Looking for a little engaged interactive theater in your life? Check out two "PARKing day" events being organized in Sacramento. The idea is to (temporarily) convert parking spaces into, well, park spaces to illustrate the potential for increasing usable, green space in urban areas by reducing our reliance on automobiles and the space they demand.
Sous les pavés, la plage!
The Sacramento River Watershed Program has released a fascinating online report on suburban sprawl and the demise of agriculture in the Sacramento Valley. It appears to be a work in progress, and the "best management practices" identified for governments to cope with sprawl are nothing new. But there is plenty of interesting information and analysis packed into the presentation. The GIS layer maps that accompany the text are especially noteworthy.
One of the more interesting observations related to the suburbanization and exurbanization of the Sacramento Valley concerns the availability of water. In most of the state, the availability of water is one of the principal checks on unrestrained sprawl. Not so in the Sacramento Valley, according to the authors:
Groundwater-fed development will also differ from development in regions that rely on surface water (including state or federal project water) in another important aspect. While surface water diversions are highly regulated and governed by a complex system of water rights and contractual obligations, comprehensive regulation of groundwater use in California is much less developed. Where the state plays an active role in overseeing the use of the state's rivers, streams, and reservoirs, the regulation of groundwater extraction is mostly a local matter. The jurisdictions charged with regulating groundwater uses are also those most directly embroiled in local disputes about land use and development. The state has little direct power to ensure the sustainable use of groundwater resources.Below the Delta and the federal and state pumping plants, water is the principal limiting factor for exurban sprawl. This is not the case for the Sacramento Valley and much of the Sierra foothills in the Sacramento Watershed. The groundwater basin in the Sacramento Valley recharges readily from the normally abundant rainfall in Northern California. In only a few areas has groundwater depletion become problematic, like in eastern Sacramento County where urban and medium density suburbs were allowed to develop solely reliant on groundwater pumping. Very likely, all the areas zoned for low density rural residential development have sufficient groundwater supplies.
Abundant groundwater resources are the exception in California, where most development has depended on guarantees of imported water. Thus, when making predictions about the build-out of the Sacramento Watershed, it is not prudent to look at the patterns from Southern California where local water supplies were the limiting factor, or the Bay Area, where confined geography have restricted exurban rural residential growth. Other areas of the nation may provide more accurate models for the potential of exurban build-out in the Sacramento Watershed.
The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that Darrell Steinberg may have found a way to include climate change impacts in regional government transportation and land use plans under Senate Bill 375. Something the ARB dramatically failed to do with their AB 32 Scoping Plan:
Fortunately, the Air Resources Board may be about to get strong guidance from the Legislature. State Sen. Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, has done a remarkable behind-the-scenes job of building support for legislation (SB375) that would require the impact on greenhouse gas emissions to be included in regional housing and transportation plans. It also would provide regulatory relief for residential and mixed-use projects that optimize available public transit.
Sacramento County has one of the most innovative and progressive affordable housing ordinances in the country. The ordinance was crafted with a coalition of building industry representatives and housing advocates and went into affect in 2005. Yet, just as soon as a more politically favorable climate emerged on the County Board of Supervisors, the Building Industry Association began to backtrack. The ordinance, which has already created 4,000 new affordable units, is now in jeopardy according to the Sacramento Bee:
The building industry challenged this ordinance in court and lost the first round. That would suggest the county is on strong legal footing with its requirement that 15 percent of any new development provide for affordable housing.
Yet for dubious reasons, a new majority on the Board of Supervisors has been negotiating a settlement with the building industry to revise this landmark ordinance. Housing advocates, who helped craft the original law, were excluded from these talks and only recently have seen details of the settlement proposal. What they've seen gives them great fear that supervisors are preparing to rush through changes that undermine the goals of the 2004 ordinance.
I make a conscious effort not to put together too many posts that unreflectively link to other sites. In my humble opinion, any blog worth its salt must provide some original content, thought, or synthesis. Simply pointing people to other writers’ posts is journalistic parasitism, and it doesn’t usually make for good reading.
Nevertheless, I think it’s worth sending out some recognition to other sites that are of interest because of their perspective on transportation and/or the natural resource policies in the Sacramento region. Here are a few that I’ve found interesting.
The blog Walkable Neighborhoods just finished a monthlong photographic examination of the walkability of urban areas in the United States. Each day, Eric Fredericks posted photos and/or commentary highlighting pedestrian-friendly urban design around the country. Some of the choices were, to say the least, unexpected. (Sacramento’s K Street mall? Sure, it’s walkable. But give me a reason to want to walk there!) And the project might be faulted for its heavy reliance on university towns and incorporated enclaves of wealth, both of which are able to address growth and traffic issues in ways that can’t easily be exported to cities where the teeming masses work and play. Nevertheless, the project is provocative, and some of the material is both enlightening and inspiring.
Locally, Sacramento is blessed with a complementary set of blogs focused on Sacramento Regional Transit, the public transportation agency that is the object of both affection and frustration for many of us. RT Driver provides an employee’s perspective on both daily life in the Sacramento transit system and on policy issues affecting operations. RT Rider covers many of the same issues from the perspective of a passenger. Both blogs have had fascinating and passionate entries on the proposed cuts to transit service as a result of the Governor’s and Legislature’s cowardly budget proposals. Check those entries out here and here. (And make plans to appear at the RT Public Hearing at 6 PM on Aug. 13!)
Finally, SacBee editor Stuart Leavenworth is slowly establishing a blog covering global warming issues. He calls it the Hot House. I’m at best ambivalent about the Sacramento Bee’s journalistic and editorial coverage of transportation and air quality issues in the region. Still, a global warming blog is a great idea, and I’m hoping that providing a forum focused on the issue has impacts on the rest of their editorial policy. Leavenworth recently has had a couple of provocative posts about the Attorney General’s strategy of forcing local planning agencies to include greenhouse gas emissions in their CEQA analysis. Read those posts here and here.
