In the 1930s two crises hit the Great Plains at once – 50 years of overfarming marginal lands had destroyed the topsoil and created what we know as the Dust Bowl, and at least twenty years of economic pressure to overfarm (to pay debts and make up for collapsed prices) had created an untenable financial situation for the farmers. Either one was going to end in disaster – the land would give out or the overuse of credit would end in deflation and ruin. As it happened, the crises both occurred at exactly the same time, producing a social catastrophe from which several states have still not recovered.

California now faces the same problem. For 60 years we have based our economy on the production and consumption of sprawl. This worked well enough until the late 1970s, when those who had prospered the most from this model decided to stop reinvesting profits in the state and in society, and took their ball and went home. The next 30 years were dominated by even more sprawl, financed by massive amounts of debt and by eating the state’s seed corn by slashing the government programs that built prosperity in the first place.

This was always bound to end in disaster, and as we are well aware, that disaster – in the form of economic depression and government bankruptcy – is now here. But the massive sprawlconomy binge had another set of costs whose bill is now coming due – water.

California had an unusually wet 20th century, and we exploited that to the fullest. To have a society built on sprawl and consumption, we needed to siphon as much water as possible to give not just to the new housing developments, but to the sprawling farms. Sprawl is a farming phenomenon as well – wasting land and water resources on resource-intensive crops grown to enrich shareholders, instead of sensibly using land and water to grow crops for subsistence and food security. California was in a water bubble, just as the state was experiencing a financial bubble. We have been living well beyond our means.

Ultimately the water bubble was going to burst. And just as in the 1930s Great Plains, it is bursting at the same moment as the economic bubble. For the least year or so you could drive down the backroads of the Salinas Valley, Salad Bowl Of The World, and see shuttered warehouses and laid off packing workers.

Now that water is less available the agricultural recession is shifting into higher gear. The highest unemployment rates in California are in our agricultural counties – 22.6% in Imperial, 14.3% in Tulare, 13.7% here in Monterey County. (Note: those stats are for nonfarm jobs, and yet the correlation between ag and the rest of the county economy is obviously very strong.)

The water crisis is now about to come to the rest of California. Sitting here in Monterey, in summer-like weather in January, I am inclined to believe the claims that this is the worst drought ever in the state’s recorded history:

California teeters on the edge of the worst drought in the state’s history, officials said Thursday after reporting that the Sierra Nevada snowpack – the backbone of the state’s water supply – is only 61 percent of normal.

January usually douses California with about 20 percent of the state’s annual precipitation, but instead it delivered a string of dry, sunny days this year, almost certainly pushing the state into a third year of drought.

The drought exacerbates the problems caused by our overuse of water resources. To prevent a total environmental collapse in the Delta massive reductions of water flows will be required. And for those of us who live in counties that don’t get our water from the Delta – places like Sonoma, Marin, and Monterey – the situation is going to be worse. Water managers in those counties are planning to 50% cutbacks in urban water use, which is an amount that will dramatically change how we live. We could let every lawn die and stop hosing down every driveway and still not get anywhere close to 50% reductions.

The Monterey Peninsula has been under Stage 1 water rationing for ten years now. You rarely see water wasted here, and new development has been at a standstill (how many towns have vacant lots and abandoned homes within a mile of the beach as we do?). But a 50% cut will force dramatic changes in how we live, as it will around the state.

Those changes ARE coming. There is no way around the fact that the way California was organized in the 20th century – politically, economically, and especially in terms of our land use and water use – is over. Done. Gone.

The question for us now is will we try to actively transition California to a more sustainable future? Or will we do nothing and let the chips fall where they may? The first option at least allows us a chance of rebuilding widely shared prosperity by funding local food, sustainable farming, and urban density. The latter would produce widespread immiseration while allowing a small aristocratic elite to enjoy a semblance of the 20th century lifestyle.

The choice is up to us.

Five top Democratic governors have called for a larger stimulus package than is presently being called for in Washington, precisely to fill in the gaps created by a loss of tax revenue in the states.

To help offset state budget cuts, a group of Democratic governors urged the federal government Friday to pass a $1 trillion economic stimulus package, significantly larger than the one under discussion in Congress.

