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.

I will be on KRXA 540 AM at 8 AM to discuss this and other California political issues

Today Darrell Steinberg is expected to finally be elected as Senate President Pro Tem, bringing the failed leadership of Don Perata to a welcome end. George Skelton welcomes him to office with a column the landmark smart growth bill that Steinberg has been pushing through the legislature. Although the bill won’t pass this year, it has a big head of steam behind it, and faces good prospects in the 2009 session.

Steinberg’s bill would link land use planning in California to the AB 32 global warming targets:

“One issue everyone has been afraid to touch is land use,” Steinberg says. “Everyone understands about using alternative fuel. But land use has been the third rail. AB 32 changed the equation because now land use has to be part of the solution to global warming. You can’t meet our goal just with alternative fuels. You have to reduce the number of vehicle miles traveled.

“If people are going to drive — and they are going to drive — we need to plan in ways to get them out of their cars faster. That means shrinking — not the amount of housing, not economic development, not growth — but shrinking the footprint on which that growth occurs.”

Steinberg wants it to occur within a smaller circle around downtown.

Basically the bill would work like this: Each metropolitan region would adopt a “sustainable community strategy” to encourage compact development. They’d mesh it with greenhouse emissions targets set by the California Air Resources Board, which is charged with commanding the state’s fight against global warming.

Also included are preferential funding for transportation projects that fit with the “sustainable community strategy” and an expedited permitting process for those developments that fit the law’s and the community strategy’s goals.

Tom Adams of the California League of Conservation Voters called the plan “the most important land-use bill in California since enactment of the Coastal Act three decades ago” and he’s right to say it. But the plan does more than help the environment and reduce carbon emissions.

One year ago I called for “redefining the California dream” – restoring the economic security of California workers by abandoning sprawl and turning to urban density and mass transit. This is not just an environmental move, but it is absolutely necessary for job growth, affordable housing, and basic financial security.

California can no longer afford sprawl. The national housing bubble burst right here, in the exurbs of Stockton, Modesto, and Moreno Valley. As gas prices rise at a rate of 30% every year since 2002, sprawl becomes literally unaffordable for most Californians, with a devastating ripple effect throughout the economy.

Republicans will predictably be furious with Steinberg’s plan, but that’s because they represent the emergent “homeowner aristocracy” – certain (by no means all) households that bought their home prior to 1990 or so, those who want to preserve the conditions of the 20th century at all costs.

As Jerry Brown recognized when he was governor 30 years ago, and still recognizes today, density done right is the key to maintaining the middle-class California dream for the 21st century. Only by following the Portland model of strictly limiting sprawl and encouraging infill development and providing the transportation options needed to serve that development can we bring affordability back to California, and secure the economic future for new generations of Californians.

Steinberg’s genius move is to link that strategy to the fight against global warming. It’s nice to finally see some real leadership from Democrats on this matter and particularly from the new leader of the State Senate. SB 375 may not make it to the governor’s desk this year, but it deserves our strong support in the 2009 session. It will transform California for the better, and there are few bills aside from SB 840 that can credibly make that claim.

Brian mentioned this in the open thread, but it really deserves its own post, it’s such a ridiculous column. George Skelton today made a full-throated but deeply flawed argument for offshore drilling that as far as I can tell boils down to “well we did it in the past, and it’s not going to help in the future…so why not?!” and winds up arguing that we should sacrifice the future for hardly anything in return. The column doesn’t start off on a promising note:

On some beaches around Santa Barbara, you could feel the oozing tar between your toes — and that was long before a Union Oil platform five miles offshore spilled crud all over 20 miles of coast in 1969. For centuries, the tar naturally had seeped up through the sand, providing the native Chumash with caulking for their canoes.

