dogtown commons

When the Grand Lake Guardian sounded the alarm two weeks ago that a thrift store chain — Out of the Closet, which supports healthcare for AIDS patients — might take over the vacant GapKids storefront on Oakland’s Lakeshore Avenue, the forces of nimbyism and “progressive” hypocrisy were mobilized. Commenters on the article were almost comical in their self-involvement and fear of the unwashed masses, writing things such as “As a homeowner in this neighborhood, I would like to see the Gap Kids store replaced with something I would actually shop in” and “I have no issue with reuse of goods, but out of the closet usually has a goodwill image.” (A “goodwill image,” in case you can’t read between the lines, means poor and trashy, certainly not the kind of refined clientele that we want in our neighborhood).

While many of the concerns raised are euphemisms like “not a good fit for the neighborhood,” the distaste for poor people is hardly concealed. Local eminence Pamela Drake is quick to distinguish between a used-clothing boutique (desirable) and a thrift store (undesirable), and she says explicitly that she likes thrift stores, as long as they are not in her neighborhood: “As a former owner of a consignment store, there is a big difference between a Goodwill and a consignment shop like Maribel. They are not really in the same category though both promote reuse. I often shop at the Alta Bates Thrift and like it. However, Lakeshore/Lake Park is a very small shopping district. Having a very large store full of dollar bins and possibly junk could tip a delicate balance and discourage new small businesses from investing.”

To be fair, there are a number of commenters who welcome the idea of a thrift store, and who seem to appreciate that vibrant urban neighborhoods depend on socio-economic and lifestyle diversity. Maybe the homeowner quoted above won’t shop in a thrift store, and that’s her prerogative, but did it cross her mind that other people who live in the neighborhood might never shop at a GapKids?

City Council member Pat Kernighan, always responsive to the needs of her constituents, has leapt into action. She wants “a more desirable store” to come to that space. She calls for community meetings and mobilization among citizens to fend off the looming thrift store menace. She informed the site owner’s representative that “a thrift store would not be welcomed by the majority of area residents” (apparently she believes this because she has heard from “15 neighbors” opposed to Out of the Closet, but only “3 neighbors” who support the idea — a very unreliable survey, given that the vast majority of neighborhood residents probably have no idea yet that a thrift store might come to the location). She called representatives of Out of the Closet and says that she “explained that Lakeshore is trying hard to attract more shoppers with disposable income to keep all the stores in business and that a thrift store would lead in the other direction.”

There you have it. Kernighan dispenses with the euphemisms about Out of the Closet not being “a good fit” for the neighborhood, or its “goodwill image,” and she gets to the heart of the matter in no uncertain terms: Thrift stores mean poor people, and “Lakeshore” is trying hard to attract rich people, not poor people. Give her points for being candid about it, at least. The “Keep Oakland Economically Segregated” lobby seems to be as strong as ever.

How much would I have to pay you to get you to push a Honda Civic about 30 miles on a flat surface?

Since pushing a small sedan is exhausting work, and it would take all day (at least!), I’m guessing that I would have to pay you more than 4 bucks to push the car a mile, never mind 30 miles. I think I’d be really lucky to find someone willing to push a Honda Civic 30 miles for 50 bucks, and if I had to pay minimum wage, it would surely cost more than that.

This thought experiment illustrates (I hope) just how energy-rich petroleum is, and how inexpensive. Just think — for a bit over $3 at street corners all over America, you can buy a gallon of fuel that will easily accomplish in half an hour what it would take a hard-working human being all day to do. It’s no wonder we’re addicted to fossil fuels, given how much energy they manage to store in such small packages. I don’t have any grand point here, but it’s something to think about next time someone says that gas is really expensive. You get a lot of bang for your buck even at 3 or 4 bucks a gallon. And when you think about it that way, it’s no longer a surprise that we are having trouble finding energy sources to replace hydrocarbons like oil — there are very few things, at least on this planet, that can pack as much punch into such a small, portable package.

Depressing:

“If I’m driving all over the place, I’m going to buy the biggest car I can get,” said Senate minority leader Dick Ackerman, R-Tustin, as he drove out of Anaheim in “the gas guzzler” — a 2005 Ford Explorer that gets 16 mpg.

“Anybody can pick whatever car they want. I pay for part of this,” he said

So he believes that the more miles someone travels, the more justified they are in driving a large SUV that gets terrible gas mileage. And by extension, I suppose that means we should leave relatively high-MPG cars like hybrids and Toyota Corollas and Ford Focuses to people who don’t drive them very much. Makes a lot of sense! (At least, it would make a lot of sense if our goal was to maximize our petroleum consumption and our auto emissions, instead of minimizing them.)

