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Over seven weeks in the East Bay Business Times, the Work Force Housing Committee, sponsored by the Business Times, published its recommendations for alleviating the East Bay’s shortage of affordable housing. The committee’s members included many of the Bay Area’s top experts on housing policy. In the final installment of the series on March 5, 2004, the committee summarized its findings in 10 key recommendations. The committee determined that these steps would do the most to eliminate obstacles to the construction of affordable housing in the East Bay and throughout California. Also included in the report are the committee’s weekly commentaries exploring the origins and potential solutions to the housing affordability crisis.

By 2020, most forecasters agree, California will be home to between 43 and 46 million residents -- up from 35 million today. Beyond 2020, the size of California's population is less certain. Depending on the composition of the population, and future fertility and migration rates, California's 2050 population could be as little as 50 million or as much as 70 million. One hundred years from now, if present trends continue, California could conceivably have as many as 90 million residents.Where these residents will live and work, and how future Californians will occupy the landscape are unclear. These are important issues as California plans its long-term future. Will future population growth consume ever-greater amounts of irreplaceable resource lands and habitat? Will jobs continue decentralizing, pushing out the boundaries of metropolitan areas? Will development densities be sufficient to support mass transit or will future Californians be stuck in perpetual gridlock? Will urban and resort and recreational growth in the Sierra Nevada and Trinity Mountain regions lead to the over-fragmentation of precious natural habitat?How much water will be needed by California's future industries, farms and residents, and where will it be stored? Where should future highway, transit and high-speed rail facilities and rights-of-way be located? Most of all, how much will all this growth cost, both economically and in terms of changes in California's quality of life?Clearly, the more precise our current understanding of how and where California is likely to grow, the sooner and more inexpensively appropriate lands can be acquired for purposes of conservation, recreation and future facility siting. Similarly, the more clearly future urbanization patterns can be anticipated, the greater our collective ability to undertake sound city, metropolitan, rural and bioregional planning.This report presents the results of a series of baseline population and urban growth projections for California's 38 urban counties through the year 2100. Presented in map and table form, these projections are based on extrapolations of current population trends and recent urban development trends.

Outside the immediate visage of regional policy analysts and smart growth boosters, the local growth control & growth management (LGC&M) movement remains extremely active, especially at the ballot box and especially in California. Analyses show LGC&M activity to be strongly correlated with state and regional growth rates—rising during expansionary periods such as the late-1980s and late-1990s, and falling during slowdown periods such as the early-1990s. Although exact numbers are hard to come by, it is estimated that about three-quarters of California cities and two-thirds of California counties have adopted some form of LGC&M program since 1980.Their continuing popularity notwithstanding, many questions remain about the efficacy and effects of LGC&M programs. Four are of particular interest:(1) To what extent do different LGC&M approaches really restrict the amount, pace, or location of growth? (2) To what extent are the resulting supply restrictions reflected in local real estate prices, especially housing prices? (3) Which LGC&M programs and approaches yield their promised benefits and which do not? (4) Do LGC&M programs cause growth to be systematically displaced from more restrictive to less restrictive communities, leading to such negative outcomes as sprawl and wasteful commuting?Using California as its lens, this report focuses on these unresolved questions. In no other US state is growth as tightly managed at the local level as California. Likewise, in no other state is there such a diversity of local growth management approaches and experiences. From a research perspective, because California lacks a statewide growth management framework, the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of growth management can be traced back to its local implementation. The report is organized into six sections: (1) Recent theoretical and empirical research into the use and efficacy of LGC&M programs; (2) An updated taxonomy of growth management and growth control measures, paying special attention to the circumstances under which such measures are likely to affect housing supplies; (3) Considering the question of efficacy by comparing pre- and post-control building permit volumes between specific growth-managed communities and carefully selected sets of comparison or peer communities; (4) Using GIS and cross-sectional regression analysis to identify empirical relationships between LGC&M programs, housing production shortfalls, and local housing prices; (5) Extending the peer-based comparison analysis to consider some of the potential benefits of growth management; and (6) Looking at the spatial displacement effects of LGC&M programs.