The package would help states compensate for cuts to education spending that could cause long-term economic decline, as well as bolster infrastructure projects and benefits programs for the poor, the governors from New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Ohio and Wisconsin said in a news conference […]

The governors recommended that the stimulus plan include $350 billion for infrastructure, including transportation, wastewater and broadband projects; $250 billion for anti-poverty programs such as Medicaid, unemployment insurance, food stamps and child care; $250 billion in flexible education spending to maintain funding for programs from pre-kindergarten to higher education; and middle-class tax cuts.

The money, disbursed over two years, would offset cuts needed to balance state budgets and would serve as a “bridge” until 2011, by which time the governors hope the economy will have recovered, said Massachusetts Gov. Deval L. Patrick.

Predictably, the Republican Governor’s Association called it a “bailout” of the general funds of the various states.

Well, yes.  The states, by and large, did not have the ability to get out from under the financial meltdown, and the consequent economic downturn that resulted shouldn’t disproportionately affect the least of their citizens.  Furthermore, given that the road to recovery is massive fiscal stimulus, having states cutting back on spending at this time, be it infrastructure, education or healthcare, is completely counterproductive and will do nothing but prolong the agony.

In the future, it will take more than backfilling state budget cuts in a downturn, but a more structured system, like a “Federal Infrastructure Finance Corporation,” to ensure that state assets aren’t sold off to private interests during a downturn.  The days of creative borrowing and the crossing of fingers are over.  We need new structures to manage economic volatility and avoid fiscal traps, PARTICULARLY in California, where the tax system too closely mirrors the boom and bust cycle.

In the near term, I imagine something like this will pass.  Barack Obama today put out a call for “strategic investments” to create jobs and improve the long-term economic outlook simultaneously.  The question locally is whether California’s plans will actually accomplish that.  CalPIRG is criticizing the state’s wish list, saying that it relies too much on increasing highway and road capacity and not enough on cleaner energy investments:

The California Public Interest Research Group reports that the state plans to spend 31% of road money on creating new capacity instead of addressing long-deferred maintenance and repair projects. By contrast, the group said, Massachusetts would commit 100% of its road funds to repairs.

“We can’t afford to waste precious resources on new highways at the expense of ready-to-go projects to repair and maintain existing roads and bridges and expand public transportation,” said spokeswoman Erin Steva.

The group also faulted the California Department of Transportation’s list, saying that only 37% of the funds would flow to public transportation. The group called for a higher percentage, citing the record ridership on California’s mass transit systems, which have been hit by severe cutbacks in recent years. The proposed percentage is less than what is being planned in Tennessee, Wisconsin and Massachusetts, CALPIRG said.

It is elemental that the stimulus spending cannot prop up an unsustainable growth model based on sprawl.  Experts up and down the state understand this, and one of the best examples is in this Merced Sun-Star editorial, which nicely explains the tension between speed and smarts:

The problem for the planners is that the stimulus must be geared toward putting people to work as fast as possible. That, many believe, argues for the traditional sort of public works, such as highways.

In many cases, plans are already in place to replace crumbling roads, highways and bridges. By contrast, plans for urban transit systems and intercity high-speed rail are less firm, meaning it may take more time to actually start turning dirt and generating paychecks […]

We’re confident that a solution exists that puts people to work right away and also lays the groundwork for a new approach to the nation’s transportation needs.

It won’t be easy, but it has to happen. We can’t continue to simply build more transportation infrastructure on a model that’s now more than a half-century old.

A new model for transportation is part of the change we need.

Read the whole thing.  One good idea calls for phased stimulus spending, giving enough for critical highway and road repairs at the start, with the bulk coming later for transit and rail projects.

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.

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.

This happened a couple days ago, but as it’s crucial that the clean-truck program at two of the nation’s busiest ports go forward, I think it’s significant:

A federal court judge in Los Angeles on Monday tentatively denied a trucking association’s bid to block a landmark clean-truck program at the nation’s busiest port complex.

After a 40-minute hearing, U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder said she would probably allow the program to move forward, despite objections from truckers.

“The balance of hardships and the public interest tip decidedly in favor of denying the injunction,” she said in court.

Under the program, the adjacent ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach would upgrade their aging fleet of about 16,800 mostly dilapidated rigs that produce much of the diesel pollution in Southern California.

