Building Rules

How Local Controls Shape Community Environments And Economies

Kee Warner, Harvey Molotch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429981593
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Urban and suburban growth is a burning local issue for communities across the United States and many other parts of the world. Concerns include protecting habitats, high costs of infrastructure, social inequalities, traffic congestion, and more intangible worries about "quality of life." Citizens pressure public officials to intensify development regulations, flying in the face of local "growth machines." Builders and growth boosters oppose regulation as unfair and bad for local economies. Based on a systematic comparative study of urban areas in Southern California, this book provides a much-needed examination of the true impacts of local development controls, including the ways that they have and have not made a difference. The authors draw general implications for communities elsewhere and how to better understand theories of growth and urban governance.

1
The Relevance of Regulation

In the United States and much of the industrial world, business leaders, politicians, and large segments of the public question efforts to regulate economic activities for the protection of natural environments. Even though some environmentalists think the protections that have been enacted fall woefully short of creating sustainable human settlements, regulation critics attack the programs and policies that have been implemented as unjustified interference in the ways people produce and consume. Land use regulation—in particular the rules governing urban growth and development—is one particularly tangible terrain on which this battle is being fought. This book reports on just how this highly controversial form of intervention in the economy has operated in terms of either enhancing local communities and their environments or undermining their economies. Writing at a time when regulation is seen as the enemy of economies, we specify within the realm of land use and in the delimited but important region of the world we study—Southern California—just how regulation and markets have operated together. We illustrate what happens when the regulation of city building increases and the effects of this regulation on an economic sphere with major stakes for wealth creation and potential for far-reaching social and environmental consequences.

The creation of wealth in regulated contexts is, of course, not new—either in land use or any other realm. Markets presuppose the basic social order that guarantees property through contract; in the case of real estate, commercial value requires not only deeds backed by government force but also the infrastructure of roads and other forms of access that create economic utility Going one step farther down the slippery but inevitable road of regulation, deeds and access mean nothing if their value can be destroyed by the acts of others, as when an upstream user diverts a common waterway or a neighbor performs activities so noxious that they seriously compromise the ability to use and enjoy one's own property. In the economists' terms, actors in the marketplace can generate externalities, neighborhood effects, or spillovers.¹ To preserve the very order of the market, these offenses must be publicly controlled, either by preventing them in the first place or by otherwise providing relief for the victims—this is the "central problem of land use law" (Piatt, 1996: 40). The U.S. Supreme Court sustained zoning laws originally in order to prevent a slaughterhouse from damaging the neighbors' land values. From the reasoning of that case, the way was cleared for a wide range of interventions whenever private land use had negative impacts on neighboring uses and, by further extension, on the community good.

Beyond the immediate stench of the slaughterhouse, we know that virtually all uses of land generate spillover effects, good and bad, near and far, complexly ecological or merely annoying to other human beings. These effects intersect in multiple and synergistic ways, over time and over distances great and small. If a homeowner cuts down a tree, the immediate neighbors have a poorer (or better) view; a landowner who clear-cuts can stimulate soil erosion that buries the neighbor's house under an eroded hillside. The loss of a unique local habitat can set in motion far-reaching ecological consequences. For example, Ellwood Grove, north of Santa Barbara, is one of a few overwintering sites for monarch butterflies that migrate thousands of miles throughout the western United States—a rallying point for environmentalists concerned with nearby development plans. No actor or even set of actors produces smog; it results when diverse people take actions that lead to the emission of specific chemicals that come together with sunshine and other natural elements to produce a qualitatively different phenomenon—a negative synergy occurs. These are the dramatic realities of Ecology 101. But virtually any human action on the land, mundane or spectacular, yields consequences that only our ignorance keeps from view.