Calling it “crud” is deliberately misleading readers about what actually happened in 1969. From UCSB:

Animals that depended on the sea were hard hit. Incoming tides brought the corpses of dead seals and dolphins. Oil had clogged the blowholes of the dolphins, causing massive lung hemorrhages. Animals that ingested the oil were poisoned. In the months that followed, gray whales migrating to their calving and breeding grounds in Baja California avoided the channel -their main route south.

The oil took its toll on the seabird population. Shorebirds like plovers, godwits and willets which feed on sand creatures fled the area. But diving birds which must get their nourishment from the waters themselves became soaked with tar….

Grebes, cormorants and other seabirds were so sick, their feathers so soaked in oil that they were not difficult to catch. Birds were bathed in Polycomplex A-11, medicated, and placed under heat lamps to stave off pneumonia. The survival rate was less than 30 percent for birds that were treated. Many more died on the beaches where they had formerly sought their livelihoods. Those who had managed to avoid the oil were threatened by the detergents used to disperse the oil slick. The chemicals robbed feathers of the natural waterproofing used to keep seabirds afloat.

In all 3686 birds were estimated to have died because of contact with oil. Aerial surveys a year later found only 200 grebes in an area that had previously drawn 4000 to 7000.

Skelton’s blithe dismissal of the ecological consequences of drilling is appalling. It’s not as if our oceans are healthy – oceans face crippling ecological crises and they’re in no position to withstand drilling.

Skelton goes on to turn “Big Oil” into a nostalgia piece (I’m guessing someone didn’t see There Will Be Blood):

Oh, another thing: My dad was an oil field roustabout, or driller or whatever job he could fill on a given shift. So were his dad, brother and cousins. They left their Tennessee farms and followed the migration to California for the 1920s oil boom.

My first summer job out of high school was in a Ventura oil field, an experience guaranteed to prod a kid into college if nothing else would. (But the oil job paid better than newspaper work, I soon discovered.)

So “Big Oil” never has been a big bugaboo for me. It was the producer of a vital commodity and provider of working-class jobs. Although oil derricks annoy many people as unsightly, I’ve always marveled at how they work, especially all lighted up at night.

Nostalgic memories do not count as a sound basis for public policy – unless of course he thinks we should go back to the days before OSHA, dump our toxic waste into the drinking water supply, and drive without seatbelts.

Worse is the conflation of Big Oil with working-class prosperity. Perhaps at some moment in the past this was true, but Skelton here merely reveals that he, like all the High Broderists, does not live in the 21st century, instead assuming that the conditions of the 1970s remain true today. They don’t.

Here in the 21st century Big Oil sucks precious income away form working-class families while returning hardly any in the form of jobs, taxes, or anything else resembling prosperity. And as anyone living near the Torrance refinery knows, they tend to actually have rather debilitating effect on working-class communities.

More below…

Skelton’s main thrust of the article is some weird attempt to argue that offshore drilling will actually produce self-sufficiency – since California uses so much gas, shouldn’t we drill offshore for more?

This argument has numerous flaws. First, Californians are reducing their gas consumption which has been relatively flat over the last 8 or 9 years. Conservation, not wasteful and useless drilling, is what brought prices back from the brink of $5 earlier this summer, and it alone is what will produce long-term savings.

Skelton tries to dismiss the correct argument that drilling now won’t produce usable oil for at least ten years:

Offshore exploration opponents point out that if the federal drilling ban were lifted today, there’d be no immediate effect on gasoline prices. It could take 10 years to get any crude to the gas pump. Fine. Most people driving today still will be 10 years from now.

This is a statement deeply ignorant of how oil works today. He is assuming that the supply of oil and the demand for oil will remain static so that in 10 years, the oil we drill off our coast will make it to the pump and reduce prices.

He is wrong.

The fact is that the demand for oil is soaring around the world, and it is becoming difficult if not impossible to increase production to match it. That is the phenomenon of peak oil at work and that is why gas prices have climbed by 30% every year since 2002. Supply can’t match ever-rising demand. The oil off American shores is so small an amount as to not be able to dent oil prices that, ten years from now, are very likely to be much higher than they are today. As demand rises around the world, oil companies will sell the oil we drill off our coast on a global market. The chances it will bring down the price of gas here in CA is next to none.

