Blog: October, 2012
No Question: California Is in Fiscal Crisis
Recent years have been filled with experts decrying the sorry state of public finance in California. And with good reason. Three California cities have filed for bankruptcy protection since June. Since 2008, local governments in California have shrunk by nearly 190,000 employees (11.2 percent) and property values over the same period declined statewide by 21.3 percent. Meanwhile, the state budget experienced consecutive annual budget deficits of $60 billion (2009-10), $19.3 billion (2010-11), $26.6 billion (2011-12) and $16.6 billion (2012-13).
What comes next?
The Institute for Government Studies at the University of California at Berkeley convened an impressive panel of experts last month to move that debate forward. Discussions covered more than the magnitude of the problem — although there was plenty to say about that. There was also talk about the factors contributing to the crisis and what we might be able to do about it.
While few disagreed about the overall state of finances in California, panelists spoke of a combination of factors that may have led the state deeper into recession:
· Existing structural challenges have been exposed by the recession. The recession has revealedfundamental imbalances between receipts and expenditures, such as weaknesses in the financing of state and local pension plans and retiree healthcare obligations. These systems were designed to be sustained through continual growth but they had never before been tested by a downturn like the one we’ve recently experienced.
· State actions to balance budgets may have intensified the impact on local governments. Steps taken by the governor and state legislature to stabilize state finances and limit the impacts of the economic downturn — such as the elimination of redevelopment agencies — may have compounded the impacts of the recession on local governments. The elimination of redevelopment agencies was projected to save the state up to $1.7 billion, but it has also left cities without financing for affordable housing or other redevelopment initiatives.
· One-time solutions have been exhausted.With a sustained downturn, the collection of strategies used to weather a short-term recession have long since been used. What is left are much more painful discussions about service reductions, e.g. closure of state parks.
· Competing traditions have left the state paralyzed.State and local governments in California have been constrained by competing traditions: an appetite for generous public services and a citizenry actively engaged in ballot-box planning. Proposition 13, the 1978 measure that capped property assessments, and Proposition 218, which requires voter-approval for new revenues, are significant barriers and have constrained the ability to generate revenues to sustain funding levels.
· Irrational optimism is preventing necessary decisions. Worse than a “perfect storm” of economic factors is the weight of history in how California moves forward. Despite the depth of the recession and the impacts of state and local reductions, there is still an overwhelming belief that the state can grow out of this problem as it has in the past. Nowhere is that belief stronger than with the growing challenge of funding public employee pensions and retiree healthcare, with a projected shortfall of between $200 billion and $500 billion just for state pension funds, depending on the estimate. Unfunded retiree healthcare obligations add an additional $60 billion. There is little agreement about how to mitigate those challenges.
The pension issue is emblematic of the broader paralysis of the state. There is consensus on the existence of the problem, but no agreement whatsoever on just how bad it is or how it should be solved. In spite of critical funding constraints, there is no agreement over whether to raise additional revenue or to reduce benefits. Financial experts appear to agree that state and local pension systems need to revisit how pensions are calculated, but enacting changes for anyone but current employees — the bulk of the current unfunded liability — is an extremely difficult proposition. A few cities have attempted to tackle the task: San Francisco negotiated changes to its system, and both San Diego and San Jose passed reforms at the ballot; Los Angeles is still on the horizon. The pension reform proposal for the State of California, signed into law last month by Governor Brown, leaves the benefits of current employees untouched but requires them to share in the expense of increased benefit costs.
And these are exactly the types of challenges that have driven several California cities into bankruptcy — Mammoth Lakes, Stockton and San Bernardino in 2012 alone. The structural costs of labor, healthcare and pension benefits have in these cases eclipsed the ability of cities to provide core services. In some instances cities are closing recreation centers simply to retain public safety services. We have clearly arrived at a time when we must prioritize services and invest limited resources wisely.
California, both the state and to some extent its cities, is at a crossroads: Either we operate within the constraints of this “new normal” or we come to agreement on solutions that can be jointly sold to legislators and taxpayers. In the past, consistent growth and fleeting downturns have allowed California to in many ways paper over the major challenges and rely on one-time fixes to weather the occasional storm.
It’s clear that time is over.
Hear recordings of the complete panel sessions >>
Improving Access to Fresh Food Across San Francisco
A map of existing food retailers shows the uneven distribution of food acces across San Francisco. Image courtesy San Francisco Department of Public Health. See the full map >>
San Francisco is known internationally for its celebration of food. The city can boast of top restaurants; nationally acclaimed grocers, bakers and butchers; a thriving fleet of food trucks; and bountiful farmers’ markets. But these food retailers are not distributed equally across the city. While San Franciscans in many neighborhoods can take a short walk or ride and find a greengrocer or supermarket, in some parts of the city, food access is more difficult.
