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MAKING CONTACT Transcript: #10-00 Where the Roads Go Phillip Babich: This week on Making Contact.... Keith Bartholomew: Building freeways doesn't reduce congestion. It does induce development. Usually it induces development that is completely dependent on the automobile. So, it doesn't build towns. What it does is it builds sprawl. Glen Bailey: We're rebuilding all the freeways. It's the most massive construction project in the history of the state, I think. All the freeways are torn up. They're closed. And there's more freeway expansion planned, including a whole new highway, that will basically destroy wetlands adjacent to the Great Salt Lake. Phillip Babich: The automobile continues reign supreme in the United States. As more and more undeveloped land is being transformed into suburbia, crisscrossed by highways. On this special edition of Making Contact, radio producer Barbara Bernstein, examines the links between transportation planning, land-use patterns, traffic congestion and affordable housing. I'm Phillip Babich, your host this week on Making Contact, an international radio program seeking to create connections between people, vital ideas and important information... In the United States, development takes over about fifty acres of land a day. As the cost of living in US cities rises, people are being forced to live far away from where they work, resulting in urban sprawl. And the transportation of choice is usually the automobile, causing even more traffic congestion. More highways are then proposed to relieve traffic. In this special edition of Making Contact, Oregon based radio producer, Barbara Bernstein, looks at how suburbanization sprawls across farmland, foothills and even mountain passes. In the first part of this show, Bernstein examines how transportation planning is key to containing urban sprawl and how short-sighted solutions, like freeway expansion, exacerbate the problem. In the second part of the show, Bernstein looks at how affordable housing within cities is key to helping people remain close to the places they work, reducing the need for more suburbs. Barbara Bernstein: The interstate freeway system, which so many of us take for granted now, was created in the 1950s. President Eisenhower believed that America's civil defense required a nationwide network of high-speed limited access highways to transport troops, tanks and military supplies. Eisenhower's vision was actually realized as a road system that at first moved trucks and commerce across the country. Before long freeways were moving commuters across metropolitan areas and reshaping the patterns of urban and suburban development in the United States. Rich Rogers: The prototype for the American freeway was the highway that Robert Moses built from New York City out to Long Island so that in the summers people could get out of the crowded city and go to the beach. Barbara Bernstein: Rich Rogers works on land use issues, as an aid for one of Portland, Oregon's city commissioners. Rich Rogers: As a little side-bar: they also built the bridges low enough so that busses couldn't go out there so that blacks from Harlem wouldn't be able to go out to the beach. Keith Bartholomew: Robert Moses was the planning director for transportation in the city of New York earlier in the 20th century. His major goal in life was to build as many bridges and as many freeways in and out of New York City as he possibly could. Barbara Bernstein: Keith Bartholomew is the former staff attorney for 1,000 Friends of Oregon, a land use watchdog group in Oregon. Keith Bartholomew: Every time he built a new bridge it would fill up with traffic almost immediately, and the traffic levels on all the other bridges would stay the same. Every road project that has ever been proposed has been proposed on this illusion that somehow building the new road will take care of traffic congestion in other parts of a metropolitan area, and it never happens, or if it does happen, it happens for a very short period of time. Building freeways doesn't reduce congestion; it does induce development. It usually induces development that is completely dependent on the automobile. So it doesn't build towns. What it does is it builds sprawl. Everybody gets there via car, everybody leaves via car. Ironically one of the ways to reduce congestion is to do exactly the opposite. In the San Francisco Bay Area, in the wake of the earthquake in 1989, the Embarcadero Freeway along the eastern side of San Francisco was debilitated and needed to be demolished. And the predictions were that congestion would be horrid, and it would have enormous economic impacts that would close down business. And none of that happened. As a matter of fact people flock to that area because it's so beautiful. Because all of a sudden where there used to be this elevated freeway which blocked the view of San Francisco Bay, now there's this open area. Barbara Bernstein: Back in the early 1970s it seemed like much of