The only thing offshore drilling will accomplish is fouling our already suffering oceans and wildlife while lining the pockets of oil companies that sell the oil to China and India. How is that useful again?

Skelton does deal with the argument that lifting the drilling ban detracts us from the necessary long-term investment in alternatives – by dismissing it almost entirely:

Alan Salzman, founder of VantagePoint Venture Partners…adds, “The car industry is going to switch over to electric, and that’s a certainty. Hundreds of thousands of electric cars will be on the road in 2011.”

Let me know when one is affordable, practical and in the showroom.

People didn’t give up their horse and buggy until Henry Ford began making affordable cars. We’re anxiously awaiting our next transportation mode. Meanwhile, we’ll need to keep pumping gas — some of it from the Santa Barbara Channel.

Skelton needs to get out of the LA Times offices and take a look at the city around him. He might be surprised at what he finds. Hundreds of thousands of his fellow Angelenos have found alternatives to driving. That’s what enabled them to reduce their gas consumption and in turn bring down prices, albeit slightly. They bike. They walk.

His own paper reported on Metro Rail’s soaring ridership and again on Metrolink’s soaring ridership. Nowhere in Skelton’s drilling article is the MTA sales tax discussed, which would have the Subway to the Sea open by the time the first oil from the Santa Barbara Channel reaches Chinese gas pumps. Nor is high speed rail discussed, or clean bus technology, or greater urban density, or any other alternative to oil that is ready to go, right now, stalled merely for lack of political will that is currently being wasted on drilling.

Al Gore said it best at the TED Conference here in Monterey last March: drilling is “like a junkie looking for veins in his toes so he can get one last fix.” Drilling distracts us from the real problems our state faces, and for absolutely nothing in return.

Skelton doesn’t have to live in a future where the oil runs out and Californians, instead of building alternatives when we had the time and money to do so, are left with no viable alternative to oil. Unfortunately the rest of us do.

His plan for more drilling isn’t letting go of the past, it’s clinging desperately to the past in a blind refusal to accept the need to change in order to produce a better future. Just as California has failed its offspring by kicking the tax and deficit issues into the future, so too will it fail the future by drilling instead of developing alternatives.

If Skelton wants to live in the past, he’s welcome to do so. But he should not condemn the rest of us to do as well. California must change if we are to have a prosperous future.  

Center-right urban theorist Joel Kotkin has an op-ed in today’s LA Times arguing that “Suburbia’s not dead yet.” Of course it’s not, and nobody has said it is. But suburbia as we know it – characterized by car-dependent urban sprawl – surely is vanishing. Kotkin argues that our future isn’t going to involve everyone living in high-rise condos and though I would agree there, his notion that SoCal suburbia as it currently exists is not going to undergo significant change is a deep misreading of reality. Suburbs will continue to exist, but the line between urb and suburb, between dense city and low-density periphery, will be obliterated.

Kotkin’s article starts off trying to claim that the suburban status quo is just fine:

Yes, high gas prices and rising sub-prime mortgage defaults are hurting some suburban communities, particularly newly built ones on the periphery. But the suburbs remain home to a majority of Americans and a larger proportion of U.S. families — and people aren’t leaving those communities in droves to live in cities. Even with economic growth slowing, many suburbs, exurbs and smaller towns, especially those whose economies are tied to energy, are continuing to do better than most cities in terms of job creation and population growth.

Of course, with politicians like Zev Yaroslavsky blocking urban density in LA it’s not exactly easy to find affordable places to live in the city centers. Most Southern Californians still live in suburbs because they can’t afford anything else. Kotkin takes a market failure, a class stratification, and reads it as some kind of free choice.