The Department of Public Health has mapped the distribution of existing food retailers as part of its Sustainable Communities Index program. The results show that a number of neighborhoods — including Treasure Island, the Tenderloin, Hunters Point and Visitacion Valley, among others — have limited to no fresh food retail options.
While a full service grocery store is never more than a couple of miles away in a city as dense as San Francisco, the lack of quality, fresh food access within a convenient distance has both quality of life and public health impacts. Week to week, having to travel further for groceries – whether by foot, transit or car – takes up time and money. This travel is an additional cost that few San Franciscans would enjoy, but it’s especially difficult for low-income residents, many of whom live in neighborhoods with the least convenient access to fresh food.
In addition to the quality of life impacts, a neighborhood’s access to fresh food is also strongly connected to the health of the neighborhood. As Policy Link, a national non-profit organization pointed out in its Grocery Gap report, proximity to fresh food is strongly correlated with levels of obesity, diabetes and other diet-related diseases. Though recent articles in the Washington Post and New York Times have questioned how much the introduction of a new food retailer into a neighborhood positively impacts public health, food access advocates have in turn raised questions about the studies that are cited and pointed out that providing fresh food retail outlets is only one part (albeit an important part) of a campaign to improve diet-related public health.
Recognizing the importance of food access, Supervisor Eric Mar introduced legislation on September 25 to better coordinate the city’s efforts on the issue. The ordinance would establish a Healthy Food Retailer Incentives Program housed in the Office of Economic and Workforce Development. On the supply side of the equation, the program would be responsible for coordinating the city’s food access initiatives within a “one-stop shop” that links new or existing small food retail businesses (those less than 20,000 square feet in size) with incentives and technical support ranging from permit expediting and design assistance to grants and loans. The program is also structured to encourage convenience stores and small grocers to reduce the amount of shelf space they dedicate to tobacco and alcohol products. On the demand side, the legislation calls for the new program to pair its support for businesses with community engagement (like that piloted by the Food Guardians and the Southeast Food Access Working Group.)
Promoting healthy food retail has the additional potential benefit of providing economic development. Studies have shown that grocery stores and thriving corner stores can not only provide jobs but can also serve as anchor retailers that lift the fortunes of nearby businesses.
Even with a new coordinated focus from a city agency, addressing food access will not be easy. The changes will take money: retailers investing in new store designs and products, and consumers buying enough fresh food to make it pencil out for the retailer. And gauging the impact will take time. Supervisor Mar’s legislation has energized conversation about what the city can do to better address food access, and SPUR will continue to track the proposal’s development.
PARK(ing) Day and the Legacy of Iterative Placemaking
SPUR and Urban Putt teamed up to build a mini-golf version of Golden Gate Park for PARK(ing) Day 2012. Photo by Sergio Ruiz.
On September 21 SPUR celebrated PARK(ing) Day with an original form of alchemy: transforming asphalt into mini-golf and pizza.
The annual event, celebrated in more than 160 cities, invites the public to reimagine metered parking spots as new types of urban space. The 2012 celebration saw artists, designers and business owners around the world taking to the streets to create everything from temporary hair salons to bicycle repair shops to green space.
This year SPUR’s PARK(ing) Day creations included a parklet featuring lounge chairs and live music — built in partnership with Transform — outside our San Jose office and, in San Francisco, a miniature golf version of Golden Gate Park, complete with Stow Lake, the bison paddock and Ocean Beach. The mini-golf parklet, built over a five-week period by SPUR members Steve Fox and Leslie Crawford, was recognized on sites from Architizer to The Washington Post as a favorite contribution.
Our Golden Gate Parklet included a miniature Stow Lake and tiny bison. Photo by Sergio Ruiz.
Setting up the parklet in front of SPUR's San Jose office. Photo courtesy Leah Toeniskoetter.
PARK(ing) Day happens just once a year, but its effects have been significantly more lasting. In the seven years since the concept first debuted, PARK(ing) Day has become the progenitor of a distinctly San Francisco model of iterative placemaking, using temporary interventions to build momentum for permanent improvements to the public realm. It began in 2005 when the San Francisco-based design studio ReBar reconceived a parking meter as a short-term lease to experiment with public urban space, then invited others to follow suit. The next year there were 47 PARK(ing) Day creations in thirteen cities. And the year after that, hundreds.
