The San Francisco area’s recently adopted Plan Bay Area may set a new standard for urban planning excess. Plan Bay Area, which covers nearly all of the San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Rosa, Vallejo and Napa metropolitan areas, was recently adopted by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) and the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG). This article summarizes the difficulties with Plan Bay Area, which are described more fully in my policy report prepared for the Pacific Research Institute (Evaluation of Plan Bay Area).
Plan Bay Area would produce only modest greenhouse gas emissions reductions, while imposing substantial economic costs and intruding in an unprecedented manner into the lives of residents. The Plan would require more than three quarters of new residences and one third of net additional employment to be located in confined "priority development areas." These measures have been referred to as “pack and stack” by critics. The net effect would be to virtually ban development on the urban fringe, where the organic expansion of cities has occurred since the beginning of time.
Irrational Planning
Violating perhaps the most fundamental requirement of a rational plan, Plan Bay Area begins with a situation that no longer exists. Further, it is based on exaggeration, systematic disregard of official federal government projections and overly optimistic planning assumptions.
Exaggerated Population Projection: The Plan assumes that the Bay Area will grow 55 percent more rapidly between 2010 and 2040 than official California state Department of Finance population projections indicate. These state-produced estimates have tended themselves to be on the high side (Figure 1). The planners scurried about to resolve these differences, but there is no indication that the state will be revising its projections. Plan Bay Area’s population projection would require growth in the Bay Area to increase by more than one-half from the 2000-2010 annual rate. The exaggeration of population growth has its uses: it leads to a higher greenhouse gas emissions projection for 2040, providing a rationale for stronger policy interventions.
Ignoring Current Greenhouse Gas Emissions Projections: The Plan also ignores the new, more favorable DOE fuel economy projections (Figure 2). These projections were issued in December, well before the publication of the draft plan in April and the adoption of the final plan in July. Indeed, if the new DOE projections had been published the day before, Plan Bay Area should have been placed on hold and revised. In short, Plan Bay Area was out of date when adopted.
Overly Optimistic Planning Assumptions: The Plan assumes that travel by light vehicle (automobiles, sport utility vehicles and pickups) would be reduced by substantial increases in transit ridership. Plan Bay Area presumes that expanding transit service 27 percent over the next 30 years will lead to a near doubling of transit ridership. This is stupefying, since over the last 30 years, transit ridership remained virtually the same, while service was expanded nearly twice as much as would be planned from 2010 to 2040.
The plan also assumes that residents forced into the priority development areas will use transit and walking much more, materially reducing their use of light vehicles. This research behind this assumption is skewed toward transit oriented developments located on rail lines with good access to downtown. But nearly nine out of 10 employees in the Bay Area work outside the downtowns of San Francisco and Oakland downtowns, and that number is increasing (according to Plan Bay Area).
Given recent history, it seems wishful thinking to believe that small transit service expansions and downtown oriented transit development can do much to attract drivers from cars. The modest gains greenhouse gas emissions reductions projected in Plan Bay Area are likely exaggerations.
Plan Bay Area’s “pack and stack” densification is likely to produce even less than the modest substitution of transit and walking for driving (see The Transit-Density Disconnect). Traffic congestion, in this already highly congested area, is likely to be worsened, which could nullify part or all of the greenhouse gas emission reductions expected from reduced vehicle use.
Correcting Plan Bay Area Forecasts
Plan Bay Area would only modestly reduce light vehicle travel and greenhouse gas emissions. This is illustrated in Figure 3, which shows that the “pack and stack” strategies that would force most new residents and jobs into priority development areas, Plan Bay Area would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2 percent (“Plan Bay Area” line compared to the “Trend” or “doing nothing” line).
By contrast, correcting the Plan Bay Area 2040 population estimates to reflect the state population projections would reduce greenhouse gas emissions more than eight times as much (17 percent), without the “pack and stack” strategies. A further correction of the Plan Bay Area 2040 estimates to reflect the latest DOE fuel economy projections, would reduce greenhouse gas emissions 22 percent, 11 times as much as the “pack and stack” strategies.