Though the American Trucking Association is opposing the bill and filed the attempted injunction, the clean-ports program was borne of a true blue-green alliance between labor and environmental groups, which is the next level of how we’re going to fight climate change in this country and build millions of new green-collar jobs.  The courts are now on the record as saying that reducing greenhouse gas emissions are in the public interest.  And the ATA is being a little coy here – a good number of the trucking firms are already upgrading, so their injunction effort was meant to satisfy a few big corporations.  It didn’t work.  

The second exciting development is SB 375, which for the first time links emissions to urban planning, and could easily become a model for the nation.  We have to make sure it’s signed into law, of course, but if and when it is, it will represent a great leap forward for the environment, live/work issues, quality of life, and traffic reduction.

The measure, known as SB375, aims to give existing and new high-density centers where people live, work and shop top priority in receiving local, state and federal transportation funds. The idea is that such developments check sprawl and ease commutes, in turn cutting the car pollution wafting through the Golden State.

Authored by Sen. Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), the bill reflects California’s push to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020. Sponsors say the measure is part of a much-needed growth policy for a state whose population is expected to swell to 50 million from the current 38 million in two decades.

“Many places across the country have realized that if you just build spread-out developments, with the expectation that everyone will have to drive for everything, it should be no surprise when the result is excessive burning of gasoline,” said David Goldberg, spokesman for Smart Growth America, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit group that helps cities and towns plan more workable, environmentally friendly growth.

“SB375 breaks new ground, because it specifically links that pattern of development to excess driving and what we need to do to address climate change,” he said.

Instead of trying to capture more resources every time there’s an energy shortage, we can reorganize our lives to maximize existing resources while making our lifestyles far less stressful and more pleasant.  It’s the solution that works on all fronts.

The budget madness is super-depressing, but these developments are cause for optimism.

Crossposted from the California High Speed Rail Blog

It wasn’t the article I was hoping to read upon my return from my honeymoon, but it’s not that surprising to read in the Fresno Bee that the Sierra Club and the Planning and Conservation League are hesitating on backing Prop 1 and even considering a lawsuit – and for the nonsensical reason that the choice of the Pacheco route might “induce sprawl.” That objection is bad enough, for reasons I’ll discuss in a moment.

But what’s really disturbing about this move is that it suggests the Sierra Club and the PCL have lost their focus – instead of looking at the big picture of high speed rail and emphasizing the game-changing environmental benefits it brings, they’re focusing on a small non-issue instead. They’ve lost sight of the forest for the trees and instead of providing leadership on this issue they may instead cast their lot with the far right and leave Californians with no viable alternative to soaring fuel prices and a transportation system that is making our environmental problems far worse.

First, their criticisms as reported by E.J. Schulz:

But the environmentalists are still seething over the selection of relatively undeveloped Pacheco Pass as the route to connect the Central Valley to the Bay Area. They favor the more urban Altamont Pass to the north because they say it would induce less sprawl….

Environmentalists would rather see trains run farther north in the Valley before heading west so that more populated cities are served. They like the Altamont route because it would bring trains closer to Modesto, Dublin, Pleasanton and Livermore in the first phase.

By contrast, the Pacheco route — roughly following Highway 152 — is in a less populated area. Environmentalists worry that a planned station in Gilroy would induce sprawl in surrounding rural areas.

These worries are baseless. Gilroy and much of southern Santa Clara County have strict urban growth boundaries. If those places were going to sprawl they would have already done so given their proximity to the job center and hot housing market of Silicon Valley. HSR doesn’t change that dynamic.

More below…

Nor does it change the fact that sprawl is facing hard times. Sprawl is bad, but it isn’t a force of nature. It is instead a product of three major factors: cheap oil, cheap credit, and favorable land use laws. The first is disappearing for good, thanks to peak oil. The second doesn’t exist now, and may never return. Certainly land use policies need to change to limit sprawl, but those changes have long ago been made in southern Santa Clara County. Why should HSR alone carry that burden? AB 32 carbon reduction goals should be applied to new housing developments, and ultimately, localities will have to change their ways.

The loss of cheap oil and the shortage of cheap credit together will lessen sprawl dramatically in the coming decades. I fully support land use changes to further kill off sprawl, but it’s not worth holding HSR hostage to produce the changes that need to happen anyway at the state and local level.

