prop 14 in 1964, which would have outlawed the continued segregation of the suburbs?

The derisive term “sprawl” was really just “a decentralized community” in the words of Mark Pisano, who headed the Southern California Association of Governments, a regional planning agency, for three decades – or so he said in the mid-1980s. “This is the way people want their community,” Pisano was quoted in a 1986 book about California development patterns. “The individual’s mobility and freedom is where people want to go.”

This is the Tom McClintock fiction of suburban life. In fact suburbia has very little freedom of mobility. Suburbs like those in Orange County, where I was born and raised, are car-only. For decades they actively resisted providing mobility choices. Bikes and pedestrians were discouraged. Rail was flatly rejected, and even though dozens of passenger trains now ply OC’s rails they recently killed a light rail project. There is no mobility freedom in California suburbs – only the tyranny of the car.

And those actions were the result of deliberate governmental choices, including on the state level. Even at a time when everybody and their brother knows we need to provide more mass transit, Sacramento politicians continue to gut the transit budget.

Walters goes on to paint a picture of cities making local decisions outside state guidelines:

The state could have theoretically affected land use by wielding its latent power, such as control of transportation projects and water supplies. Local officials, however, guarded land use authority jealously, not only for financial reasons, but because their voters wanted to control their communities’ socioeconomic ambience. And with the exception of coastal development, the state largely left land use alone.

This is not entirely true. California has not mandated a statewide urban growth management plan the way Washington and Oregon have. But California has greased the skids for sprawl for decades. An important and often overlooked factor in the passage of Prop 13 was a desire to stop Jerry Brown’s urban density program and starve the cities of tax dollars to provide economic opportunity and the resources for urban growth. It gave sprawling suburbs a massive tax break. The state legislature further obliged the suburbs in 1982 by passing the Mello-Roos Act, which allowed developers to pass fees onto buyers for schools – but did nothing for urban school districts.

Walters suggests that Darrell Steinberg’s SB 375, which Arnold signed this week and finally links land use planning to global warming – 38% of California carbon emissions are from transportation, which sprawl helps produce – could lead to a political backlash:

It’s a momentous step, but also one that could create a backlash among cultural traditionalists and create even more political fault lines in an already highly fragmented state.

“Cultural traditionalists?” Sorry Dan. California’s sprawling suburbs aren’t a cultural choice. That’s a myth. They are the product of decades of favorable land use policy.

How else to explain the fact that so many young people from the suburbs – myself included – make a beeline for the urban cores as soon as we are able? Or the desire among many suburbanites for more transportation choices and a less auto-oriented lifestyle? Or the fact that urban property is holding its value while suburban and exurban property values are in free fall?

California’s future is an urban future. Only by encouraging urban density and providing the transit infrastructure to serve it can we have a California Dream for the 21st century – sprawl can no longer provide affordable housing or economic security, and it comes at a massive environmental and climatic cost. Californians are already coming to understand and embrace this future. The only political backlash to worry about is the backlash from the landless millions who demand a dense, sustainable, affordable life in the California of the 21st century.

One of the bigger news stories circulating this morning is Arnold’s letter to Treasury Secretary Paulson warning that California might run out of cash if the credit markets don’t unfreeze. The state needs to borrow $7 billion but is having trouble finding a willing lender. The gist of the problem, according to the LA Times:

It’s customary for California to borrow billions of dollars at the start of the fiscal year to fill its coffers until the usual flood of sales tax receipts comes in after Christmas and income tax receipts arrive in the spring.

“California is so large that our short cash-flow needs exceed the entire budget of some states,” Schwarzenegger wrote.

The cash needs to be in the state’s bank account by Oct. 28 to be available to fund a scheduled $3-billion payment to more than 1,000 school districts.

Said Matt David, Schwarzenegger’s communications director: “California faces the potential of a perfect storm created by the financial crisis’ effect on liquidity, lower-than-anticipated revenues currently coming into the state, and our late budget. The governor is taking steps to prepare for this scenario to ensure that the state can make critical payments.”

The SacBee clarifies the role the late budget played in bringing about this mess, by quoting California Treasurer Bill Lockyer:

“More urgently, because the state budget was so late, we have only four short weeks to complete what otherwise would be a routine revenue anticipation note sale to meet the state’s cash-flow needs,” he said.

Had the budget been on time the revenue anticipation note sale would have been completed earlier, before the credit markets seized up. We have Sacramento Republicans to thank for this, who put their own ideological agenda above basic financial principles and the needs of the state.