the United States was caught up in a frenzy of freeway building. But when I moved to Portland, Oregon in 1971, a plan to construct a freeway through my new neighborhood was generating a storm of controversy. Keith Bartholomew: The Mt. Hood Freeway would have gone from downtown Portland out through the southeast part of the region through some beautiful neighborhoods. The Oregon Department of Transportation had bought up right of way for about a third of the length of the freeway, and structures were starting to be raised, when the mayor of Portland, Neil Goldschmidt led the charge to change the plans for the city to do away with the freeway and to use the funds that would have built the freeway for other types of transportation, including Portland's first light rail line. In the 1980s the same story played itself out in a more of a suburban context with a freeway known as the Western Bypass, which was a circular freeway which would have gone around the westside of the region. A group of citizens with the help of 1,000 Friend of Oregon and an organization called Sensible Transportation Options for People crafted a new land use plan for Washington County so that instead of continuing the cycle of sprawl and freeways and sprawl and freeways and sprawl and freeways, that Washington County would move more towards the notion of building small towns where you would have walkable environments and access to the rest of the region through a regional transportation system. This was all happening in the context of plans to build a new light rail line, so it was very convenient to start talking about some of these themes. And in the end the region decided to not build the freeway. So we now have the new light rail line. We now have new land use plans in much of Washington County trying to focus new development into the station areas, into walkable environments. And guess what? Washington County is ending up with traffic congestion relief and economic development, without building a freeway. Barbara Bernstein: Since the state of Oregon instituted statewide land use regulations in 1973, advocates of this plan have tried to ensure that the state's transportation policies reflect the goals of the statewide land use laws. Robert Liberty is the executive director of 1,000 Friends of Oregon, a group that was formed to make sure that Oregon's land use laws continue to have teeth. Robert Liberty: You cannot do transportation planning investments without thinking about land use. Transportation needs grow out of land development pattern and a good transportation system is thought of as a component of the entire community, not as something separate. Barbara Bernstein: Robert Liberty has spent time sharing Oregon's notions about land use with residents of Salt Lake City, like artist and activist Stephen Goldsmith. Stephen Goldsmith: When Robert Liberty and myself and a couple others were flying over the area and he looked down and he noticed you have the new Sandy City Hall and the high school separated by two parking lots. And then you have this new regional shopping center going in, and you look and see where the light rail connection is going to be and how, if this had been planned with any intelligence, you could have walked from the transit station to city hall, the transit station to the high school, and the transit station to the retail but instead they're so far apart, instead they are these seas of parking lots. Barbara Bernstein: Glen Bailey, the executive director of Crossroads Urban Center in Salt Lake City, adds that Salt Lake City planners have also been shortsighted when it comes to solving traffic congestion, which everyone complains about. Glen Bailey: We're rebuilding all the freeways. It's the most massive construction project in the history of the state I think. All the freeways are torn up. They're closed. And there's more freeway expansion planned, including a whole new highway that would basically destroy wetlands adjacent to the Great Salt Lake. And at the same time, they're opening the light rail. Now the smart thing to do would have been to build light rail, and open it, and have it running. And then tear up the freeways, so that people would feel like: "Well, the freeways are torn up I'll take light rail for awhile," realize that it's not so bad, in fact maybe it's a better way to get to and from work. And then there would be a ridership established for light rail. Of course they didn't do that. They're doing light rail and rebuilding the freeways at exactly the same time. So when light rail's ready to run and establish a ridership, we'll have brand new freeways with extra lanes that are easier to use than they have been in years and dissuade people from getting out of their cars David Keller: Americans don't like it when we are told that rather than widening a freeway, perhaps we should have public transportation. Barbara Bernstein: David Keller is the director for the Center of the Study of Ethics at Utah Valley State College in Orem, Utah. David Keller: We