Heavy Costs for Households and Businesses
The Plan’s “pack and stack” strategies seem likely to exacerbate the Bay Area’s already high cost of living. Currently, the San Francisco and San Jose metropolitan areas have the worst housing affordability among the nation's 52 metropolitan areas with more than 1 million residents. San Jose's median house price relative to its median household income was 7.9 last year, according to the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey. San Francisco’s median multiple was 7.8. This severely unaffordable housing results from recent decades of urban containment or smart growth policies, which have severely restricted the land on which development can occur. This drives up prices (other things being equal), consistent with economic principle. This has been made worse by house and apartment impact fees imposed on developers that are far above the national average.
By comparison, in major metropolitan areas that have not implemented strong urban containment policies, the median multiple has typically been 3.0 or less since World War II, including the Bay Area before its adoption (Figure 4). The “pack and stack” strategies would largely limit new development to small parts of the Bay Area, an even more draconian prohibition than the long standing restrictions on urban fringe development. This further rationing of land could be expected to drive land prices even higher, making it even more difficult for households and businesses to live within their means.
The problem is already acute. The new US Census Bureau housing cost adjusted data shows California to have the highest poverty rate among the states and the District of Columbia (metropolitan area data is not available). An early 2000s Public Policy Institute of California report showed Bay Area poverty to be nearly double the official rate, adjusted for the cost of living. Ultra pricey San Francisco had among the ten highest poverty rates – over twenty percent – of any urban county in the country.
Unaffordable housing has also fueled an exodus to the San Joaquin Valley (Central Valley). Now more than 15 percent of the workers in the Stockton metropolitan area commute to the Bay Area, which led the Federal Office of Management and Budget adding Stockton to the San Jose-San Francisco combined metropolitan area (combined statistical area). In addition, the greater traffic congestion is likely to lengthen work trip travel times. This is likely to further increase emission while also burdening job creation and economic growth (see Traffic Congestion, Time and Money).
Ignoring the Economy and Poverty
Plan Bay Area effectively ignores these costs (despite rhetoric to the contrary), by failing to subject its strategies to a cost per ton metric. According to the United Nation’s Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), sufficient greenhouse gas emissions reductions can be achieved at a cost between a range of $20 to $50 per ton. The previous regional plan (through 2035) included such estimates. Only highway strategies achieved the IPCC range. Transit and land use strategies cost from four to more than 100 times the top of the IPCC range. Even those estimates did not include the prohibitively higher housing costs that result from urban containment policies. The cost metric is crucial, because spending more than necessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions limits job creation and economic growth, which leads to reduced household affluence and greater poverty. This is the very opposite of the economic objectives of public policy. Virtually all political jurisdictions around the world seek greater prosperity for their residents and less poverty. A legitimate regional plan requires subjecting its strategies to economic metrics.
Opposition
There is opposition to Plan Bay Area. A citizen movement worked for rejection and has now filed suit claiming that the Plan violates the California Environmental Quality Act. The suit also alleges that MTC and ABAG used a questionable interpretation of state law and regulation to justify the irrational Plan outcomes.
Recorded Votes
Opponents were also successful in obtaining a rare recorded vote at ABAG. The governing board (General Assembly) is composed of selected elected officials from cities and counties who are not elected to their ABAG positions. ABAG adopts virtually all of its actions by consensus, rather by recorded votes, as occurs in many of the nation’s regional planning boards.
Consensus decision making seem especially odd in California, where inability to obtain sufficient votes in the legislature for the state budget required a constitutional amendment. Neither do city councils and county commissions operate on a consensus basis on controversial issues.
There is no shortage of controversial issues, at ABAG or other regional planning agencies. A good first reform would be for recorded votes to be the rule, rather than the exception. Consensus decision making may be appropriate for clubs, but it is not for representative bodies in a democracy (Note).
Impeding the Quality of Life
Plan Bay Area was outdated when approved and reflects a world that no longer exists. Drafters have insisted on extravagantly expensive and intrusive policies that produce only minimal greenhouse gas reductions, and at great cost, using, among other things, unreasonably bloated population forecasts to bolster their approach. Unless changed, the Plan will likely be more successful in driving up housing prices, limiting options for families, and further congesting traffic than meeting its stated goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.
Photo: San Francisco (by author)