CitizenMarin invites you to Save the Date & Make Your Voice Heard !

Save the Date!

 

 

The 1st Annual Marin Town Hall Meeting
 

"Our Planning and Affordable Housing Challenges in Marin"

 

Wednesday, March 20th 2013

6:30 to 9:30 pm
 

Al Boro Community Center,

San Rafael, CA 94901

 

  Learn about how regional planning is robbing our communities of local control and threatening our chance for a sustainable future! Join us and make your voice heard!

Details to follow for this tax deductible event!

Marinwood Village/Dixie School Bus Yard in FEMA flood zone

Just when you thought it couldn't get worse....

According to the 2009 FEMA Flood Zone Map. Fema Map home page  , over half of the Dixie School Bus Yard and parts of Marinwood Plaza appear to be on or next to the Miller Creek Flood Zone.

Aren't there significant restrictions to building in a flood zone?   Why isn't this fact public?


The Marinwood Village site appears very troubling for housing.  It has toxic chemicals, it is located next to a freeway with significant health hazards, two high powered microwave farms are located in the Southeast corner of the property and a 16 foot retaining wall will have to be built for the tenant and we may need a ladder truck for fighting fires in the multistory structures.  Of course the issues of school crowding, pollution, traffic, parking, strain on government services, and their 55 year tax free existance at the expense of the community won't be going away either.

It appears that Bridge Housing has some significant "selling" to do.

Will High Density Housing Import Crime?

American Murder Mystery

Why is crime rising in so many American cities? The answer implicates one of the most celebrated antipoverty programs of recent decades.

By Hanna Rosin

Photographs by Robert King/Polaris Images
Video footage shot by Hanna Rosin

THE THIN BLUE LINE: Doug Barnes of the Memphis Police Department inside the Old Allen Station armory

 

To get to the Old Allen police station in North Memphis, you have to drive all the way to the end of a quiet suburban road until it turns country. Hidden by six acres of woods, the station seems to be the kind of place that might concern itself mainly with lost dogs, or maybe the misuse of hunting licenses. But it isn’t. Not anymore. As Lieutenant Doug Barnes waited for me to arrive one night for a tour of his beat, he had a smoke and listened for shots. He counted eight, none meant for buck. “Nothing unusual for a Tuesday,” he told me.

 

Barnes is white, middle-aged, and, like many veteran cops, looks powerful without being fit. He grew up four miles from the station during the 1960s, he said, back when middle-class whites lived peacefully alongside both city elites and working-class African Americans. After the 1968 riots, Barnes’s father taught him the word curfew and reminded him to lock the doors. Still, the place remained, until about 10 years ago, a pretty safe neighborhood where you could play outside with a ball or a dog. But as he considered more-recent times, his nostalgia gave way to something darker. “I have never been so disheartened,” he said.

 

He remembers when the ground began to shift beneath him. He was working as an investigator throughout the city, looking into homicides and major crimes. Most of his work was downtown. One day in 1997, he got a call to check out a dead car that someone had rolled up onto the side of the interstate, on the way to the northern suburbs. The car “looked like Swiss cheese,” he said, with 40 or 50 bullet holes in it and blood all over the seats. Barnes started investigating. He located one corpse in the woods nearby and another, which had been shoved out a car door, in the parking lot of a hospital a few miles away. He found a neighborhood witness, who gave up everything but the killers’ names. Two weeks later, he got another call about an abandoned car. This time the body was inside. “It was my witness,” he recalled, “deader than a mackerel.”

 

At this point, he still thought of the stretch of Memphis where he’d grown up as “quiet as all get-out”; the only place you’d see cruisers congregated was in the Safeway parking lot, where churchgoing cops held choir practice before going out for drinks. But by 2000, all of that had changed. Once-quiet apartment complexes full of young families “suddenly started turning hot on us.” Instead of the occasional break-in, Barnes was getting calls about armed robberies, gunshots in the hallways, drug dealers roughing up their neighbors. A gang war ripped through the neighborhood. “We thought, What the hell is going on here?” A gang war! In North Memphis! “All of a sudden it was a damn war zone,” he said.