just go out and hop in the car and start motoring off whenever we please. We define this as freedom. However a society based on the automobile, I believe, may be restricting our freedom through congestion, pollution, the ever present need for new highway construction Barbara Bernstein: People come up with all kinds of reasons why they don't want to get out of their cars. Even in Oregon. Mel Zucker and Larry George have for years been political opponents of 1,000 Friends of Oregon's Robert Liberty and Keith Bartholomew. Melvin Zucker: You couldn't get me out of a heavy four wheel drive. Room for your cellular phone, for the coffee mug, your dictating machine. When you're in a car, particularly making any kind of long trips, you want to use all of your time. Larry George: People love the bargains they get at the big box discount sellers. All of those are only accessible via automobile because people buy so much food you couldn't carry that much food out of there. So here's what you need to say to people: Are you willing to pay more for your groceries to shop at a local store that you have to walk to? Melvin Zucker: People say: "God, I miss that little neighborhood store. I loved having that shoemaker right there downtown." But the fact is, they never used them when they were there, and so they went out of business or couldn't afford to stay in business any longer. The small store does not have the prices, it does not have the variety so people don't use the small store. They go to the Walmart and then they say wasn't it nice when we used to have that small store that we didn't use. Rich Rogers: Mel Zucker looks at those consumer decisions about driving and housing as permanent fixtures on the landscape. They're innate to people. Barbara Bernstein: Portland City Commission Aid Rich Rogers Rich Rogers: I think that they could change a lot over time. But by "time" I don't mean an election cycle which is the cycle that interests most politicians. If you look over the changes in 20 to 30 year intervals that happen around transportation, that happen around housing preference and housing production, and automobile production, what kinds of cars and what kinds of houses are being built, then you really do see the potential for things to change pretty radically. Barbara Bernstein: In Oregon it seems that radical changes in transportation attitudes are happening much more quickly in the highly urbanized Portland area than in more rural parts of the state that are beginning to experience rapid population growth. Take the booming desert community of Bend, in Central Oregon for example. A bypass that the state built around the town a number of years ago has filled with commercial strip development. Robert Liberty: Robert Liberty: It was so congested that a bypass had to be built around it, even though it was itself a bypass. And that bypass cost 90 million dollars. Downtown Bend is now this kind of cute tourist place which is nice, but imagine if all that development had gone into downtown Bend. It would be a real lively city center. Deborah Howe: At the time that the bypass was done for Bend the state didn't have in place the wherewithall to say, look we've created this road for you, don't reduce the capacity by allowing all this development. Barbara Bernstein: Deborah Howe is a Professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State University. Deborah Howe: Things have changed dramatically now because the Department of Transportation is recognizing the connection between transportation and land use. And now the Department of Transportation is asserting a much stronger voice, in fact, not allowing development on certain roads, which I think is a very positive sign. Melvin Zucker: ODOT is out of control because they've lost their mission. Barbara Bernstein: Mel Zucker, a transportation consultant for property rights groups, has spearheaded attacks on the Oregon Department of Transportation. Melvin Zucker: I see where we have 75% of the funds spent in this region going to transit and transit oriented development. When we have massive congestion on the roads that affect people's lives, you don't put your highest priority into bike lanes and pedestrian paths. And that is where their priorities are. These are very expensive projects and nobody uses them. ODOT has become saturated with transit people who know nothing about highways. The director is somebody who worked for a lunatic fringe group of anti-road haters, STPP, Surface Transportation Policy Project. They're just absolute car haters. Stephanie Welch: You're listening to Making Contact, a production of the National Radio Project. If you'd like to get in touch with us, we'll be giving out our toll-free number at the end of this broadcast. Phillip Babich: Considering the rapid development of farmland, the increase in road building and the rise in traffic jams, the future seems like it could be one of heavy pollution and road rage. But many environmental groups say that this is not inevitable. And there are some