Brown acted primarily to help balance the seriously underfunded California state budget. But, Brown was up to more than just balancing the budget; he was attacking the source of the housing bubble, the source of our unbalanced economy, and yes, the source of our present economic misery.
When I was in graduate school, I studied Government. Oh, you are probably saying, THAT is the source of our misery; Government.
Not quite!
Now there is Government and there is political science. Political Science is the fun side of government, the clash of ideas, biographies of great leaders; etc.
Local governmental planning and development begins to fog over the lenses pretty quick. I remember being assigned readings from Lewis Mumford, who wrote in the thirties about the dynamics of urban growth. He basically studied the growth of cities, and how that reflected the culture. Go ahead, google it...not exactly the most exciting topic.
I can tell I am losing you already. I can see the eyelids dropping.....
But, local government and local development is really where good government needs to be. Our problem is not government, our problem is the lack of anti-speculative government.
The ways communities grow, renew, or die are essential parts of governmental planning. Good government results in good planning, which causes in healthy growth. Bad government comes when the speculators run the show!
Since some real conservatives might still be reading this (a longshot), look for example at the Central Valley Project in California. This massive governmental plan, was developed over years, by both political parties, to counter the damage placer gold mining had caused to California's aquafers. Rivers and streams had been mauled by the gold rush over fifty years, turning the fertile Sacramento Valley into a flood zone, and filling the rivers with sludge. The result was economic disaster for California.
Hum......economic disaster caused by short sighted economic greed....hum....
Anyway, the Central Valley Project, a well planned governmental effort, has resulted in a series of dams, that are still criticized by ecological purists, but have certainly worked to reclaim thousands of acres of farming land with huge economic benefits. We are talking the most important economic engine in California is due to the Central Valley Project.
In short, good government planning, which is boring planning by bureaucrats who nobody knows or cares about, works for the benefit of us all.
It seems the more boring and mundane the project is, the better it turns out. The less speculative in nature the better. Long term, reliant but reasonable return on investment is best.
Brown, who is just such a bureaucrat, no matter what you think of him politically, is a political and governmental wonk. That is, he has lived in governmental dynamics and politics, particularly at the state and local level, all of his life. He has a deep and thorough understanding of local planning and its implications for our culture.
He understands that boring, thorough planning, works in the long run; not expedient quick profiteering.
In attacking our redevelopment planning sector in California, he is calling our attention to a toxic and harmful trend in local urbal planning that threatens California's prosperity.
It is not high taxes or over regulation, in fact, it is speculation and expediency that have us in trouble.
The enemy is urban sprawl, and the destruction of downtown areas. This has NOT been a natural consequence of growth at all, but a calculated urban planning strategy, fueled by the petroleum industry, fostered by real estate interests, and pushed always by quick buck artists.
At its core is rampant short sighted speculation; from the same people that brought us the recent housing bubble and Wall Street speculation. These charlatans are killing us!
And, it has not been the province on either political party; both have participated and both are guilty. It really is not a political issue. It is a planning issue. It is a moral issue.
It really is not difficult to understand (look out here comes the dull, boring local government lecture).
In the 50s and 60s local government embarked on redevelopment plans. This is not surprising considering the Great Depression started in 1929, and then came World War II, not allowing any financial resources to be available for urban renewal. The government was too busy keeping people alive, or later killing them, to spend much fixing a downtown sewer.
In the fifties and sixties, local governments noticed the basic infrastructures were wearing out. Downtowns were becoming areas of blight, the wealthy were moving out of neighborhoods into the suburbs.
To counter this need, redevelopment efforts were started at the local and state level, with some influence even from the federal government. The idea was to counter urban blight and rejuvenate downtown. This goal was hijacked.
Expediency got in the way. Since people were fleeing the downtown area (mostly to get away from the people of color who lived there); redevelopment was "hijacked" by developers who shifted it from downtown revitalization to suburban sprawl.
And, the automobile culture was exploding at the time. The national highway system was growing, tying remote areas to urban centers. Shopping malls replaced downtown development as the sign of urban economic health.
And sprawl intensified. At first the sprawl was not significant, a few miles out of town. Then it grew into twenty, thirty miles. Why worry, everyone had a car, so a few more miles to work (which stayed in the downtown area with the advent of multi-story high rises) was easy.
Today this has resulted in the average urban communter having a 40 mile drive one way to work every day. This commute is usually at about 10 miles per hour, spewing tons of CO2 and pollution into the atmosphere. It is so bad that to drive in Sacramento in the morning or late afternoon is virtually impossible. It is so bad that the San Jose Mercury devotes several columns each day to the "choke points" (no pun intended) of the freeway madness that communters endure everyday. People spend hours each day in their cars, going 5 to 10 miles an hour, cussing the madness.
Meanwhile train tracks are empty. The bullet train project is attacked as madness, as wasteful, by a car culture that thinks nothing of spending billions a day going nowhere fast!
Californias pay so much for cars and insurance, that they even recalled a Governor, for having the temerity to renew a vehicle license fee level, which was called for by law by the way, and elected yet another actor who this time didn't have clue what he was doing.
The actor then reduced the vehicle fee, was a momentary hero, than flopped around bewildered when the budget didn't balance. That fee non-renewal by the way was tax deductable, so its impact to the average taxpayer was minimal. The impact to local governments and now schools was huge!
Meanwhile, multiple car ownership was encouraged, especially of gas hogs, that now sit in commuter's driveways since they can't afford the gas to run them! And people still sit in traffic all day, every day....on and on and on....
Having fun yet?