The death of sprawl has already made itself manifest in Gilroy. The Westfield shopping center developers had a plan to convert a significant amount of farmland acreage east of Gilroy along Highway 152 into a huge mall. The plan aroused the opposition of the community and it was dropped earlier this year. High fuel prices, the credit crunch, and public defense of urban growth boundaries all combined to kill that sprawl project. Those factors will do so again.

A Gilroy HSR station would produce strong incentives for transit-oriented dense development in Gilroy, the kind of development that California cities need to focus on instead of sprawl. Gilroy is already partway there, and an HSR station where the current Caltrain station is located at 8th and Monterey would actually discourage sprawl because there would be viable alternatives to building on new farmland. The combination of infill development and strict urban growth rules are what have made Portland’s anti-sprawl plans a success – you need both for the anti-sprawl measures to work. And high capacity mass transit is a necessary component.

Further, since the Authority has rejected plans for a Los Banos stop, and since as Mehdi Morshed explained in the Fresno Bee article that the communities along the Altamont route were not supportive of HSR, what on earth explains the ongoing refusal of the Sierra Club and the PCL to throw their support to Prop 1?

The only answer is a very depressing one, but an answer that is becoming more widely accepted among many environmental activists, sustainability activists, transportation activists, and folks on the left more broadly: the Sierra Club and the PCL have lost their way, and have lost sight of the big picture. In case folks haven’t been paying attention, this country faces a climate crisis and an energy crisis. It’s not like we have a whole lot of time to be fighting over objections that are not grounded in fact. At Netroots Nation two weekends ago Al Gore explained that we need to stop burning carbon and make a bold move to power our society with renewable energy. An electrically-powered high speed train system won’t achieve that 100% renewables goal itself, but it would provide significant environmental benefits:

-Reduce carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to removing 1.4 million cars from the road, and take the place of nearly 42 million annual city to city car trips

-Reduce CO2 emissions by up to 17.6 billion pounds/year

-Reduce California’s oil consumption by up to 22 million barrels/year (same as above)

According to the Final EIR 63% of intercity trips over 150 miles in California are taken by car (scroll to page 12). HSR would provide a huge dent in that figure.

High speed rail is one of those game changing proposals. How can the Sierra Club and the PCL overlook the cars taken off the road? How can they overlook the CO2 reductions? How can they overlook the reduction in pollution, especially in the Central Valley?

Four years ago Michael Schellenberger and Ted Nordhaus criticized the Sierra Club directly in their seminal essay The Death of Environmentalism. In their view the environmental movement, by focusing on small battles, has totally failed to address global warming, and that organizations like the Sierra Club “have little to show” for nearly 30 years of environmental activism after the big victories of the late ’60s and early ’70s. One of their specific criticisms is that the Sierra Club, for example, often eschews big policy changes for a niggling incrementalism that has done nothing to arrest the rate of warming. This has led them to refuse to articulate a bold vision for addressing the global warming crisis that of course hurts the natural environment, and it has led them to ignore the politics of producing change.

The Sierra Club’s failure on high speed rail proves each of Schellenberger and Nordhaus’ controversial charges. Instead of helping change the way Californians get around their state, shifting them away from oil-burning methods of travel to clean methods of travel that limit sprawl and generate urban densities, they are focusing on a small objection that doesn’t even hold up on close examination. They have endorsed the concept of high speed rail in the past but if they don’t endorse Prop 1, what other opportunity will they have to get it passed? If the HSR bonds don’t pass this year, they aren’t coming back anytime soon. It might take 10 years to revive the project – it’s taken 15 in Texas – and that means completion of the line wouldn’t happen until close to 2030.

By then it may be too late. Instead of refusing to support Prop 1 out of pique that they lost the Altamont vs. Pacheco argument, the Sierra Club and the PCL should follow Van Jones’ advice and move from opposition to proposition. We have a proposition – literally – before us. Instead of being on the constant defensive the Sierra Club and the PCL can help California take a bold step in the right direction with Proposition 1. If we pass these bonds in November it will then be a signal to other states and to Congress that HSR is a politically popular project and it will spur similar projects around the country – projects that we desperately need.