But of course that’s not exactly what he was trying to say. What he really meant was that he spends a lot of time on the road, therefore he wants to spend that time in a commodious SUV instead of a perfectly functional but slightly less spacious midsize sedan or smaller SUV. That is at least a comprehensible rationale, but the obvious unspoken implication is that his personal comfort is the only factor he considers when he chooses a vehicle, because he don’t really care about our reliance on oil from the Middle East and Venezuela, and he doesn’t care about reducing the pollution and greenhouse gases that he emits when he drives “all over the place.”

His second sentence drives the point home. His logic seems to be that since he pays for “part of” his SUV, he has no responsibility to consider anything except his own comfort. This is like someone changing the oil in their car, then dumping the used oil into the nearest public park, and justifying it by saying “I paid for this motor oil, therefore all I need to consider is what is easiest for me, not whether my waste oil is polluting the park or draining into the bay.” Just because he pays for “part of it” doesn’t mean that he has no responsibility for the long-term consequences of his decision.

What is depressing is not just that one state Senator doesn’t “get it” — no surprise there at all. What is so depressing is that his me-first-and-me-only mindset is probably representative of most of his constituents, and perhaps even most Californians. And what is really depressing is that his attitude illustrates a major problem we have: The people most likely to take action to reduce oil consumption and tailpipe emissions are generally the people who are already causing the least damage, and the people least likely to take action are also the people who are causing the most damage, by driving less fuel-efficient vehicles and driving them more often.

In other words, the people choosing to commute by BART, bus or bicycle, or leaving their cars in the garage, or switching to hybrids, tend to be people who already spent less time in their cars, or who were already driving relatively fuel-efficient small sedans. This isn’t to say that it’s not helpful for these people to drive fewer miles and drive more fuel-efficient cars, but you don’t gain as much by switching from a Corolla to a Prius — even if the Prius gets 20 MPG more — as you would gain by convincing a 16-MPG SUV driver to switch to a 26-MPG midsize sedan. Even though the MPG differential between the Corolla and the Prius is twice as large as the MPG differential between the SUV and the mid-size sedan, when you calculate the actual amount of fuel saved, you gain more by the switch from a gas-guzzling truck to an average-MPG sedan. This is a bit counterintuitive, but when you do the math, it is not even close.

Where does this leave us, aside from being more depressed than we already were about the possibility of reducing our dependence on oil and our auto emissions? Well, for me it drives home the need for mandated action on fuel-efficiency, rather than relying on purely market-based solutions and voluntarily conservation to do the trick. In general, I favor policies that give people market-based incentives to change their behavior, rather than regulations that limit choice or artificially manipulate prices. Whenever possible, I would like to see policies that encourage housing density and carfree commuting, such as reforming the zoning and approval processes in order to encourage development closer to where most people work, even if a particular project isn’t perfect in everyone’s eyes (hello, Oak to Ninth!) or even if some neighbors have aesthetic issues with a project (hello, Emerald Views!).

But markets have limitations. In my opinion, one major limitation is that markets are lousy at factoring long-term costs into near-term prices, so even though almost everyone agrees that we are likely to face energy shortages and significant climate-related problems in the next 100 years, the price of oil reflects mostly nearer-term factors such as whether Saudi Arabia will increase production in the coming year, or how much petroleum central Asia will yield in the next decade. Like it or not, I think our policy-makers need to be more foresighted than the commodities markets about what the actual long-term costs of our current lifestyle is.

It’s important to face facts: No matter how much we encourage housing density in urban areas, or increase funding for mass transit, or raise consciousness about the adverse ramifications of oil consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, some people will still not be willing to sacrifice their “comfortable” SUV’s no matter how high gas prices get. So even if we could convince everyone within walking distance of a bus stop to give up their cars, it probably wouldn’t make an enormous difference unless we could also get drivers of incredibly-gas-guzzling vehicles to switch to to somewhat-less-gas-guzzling vehicles. That’s just not going to happen voluntarily, so I don’t see any choice but to pursue even more draconian fuel-efficiency mandates even stricter than those that California is already fighting with Washington to get implemented.

The Los Angeles Times had an article today that may be a harbinger of things to come, as California confronts the problems posed by a burgeoning population and a shrinking water supply. The headline is “Water laws may throttle growth” and this is how it begins:

The planned distribution center for the footwear firm Skechers USA would rise on 1.7 million square feet in the Inland Empire, making it one of the largest warehouses in the United States. It would anchor a new community called Rancho Belago, a variation of the Italian for “beautiful lake,” after nearby Lake Perris reservoir.