California is home to 64 military facilities, more than any other state. All four military service branches, in addition to the US Coast Guard, operate facilities in California. More than half of California's military facilities are located within, at the edge of, or within a stone's throw of major metropolitan areas.California is also home to more than 34 million people, most of whom live in metropolitan areas. By 2020, the California Department of Finance projects, California's population will grow to 45 million. If past trends continue, the majority of this growth will occur at the edges of existing metropolitan areas, nearby or adjacent to active military facilities.Many military facilities conduct operations that extend beyond their perimeter boundaries and generate significant aircraft and artillery noise. As California's population grows, the number of people living near military facilities and impacted by facility operations will also grow.Without some degree of forward planning to reconcile the space needs of California's growing population with the operational needs of the military, the encroachment of urban growth on California military installations may significantly compromise the presence, functions, and missions of the military in California.This report provides information regarding the potential encroachment effects of projected population growth and urban development on California military installations. It also presents and evaluates alternative planning and policy approaches for dealing with current and projected encroachment issues. Finally, it develops a web-enabled spatial database for use by civilian land use planners and military operations planners in analyzing encroachment issues and undertaking future encroachment zone studies.

The nine-county San Francisco Bay Area, according to the California Department of Finance, will add nearly 1.5 million new residents between now and 2020. Depending on the density of new development, the region will need between 90,000 and 150,000 acres of developable land to accommodate this level of growth. If current trends continue, most new development will occur on previously undeveloped greenfield sites at the urban fringe. This will put substantial pressure on the region's natural environment and open space lands -- particularly in Alameda, Contra Costa, and Santa Clara counties. One way to preserve open space and sensitive environmental lands is to accommodate more growth as infill.The term "infill," which has traditionally meant the development of vacant, cleared, or abandoned parcels, has more recently been expanded to include land reuse and recycling -- that is, the redevelopment of developed parcels that are physically or economically underutilized.This report considers the potential for and economic viability of infill and refill development throughout the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area. Its purpose is three-fold: (1) to ascertain the physical and economic infill capacity of the Bay Area, using a realistic range of densities and economic conditions; (2) to identify the locations and pattern of infill opportunities within the Bay Area, keeping in mind the economic, physical, governmental and social structure of the Bay Area; and (3) to establish and test a procedure for identifying and analyzing infill development which can be reliably used elsewhere in the state and country.The results of this analysis lead to several conclusions regarding the potential for increased residential infill activity in the San Francisco Bay Area.

California will need an unprecedented amount of new housing construction -— more than 200,000 units per year through 2020 -- if it is to accommodate projected population and household growth and still be reasonably affordable. California will need more suburban housing, more infill housing, more ownership housing, more rental housing, more affordable housing, more senior housing, and more family housing. California will also need more diverse housing, and more diverse neighborhoods. California's high land and construction costs, coupled with the cumbersome and open-ended nature of the local entitlements process, have served to discourage innovative land planning, site design, and building design. While there are few intrinsic limitations to meeting California's future housing needs, the core of the existing housing production system is too fragmented and haphazard to produce the volume and quality of housing needed. This applies to the laws and procedures that govern housing development, the funding and lending programs, and the myriad public, private, and non-profit organizations that produce and operate housing in California. If indeed California is to remain a state where people from all backgrounds and walks of life are able to pursue the American dream of homeownership and secure housing tenure, then substantial investment and innovation in housing development policy, financing, and planning will be required.

Transportation planners have traditionally considered land use policy to be outside their purview and have generally accepted existing (or proposed) land use policies and patterns as a given. That attitude changed, however, with the passage of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 and the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. For the first time, the law required planners to explicitly consider the effects of alternative land use policies on local land use patterns and thus on transportation system performance.

In this issue of ACCESS, we examine how land use considerations can improve transportation planning. Transportation planners have traditionally sought to maximize mobility by supplying better roads and common carriers, thus making it easier to move around. Seldom have they sought to improve the characteristics of destinations. That's been the responsibility of city planners and land developers. But, say our authors, that separation of land use and transportation planning is no longer good enough.