Why would the Sierra Club and the PCL oppose these things? They have let their opposition to the Pacheco alignment blind them to the bigger picture. That decision has been made and even though the Sierra Club and the PCL lost, they can still be big winners. Let’s hope they recognize the pressing environmental need for high speed rail before it’s too late.

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.

The New York Times confirms what I argued back in April: high energy prices are putting a halt to urban sprawl. The NYT article focuses on the Denver exurbs but one can just as easily substitute it for the Bay Area or SoCal exurbs:

Across the nation, the realization is taking hold that rising energy prices are less a momentary blip than a change with lasting consequences. The shift to costlier fuel is threatening to slow the decades-old migration away from cities, while exacerbating the housing downturn by diminishing the appeal of larger homes set far from urban jobs.

In Atlanta, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Minneapolis, homes beyond the urban core have been falling in value faster than those within, according to an analysis by Moody’s Economy.com….

Basic household arithmetic appears to be furthering the trend: In 2003, the average suburban household spent $1,422 a year on gasoline, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By April of this year – when gas prices were about $3.60 a gallon- the same household was spending $3,196 a year, more than doubling consumption in dollar terms in less than five years.

Which is exactly what we witnessed here in California. The housing bubble began to burst here in CA in mid to late 2006, when gas prices first broke $3 for a sustained period of time. And the areas first and hardest hit were those dependent on long commuters – Riverside County, Stockton, Modesto.

It’s a phenomenon we’re witnessing here in Monterey County. Home prices have held fairly steady here on the peninsula, but in the new suburbs such as Marina and Greenfield sprawl has ceased. Several major developments have been put on hiatus or canceled outright, even though the cities have already built the roads.

The deeper problem is that California has spent far too much time and money promoting a failed urban model. The time has come to Redefine the California Dream for the 21st Century. We need to reinvest in our city centers and provide the infrastructure – especially the mass transit infrastructure – to bring folks into the urban centers. But we must also provide the housing capacity for them. The 20th century homeowner aristocracy has to give way to a 21st century middle class that will be fundamentally urban, not suburban.

Over the weekend David Dayen compared California’s situation to that of Youngstown, Ohio in the 1980s. It was an interesting choice of cities. Youngstown is pursuing a strategy of livability and post-industrial land use, including the encouragement of food production and cutting off services to abandoned housing tracts. It took Youngstown 25 hard years to accept that the past will never return and a new path is necessary. Will it take California that long to realize its suburban dream is dead and that our future is urban?

God I hope not.

 (Cross posted at Living in the O.)

Though much of the city was difficult (or at least very time consuming) to navigate by public transit, there is a trolley system that covers the downtown area and a few of the surrounding areas. So if you live in one of these areas, it does seem like you wouldn’t need to use a car very much. Considering that we’re having trouble even implementing bus rapid transit in Oakland, I’m a bit jealous that central San Diego is way ahead of us with rail.

Also, many San Diegans commute to Los Angeles, and unless they like sitting in traffic for 3 or 4 hours, many of them use the Metrolink train, much as some Oaklanders commute by Amtrak to Sacramento. So though there’s still tons of driving that’s symptomatic of southern California sprawl, I learned that there are alternatives to driving in San Diego that are fairly widely used.

Another thing that surprised me was the walkability of individual neighborhoods. Though it’s mostly inconvenient to walk between neighborhoods, there are several neighborhoods in San Diego where it’s possible to walk to just about everything (markets, shopping, parks or the beach, restaurants, bars, etc.). In fact, my friend’s apartment in Ocean Beach has the same walk score as my apartment in Oakland (88). On Sunday, we went to a friend’s house that is in between neighborhoods (near Hillcrest) and I was a bit shocked when we did not get back into the car and instead walked a few blocks to a restaurant (her house’s walk score is 89). It really seemed to me that it was just as easy to find a walkable neighborhood in San Diego as it is to find one in Oakland. This surprised me because I always had assumed that San Diego was much like LA in that respect, and though there are a few walkable neighborhoods in LA, it’s usually not so easy to find a walkable neighborhood that’s affordable to live in.

It was nice to clear up some of my misconceptions and to find out that San Diego isn’t quite as car-centric as I had assumed. But don’t worry, I’m not planning to move to San Diego anytime soon. I still think it’s a whole lot easier to be carless in Oakland than it is to be carless in San Diego.