Now, in a sign of growing water anxieties, the Skechers warehouse and six other large projects in western Riverside County are on hold until March or later because the local water agency could not promise to deliver water to serve them.

The dilemma shows what can happen when construction and global trade, key drivers of the regional economy, are reined in by a potential lack of water.

“Just looking at the raw numbers, we kept coming up short,” said David J. Slawson, president of the board of directors of the Perris-based Eastern Municipal Water District, one of the largest districts in the state.

Slawson explains that his own livelihood as a land surveyor depends on growth, that no one on the board wants to hobble the economy. Still, he said, the restriction is “something we feel is necessary until we have some better numbers and we see some action statewide.”

The District’s decision was based on two laws passed in 2001 which require local agencies to assess future water needs when they are considering large development projects. As anyone who has seen Chinatown or read Cadillac Desert knows well, struggles over water resources are nothing new to California, and there’s reason to think that we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Given the importance of water to the state’s future, it’s good to see the state’s biggest newspaper addressing the practical local consequences that result from limited statewide water supplies. However, the LA Times article seems strangely focused on the narrow matter of how the 2001 laws may “hobble” and “throttle” the region’s economy, rather than the larger questions of what kind of growth is feasible given the looming water crisis, with minimal economic damage. Call me crazy, or call me an urban snob, but I have a hunch that building thousands more green-lawned, swimming-pooled exurban homes in a desert may not be the best use of the state’s limited water.

While the reporter does explain the logic behind the two statutes, and does a service by publicizing the issue, much of the article is written as if laws and court rulings were to blame, rather than the lack of water. That unfortunate headline, “Water laws may throttle growth,” is symptomatic of the tone taken in much of the article — as if there would be no problem with millions of people moving to parched areas if only those pesky lawmakers would get out of the way.

Plenty has been written recently about coming water shortages, including a long New York Times Magazine cover story in October and books such as Fred Pearce’s When the Rivers Run Dry and Ken Midkiff’s Not a Drop to Drink. Unfortunately, as with most issues, people will not pay attention until it starts affecting them and their neighbors. Like most Americans, I take the water coming out of my tap for granted, and I take the relatively inexpensive fresh produce at local markets for granted, but sometime soon fresh water may be a luxury here as it currently is in many other parts of the world. The LA Times had a perfect occasion to make the connections between the big picture and the local angle, and I wish the article had more deeply explored how California should plan for a future in which more and more people will share less and less water.

Contrary to the widespread myth that Americans will never get out of their cars, behavior does seem to be changing as people start to accept that high gas prices are here to stay. From the Oakland Tribune:

Commuters are turning to public transportation in record numbers as gasoline prices seem to have gotten comfortable at or above $3 a gallon.

Unlike past surges in transit ridership, this one doesn’t have the help of a major freeway disruption like the Labor Day weekend closure of the Bay Bridge in August or the collapse of a MacArthur Maze ramp in April.

On Nov. 14 and Dec. 7, BART had its second and third biggest days, with 382,865 and 381,499 people inserting tickets on their way out of the system, respectively.

“This year’s going to be our biggest year ever,” said BART spokesman Linton Johnson, adding it would be on the heels of breaking the barrier of 100 million trips for the system’s last fiscal year, which ended June 30.

The jump has been noticed at other transit agencies, too, especially those that carry longer-distance commuters who have the choice of driving.

Caltrain’s ridership jumped 9.3 percent last month over November 2006. The Gilroy-to-San Francisco route hit a record for that month of 36,454 rides. The Capitol Corridor, which runs from the Sierra foothills to Sacramento, Oakland and San Jose, was up 13 percent from the previous November, to 136,650 riders for the month. Ferry ridership was also rising.

The fact that many people actually will switch from automobile to mass transit given the right combination of incentives and disincentives has been pointed out here several times before, but unlike the previous occasions when the switch was caused by highway or bridge closures, the trend outlined above seems to be driven only by high gasoline prices and perhaps growing awareness of the environmental benefits of public transportation compared to car commuting.

Oddly, the author of the above Tribune article, transportation reporter Erik N. Nelson, doesn’t mention that BART recently announced that it is increasing fares more than 5% starting next month. If, as the figures cited above suggest, people’s transportation choices are guided to some degree by rational cost/benefit analyses, rather than warm and fuzzy attachment to their cars, then you would think that an imminent hike in BART fares would be worth mentioning. I hear people complain all the time that BART is too expensive to make it worth giving up the convenience of their cars, and I would rather see BART pursue increased revenue by further boosting ridership instead of by hiking fares. Thankfully, BART’s fare hike is being accompanied by increased service, so there is reason for some optimism that the disincentive created by the higher prices will be offset by the allure of more frequent trains.

