Is it possible for farmland to be blighted?
That was how San Jose described the North First Street corridor, an area that was farmland not too long ago. Thanks in part to efforts of the San Jose Redevelopment Agency, it has now been paved over into office park hell.
North First Street is another example where RDA’s fail to consider neighborhood livability and sustainability in development plans. The VTA built a billion-dollar light rail line along 1st St, but the development is purely auto-oriented.
Most galling of all is the RDA parcel at Holger Way, at 237/North First interchange.
A pretty good Class I bike/ped trail runs alongside highway 237. Some of it was built as part of the Bay Trail project, other segments were built as mitigation for the highway 237 construction. One annoying gap is between North First and Zanker. How easy would have been for San Jose to have fixed this gap, as part of redevelopment. Problem was, their staff had no idea the trail even existed.
Not only was this gap not filled, but for 10 years a fence was thrown up across Holger way, forcing cyclists to make an unnecessary detour.
The reason I bring up this planning clusterfuck is because the annual meeting of the California Redevelopment Association is being held in — of all places — San Jose. And this may be their last meeting ever, because Governor Brown wants to eliminate Redevelopment Agencies for good.
As reported in the Mercury News, the conference was more of a confessional:
Is it an Irish wake or an old-fashioned revival meeting? At this week’s annual meeting of the California Redevelopment Association, it’s been hard to tell. The three-day conference, which ends Friday at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, may turn out to be the final gathering of almost 400 of the state’s active redevelopment agencies if a proposal by Gov. Jerry Brown to eliminate them comes to pass. Or, as the roughly 600 attendees are hoping, their last-minute efforts, counterproposals and reform pitches to state legislators may be enough to pull redevelopment from the grave. With crisis, some say, comes opportunity — and maybe even redemption. “We have to admit to ourselves that we have sown some of those seeds of our own destruction,” John Shirey, executive director of the association, told a general session audience.
San Jose has been one of the worst abusers of redevelopment process. What better place to bury RDA?
It is a logical fallacy to conclude that a stupid site plan means that the institution of redevelopment is corrupt. Put the blame on the civil engineers and AICP planners, where it belongs.
Real urbanists are deeply concerned about the abolition of redevelopment, which is the only method of capturing future value created by infill development. Without value capture and long-term project area planning authority, sprawl will be even cheaper than infill and transit will be even harder to justify.
Yes, there has been controversy around redevelopment. Redevelopment has always had a corps of property-rights opponents, who dredge up anecdotes to smear any role for today’s generation to address the market failures caused by previous generations. Some of these smears are decades old.
This year’s outcome in the fight between the State and its cities is directly attributable to Props 13, 218, and 98, which, acting together, makes local government in this state a cruel joke. You really must read “California Crack-Up” by Joe Matthews and Mark Paul.
I’m old enough to remember Emeryville and Mission Bay as toxic wastelands. They would be toxic wastelands today but for the redevelopment powers wielded carefully over many years by honest diligent elected officials and their staff.
Because Wall Street crooks stole all the money, and Fox News liars installed the property-rights and hate-government programs in the brains of the Tea Party, your generation is now doomed to repeat the mistakes of the 1950s.
Steve,
The Emeryville toxic wastelands were redeveloped into sprawling, big-box retail wastelands. What kind of “real” urbanist supports that type of redevelopment?
Yes, if done correctly, redevelopment would be a powerful tool for infill, transit-oriented development. But that isn’t how it turned out.
The way farmland can be declared blighted is that California Health and Safety Code section 33031 includes “Depreciated or stagnant property values” as one of the economic conditions that indicate blight. Anything at all that isn’t providing the city with lots of tax revenue can be declared blight and wiped out. Ridiculous, but it’s the law.
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