Even with the field still in its infancy, ecological analysts are constantly uncovering the complex range of potential external effects—aesthetic, cultural, economic, and ecological—of human actions, and these ecological discoveries lead environmentalists to advocate new restraints on development. The "perpetual crisis," as Wendell Berry (1995: 65) puts it, caused by "our presence in this varied and fertile world ... forces upon us constantly a virtual curriculum of urgent questions." The ongoing and indeterminate character of understanding environmental impacts frustrates the linear-minded, who think that policy should be "done," that constraints on the economy should be minimal and settled, or that environmental protection should be, once and for all, accomplished. By requiring a specific environmental impact review (EIR) before individual projects involving federal lands or federal funding could be built, the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) institutionalized this indeterminacy, at least for certain developments. EIRs have become a tool for the continuous and contentious development of additional environmental knowledge, whereby the unfolding of answers comes from experts in various realms, but also from ordinary people directly understanding their environments by adopting scientific methods—"popular epidemiology" as it has been called in the case of residents' diagnoses of local environmental health hazards (Szasz, 1994).

Growth control has become a mechanism, perhaps a crude one, to deal with the perceived negative spillovers of urban growth. In its most simple and, as we will see, rare configuration growth control attempts simply to freeze the action. Developers liken this to pulling up the drawbridge. Stopping development, even cold and altogether, becomes one understandable alternative, especially when people do not understand the ecological consequences of development or when they have little faith that governments will properly mitigate the effects that are known.² The more common variations of growth control we describe in coming chapters embody a skepticism toward the development process and a break with past naïveté about spillover potentials.

Compared with the public sentiment about other topics, the concern for the environmental effects of development is not shallow. Surveys of American public opinion show continued widespread concern about pollution problems and the belief that government should play an active role (Times Mirror, 1990, 1994). According to the 1998 National Environmental Education and Training Foundation/Roper Survey, 62 percent of Americans believe that environmental protection and economic development can go hand in hand. If forced to choose one or the other, 71 percent would choose the environment (Coyle, 1998: 2). Majorities of people are willing to see more federal funding for control mechanisms (Times Mirror, 1990) and are willing to pay more for goods to better serve environmental goals (Times Mirror, 1994). Almost unique among the movement-based issues of the last decades, support for the environment cuts across boundaries of race, class, and gender and persists, even as support for other causes of both left and right (e.g., civil rights, balanced budgets) come and go (Van Liere and Dunlap, 1980). In a rare display of personal commitment, people also have changed some of their own habits, sorting garbage into separate containers, sometimes taking it on their own to recycling centers, and recycling enough waste to substantially reduce pressures on landfills (now approaching a one-third reduction in some communities). In no other realm of public life have individuals changed their behavior like this—usually for no reason beyond wanting to do the right thing. One of the first realms where conservative Republicans were forced to backtrack in their mid-1990s "Contract with America" was in their efforts to roll back environmental protection

Growth rightfully takes the blame for mundane local difficulties, like effects on air quality and traffic congestion or just changing the "feel" or "character" of communities. People also perceive other problems, like crime, to be caused by growth; even though research does not support such reasoning, the belief helps build the movements against development. Qa more subtle ground, publics grow in their understanding that what were once taken as "acts of God" involve acts of development. Forest fires destroy homes built in the paths of what we now know to be events of natural regeneration; "out of control" water sweeps away whole towns built in flood plains by professional developers; in the arid West, overbuilding drains local water supplies creating "droughts" within the normal precipitation cycle, leading to the imposition of water conservation measures and to the high costs of securing alternate sources of water. Increasingly, these difficulties raise the possibility that to make development more harmonious with nature there should be changes in the way cities grow.

For all sorts of reasons, then, some profound and some trivial, some quite correct and others off the mark, some urged by national experts and some derived from local experience, environmental awareness has filtered into public consciousness. Although suspicions abound that intervention hurts society and economies, there is parallel suspicion that life, community, and earth can not be left merely to markets. We suspect that these two perspectives, however paradoxical, coexist not only in the same cities and communities but within many individuals. Clarifying the effects of regulation may help assuage dilemmas at both the levels of policy and individual consciousness.