That’s an enviable problem to have:

OAKLAND — In mid-October, Dan Rascher and his wife bought a $1.4 million home in Upper Rockridge so their child could gain entrance to Hillcrest, Oakland’s most prestigious public school.

Last week, they began to doubt their investment. A proposed boundary shift, prompted by a population boom and overcrowding at Hillcrest, would make Montclair Elementary — a well-regarded, yet less exclusive school nearby — the family’s new school.

“It was really like a kick in the stomach,” said Rascher, who said no one informed him about the ongoing enrollment squeeze when he made the offer on his home. Although Montclair is a fine school, he said, “We didn’t think we were going to buy a Montclair home at a Hillcrest price.”

This is good news:

The Berkeley City Council has given the green light on a new green initiative: a solar power loan program that would be the first of its kind in the nation.

The council unanimously approved a concept put forth by the mayor’s office that would loan individual property owners the up-front cost of installing solar panels; a fee that costs $20,000-30,000 depending on the size of the home.

Solar power isn’t a solution to all our energy problems, but programs like Berkeley’s are a step in the right direction — that is to say, programs like Berkeley’s are a step away from coal and petroleum as our main energy sources. Yes, solar panels are expensive, but we need to re-think what we mean when we talk about the cost of energy. Cost comparisons shouldn’t just involve the price of solar panels versus the price of one’s regular monthly electric bill. There are other costs associated with coal-based electricity that don’t appear on a monthly bill — such as the costs of dealing with air pollution, global warming, and other consequences of our carbon-based power sources. These are long-term costs that are shared widely among the population and future generations, and therefore these costs aren’t included in monthly bills, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Berkeley’s proposal isn’t only good policy because low-interest loans will enable some environmentally-minded homeowners to install solar panels who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford the upfront costs. It’s also good policy because it recognizes that individual homeowners making personal cost-benefit analyses have little incentive to shell out a lot of money for solar panels. The cost of solar panels is borne by individuals, while the true costs of coal and oil are borne by all of us, and future generations. By fronting the money for solar panels with low-interest loans, Berkeley would be giving its residents an incentive to make cost-benefit analyses that include long-term, shared costs which will never be reflected in one homeowner’s monthly electric bill.

The reality is that almost all individuals will make decisions based on rational economic self-interest. Who can blame them? That’s why it is so important for politicians — whose job it is to look out for the community at large — to think beyond the daily price of gasoline and electricity, and start implementing innovative policies that will help deal with ALL the costs — present and future — of our marriage to fossil fuels.

The San Francisco Chronicle published a good article by Tom Steinbach and Mike Howe of the Greenbelt Alliance summing up clearly and succinctly how technology, transportation, and smart development are all pieces of the puzzle as we face a future of population growth, rising energy costs, and climate change. It could have included more discussion of mass transit, but the sad reality is that most people do drive everywhere, and will for the foreseeable future, so the focus on drivers is understandable in a short article like this.

Unfortunately, their article appears side-by-side with an article by Joseph Perkins of the Home Builders Association of Northern California. Perkins makes some valid arguments, pointing out that the best way to bring down housing prices is to increase supply. That is just basic economics that many anti-development activists would rather ignore. But instead of dealing with all the interconnected issues described by Steinbach and Howe, Perkins argues solely against “no-growth, anti-housing” activists. Worse still, his proposed solution to the housing shortage seems to rely exclusively on increased sprawl and development of open space that is currently off-limits:

Bay Area environmental groups argue that most of the home building and development that occurs between now and 2030 ought to be confined to the 16 percent of the region’s land area that already is developed.

They suggest that most of 1.5 million additional residents expected in the Bay Area over the next quarter century can be accommodated by smaller-scale, infill housing development.

But that requires a suspension of disbelief. Just last year, in fact, UC Berkeley’s Institute of Urban and Regional Design issued a report cataloguing every single infill parcel in the state that could be considered a realistic candidate for development.

If housing were built on every single one of these infill parcels, including those here in the Bay Area, they would yield only a quarter of the new housing needed to keep pace with population growth.

So even under the most optimistic scenario, three-quarters of the Bay Area’s future housing need is going to have to come from green field development. The region is going to have to zone an additional 2 to 4 percent of its acreage for home building (which would leave the region 80 percent undeveloped).