The purpose of this report is to evaluate the usefulness of the California Urban Futures (CUF) Model for analyzing realistic land use policy and planning alternatives at the sub-regional or county level. Following previous meetings of the ABAG Regional Planning Committee and consultations with local officials and planners, two Bay Area Counties were selected for further study: Solano and Sonoma.This report is organized into four sections. This section explains the logic and limitations of the CUF Model. Part II presents the results of four sets of land use policy simulations for Solano County. Part III presents CUF Model results for six Sonoma County Scenarios. Part IV builds on the experiences gained analyzing land use policy initiatives in Sonoma and Solano counties to evaluate the overall usefulness of the CUF Model for sub-regional planning.

The California Urban Futures model is the first in a new generation of metropolitan simulation models which replicate realistic urban growth patterns and the impacts of development policy at various levels of government. It projects population from the 'bottom-up', it allocates growth to sites based on development profitability, it realistically embodies the role of accessibility in the development process, and it is operated through the medium of geographic information systems. This paper is an explanation of the rationale of the model and the way it has been built in terms of its formal structure, its databases, its decision rules which reflect the development process, and its application to the San Francisco Bay Area where it has been used to evaluate the impact of a diverse set of development policies. The paper concludes with an agenda for further model development.

The 1992 election of President Bill Clinton rescued housing, cities, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) from the obscurity to which they had been relegated by the Reagan and Bush administrations. How much the Clinton Administration does for cities and housing-that is, what level of resources will ultimately be directed to cities and housing-remains to be seen. For the moment, however, there is little doubt that the problems of urban America in general, and of housing in particular, are back on the national agenda:History teaches that new presidents and new administrations often take new approaches to housing policy. What directions should the Clinton Administration take? Should it break completely with past housing policies and programs, and consider fundamentally new ap­ proaches-perhaps those pioneered at the local level in places like Boston and San Francisco? Or should it continue and expand the pro­ grams and institutions that have successfully weathered the indiffer­ ence of the last twelve years? Where those programs and policies have been successful, should the Administration build on them?

Housing prices in the coastal United States have increased sharply since the mid-1970s. On the one hand, high or increasing housing prices are indicative of a strong and grow­ ing economy. On the other hand, housing prices that are "too high" (relative to prevailing wage levels and cost struc­ tures) make cities and region less attractive to businesses look­ ing to expand, and may even encourage some businesses to leave. This paper describes the resul13 of a recent survey of firms in a selected set of high-priced, moderately-priced, and low-priced metropolitan areas throughout the United States. In undertaking the survey, special attention was focused on the role of housing prices in business location and expansiondecisions. Unlike previous SUI'Ve)'S of the determinanl3 of business location, this one was designed to distinguish between the factots (including housing) that influence a firm's: (1) decision to choose a new site or location; (2) deci­ sion to leave an old site or location; and (3) ability to recruit newemployees. Highhousingpricesandalackofaffordable housing were found to be a significant deterrent to the ability of firms to recruit qualified labor, but did not, by themselves, either attract businesses to new sites; or cause them to leave existing sites.

This article uses a series of fixed-ratio projections and scenarios to explore the potential for local residential energy conservation mandates and compact growth programs to reduce locally based CO2 emissions in eleven representative US metropolitan areas. Averaged across all eleven metros, residential energy conservation mandates could reduce residential CO2 emissions in 2030 by an average of 30 percent over and above 2010 levels. In terms of implementation, residential conservation standards were found to be goal-effective, cost-effective, scale-effective, and in the case of new construction standards, reasonably resistant to local political pushback. Local compact growth programs do not perform as well. If accompanied by aggressive efforts to get drivers out of their cars, compact growth programs could reduce auto-based 2030 CO2 emissions by as much as 25 percent over and above any emissions reductions attributable to higher fuel economy standards. Unaccompanied by modal diversion programs, the stand-alone potential for local compact growth programs to reduce auto-based CO2 emissions falls into a more modest range of 0 to 7 percent depending on the metropolitan area. Based on past performance, local compact growth programs are also likely to have problems in terms of their goal- and scale-efficiency, and their potential to incur political pushback. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]