states that are tackling the problem of urban sprawl. Among them is Maryland which puts great emphasis on protecting farmland and other undeveloped areas. Oregon is also a state celebrated for its long history of statewide land use regulations. Many urban planners encourage the construction of affordable housing within cities to stem the spread of urban growth. People would then be able to afford to remain close to the places they work. But instead, low-income neighborhoods are being leveled to make way for construction of up-scale housing, displacing residents who are then forced to commute to work each day. In part two of this special edition of Making Contact, Barbara Bernstein reports on how urban sprawl can be caused or curbed by the choices communities make about housing. Barbara Bernstein: When we analyze traffic congestion in American communities one key question arises: why do so many people have to drive so far and so much? Tasha Harmon: All the people who are complaining endlessly about the traffic between Portland and Washington County need to recognize that the best transportation policy is an affordable housing policy, which means that people have the choice to live in the communities that they work in. Barbara Bernstein: Tasha Harmon works with the Community Development Network in Portland, Oregon. Tasha Harmon: I've been hearing some horror stories from people in Washington County Community Action about trying to find housing for people who work the low paying jobs in the Silicone Forest, who've been living out of their vans in Washington County, because they cannot afford the commute, nor can they afford to rent anything in the town in which their job is. Robert Liberty: One of the problems in the United States today is the abuse of local zoning power to keep people out based on income. Barbara Bernstein: Robert Liberty, 1,000 Friends of Oregon. Robert Liberty: There would be an uproar if some wealthy suburb said: "You can't live here if you're black" . I mean that would be illegal. But communities can say: "You have to have a 12,500 square foot lot and a minimum sized house of 3,000 square feet, and we're not going to allow any apartments or multi-family housing or even houses on small lots. So that you people who are zoned out of living here, you can come wait on the table and pick up our trash and mow the lawns and maybe even teach our kids or patrol the streets as policemen, but you can't live here because we're going to use zoning to keep you out." It's not a hidden agenda. This isn't some liberal paranoid vision, that's what it's for-to keep people from different classes from mingling. And, of course, that overlays with race so it's another way of keeping out people of a different race. In Oregon we said: Every single community must zone land for apartments; must zone land for manufactured housing; must allow manufactured housing on single family lots; must zone for small lots, and you cannot use a city charter or anything else to stop low cost or subsidized housing. Barbara Bernstein: Besides classism and racism, sheer market forces also dictate the shortage of affordable housing. Donna Gerber is on the Board of Supervisors of Contra Costa County in Northern California, a county erupting with enormous tracts of new housing, malls, and commercial parks. Donna Gerber: We really need more affordable housing. We don't need a lot of high end housing, which is what's being built. That needs to be done in the areas that have access to mass transit, that have infrastructure already in place. It makes more sense. There's more of a tax base to do it. But the trick is encouraging the development community to be interested in putting their money and their interest into those areas and upgrading those areas and not letting them die. Robert Liberty: One of the charges laid at the door of the Oregon planning program by the National Association of Homebuilders and some local homebuilders is that urban growth boundaries limit the supply of land and therefore drive up the cost of housing. Well, that's a nice theory and it certainly helps them in their argument in favor of expanding the urban growth boundary faster than it needs to. But if unlimited land supplies assured affordable housing, it's a little hard to understand why housing in Portland cost $24,000 less than Los Angeles and about half as much as it is in the San Francisco Bay Area. Let's think about what would happen if the land supply was expanded. So you pour a lot of land on the market and so land prices go down. Meanwhile because we have a hot job market and people are able and willing to pay $160,000 for a house...so there are all these people queued up. Now the homebuilder's costs have just dropped because the supply of land's increased. Now do you think that homebuilders automatically reduce the price of a home because their costs went down? No, that's just added to the profit. So the idea that, if you reduce the homebuilders' costs out of a fit of generosity, they're going to pass the