Bay Area environmentalists refuse to accept this reality. In fact, a consortium of local environmental groups actually proposes that the region add an additional 1 million acres of land to the inventory of permanent space over the next three decades - about the same time the Bay Area will be adding those 1.5 million new residents.

Imagine that: a consortium of environmentalists “actually proposes” keeping more of the Bay Area from becoming car-dependent suburbs and strip malls — how ridiculous! Meanwhile, Perkins says nothing about transportation, nothing about energy, nothing about climate change, and nothing about housing density. His only solution seems to be to keep building and building on ever-increasing amounts of land.

These are complicated issues that require a sophisticated balancing of environmental, economic and political factors. There is plenty of room for serious debate about how to deal with a growing population, a shortage of housing, and looming environmental and energy crises. But caricaturing all environmentalists as “no-growth, anti-housing” activists who “refuse to accept reality” isn’t useful, and neither are one-dimensional solutions to complex problems.

(Photo above by R80o (Mark Strozier) on Flickr)

I’m starting to feel like a broken record on this issue, but today is World Carfree Day, and yesterday the LA Times reported on a new report by the Urban Land Institute pointing out the relatively minor impact of incremental improvements in things like fuel efficiency, compared to larger choices about where to live, how much to drive, and so on:

The report, “Growing Cooler: Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change,” analyzed scores of academic studies and concluded that compact development — mixing housing and businesses in denser patterns, with walkable neighborhoods — could do as much to lower emissions as many of the climate policies now promoted by state and national politicians.

Up to now, climate policy has primarily focused on such things as higher fuel economy for cars and trucks, cleaner fuels, greener building standards, lower power plant emissions, and international treaties. But a growing consensus of experts is also homing in on the everyday zoning decisions of local officials and county planners.

Since 1980, the number of miles Americans drive has risen three times faster than the population and almost twice as fast as vehicle registrations. And it is getting worse: The U.S. Department of Energy projects that between 2005 and 2030, driving will increase 59%, far outpacing an estimated national population growth of 23%.

While dramatic lifestyle changes can do much more than small technological improvements to reduce fossil fuel use and carbon emissions, policymakers and many environmentalists often focus on improving automobile fuel efficiency, encouraging the use of low-energy lightbulbs, and other consumer-oriented choices that the public can adopt with little sacrifice. This results in the jarring disconnect that we get in, for example, An Inconvenient Truth, when Al Gore spends over an hour detailing the major disruptions to human civilization that are likely to occur if global warming proceeds, then ends the movie with a list of mostly small suggestions like turning one’s thermostat up or down by 2 degrees, and keeping one’s car tires properly inflated.

After the maps showing large chunks of densely populated land being submerged by rising oceans, Gore’s suggested actions seem laughable in their smallness, but one can understand his decision to focus on small-scale solutions instead of revolutionary changes to the way most of us live. People are attached to their comfortable, convenient lifestyles, and this passage from the LA Times article shows what environmentalists are up against:

The California Chamber of Commerce and the California Building Industry Assn. declined to comment on the report, but James Burling, litigation director for the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative group that has battled environmentalists over land-use issues, dismissed “the latest anti-sprawl crusade based on global warming” as “no different from every other anti-sprawl campaign from Roman times to the present.”

“So long as people ardently desire to live and raise children in detached homes with a bit of lawn, there is virtually nothing that government bureaucrats can do that will thwart that,” he said.

Reading quotes like that probably instills terror in the minds of politicians, and their fear of asking people for real sacrifices at the gas pump or the tollbooth is understandable. So it’s easy to see why everyone wants to focus on technological improvements and consumer choice rather than financial sacrifices or lifestyle changes, but that emphasis shouldn’t fool us into forgetting that we already have a pretty good understanding of what can be done to stop human-caused global warming.

We also shouldn’t forget that lifestyle changes may be inevitable, as the costs — both financial and environmental — of energy increase. The real question may be whether we will make the changes voluntarily and with forethought, or involuntarily, as our supply of cheap oil starts to run out and living “in detached homes with a bit of lawn” 40 miles from one’s office stops being economically feasible. Predictions vary about how easily we can adapt to new circumstances, and how severe the disruptions may be, but if the industrialized world does not make some difficult choices now, then soon we may live in a world whether the choice between incandescent and fluorescent lightbulbs is the least of our worries.

Are we heading toward a time when every piece of every visible surface has been bought by an advertiser? Last night I was compelled to listen to a loud advertisement while riding an elevator for five floors. Then I wake up and read about this.