 

As we drove around his beat, this new suburban warfare was not so easy to make out. We passed by the city zoo and Rhodes College, a serene-looking campus on a hill. We passed by plenty of quiet streets lined with ranch houses, not fancy but not falling down, either. Then Barnes began to narrate, street by street, getting more animated and bitter by the block.

 

Here was the perfectly pleasant-looking Maplewood Avenue, where the old azaleas were just starting to bloom and the local cops were trying to weed out the Chicago drug connection. Farther down the avenue, two households flew American flags, and a third was known for manufacturing “cheese,” a particularly potent form of powdered heroin. The Hollywood branch of the local library, long famous for its children’s room, was now also renowned for the time thugs stole $1,800 there from a Girl Scout who’d been collecting cookie funds. Finally we came to a tidy brick complex called Goodwill Village, where Barnes had recently chased down some gang members who’d been taking turns having sex with a new female recruit. As we closed in on midnight, Barnes’s beat began to feel like the setting of a David Lynch movie, where every backyard and cul-de-sac could double as a place to hide a body. Or like a suburban remake of Taxi Driver, with Barnes as the new Travis Bickle. “I’m like a zookeeper now,” said Barnes. “I hold the key, and my job right now is to protect the people from all the animals.”

 

On September 27, 2007, a headline in The Commercial Appeal, the city’s biggest newspaper, announced a dubious honor: “Memphis Leads U.S. in Violent Crime.” Local precincts had been seeing their internal numbers for homicide, rape, aggravated assault, and robbery tick up since the late 1990s, starting around the time Barnes saw the first dead car. By 2005, a criminologist closely tracking those numbers was describing the pattern as a crime explosion. In May of 2007, a woman from upscale Chickasaw Gardens was raped by two men, at gunpoint; the assailants had followed her and her son home one afternoon. Outraged residents formed Citizens Against Crime and lobbied the statehouse for tougher gun laws. “People are concerned for their lives, frankly,” said one county commissioner, summarizing the city’s mood. This March, a man murdered six people, including two young children, in a house a few miles south of Old Allen Station.

 

Falling crime rates have been one of the great American success stories of the past 15 years. New York and Los Angeles, once the twin capitals of violent crime, have calmed down significantly, as have most other big cities. Criminologists still debate why: the crack war petered out, new policing tactics worked, the economy improved for a long spell. Whatever the alchemy, crime in New York, for instance, is now so low that local prison guards are worried about unemployment.

 

Lately, though, a new and unexpected pattern has emerged, taking criminologists by surprise. While crime rates in large cities stayed flat, homicide rates in many midsize cities (with populations of between 500,000 and 1 million) began increasing, sometimes by as much as 20percent a year. In 2006, the Police Executive Research Forum, a national police group surveying cities from coast to coast, concluded in a report called “A Gathering Storm” that this might represent “the front end … of an epidemic of violence not seen for years.” The leaders of the group, which is made up of police chiefs and sheriffs, theorized about what might be spurring the latest crime wave: the spread of gangs, the masses of offenders coming out of prison, methamphetamines. But mostly they puzzled over the bleak new landscape. According to FBI data, America’s most dangerous spots are now places where Martin Scorsese would never think of staging a shoot-out—Florence, South Carolina; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Reading, Pennsylvania; Orlando, Florida; Memphis, Tennessee.

 

Memphis has always been associated with some amount of violence. But why has Elvis’s hometown turned into America’s new South Bronx? Barnes thinks he knows one big part of the answer, as does the city’s chief of police. A handful of local criminologists and social scientists think they can explain it, too. But it’s a dismal answer, one that city leaders have made clear they don’t want to hear. It’s an answer that offers up racial stereotypes to fearful whites in a city trying to move beyond racial tensions. Ultimately, it reaches beyond crime and implicates one of the most ambitious antipoverty programs of recent decades.

 

Early every Thursday, Richard Janikowski drives to Memphis’s Airways Station for the morning meeting of police precinct commanders. Janikowski used to teach law and semiotics, and he still sometimes floats on a higher plane; he walks slowly, speaks in a nasal voice, and quotes from policy books. But at this point in his career, he is basically an honorary cop. A criminologist with the University of Memphis, Janikowski has established an unusually close relationship with the city police department. From the police chief to the beat cop, everyone knows him as “Dr. J,” or “GQ” if he’s wearing his nice suit. When his researchers are looking for him, they can often find him outside the building, having a smoke with someone in uniform.