And the notion that the suburbs are doing better than the cities is simply wrong. Last month the New York Times demonstrated that home values are falling faster in the suburbs than in the city centers. Office parks are experiencing high vacancy rates, especially in ’00s suburbs like Elk Grove.

But being wrong doesn’t stop Kotkin. More below…

Contrary to pundits’ forecasts, during this decade of high energy prices, the country’s urban populations, for only the first time in recent history, actually fell, according to a census analysis by economist Jordan Rappaport at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

This stat has several flaws. First, from 2000 to 2006 the suburban model still seemed viable in many metro areas. $3 gas was the tipping point – when gas prices hit that mark for a sustained period in 2006, the housing bubble burst. When this decade is finished in December 2009, the stats from the last half will look rather different from the first half.

Kotkin’s entire argument rests on numbers like these, and he digs his hole deeper:

Nevertheless, since 2003, when gas prices began their climb, suburban population growth has continued to outstrip that of the central cities, with about 90% of all metropolitan growth occurring in suburban communities, according to the 2000 to 2006 census. And the most recent statistics from the annual American Community Survey, which is conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, show no sign of a significant shift of the population to urban counties, at least through 2007.

Again, this periodization almost totally misses the rapid collapse of the newest suburbs. Yes, a lot of growth occurred there from 2000 to 2006 – and by mid-2008 much of it has been given back. Here again his argument is shot down by recent events.

The flat condominium markets in most large urban markets are another sign that people are not streaming into cities from the suburbs and buying. Many condo projects in such cities as Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami and San Diego have either been canceled or converted into rentals, with many units remaining vacant. As a Southern California condo developer told me recently, lower house prices are not going to make people more disposed to buying apartments.

The flat condo markets are a direct casualty of the housing bubble bursting and particularly of the credit crunch. Condos saw spectacular price appreciation in those cities, overshooting what was normal and reasonable. Of course, people shouldn’t have to buy apartments – in a post-peak credit era, long-term rents or other arrangements can substitute for the high costs of ownership. In any case, the market for urban density is there and will continue to exist as long as prices are affordable and wage levels are supported.

But the biggest reason the suburb-to-city narrative is not following the script of the urban boosters and theorists has to do with employment. Living close to your workplace makes sense, not only because it cuts commuting costs and reduces greenhouse-gas emissions — by saving time, it also gives people more time for family and leisure activities.

The problem for many cities is that they lack the jobs for people to move close to. Since the 1970s, the suburbs have been the home for most high-tech jobs and now the majority of office space. By 2000, only 22% of people worked within three miles of a city center in the nation’s 100 largest metro areas.And from 2001 to 2006, job growth in suburbia expanded at six times the rate of that in urban cores, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics by the Praxis Strategy Group, a consulting firm with which I work.

This is a real issue. Living in Monterey, where most of the jobs I want are in the Bay Area, a 1-2 hour commute each way, it bites especially hard. It is true in Southern California as well.

But Kotkin assumes that this pattern will continue to exist. It won’t, because the cheap oil that enabled it is gone. Again he relies on 2000-06 as the era that supposedly proves his point, despite the unraveling of that era.

Suburban office parks are a classic example of massive waste. As long as oil was cheap that waste was hidden or not relevant. But expensive oil means the waste of sprawling office parks with too many parking spaces far from nodes of housing, shopping and transit now presents immediate and unavoidable costs. Urban office vacancy rates are rising, but not nearly as fast as suburban vacancy rates. Jobs will start relocating to more dense areas even of the SoCal megalopolis. Kotkin is nuts to assume that the pre-2007 patterns will continue for much longer.

A desire to live closer to their jobs doesn’t mean that people have to move to the inner core, particularly if that’s not where the jobs are. Of the 20 leading job centers in Southern California by ZIP Code, none are downtown. The central core does remain an important job center, but it accounts for barely 3% of regional employment. Among those who work downtown, some may shift from cars to public transit, although many will simply buy a more fuel-efficient car and stay put in the suburbs.