As PARK(ing) Day caught on around the world, a bell went off for San Francisco officials and activists accustomed to being constrained by limited resources, a change-resistant public culture and a regulatory review process so punitive that, on small projects, clearance could cost more than construction. Temporary, reversible projects, on the other hand, could be fast-tracked, and impacts studied in situ, all while changing both the fabric of the city and the discourse around it. Parklets in parking spots, plazas in alleys, Sunday street closures, separated bike lanes, retail hubs on vacant lots and urban farms — all have been the fruit of this like-mindedness between artists and policymakers around the benefits of travelling the temporary to permanent continuum.
A semi-permanent parklet on 22nd Street in San Francisco. Photo by Sergio Ruiz.
The impact of this San Francisco model is powerfully on display at the 2012 Venice Architectural Biennale, where the United States pavilion won an honorable mention for its arsenal of DIY, mirco-urbanism projects — models of iterative placemaking that are heir to PARK(ing) Day’s provocative intervention. Not surprising, a significant number of the firms representing the U.S. are from San Francisco.
These developments are very exciting. Temporary interventions invite the community to inhabit and test new spaces and programs and give shape to the permanent solution. But temporary cannot be a substitute for permanent. It cannot become the only option for creating and maintaining public space. The real legacy of the San Francisco model will lie in leveraging these temporary experiments into high-quality public spaces with an enduring civic presence.
SPUR Launches San Jose Urban Design Initiative
Downtown San Jose's Outdoor Living Room project uses urban design elements like landscaping to create an inviting public space along South First Street. Photo from SPUR's San Jose study trip.
SPUR’s San Jose office is convening a task force of city officials and planning and development thought leaders to tackle a vexing question: How can the nation’s tenth largest city transform its historically suburban built environment into one that supports an active street life, greater use of transit and a stronger urban fabric? San Jose has charted an ambitious course through its new 2040 General Plan; one of the major goals is to concentrate development in key areas called urban villages. These villages, mostly located along major transit lines, aim to support reductions in solo driving and associated carbon emissions while creating a more engaging, livable city that can compete for the creative workforce that is driving today’s tech economy.
As the city initiates a local planning process for these areas, a critical opportunity emerges to get the placemaking details right. SPUR’s initiative will focus on physical planning and urban design. We will address site planning; building placement, orientation and access; the design of streets and blocks; the design and use of open space; and the organization of land uses. In short, we will look at all the ways a land use program is translated into a place that either does or does not support walking, cycling and transit.
Efforts to achieve better urban design outcomes are nothing new in San Jose. In fact, sound urban design principles have been articulated repeatedly in city guidelines since the 1980s. But despite great strides in the downtown and some gradual improvement elsewhere, development in San Jose is still overwhelmingly auto-dependent and has not produced the kinds of pedestrian- and transit-friendly neighborhoods that can truly support a shift away from the private car. Financial pressures and fierce competition for employment uses have hampered the city’s ability to uphold the principles espoused in its plans.
SPUR’s task force will reach well beyond planning and urban design, drawing from all the disciplines that shape the built environment, from development and traffic planning to lending and marketing. We will drill into the policies, processes, decisions and compromises that shape real-world projects and identify impediments to urban design excellence. We will also develop a collection of precedent projects from places similar to San Jose to show what success can look like — and how it can happen under complex real-world constraints. Finally, the task force will produce a report recommending changes to the development process that can yield improvements on the ground. Once these recommendations are in place, SPUR will support their implementation through the urban village planning process and help city officials make this ambitious vision everything it can be.
Read the San Jose 2040 General Plan >>
Keep up with this project — join SPUR’s San Jose mailing list >>
Combatting Coastal Erosion, One Truckload of Sand at a Time
The City of San Francisco and the National Parks Service recently partnered to fight erosion by placing sand at the southern end of Ocean Beach. Image courtesy of the San Francisco Department of Public Works.
Over the past two months, the National Park Service, Public Utilities Commission and Department of Public Works collaborated to move more than 73,300 cubic yards of sand from the north to the south end of Ocean Beach to provide protection against erosion. This process stabilizes the coast temporarily and provides useful data about coastal erosion rates. In addition to reducing the need for more engineered erosion protection measures, such as large piles of boulders, the Ocean Beach Sand Management Project also restores public access on the north end of the beach, where sand had built up, blocking the promenade and stairwells.