It’s also likely that this letter is not just designed to publicize California’s cash flow problem, but to help grease the skids for the Paulson bailout that is being debated right now on the floor of the House. Arnold supports the bailout but believes it was “mismarketed”:

What was wrong right from the beginning was the way it was marketed. I mean, you can’t talk about a Wall Street bailout. No one in America is interested in bailing out Wall Street [laughter] because those are the guys that are making the billions of dollars. So who is going to help that? But if you go and explain to people this is going to be a bailout for the ordinary citizens and for businesses, small and large, for everyone, the economy and everyone will be affected all the way down to Main Street, not Wall Street, that is then a different ball game.

This letter is certainly much better marketing for the bailout than anything we’ve seen out of Capitol Hill. That’s not to say the cash crunch isn’t real here in California – it is. And we should remember who and what we have to thank for it – Republicans, and the 2/3 rule.

Arnold has been making some rather shocking vetoes of important legislation this week, including a cave-in to Sarah Palin on port air quality and the veto of the anti-rescission bill. On balance his record on bills this week is atrocious.

But there are a few bright spots, including a bill that has the potential to revolutionize land use in California. Arnold has signed Sen. Darrell Steinberg’s SB 375, a bill that links land-use planning to the AB 32 global warming targets. The intent is to eliminate sprawl by limiting sprawl and favoring infill development.

The logic is clear – sprawl creates more auto traffic, and more auto emissions, which worsens global warming. 38% of greenhouse gas emissions in California come from transportation. The obvious solution is to crack down on sprawl and encourage infill development – urban density served by mass transit. SB 375 includes language streamlining CEQA review for infill development that meets carbon emissions reduction goals.

That’s an important element of an anti-sprawl, anti-global warming effort. It’s the Portland model – you can’t stop sprawl merely by limiting growth on the edge of a metro area. You must also encourage infill, dense development and provide the mass transit to serve it.

It’s also vital to California’s economic recovery. As I have argued before, we must redefine the California Dream by using urban density to provide for affordable living and economic security.

There are still some outstanding issues regarding SB 375 – business groups were lobbying to have urban commercial projects given the same CEQA streamlining as residential projects:

Some business groups remained critical because the bill did not allow commercial development to benefit from CEQA changes. And some local officials said it overreached by allowing the state to dictate greenhouse-gas reduction goals for each region.

Steinberg said he promised the governor that next year he will clarify that projects funded by the 2006 voter-approved transportation bonds will be exempt. But Steinberg said he agreed only to have “good-faith” discussions about the commercial development issue.

“The balance we struck was so precarious, we couldn’t pile anything more on top of the bill,” Steinberg said.

California cannot afford sprawl. SB 375 is a big step forward in our efforts to redefine the California Dream and follow Portland’s successful model into a prosperous 21st century future.

Hector De La Torre’s bill, AB 1945, which would have forced health plans to seek approval from a third party before rescinding health insurance – a VERY common practice, unfortunately – was vetoed by Arnold today. Interestingly, Arnold was for it before he was against it as De La Torre noted:

Having the governor not engage in any discussions or negotiations for months, and then just veto the bill is astonishing,” he said. “The issue was good enough to use as an applause line in his State of the State Address in January, but not to sign a good piece of legislation that would protect insured people in the individual market.

It’s another sop to the HMOs, whose business model relies on preventing people from getting the health care they need. This is especially true on the individual health insurance market (the one John McCain wants you to rely on) – if you get sick, the insurance company is going to comb over your application, your policy, and your life with a fine toothed comb to find a reason to cut you off and watch you suffer.

Arnold has vetoed a lot of bills this session, but few vetoes will hurt more Californians than this one.  

Matt Stoller at Open Left has reproduced a letter from progressive Democrats in the Congress demanding changes to the proposed bailout package. Barbara Lee and Lynn Woolsey are the two lead authors, and other California members of Congress who have signed it include Hilda Solis and Pete Stark.

The letter insists that 4 kinds of reform be included in any bailout:

• A 0.25% tax on all stock trades and “exotic transactions” such as derivatives trading as a kind of “progressive PAYGO” to ensure that the taxpayers won’t be paying the costs of the bailout.
• Equity shares in any companies that benefit from the bailout
• “Major bankruptcy reform” including homeowner renegotiation of mortgages. Obama undercut progressives on this when he said bankruptcy reform didn’t need to be part of the package, perhaps a telltale sign of how unprogressive an Obama administration might be. But it’s still a necessary part of any financial solution.
• A detailed list of new regulations to protect consumers and provide more stable, responsible regulation of the financial industry to prevent a recurrence of this crisis.

The progressives’ move in Congress comes as more economic observers question the need for a bailout. It’s possible that this represents the first move by the 74 members of the Progressive Caucus to block a bill that in particular lacks bankruptcy reform. Even so, an axis of Bush Dogs, House Republicans, and timid/weak/complicit House Democratic leadership may prove to be too much for the Progressive Caucus to overcome.