savings along to consumers is incredibly naive. I think a lot needs to be done to generate more affordable types of housing, and guess who's fighting us? The Homebuilders Association of Metropolitan Portland. Tasha Harmon: The places where Portland has seen the largest increases in housing prices are those low income neighborhoods that have been undervalued for long periods of time relative to the interest of their housing stock and their location. Now the homebuilders are arguing that this problem is caused by the urban growth boundary. Barbara Bernstein: Tasha Harmon, with the Community Development Network in Portland, Oregon, points to studies done by the Portland area's regional government, Metro, which undercut this assumption. Tasha Harmon: Metro actually compared the population increases to housing price increases in the 1970s and early 1980s, the last boom, with the current growth boom and the curves looked almost exactly alike. There's a very, very, very powerful relationship between how fast the population is increasing and how fast housing prices are increasing. The really interesting thing of course is that the urban growth boundary played essentially no role in regulating the land supply during that last growth boom. There was too much undeveloped land still inside the boundary at that point for it to be playing a major role. Barbara Bernstein: Marin County, an affluent enclave just north of San Francisco, is another region where developers blame strict land use laws for the lack of affordable housing. Karen Urquhart is the former director of the Marin Conservation League. Karen Urquhart: Affordable housing is a very serious problem in Marin. There's no question about it. It's a trade-off. However, considering the location of Marin within the nine Bay Area counties, if you had opened up Marin county to major development, you would have simply had 100s of 1,000s of more very expensive homes. So allowing development as some people would have you believe to get affordable housing, it doesn't happen that way. Affordable housing has to be subsidized. Tasha Harmon: If we're going to solve the affordable housing problem and create healthy communities for our region and our country, we need to look at land as a community resource and as a resource in its use value, rather than seeing it as a speculative commodity. And we need to treat it that way in terms of taxation, in terms of laws, in terms of what the incentive system is for how people behave around land. We need to look at a taxation system that does not reward people who speculate, whose job it is to make money by buying and selling land, buying low and selling high. Glen Bailey: People with money are making the choice of moving back into the city, rather than being out in the suburbs. Barbara Bernstein: Glen Bailey, with Crossroads Urban Center in Salt Lake City. Glen Bailey: Denver and a number of other cities have taken basically old warehouse districts and made them into very upscale places to live and play basically. What I'm afraid of when that happens is that we drive out the people that live there now. Barbara Bernstein: Will Toor, the mayor of Boulder, Colorado is watching exactly that phenomenon unfold in his community, just outside of Denver. Will Toor: Unless we're able to do something on a significant scale to provide housing that's permanently affordable, we're going to see a real change in the character of the community. In at least a large part of Boulder over the next twenty years, as the existing people who may have bought those houses when they were under 100,000 bucks, as they eventually sell those houses, I think we'll see a totally different and much narrower segment of people who will be able to live here. We're looking at what we can do to create some new housing that would be likely to remain affordable. Boulder's lucky in that we have a number of mobile home parks that have a few thousand people living in them and those are probably one the big reservoirs of affordable housing here, but we're unlikely to ever see too many millionaires from California trying to buy a mobile home and turn it into something else. Maria Garciaz: When we moved into our existing neighborhood which is in the NW quadrant, the average home was selling for $29,000 Barbara Bernstein: Maria Garciaz is Executive Director of Salt Lake Neighborhood Housing Services. Maria Garciaz: And now you're looking at $121,000 and in order for a family to afford that at the current interest rates as of today, your income has to be about $40,000. The median income in my neighborhood is $21,000. So it's very difficult for the families renting in my neighborhood to buy those homes. What we're seeing is a lot of families are paying $800 and $900 for two bedroom apartments. A lot of families are doubling and tripling up. Tasha Harmon: There are a lot of speculators operating in what have been low income neighborhoods in the Portland area Barbara Bernstein: Tasha Harmon, Community Development Network in Portland, Oregon