For residents who live in suburban areas with large concentrations of employment — Burbank, Ontario and West L.A. — commutes to work can be shorter than those experienced by their inner-city counterparts, according to Ali Modarres, a professor of geography at Cal State Los Angeles. Commutes in these communities, on average, are less than 25 minutes, while in high-density areas, such as Pico-Union, they average 35 minutes.

Kotkin initially argues that SoCal urban density is to judged solely by downtown LA, a model that doesn’t fit SoCal realities – as he then acknowledges in his next paragraph. Forgive my skepticism.

Burbank and West LA are not suburban in the way Ontario is – and as the Ontario tent city demonstrated, Ontario isn’t exactly a great example to use to prove suburban robustness. Burbank, West LA, Pico-Union, Santa Monica, Sherman Oaks, Long Beach, and Santa Ana are perfect examples of how dense nodes are the key to SoCal’s future.

The suburb-to-the-city narrative faces other obstacles. By the early part of the next decade, the large millennial generation born since the early 1980s will begin to form families, and they will, as have previous generations, probably seek open space and good schools for their children — and that means they will settle in the suburbs. And there is no census evidence suggesting that immigrants have reversed their decade-old pattern of moving to the suburbs.

This is perhaps the most ridiculous and unsupported part of Kotkin’s op-ed. He’s basically arguing that Californians like the suburban lifestyle and that we Millennials are going to choose it, as if only the suburbs will provide open space and good schools. Most Millennials in California aren’t able to afford to buy a home at all, and likely never will at current rates. Those who have started families have begun gravitating toward city centers or dense nodes, where housing can be found that is near transportation and that doesn’t require a lot of driving.

Kotkin assumes that we can still afford sprawl, when it is clear we cannot. Millennials have experienced a generation of inequality so it’s not clear how exactly they’re going to afford to live in sprawling suburbs, if any continue to exist. The millennial future is a dense future.

Continuing high energy prices will likely change the nation’s geography, but not in ways some urban theorists are predicting. Rather than cramming more people and families into cities, they may instead foster a more dispersed, diverse archipelago of self-sufficient communities. From here, that looks like a far more pleasant scenario not only for suburban and exurbanites but for urban dwellers who don’t want to live under dense conditions reminiscent of 19th century industrial cities or the teeming metropolises of the contemporary Third World.

This is pretty much a fantasy unmoored from reality. California suburbs are difficult to make self-sufficient, as SoCal long ago paved over its highly productive farmland and overshot its water capacity decades back.

However, the basic concept that suburbs won’t vanish is correct. What will happen is that they will grow less dense as they are adapted for the 21st century. Rather than trying in vain to defend the 20th century, as Kotkin attempts, the answer instead is to retrofit suburbia. Encourage the construction of light rail, solar and wind power, bicycle facilities, and urban gardening. In some of the pre-1980 suburbs this is not going to be as difficult as it might initially seem.

The classic city centers of SF, Oakland, and LA have a vibrant future. But so do “suburbs” like Santa Ana. In fact, it’s my belief that Santa Ana has one of the brightest futures of any city in SoCal. It sits at the center of Orange County, close to job centers and at the node of the transit network that does exist in the county. An Orange County mass transit system would use Santa Ana as its centerpiece, and the existing concentration of government and financial buildings can be a magnet bringing more jobs to the area.

But all of that requires significant public investment and government action – which Kotkin opposes. He instead things suburbs will somehow naturally evolve into a happy land of sustainable societies. Without government action, the more likely outcome really is the kind of class stratification we see in a place like Brazil – and are already beginning to see here in California.