Still, this letter is a welcome move by California progressives like Barbara Lee and Lynn Woolsey. The bailout needs to be either made a fundamentally progressive policy move or stopped entirely. If a progressive coalition is to come together to stop it leadership from the Progressive Caucus is a necessary component. Even if it is too little too late, it potentially marks the beginning of a push for truly progressive solutions to our economic crisis – the kind that FDR and the Democratic Party stood for 75 years ago, but that current Democratic leaders from Obama on down have now eschewed.

UPDATE: A deal has been announced, although the details have been slow to materialize – a likely sign that the deal isn’t exactly set in stone. More significantly Republicans are being pressured to deliver 70-100 votes which suggests that Congressional progressives, especially those from California, do have leverage to stop this train wreck. Universal health care, green infrastructure, a jobs-and-wages economic recovery – all those things are imperilled by this bailout. Better to deal with this after January 20.

Things are hopping here in San Mateo. There are around 3,000 UHW members here now, and they estimate about 6,000 will have come through by the end of the day tomorrow. The hearing hall is apparently packed to the rafters – only SEIU members are allowed in. Buses are arriving every few minutes to disgorge more members. First thing that happens is they go to a teach-in, then get signs and participate in rallies.

UHW has also set up a phonebank which is hopping right now – not an empty seat to be found. Currently they’re calling other union members to explain the situation here. They plan to call union members in swing states for Obama later today but SEIU hasn’t yet delivered the call lists.

You have to see this to really understand how the members are thinking and reacting. I saw this at the UHW Leadership Convention in San José but it’s been confirmed here in San Mateo: the UHW membership has NO interest whatsoever in being trusteed. They don’t trust the International’s leaders, owing to several years of conflict over contract negotiations, including allegations that SEIU International monitors have been trying to go around elected bargaining teams.

I know that many progressives are understandably trying to stay neutral or stay out of this. SEIU International and Andy Stern have been valuable patrons of progressive bloggers and have given valuable support to progressive candidates like Donna Edwards. I get why many progressives want to stay out of it.

But this just doesn’t feel right. At the core of progressive values is democracy. Whether it’s Americans or union members we progressives understand that democracy is the only way the people’s needs will be met, because people have the power to do it themselves. When democracy is undermined needs go unmet. In other SEIU locals run by appointed leaders, like Tyrone Freeman, significant financial scandals have resulted. These discourage members from becoming active and seeking the change we all know we need. Progressive bloggers need to be as wary of this as are the nation’s leading labor scholars, who full well understand the long-term costs of undermining democracy.

This is a very diverse crowd where we white men are not just a minority, but stick out like sore thumbs. UHW is doing revolutionary work in mobilizing the very Californians who will be the base and the activists and the leaders of progressive change. If the International destroys their union it’s going to take a LONG time to get back to this moment of incipient, transformative change.

I yearn for the day I no longer have to write titles like that:

Democrats have decided to allow a quarter-century ban on drilling for oil off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to expire next week, conceding defeat in a months-long battle with the White House and Republicans set off by $4 a gallon gasoline prices this summer.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., told reporters Tuesday that a provision continuing the moratorium will be dropped this year from a stopgap spending bill to keep the government running after Congress recesses for the election.

Republicans have made lifting the ban a key campaign issue after gasoline prices spiked this summer and public opinion turned in favor of more drilling. President Bush lifted an executive ban on offshore drilling in July.

“If true, this capitulation by Democrats following months of Republican pressure is a big victory for Americans struggling with record gasoline prices,” said House GOP leader John Boehner of Ohio. (AP via SFGate)

To her credit Dianne Feinstein is outraged, sending out this statement a few minutes ago:

I think it’s awful. This battle is not over.  We will come back and fight another day – that’s for sure.

I regret the House appropriations committee didn’t see fit to go with a better, more widely accepted alternative, which would have kept in place a moratorium 50 miles or more off shore.  In my view, there were better options than this.

Once again the Democratic Congress caves to Republicans who say “boo!” Drilling had faded from public consciousness and Democrats would have done well to insist it not happen.

Especially as bailouts are being discussed, you’d think Democrats would not want to be sending any signals that they can wave the white flag if pressured to do so.

Dems would have done well to listen to Van Jones, who at Netroots Nation in July explained the need to move from opposition to proposition – that the only way we will beat back the drilling push is to aggressively propose a more sensible and sustainable alternative. Dems didn’t do that, and once again they’ve failed at politics and failed America.

Sure, they might restore the ban next year – but it’s not clear if it will be a total moratorium, or if this will have opened a door that can’t be closed again. And if McCain wins, Congress will have a very difficult time reimposing a moratorium.

Otherwise they’ve signed a death warrant for California’s oceans and those who depend on them for a living.