Environmentalism as Local Urge

The measures we deal with are local—those who focus on global crises might say "merely local." But local policies have impacts on larger realms. Macro-economies, of course, result from concrete economic activities that must occur somewhere. The cumulative effects of local regulation add up to impacts for the economy overall, a point obviously not lost on the critics of regulation. But the same is true for cumulative ecological effects. The way cities grow determines, for example, the need for cars, how much they are driven, and the specific meteorological environments into which their exhaust will flow—including the amount of "greenhouse gasses" produced and their effects on global warming. The form settlements take shapes the use of all sorts of environmental resources, not only fossil fuels but land, habitats, water, air, and, on the other end, the production and disposal of the array of human "wastes." The particulars of settlement shape consumption of all sorts, including the very need for such durable goods as cars, lawnmowers, and air conditioners, and the capacity of land-fills to absorb the aftermath of consumption. The size, configuration, and political organization of cities influence the capacity for regionalism; the ability of particular regional settlements to be more self-sufficient diminishes broader environmental impacts. Local development—its overall scale, the materials used, the amount of energy required, the waste produced—reverberates through and around the earth.

The local scene is also an important setting for action and social change that can redirect these development processes; it makes sense that environmental politics begins in the backyard. Locality is the learning site and, by necessity, the place where new ways of life can be tried and witnessed. At the same time, the social, political, and economic organization of urban growth offers people a model for relations with nature more generally. True, distant catastrophic environmental threats to human life—like the nuclear crisis at Three Mile Island and the poisoning at Bhopal, India—also teach and inspire action. But such stories' impact comes not just from the fact that an agitated world press tells what happened, but from local populations' imaginings that such tragedies could happen "right here at home." News of wars among distant peoples, imagined as driven by primordial hatreds or schemes of tyrannical regimes, has only weak implications for those who think they live in stable democracies among more or less reasonable people. But people take distant human-made environmental crises to be applicable to their own communities. Chernobyl set back nuclear development across the democratic world, even where the technology was far more sophisticated and the monitoring systems more competent. Risk assessment studies show repeatedly that people fear most that which they can not control—for example, their airplane's safety compared to slipping in the shower (see, for example, Starr, 1969). They have special concern and anger over those risks they think others could and should have controlled—adding still another dimension to troubles perceived as coming from human-made development.

The local also matters, both as a force and site of environmental study, because it is the cauldron where diverse constituencies negotiate their competing needs and form coalitions. Race and class divisions create a challenge for any type of social movement, especially those without resources of great wealth and corporate power. A reform movement like environmentalism, which challenges major economic interests and those who depend on their campaign contributions, can afford to alienate few other constituencies. By embracing the concerns of low-income and minority populations, urban environmentalists can bolster "environmental justice" and address community environmental quality more effectively. Inner city communities do bear the biggest urban environmental impacts; they are disproportionately bisected by freeways, built on land permeated by poisonous byproducts of industrialization, and more likely to be adjacent to locations chosen for garbage dumps and incinerators.³ By defending inner cities as a vital part of the urban ecosystem, environmental organizations broaden their base. By preventing (or remediating) these hot spots of environmental degradation, they also control pollution more efficiently by addressing the problem close to its source. This is still another result of environmental knowledge: Source reduction protects those, human and otherwise, more distant. Naive and sentimental "Bambi projects" that secure the woods around a manor house do not become the primary focus of environmental reform. Responding to the needs of diverse local urban groups not only wards off a trivial environmentalism, but also helps build larger coalitions that go beyond environmental issues.

The most intense and repeated citizen resistance comes in reaction to specific developments—often dubbed LULUs (Locally Undesirable Land Uses). But the LULU category has become more inclusive over the past generation (Blumberg and Gottlieb, 1989; Hamilton, 1990; Piller, 1991). Newly awakened constituencies thwart plans not only for toxic dumps and prisons but also for what were once utterly uncontested types of development, like university campuses, private research facilities, luxury homes, and sports facilities. Whether as a cover for more selfish motives or because of an authentic vision (or both), citizens fight to keep wetlands intact or an endangered species' habitat undisturbed. A millionaire's house on wetlands becomes as much an offender as a public housing project in a single-family zone. The array of LULUs thus grows as communities define and defend a range of valued local qualities, including natural ecologies.