 

One Thursday in March, I sat in on the morning meeting. About 100 people—commanders, beat cops, researchers, and a city councilman—gathered in a sterile conference room with a projector up front. The session had none of the raucous air of precinct meetings you see on cop shows. Nobody was making crude jokes or bragging about the latest run-in with the hood rats.

 

One by one, the precinct commanders presented crime and arrest statistics in their wards. They broke the information down into neat bar graphs—type of crime, four-week comparison, shifting hot spots. Thanks to Janikowski’s influence, the commanders sounded more like policy wonks than police. “It used to be the criminal element was more confined,” said Larry Godwin, the police chief. “Now it’s all spread out. They might hit one area today and another tomorrow. We have to take a sophisticated look on a daily, hourly basis, or we might never get leverage on it.” For a police department facing a volatile situation, the bar graphs imposed some semblance of order.

 

Janikowski began working with the police department in 1997, the same year that Barnes saw the car with the bullet holes. He initially consulted on a program to reduce sexual assaults citywide and quickly made himself useful. He mapped all the incidents and noticed a pattern: many assaults happened outside convenience stores, to women using pay phones that were hidden from view. The police asked store owners to move the phones inside, and the number of assaults fell significantly.

About five years ago, Janikowski embarked on a more ambitious project. He’d built up enough trust with the police to get them to send him daily crime and arrest reports, including addresses and types of crime. He began mapping all violent and property crimes, block by block, across the city. “These cops on the streets were saying that crime patterns are changing,” he said, so he wanted to look into it.

 

When his map was complete, a clear if strangely shaped pattern emerged: Wait a minute, he recalled thinking. I see this bunny rabbit coming up. People are going to accuse me of being on shrooms! The inner city, where crime used to be concentrated, was now clean. But everywhere else looked much worse: arrests had skyrocketed along two corridors north and west of the central city (the bunny rabbit’s ears) and along one in the southeast (the tail). Hot spots had proliferated since the mid-1990s, and little islands of crime had sprung up where none had existed before, dotting the map all around the city.

 

Janikowski might not have managed to pinpoint the cause of this pattern if he hadn’t been married to Phyllis Betts, a housing expert at the University of Memphis. Betts and Janikowski have two dogs, three cats, and no kids; they both tend to bring their work home with them. Betts had been evaluating the impact of one of the city government’s most ambitious initiatives: the demolition of the city’s public-housing projects, as part of a nationwide experiment to free the poor from the destructive effects of concentrated poverty. Memphis demolished its first project in 1997. The city gave former residents federal “Section8” rent-subsidy vouchers and encouraged them to move out to new neighborhoods. Two more waves of demolition followed over the next nine years, dispersing tens of thousands of poor people into the wider metro community.

 

If police departments are usually stingy with their information, housing departments are even more so. Getting addresses of Section 8 holders is difficult, because the departments want to protect the residents’ privacy. Betts, however, helps the city track where the former residents of public housing have moved. Over time, she and Janikowski realized that they were doing their fieldwork in the same neighborhoods.

 

About six months ago, they decided to put a hunch to the test. Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns with Betts’s map of Section8 rentals. Where Janikowski saw a bunny rabbit, Betts saw a sideways horseshoe (“He has a better imagination,” she said). Otherwise, the match was near-perfect. On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section8 addresses are represented by little red dots. All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire. The rest of the city has almost no dots.

 

 

Betts remembers her discomfort as she looked at the map. The couple had been musing about the connection for months, but they were amazed—and deflated—to see how perfectly the two data sets fit together. She knew right away that this would be a “hard thing to say or write.”

 

 Nobody in the antipoverty community and nobody in city leadership was going to welcome the news that the noble experiment that they’d been engaged in for the past decade had been bringing the city down, in ways they’d never expected. But the connection was too obvious to ignore, and Betts and Janikowski figured that the same thing must be happening all around the country. Eventually, they thought, they’d find other researchers who connected the dots the way they had, and then maybe they could get city leaders, and even national leaders, to listen.

