Slums of Suburbia

At ground zero in the housing meltdown

Though expanding, the valley’s population is overwhelmingly young and poor, with a median age of less than 30 and poverty rates that rival Detroit and Appalachia. Big, sprawling, single-family suburban houses were the wrong fit. But the farmland was cheap, the zoning codes were lax, and, with Proposition 13—state legislation limiting property taxes—squeezing their budgets, city governments were eager to sign off on expansion. “Part of the sprawl problem we have is that [municipalities] are expanding housing to try to get a little more tax money to survive, and that’s what’s destroying the ag[riculture] and the open space and everything else,” says Rollie Smith, the valley’s federal HUD director. “But Prop 13 really makes it impossible for these places to do anything else.” With no regional-planning mechanism to stop them, the borders of the valley’s 62 cities sprawled outward.

The result was one of the most stunning changeovers of land use in our time.
In a region where it’s nearly impossible to hold a conversation without at least one mention of the valley’s unique agricultural advantages, the rate at which farmland was converted to urban use doubled in a decade. It was paved over at a stunningly inefficient rate: an acre for every eight people, according to Edward Thompson at American Farmland Trust. The real problem is more technical, he says; because most of the valley’s cities are located right on top of the most productive land, their rapid expansion was destroying the best of the best.

Valley leaders say they’re on the case, putting together a blueprint for a green future, focusing on dense development and a renewed emphasis on city centers, and shifting toward a solar- and wind-energy-based economy. To that end, federal stimulus funds are helping. For the first round of funding, the valley picked up $617 million. For the second, they’re hoping for $137 million. But their wish list is more than $10 billion and, as Mike Dozier, the regional point person for stimulus planning, puts it, getting money to the right places can be like “like nailing Jell-O to the wall.” Smith, the HUD director, agrees. The valley’s cities are small and poorly coordinated, he says, so they have more trouble jumping through bureaucratic hoops than well-developed metro areas. Plus, while stimulus funds are coming through for efforts that revitalize crumbling old neighborhoods in the valley’s bigger cities, the smaller, newer ones are getting passed over. As for those exurbs of new, vacant foreclosured homes? Good luck.

To conservationists, that may be tough love, but it’s the right place to invest the valley’s money. Still, Smith says even the cities are not getting enough to revitalize their centers and lure people back from the suburbs. On that front, the state’s raid on local general funds and redevelopment money is expected to have a particularly brutal effect. No one knows exactly how much the valley will lose in budget cuts, but all seem to agree: it will be far more than what’s coming in through the federal stimulus. “The one nice thing about this crisis is that it stopped that crazy land grab that was going on outside the cities,” Smith adds.

Newsweek