I have several students who are struggling to focus on their term paper research topics because they find that all planning issues are inter-connected. On the one hand I praise them, because holistic thinking is one of the distinctive traits of a well-educated planner. On the other hand, I urge them to figure out how to responsibly set aside all the many inter-linked factors in planning so that they can effectively critique one issue that can be decided by non-planners: both the voting public and the leaders they elect.
A broad understanding in American planning is that traffic congestion (and therefore stress, lost work-hours, and greenhouse gas emissions) is inseparable from housing availability and the geography of jobs. In California general plan law, Housing, Circulation (transportation), and Land Use are three (of the seven) required Elements in every General Plan for a city or county. During during general plan updates, each Element might be updated by a private consulting firm, because cash-strapped cities cannot afford to retain staff with the skills to do an occasional update. But consultants–even very competent ones–are not necessarily local and their contract stipulates that they focus on that one Element. Structurally, this whole arrangement pushes all parties involved to think about each issue very separately–even though we all know that they are deeply inter-linked and inseparable.
The problem gets even worse when we recognize that we will need to plan for very rapid changes in our urban structures and system over the next few decades. As I wrote last year, climate change has made much of California far more prone to extreme firestorms. Most of the extreme danger is in forested hills and mountains, but some of that pertains to cities as well–such as the East Bay Hills, the Santa Cruz Mountains, and multiple ranges and canyons in metro Lost Angeles. The fraction that affects cities means that about 1/3 of California cities are places where I would recommend against ever buying or building. We will need to accommodate several million internal California refugees, and if we have any ethics at all, we will also need to accommodate the people seeking to flee Greg Abbott’s cruel policies in Texas. Furthermore, millions of international refugees may be coming from Ukraine and other world regions.
After reading a draft paper of one of my students, I realized that we probably need to change Land Use policies first. Why? Housing, transportation, job location, environmental protection…these all are interlinked. True. But the point of greatest resistance is Land Use. If it cannot be changed, then all the most innovative transit solutions, all the most nuanced environmental regulations, all the most hard-nosed value-stabilization policies will fail. If we maintain segregated sprawl-o-rama as our default land-use policies, everything else will fail. On the other hand, changing those policies is the least expensive. Yes, you will need to have a series of meetings to enact new regulations and repeal a vast array of old regulations. But but the meetings and paperwork of policy change are far cheaper than rebuilding infrastructure for walkability, for sustainability, and for sustained economic growth.