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Full story : American Murder Mystery

  

Trains are coming and they want land and your taxes.

The Smart train is seizing land via eminent domain but forcing private property owners to pay for their own train crossings.

See this recent TV Report.

Smart Trains use eminent domain but force private property owners to pay for own crossings


The Board of Supervisors have commissioned studies for trolleys to run from Fairfax to San Rafael.  Make no mistake. This is all about building low income housing and getting federal tax dolllars.  The trolley people want to build a network of trolley lines throughout the neighborhoods of Marin.

see www.marintrolleys.org.

It all seems so nice until you consider the real world implications.  The trolley will significantly add to commute times, cause congested traffic and create access problems for thousands of property owners.

We live in the 21st century.  We need to make peace with our time and forget returning to the 19th century way of life.  Many exciting  green transportation alternatives exist that will allow us to get
to our destinations quickly and cheaply.  Wouldn't you rather spend time with your loved ones than on crowded public transportation? 

A Vehicle Mileage Tax Coming Soon to California?

Editor's Note:  The MTC suggested a VMT (vehicle mileage tax) in June 2012 but was promptly denied. Caltrans will now install meters at on/off ramps which may have the same effect.  The motivation is to raise additional revenue and to make transportation more expensive so that people will be encouraged to use public transit.  Look for policies like this in California shortly.

from Atlantic Cities:

In Oregon, Pushing Ahead With Road Use Fees

• Eric Jaffe
• Jan 18, 2013
• 25 Comments

Shutterstock

 

Close

If the gas tax were a fuel gauge, its needle would be quivering pretty close to Empty. As great as hybrid, electric, and fuel-efficient cars are for the environment, each new one to hit the road diminishes gas tax revenue. Even if states increased the tax — which many have refused to do for far too long — its long-term viability as a funding mechanism is doubtful at best.

The most compelling replacement for the gas tax is a vehicle-miles traveled fee. From a funding perspective, a V.M.T. fee would certainly level the playing field: instead of paying road taxes at the pump, drivers would pay based on how much they drive. But for some people, the idea of having the government track their every movement is just too creepy to accept.

The state of Oregon is trying to overcome those privacy concerns by exploring options for being tracked in a mileage program. In a new V.M.T. fee pilot program, still in progress, participants can choose from five mileage reporting plans, ranging in transparency from invisible to opaque.

"We have to somehow, some way, have people tell us how many miles they've driven," says Mary Olson, a commissioner at the state's department of transportation, and also a participant in the latest pilot. "If you want to use technology to do that, you run into privacy issues. Some people are very sensitive about that. Other people like me don't care at all. You can't have one solution. You have to have multiple solutions."
Oregon has been way ahead of the curve when it comes to implementing V.M.T. fees. The state's first concept study, completed in 2007, concluded decisively that "a mileage fee could be implemented to replace the gas tax as the principal revenue source for road funding." Nine in ten participants in that study said they'd support a V.M.T. program moving forward

[PDF].
The new usage charge pilot program, which began in November and runs through the end of this month, involves about 40 volunteers from state government. Participants chose the tracking plan that best fit their privacy tastes and will pay 1.56 cents for each mile driven — receiving a credit for any gas tax paid during the test period. The idea is to make sure each tracking option works in practice.
"What we're trying to accomplish now is really the mechanics of it," says Olson. "The goal today is not to raise more revenue. The goal today is to try to figure out a collection system that is efficient and that we have confidence in and that addresses all the concerns the public has."

The five tracking plans vary in terms of oversight. Two are managed by the Oregon D.O.T., three by a third-party vendor. They also vary in terms of payment: some require setting up an online account tied to credit or debit information, others go the old fashion route of monthly bills payable by check.
The key difference is the tracking system. Two advanced plans track mileage data as well as movement with a G.P.S.; the advantage here is that users aren't charged a fee for driving on private or out-of-state roads — only public roads in Oregon. Two basic plans involve an odometer-type device that collects mileage data but has no G.P.S. to track movement. Users may end up paying a little more, but they're getting privacy in return.