Tasha Harmon: And so they go in and they go door to door and they knock on little old ladies' doors who bought their house for $6,000 in 1940 and who are looking at higher taxes and maintenance costs and a bunch of other things, and say, you know, "We'll give this great deal for you: we'll pay you $70,000 for this house. We'll pay cash!" And the woman has no idea what the house is worth, and it sounds like a huge sum of money. She says, fine. They pay her $2,000 to hold that right for six or eight weeks. They go find another buyer. And we've seen title transactions in the records where you have on the same day in the same title office, the woman comes in, she gets $70,000 in cash. She walks out the door. The buyer comes in, gives them $140,000 for the same house. And they're essentially rewarded for that behavior by our tax system. The gains that they make on that, I believe at this point are taxed less than income they would make by working and getting wages. Maria Garciaz: What our organization is trying to do is, we own a good percentage of the property in the northwest quadrant in terms of raw land. And we try and develop it and keep the home cost below $121,000 and offer 3 and 4% first mortgage rates. Barbara Bernstein: Maria Garciaz, Executive Director of Salt Lake Neighborhood Housing Services. Maria Garciaz: We're trying to work with landlords to acquire a lot of their property or to provide them loans to help subsidize the property so they can increase the standards of living for families there with an agreement that they'll maintain low rents. We're taking families through home ownership training, teaching them about saving money, teaching them how to prepare for home ownership. So we're trying to identify who those families are, get them ready for home ownership, and helping put them into homes that are affordable and within their means. Tasha Harmon: We proposed, what we called a speculation tax, as part of package of local tax reforms which says, the faster you turn a house over and the more money you make on it, the higher the tax is and by the end of six years it goes away. But it's designed to penalize people for that kind of behavior. There's a similar tax in the state of Vermont which is designed to prevent people from taking farmland and turning it into summer homes for people from Boston and New York. Barbara Bernstein: Affordable housing activists in Oregon, like Tasha Harmon, have formed a coalition with a wide range of other social change activists, including Robert Liberty of 1,000 Friends of Oregon. This Coalition for a Livable Future is trying to forge a united front that sees the links between providing affordable housing, sensible transportation options, fighting sprawl, protecting farmland and saving natural areas both inside and outside the urban growth boundary. One of Tasha's coalition partners is Mike Houck, the urban naturalist with the Portland Audubon Society. Mike Houck: There are natural coalitions between those folks who are concerned about social and environmental justice issues and those who are concerned about environmental issues. Until now in this region at least, there has been very little interaction between those communities and that's definitely not helped either of our causes. So I see as we talk about building livable communities...I see the power, incredible power in bringing folks who are concerned about human welfare and the environment together to collaborate on things, rather than trying to nibble at their own little teeny decreasing piece of the pie. We need to make the pie bigger and get a bigger chunk of it together. Barbara Bernstein: For Making Contact, I'm Barbara Bernstein, in Portland Oregon. Phillip Babich: That's it for this special edition of Making Contact: a look at land use and urban sprawl. Thanks for listening. This program was written and produced by Barbara Bernstein. Original music was composed and performed by Barbara Bernstein. With vocals by Isseta Smith. Additional music was by Steve Reich, performed by Pat Mathiney. Special thanks to Catherine Snow and the studios of KUER-fm in Salt Lake City. Laura Livoti is our Managing Director. Peggy Law, executive Director. Associate producer, Stephanie Welch. Senior advisor, Norman Solomon. National producer, David Barsamian. Women's Desk coordinator, Lisa Rudman. Prison Desk coordinator, Eli Rosenblatt. Production assistant, Shereen Meraji. Archivist, Din Abdullah. And I'm your host and managing producer Phillip Babich. If you want more information about the subject of this week's program, call the National Radio Project at 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tapes and transcripts. That's 800-529-5736. You can also go to our website at www.radioproject.org. Making Contact is an independent production. We're committed to providing a forum for voices and opinions not often heard in the mass media. If you have suggestions for future programs, we'd like to hear from you. Our theme music is by the Charlie Hunter Trio. 'Bye for now. |