Marc Haefele has an excellent, and troubling, op-ed in today’s LA Times on Zev Yaroslavsky: “LA’s anti-density warrior”. It is a portrait of one of Southern California’s most powerful politicians who, apparently, fights urban density for its own sake. Although it is the Republicans that I have labeled as the chief defenders of the “homeowner aristocracy” – those particular homeowners who seek to preserve their property values and obsolete concepts of the urban landscape at the expense of everyone else – Supervisor Yaroslavsky shows that it doesn’t take a conservative to help lock out the mass of Californians from their dreams of economic security:

Yaroslavsky flatly denies that there’s any good in the city’s turn to greater density to create more affordable housing. Before cheering neighborhood councils and homeowner associations, he argues that greater density will destroy the ambience of neighborhoods and fill the pockets of developers but will do nothing to add to the city’s housing stock. Recently, he took Times columnist Steve Lopez on a city tour to point out what Yaroslavsky considers overdevelopment eyesores.

It is a portrait of a politician playing to the homeowner aristocracy, despite the complete absurdity of the position that density has no place in providing the affordable housing the region so desperately needs. More below.

Last summer, spurred by several developments in Los Angeles, I wrote Redefining the California Dream for the 21st Century, where I explained that the 20th century California dream, based on suburban sprawl, was dying, why urban density was the only path to economic security for most Californians in the 21st century, and how a “homeowner aristocracy” was emerging to fight this in the delusional hope of hanging on to the 20th century vision.

The gist of the argument is that due to rising fuel costs and declining fuel supplies, folks are going to need to live close to where they work and shop, where they can commute without having to get in a car. This means more people will want to live in urban centers, and that will mean a need for affordable housing, which we are already witnessing. But density provides not just affordable housing but affordable living – with lower fuel costs and the more efficient use of resources that comes with urban living, working Californians can have a hope of economic security – of the California Dream that has driven our state for decades.

None of this is new knowledge. We’ve known since the 1970s that California needs an urban density strategy. The governor at the time, Jerry Brown, recently returned to that theme in his speech to the California Democratic Party Convention last weekend, describing this as “elegant density”.

But neither is Zev Yaroslavsky’s anti-density politics new. He came to political prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a defender of “neighborhoods” on the prosperous Westside from various kinds of development. He has been one of the most dogged opponents of the proposed “Subway-to-the-Sea” and in 2000 helped author and pass an ordinance preventing the MTA from using sales tax money to build it.

His current fight against density is broadly-based, but has zeroed in on SB 1818, a 2005 law that makes it easier to construct new density projects as long as they contain a specific proportion of low or moderate income housing. To Yaroslavsky this approach “doesn’t take into account the individuality of neighborhoods.”

But there is nothing that says a neighborhood will lose its individuality if it grows more dense, and certainly nothing that says neighborhoods never change over time. What he is really saying is that density upends the 1950s model of detached single-family homes and single-story strip-mall commercial centers – which is of course the point, because that 1950s model no longer works for most people:

About 62% of the city’s inhabitants rent, and the monthly payment for a typical one-bedroom unit is more than $1,400, according to city housing statistics. That’s unaffordable to anyone making under $50,000 a year, given the rule of thumb that a tenant should spend no more than 30% of his or her income on rent. The housing meltdown has made matters worse, as foreclosures push former homeowners into a rental market with a 2.5% vacancy rate.

And as jobs become harder to find, it’s going to add even more pressure to this housing crunch. Ed Reyes, who represents the 1st District on the LA City Council, described to Haefele what conditions were like for most of those lower-income workers who managed to find a place to live in the urban center:

This density can be found on the 500 block of South Berendo Street in Pico-Union, in Reyes’ district. One of the buildings on the block contains 40 units and is 80 years old. Its pale blue exterior paint only partly hides rotting woodwork underneath. A 400-square-foot unit in this building can cost $900 a month. The apartment I recently visited had three double beds; the sink and refrigerator were in the living room. Considering the apartment offered 50 or 60 square feet a person at full occupancy, it was neat and clean, but irremediably run down.

“This is what we call invisible density,” Jaime Rojas of the Latino Urban Forum said. “To say that it doesn’t exist is wrong.” Hundreds of thousands of people live in such apartments in L.A.