The most primitive plan, for people who want the most privacy, uses no tracking device at all. Users pre-pay a flat fee that assumes a monthly mileage. At some point, say when the car gets official inspections, the odometer is checked and the difference between miles paid and miles driven is reconciled.

Olson has chosen the most advanced plan. She says she plugged a small device into her car's diagnostic port and set up an online account — the whole process took five minutes. She has a pretty typical commute pattern, going five days a week from her home in Oregon City to her office in West Linn.

She says that in December she drove a total of 336.6 miles, according to her online V.M.T. statement, of which 334.4 miles were taxed. Her V.M.T. fee came to $5.21, but she received a gas tax refund of $6.20. That left her account with a credit of 99 cents. To challenge the system, Olson says she used her car's actual odometer to track her mileage on private, non-taxable roads, and that figure squared nicely with the V.M.T. statement.

"The gas tax is a perfect tax. It's not invasive on the person using it and it requires very little effort on the agency that depends on that money for providing services," says Olson. "Trying to replace that is really difficult, because anything you try to do is so much more complicated than just pulling up to the pump and paying for gas."

The usual caveats apply when discussing a system V.M.T. As we pointed out last August, mileage fees don't exactly encourage greener cars. They also may be vulnerable to tampering and create equity problems, especially in corridors that lack transit options. (Some of those concerns can be addressed if a proper portion of the fee goes toward public transportation.)

Despite these cautions, Oregon is preparing to take its system public soon. The state legislature has prepared a bill that would implement a V.M.T. fee on all vehicles getting 55 miles per gallon or better. (The change only applies to car models beginning in 2015, however, and as currently written the law wouldn't go into effect until that year.) Olson says the bill will be introduced sometime in 2013.

"It has to happen," she says of a shift to mileage fees. "Realistically, given the age of the transportation system, and the demands of increasing population, you have to be prepared to raise the necessary funds to provide the citizens with the type of transportation system that they want."
Top image: Minerva Studio/Shutterstock.com. Inset chart courtesy Oregon Department of Transportation

Keywords: Portland, VMT, mileage fee, oregon, gas tax

Eric Jaffe is a contributing writer to The Atlantic Cities and the author of The King's Best Highway: The Lost History of the Boston Post Road, the Route That Made America. He lives in New York

VIDEO: Light Rail Greatest Hits.

 

Should we expect SMART rail through San Rafael to be safer?

8 Urban Policy Ideas for Obama's 2nd Term

Editors Note: President Obama is a big supporter of Smart Growth and regionalist approach to government like ABAG (Association of Bay Area Governments)that take away rights of local communities to determine planning according to local needs. No sooner had the polls closed when SMART GROWTH urban planners offered ideas to accelerate Smart Growth . Much of the funding for the urbanization of Marinwood-Lucas Valley will come from HUD and other federal programs. Here is an article printed in the Atlantic on Wednesday after the election:

8 policy ideas the president should feel more than free to steal. 

• Emily Badger and Sommer Mathis Nov 07, 2012

America's cities may not have been a focus of this year's presidential campaign, but the economy certainly was. And all the evidence we have is that our urban areas, where some 80 percent of us live, are the true drivers of our economy. If the next president wants to find a way to jump start innovation and entrepreneurship, consumer spending, the housing market, and yes, the creation of jobs, focusing on policy areas that strengthen America's cities is a no-brainer, regardless of party affiliation. (Or at least, it should be.)
And so below you'll find eight of our favorite federal urban policy ideas, gathered in advance of Tuesday's election results, that we now hope someone on President Obama's team will print out and tape to their forehead. Heck, why stop there: you can do it, too! [NOTE: This has been updated slightly since it first posted Tuesday evening, to reflect the results of the election]
Reform and cap the home mortgage interest deduction and spend the savings on low-income housing. Currently, the federal government funnels about $35 billion a year in housing aid to families making more than $200,000 a year through the widely popular but counterproductive home mortgage interest deduction. Yonah Freemark and Lawrence Vale made a strong argument for creatively restructuring this housing aid in a recent New York Times op-ed:

The National Low Income Housing Coalition (N.L.I.H.C.), working with Representative Keith Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota, and more than 350 organizations nationwide, suggests reforming the deduction by converting it to a credit, capping eligible mortgages at $500,000 and using the proceeds to finance the National Housing Trust Fund.