Why does sand erode in some places and accrete in others? Sand accumulates at the northern end of the beach through a complex interplay of natural sediment dynamics and management practices. Among other things, United States Army Corps of Engineers annually dredges the Golden Gate Marine Shipping Channel through an offshore sandbar and places the dredged sand in two sites, where it is picked up by ocean currents and eventually deposited on Ocean Beach. The effects are especially notable during the spring, when shifting winds and currents deposit significant amounts of sand and create large sand mounds in the north. This system is part of a pattern of sediment circulation that moves sand from the Golden Gate to about the middle of Ocean Beach, gradually pushing it northward. (See a video of this process in action.)
While the northern end of Ocean Beach has been widening due to these natural and manmade factors, the southern end of Ocean Beach experiences a net loss of sediment as circulation patterns move sand southward. Winter storms will probably cause additional erosion near Sloat Boulevard. Unchecked, this erosion is likely to have environmental consequences and damage city infrastructure, including San Francisco’s wastewater treatment system.
Going forward, the Army Corps of Engineers plans to eliminate the need to move sand by truck and will deposit dredged sand directly where erosion is worst. The Corps will move four times this year’s volume of sand from the Marine Shipping Channel and pump it directly onto the beach near the intersection of Great Highway and Sloat Boulevard. This beach nourishment project is fundamental to recommendations SPUR has made in the Ocean Beach Master Plan. It is also part of the Coastal Regional Sediment Management Plan, a new interagency effort between the Army Corps and the California Natural Resources Agency. That process will study sediment management options from Baker Beach in San Francisco to Shelter Cove in Pacifica, including beach nourishment, artificial reefs and managed retreat.
As SPUR and our partners continue to plan for climate change and sea level rise at Ocean Beach, these kinds of nimble, adaptive multi-agency efforts will become increasingly important. Projects like these help bridge the gap until SPUR’s Ocean Beach Master Plan recommendations can be implemented.
Combatting Coastal Erosion, One Truckload of Sand at a Time
The City of San Francisco and the National Parks Service recently partnered to fight erosion by placing sand at the southern end of Ocean Beach. Image courtesy of the San Francisco Department of Public Works.
Over the past two months, the National Park Service, Public Utilities Commission and Department of Public Works collaborated to move more than 73,300 cubic yards of sand from the north to the south end of Ocean Beach to provide protection against erosion. This process stabilizes the coast temporarily and provides useful data about coastal erosion rates. In addition to reducing the need for more engineered erosion protection measures, such as large piles of boulders, the Ocean Beach Sand Management Project also restores public access on the north end of the beach, where sand had built up, blocking the promenade and stairwells.
Why does sand erode in some places and accrete in others? Sand accumulates at the northern end of the beach through a complex interplay of natural sediment dynamics and management practices. Among other things, United States Army Corps of Engineers annually dredges the Golden Gate Marine Shipping Channel through an offshore sandbar and places the dredged sand in two sites, where it is picked up by ocean currents and eventually deposited on Ocean Beach. The effects are especially notable during the spring, when shifting winds and currents deposit significant amounts of sand and create large sand mounds in the north. This system is part of a pattern of sediment circulation that moves sand from the Golden Gate to about the middle of Ocean Beach, gradually pushing it northward. (See a video of this process in action.)
While the northern end of Ocean Beach has been widening due to these natural and manmade factors, the southern end of Ocean Beach experiences a net loss of sediment as circulation patterns move sand southward. Winter storms will probably cause additional erosion near Sloat Boulevard. Unchecked, this erosion is likely to have environmental consequences and damage city infrastructure, including San Francisco’s wastewater treatment system.
Going forward, the Army Corps of Engineers plans to eliminate the need to move sand by truck and will deposit dredged sand directly where erosion is worst. The Corps will move four times this year’s volume of sand from the Marine Shipping Channel and pump it directly onto the beach near the intersection of Great Highway and Sloat Boulevard. This beach nourishment project is fundamental to recommendations SPUR has made in the Ocean Beach Master Plan. It is also part of the Coastal Regional Sediment Management Plan, a new interagency effort between the Army Corps and the California Natural Resources Agency. That process will study sediment management options from Baker Beach in San Francisco to Shelter Cove in Pacifica, including beach nourishment, artificial reefs and managed retreat.
As SPUR and our partners continue to plan for climate change and sea level rise at Ocean Beach, these kinds of nimble, adaptive multi-agency efforts will become increasingly important. Projects like these help bridge the gap until SPUR’s Ocean Beach Master Plan recommendations can be implemented.
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