And for every person living in a dilapidated building like this, there is another low-income worker who had to move to Ontario, or Palmdale, or Norwalk, and fight traffic and rising gas prices to make it to work. LA’s working core, the people who keep the city alive and prosperous, are in need of new density to make a living. So why should homeowner aristocrats and their political defenders try and stop them?

Reyes sees the rising anti-density fervor in the city as veiled opposition to finding suitable affordable-housing sites outside low-income ghettos.

That would not surprise me. Opposition to urban density in California has usually taken on a mixed race and class character, where mostly white and well-off homeowners fight against density that they worry will bring a “lower element” into the neighborhood.

The article closes by showing how out of touch Yaroslavsky is with the politics of affordable housing:

“There are funds available,” he replied, citing federal block grant money and county money that originates from such federal agencies as the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Such funding, however, has been scarce since the dawn of the Bush administration. Nonprofit housing groups say it started disappearing in the Reagan years.

Yaroslavsky didn’t seem to know this.

In other words, Yaroslavsky is still playing the same game in the late 2000s that he was in the 1970s and the 1980s, despite fundamentally changed conditions and an even more staggering need for dense, affordable housing. At precisely the moment when LA’s future can be secured by turning to a new density, which in turn would secure the future of its working population, those few who benefited from the late 20th century policies of sprawl and cars are working to protect what they have – even if it means nobody else can enjoy economic security.

Yaroslavsky’s LA is dead. It’s time he acknowledged it, and that the city moved on into a more prosperous and equitable – and dense – future.

Former (and future?) governor and current Attorney General Jerry Brown was waxing nostalgic about his days in the governor’s mansion, driving the famous blue Plymouth (“it lasted 240,000 miles without an engine overhaul – now that was sustainability”), and suing Ronald Reagan over the governor’s mansion.

But the core of his speech dealt with our climate crisis. Brown emphasized his administration’s earlier efforts to encourage smart growth, urban density, walking, even trains. And he called for renewed action on this today. He conceptualized it as “elegant density” – get people out of their cars, build more walkable communities served by trains and other forms of mass transit, powered by solar energy, to not just deal with global warming, but to encourage a more sustainable California.

During the 1970s, Brown had tried to promote a similar agenda. He appointed a trains advocate as the head of Caltrans, promoted a solar energy program, and cut off funds for freeway construction projects, and establishing the Office of Planning and Research. He even promoted an ambitious Urban Strategy for California emphasizing density and limiting sprawl.

Prop 13’s passage ended much of this as state government was starved of funds. But Prop 13 was about more than low taxes. It was the reaction of the lovers of suburban sprawl, of the 1950s model of California, against Brown’s more forward-thinking model. As recently as 2001 arch-conservative Tom McClintock danced on the grave of Brown’s sustainability strategy calling it:

a radical and retrograde ideology into California public policy that quite abruptly and permanently changed the state.

That radical ideology has been the central tenet of governance in California through four successive gubernatorial administrations, Democratic and Republican, to the present day. It was described by Jerry Brown as “the era of limits,” punctuated by such new-age nonsense as the mantra, “small is beautiful.” Suburban “sprawl” would be replaced with a new “urban strategy.”

Republicans continue to make these arguments. They are bent on preserving the failed 1950s model of urban life at all costs. By doing so they have become a party of aristocracy. “Elegant density” isn’t just an environmental and climate strategy – it’s also necessary for the survival of California’s working and middle classes in the 21st century. Republicans will fight against this, and so it is very good to hear Jerry Brown mounting a full-throated defense of sustainable living.

The rest of his speech is pure red meat – bashing the Bush Administration and its EPA (“those idiots”), denouncing them for the mortgage crisis, and calling for the repeal of NCLB. If he does have the governor’s office in mind in 2010, this kind of playing to the base would make him an even more formidable opponent in the Democratic primary.