This is a good idea: it would increase the number of middle-income families qualified for homeowners’ aid but reduce expenditures over all by cutting spending for the wealthy. Were about $30 billion in saved funds redirected to the poor, as the coalition proposes, federal funding for affordable housing could be almost doubled with no change in the deficit.

Raise the gas tax by 15 cents a gallon. This recommendation comes from the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles debt reduction commission. The gas tax, currently at 18.4 cents a gallon, feeds the Highway Trust Fund that pays for road infrastructure and mass transit across the country. The fund is on its way to insolvency, though (an ironic byproduct of the fact that we have more fuel-efficient cars and hybrids on the road today). In the long term, most experts agree that we need to move away from the gas tax toward some kind of user fee to fund transportation infrastructure, but in the meantime, nearly doubling it is our best bet. This will be wildly unpopular (with politicians and drivers). We should do it anyway. A slightly smaller hike of 10 cents has been projected to cost U.S. households on average about $9 a month.

Create a national infrastructure bank. Transportation is not the only infrastructure we’re bad at funding. The same applies to bridges, ports, waterways and energy systems. These projects are often funded by Washington according to earmarks, not actual significance. A new national infrastructure bank with an independent board could finance only those projects with the greatest regional or national value, leveraging private capital to pay for projects normally funded entirely with public money. This approach, similar to one that’s been used in Europe, Asia and Latin America, would also re-frame infrastructure as an investment rather than an expense. You can read more pleas for this idea here, here and here.
Reform the Federal Railroad Administration and enable regional high-speed rail funding. There's wide agreement that European-style high-speed rail would make the most sense here in the U.S. in the Northeast corridor and along the California coast. But neither will come to fruition until their two main obstacles are removed: the puzzle of how to ensure dedicated funding for them, and the dysfunctional Federal Railroad Administration.
On funding, we like former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit's idea of copying the strategies behind the original Interstate Highway Act of 1956, which owed its passage to "a lot of discussion, brokering, setting goals" with governors, as Babbitt puts it. Via Better Cities & Towns:

The biggest difficulty, he indicated, is that high-speed rail requires a dedicated form of financing. Would the country as a whole be willing to pay for a system serving seven or so states? That’s highly unlikely, said Babbitt. “There are 43 states that will say no to an earmarked tax.”
The way to overcome that obstacle is by establishing a gasoline tax that would be paid by residents of the Northeast corridor states, he argued. “That’s the lesson of the Interstate Highway Act. We need to get back to dedicated user fees. It should be focused on regional users.”

As for the FRA, thanks to our friends at Market Urbanism for tweeting this link to us earlier, which includes a brutal recap (written five years ago) of the agency policies that led to the debacle that is Amtrak's Acela service. We'll let Eric McCaughrin of the East Bay Bicycle Coalition remind us of all the gory details:

Amtrak's botched attempt at a high-speed train is a good case study in the problems caused by the FRA. As originally designed, the Acela was supposed to provide high-speed rail service on the Northeast Corridor (NEC) between Boston, New York, and Washington DC with speeds as high as 150 mph.
In order to procure the world's best off-the-shelf train for the least amount of money, Amtrak decided to buy an existing design from a European or Japanese manufacturer, who have decades of experience building and operating high-speed trains. The winner of this competition was a consortium of Bombadier and Alstom (the French TGV builder).
Then, in 1999 with Acela planning fully underway,
the FRA pulled the rug out by issuing regulations for high-speed rail service requiring trains to withstand 800,000 pounds force without deformation. The 800,000 figure is an arbitrary number dating back to the 1920s; this mandate has since been increased to 1 million pounds.
The buffering requirement confounded Bombadier. Train weight is of crucial importance as it affects the amount of track wear, noise, and energy costs. To meet the buffering regulation, the train would have to be significantly bulked-up. The result was a highspeed train nearly twice as heavy as its European counterparts. As such, the Acela has been described variously as a tank-on-wheels and a bank-vault-on-wheels. Indeed, an overweight train like Acela would be banned from the European high speed rail network.