And who benefited from the sprawl? Land was certainly cheaper the further you went out of town. Speculators swooped in, buying up large tracts of what was farming land, at low prices, and got rich using local governmental redevelopment funds (at taxpayer expense), to build auto malls and shopping malls that now lie vacant.
Developers became quick buck artists, looking always for the fast and easy profit.
Let's add Prop 13 to the mix. This tax con, rewards speculators and large developers far in excess of homeowners, resulting in billions of dollars of profit for the apartment and mall developers, and pennies of tax savings for the ordinary homeowner. And, local schools and services have been cut ever since.
How, you might ask, can someone make money building malls that nobody occupies? Try capital gains tax games, where a loss actually cuts your tax liability. Trust me, they are making money; they are the 1%. We are the 99%, left holding the bag, as our tax dollars help redevelop areas that actually kill our economy and cost jobs.
It is kind of like Potterville in "It's A Wonderful Life", where the rich banker, speculator, if left alone, ruined the little town with his quick buck dishonestly. In fact, it is EXACTLY LIKE POTTERVILLE!
The result of what must be called basic dishonesty, was sprawl for sprawl's sake. Of course the driving force was that it was cheaper and quicker.
Downtown real estate costs more than Farmer Brown's almond orchard. To develop a flat area is cheaper than tearing down an old building and putting up a new one. Short cuts are good business. Hey, its profit, "Greed is Good"...
But, as most of us know, cheaper is not always better. You get what you pay for is not an irrelevant saying. There is no such thing as a free lunch. If it looks too good to be true, it isn't.
Speculation will hurt your on the long run....
I could go on and on....But you get the picture.
I live in a very poor county that has been hit hard by the recession. Right now there are plans to build a large shopping mall in the middle of prime farm land, at least ten miles outside of Redding. This is being pushed by a developer from Idaho (?), and local builders as the panacea to stimulate Shasta County's economy.
And you should hear the builders salivate. Of course, Redding right now has millions of square feet of retail space that lies vacant. The old malls are less than half occupied, so where will the renters come from?
Don't worry about that, say the developers. We will build it and they will come.
They never come!
The locals don't think so, and have floated a petition that is putting the development to a vote.
People are tired of the sprawl, and are even willing now to forego the temporary economic stimulus that the mall supposedly represents; the stimulus never comes. They also smell a rat.
Brown, who unlike most of us, actually revels in this stuff, has been around so much government that he knows urban sprawl, as it is presently practiced in California, is toxic to real economic growth. Read carefully........this nonsense is killing us!
How can this be, you ask? How can redevelopment be bad?
Here are a few toxic consequences:
1. Building office space far in excess of demand, in remote places makes NO SENSE!
2. Spending millions of dollars of tax money, developing remote shopping malls while the downtown area rots makes NO SENSE!
3. Catering to quick buck artists, whose only motivation in developing a farm into a parking lot to make a quick buck makes NO SENSE!
4. Forcing urban renewal forty miles out of town, or building an auto mall when car sales are way down makes NO SENSE!
5. Being at the mercy of developers, who attack anyone who questions their motives as being "anti-growth" makes NO SENSE!
6. Sacramento's Natomas area, built on a flood plain, pushing dwellings miles away from downtown, into a flood plain, makes NO SENSE!
7. Expanding freeways, adding lanes, encouraging multiple ownership of cars that are poisoining the atmosphere and accelerating global warming, makes NO SENSE.
I could go on and on.
We have been duped, fooled, lied to and manipulated. Lewis Mumford would have a field day with the pure speculative nonsense that particularly California has practiced for the past fifty years regarding urban planning.
The housing bubble, that should have been a clear lesson to us of the dangers of spleculation, poor planning, and the quick buck, is deeply engrained in the urban sprawl, and false, dishonest, and lousy urban planning "redevelopment" of the past fifty years.
It is all a toxic brew, that is poisoning us.
We have fifty years of bad governmental planning, and frankly crooked dishonest speculators to overcome.
We should be giving credit to Governor Brown for finally calling our attention to this fraud. We should be putting some of these crooks in jail!
Development for development's sake is a fraud. Short term profit and gain that contain disastrous consequences in the future, like developing the Natomas area north of Sacramento, is a fraud.
If there are good chances the wheel will fall off the wagon when you go to fast...it probably will.
Finally there is Jacksonville, California. A few years ago I visited Jacksonville to do a school accreditation. As I drove into town, I could not help but notice a huge development. It was an auto mall, one of the biggest I had ever seen.
At the high school I asked about it. Some of the teachers were skeptical, worried about building such a large auto mall almost 50 miles from the nearest population center. But, others, believing the developers, expressed hope that the new mall would be a source of employment for the local economy, that had been suffering from the shift from logging and agriculture to suburbia.
Three years later, I returned for another visit. I looked to my right, as I came into town, and saw the auto mall, closed! Acres of pavement, thousands of square feet of space, emply, closed.....nada!
I asked about it when at the high school again. I was told, this time with a tinge of anger, that the mall had opened all right, in 2007, hired lots of people, then crashed to a close with the recession.
As it turned out, the people in Sacramento, for whom the mall was intended, would not drive the fifty miles to Jacksonville to visit the shiny new mall to buy a car they didn't need and now could not afford.
The city if Jacksonville, I was told, was trying to lure tenants to occupy the thousands of square feet of retail space that was just sitting there. Of course, no tax proceeds were coming from the mall, it was vacant; and prospects for occupancy were nill. Jacksonville basically got screwed!
So Jacksonville was left holding the bag, while the developers profited from the redevelopment taxpayer dollars and enjoyed the tax break caused by the loss.
Urban sprawl wins again...sprawl you all....
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