In our most immediate experience, the "environment" is in the breath of air we take, the view before our eyes, the noise that enters our ears, and the odors that reach our nostrils. Despite environmental organizations' ambitious involvement in national and international policy making, localities are where we sense the environment. When people are suspected of reacting to these sensate impulses, they can be accused by more practical business people (and even some environmentalists) of "emotionalism" or of not seeing "the big picture." An alternative is to view the quality of these experiences as the very essence of life, certainly as crucial in practice as any of the artificial products that come from defiling these experiences or imitating them through merchandise and commercial entertainments. These intrinsically local connections with "nature," whether based in reason, emotion, or both, offer fertile grounds for challenging conventional methods of building urban environments.

Wendell Berry—poet, farmer, and social commentator—warns that the celebrated bumper sticker "Think Globally, Act Locally" is too mechanical in its local-global split. It may distract environmentalists from the need to think and act locally in order to create necessary changes in the local and regional arenas where they can and should be effective (Creedon, 1993). The immensity of global issues can leave reformers defeated or can become a form of mere symbolic politics, waged through the convenience of bumper stickers, Sierra Club dues, and platitudes. Growth control groups, although typically short of Berry's depth of understanding, are—whatever else—focused on the local in both their thinking and their acting.

The results of such local thinking and doing have gone beyond any particular locality by dint of their volume. As early as 1975, over 300 U.S. jurisdictions had adopted some form of growth control (Logan and Zhou, 1989: 461; Colin, 1979). By 1988, 150 localities in California alone had enacted control measures (Glickfeld and Levine, 1990: 5). By another count, environmental groups were sufficiently organized in about one fourth of all California cities to make significant impacts on growth policies (Clark and Goetz, 1994). The content of local policies ranged considerably in restrictiveness and scope, but, by one indicator, 10 percent of California jurisdictions had adopted explicit population growth caps by 1990 (Glickfeld and Levine, 1990: 23). Although exclusive suburbs have long engaged in some form of density and growth limits (indeed such was their raison d'être), this new wave of land-use control involves a far more diverse array of communities: old towns and new, central cities and fringe, white and minority, small and very large. Even where environmentalists did not take control—and this was certainly the case in the great majority of U.S. localities—tightened procedures did at least gain toeholds in many places, and with them came new types of orientations.

The fight for local controls has been a proving ground for people who then move on to state and national policy realms, both as activists in national groups and as members of state legislatures and federal agencies. The growth control movement thus not only has the potential for changing local policy but for altering the ideological stripe of state and national civic life. We return, then, to the issue of scale: By virtue of their content, repetition, and sponsors, the potential impacts of local controls become large—not always global but certainly well beyond mere parochial interest.

The Critique: Stranglers of the Economy

The perception that controls were indeed becoming commonplace, moving beyond the traditional suburbs of the exclusionary rich to a more general urban order, helped bring on the mid-1990s reaction of deregulation and government downsizing. In the United States, a need to build the economy dominated the news, particularly in prior high-growth zones like California—also the leader of the country's environmentalist reforms. Following an increasingly pervasive economistic logic, some deduced that when localities limit either the amount or the conditions of development, some businesses may be killed off altogether—taking with them jobs and needed housing. By the same reasoning, if environmental rules raise production costs at factories, the goods will be priced higher and markets will be lost to places abroad with more favorable business climates. Jobs and corporate tax dollars will evaporate, leaving unemployment, welfare costs, and homelessness in their wake. So runs the newly invigorated argument for freeing up the hidden hands to have their way with the social and physical landscape.

Even in the former stron...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Relevance of Regulation
• 2 Sites
• 3 Has Growth Been Stopped? Not Much
• 4 Power to Build: How Cities Grow Under Growth Control
• 5 Project Peddling: What Gets Approved and How
• 6 Indirect Effects: How Building Rules Make Growth Different
• 7 Building the Rules
• Appendix A: Measuring Growth Control Impacts
• Appendix B: Chronologies of Growth Control
• Appendix E: Case Study Details
• Appendix F: Interview Schedule
• Reference List
• Index