Deploy social impact bonds. While we’re at it looking for novel funding schemes, this one would help pay for social programs that serve, for instance, foster children, criminal offenders, the mentally ill or drug addicts. These are the types of initiatives that tend to get hit first with budget cuts. But social impact bonds, already tried in Britain, could connect private investment to public good to keep such programs alive. John Roman and Jeffrey Butts at the Urban Institute explain how it worked in Britain here:

A social investment bank called Social Finance issued a 5-million pound bond to finance services for 3,000 recently released prisoners. Private investors, including community foundations and other charitable organizations, purchased the bond with the promise that if recidivism among the returning prisoners was reduced by 7.5 percent, they would receive a 7.5 percent return on their investment after six years, paid by the government. Even larger reductions in recidivism would result in greater returns.

Why would investors buy such bonds? Private donors, charities, and charitable foundations whose mission is to do good work and improve communities are betting that the profits they earn will allow them to do even more good work and more community development than they otherwise could. If the program flops, they are no worse off than if they had invested directly through grants.

Make “location efficiency” a thing and use it in federal policy. The Center for Neighborhood Technology popularized this idea with its Housing + Transportation Index measuring the two interrelated costs of living. Often, if you have a cheap house in the suburbs, you spend a lot on gas, while a more expensive apartment in a walkable neighborhood can come with dramatically lower transportation costs. This tradeoff speaks to location efficiency: How close is your home to the places you need to go – to your job, your grocery store and your favorite pub? Walkable neighborhoods are "location-efficient;" suburban subdivisions are not.

Under the Obama Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has begun to take a greater interest in this concept. Imagine if the federal government created a clear and unified definition for "location efficiency" and then used it as a metric to determine which local projects merited federal grants or other support. What if you could qualify for a larger federally backed mortgage on a "location-efficient" home?

Reform elections so they aren’t as chaotic as they were today. Seriously, why in America in 2012 should it take several hours of waiting in line to cast a simple ballot?

Some solid ideas to solve this, via our Atlantic colleague Andrew Cohen:

Congress ought to pass a "Voters' Rights Act," which guarantees a mail-in option and ensures significant early-voting hours for 10 days before a federal election. That would give working people -- you know, the real "middle class" -- four full days over two weekends to cast their ballot. Congress also ought to expand the scope of the Voting Rights Act, the venerable civil-rights statute, to force local election officials everywhere in America (and not just in Southern jurisdictions) to justify restrictions on voting rights.

And the next president, whoever he is, ought to quickly empanel another Commission on Federal Election Reform to investigate these partisan state schemes and recommend ways to achieve meaningful reform. Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor should head that commission. And former U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald should head up its investigative functions.

Invest in protecting our largest coastal cities from rising sea levels: The next president should do anything he can to reduce the carbon emissions that are contributing to global climate change. But the tragic truth is that even if America does everything possible to combat rising sea levels, sea levels are still going to rise. If Superstorm Sandy taught us anything, it's that we're well past due on discussing serious infrastructure solutions to this looming problem. Let's get started right away, while the political climate is primed. In the case of New York, here's five possibilities worth considering.
Top image: Andrew Kelly/Reuters

Full article: 8 Urban Policy Ideas

Planners want to Move your job Downtown.

Editor's Note: This article is published by SPUR (San Francisco Planning and Urban Renewal) www.spur.org who are key influencers of policy for ABAG and the County of Marin which is behind the Urbanization of Marinwood-Lucas Valley. 

Job Sprawl in the Megaregion

How can we slow the decentralization of work in Northern California?

Of the nearly 60 Fortune 1,000 companies in Northern California, only one-third of them are based in our megaregion’s central cities of San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento and Oakland. This sprawling pattern of job growth poses great challenges as the boundaries of the megaregion expand outward, resulting in unsustainable commute patterns and increased levels of greenhouse gas emissions. While many key industries of our megaregion’s economy are now based in these car-oriented suburbs, this sprawling pattern of employment must change if we wish to meet regional and statewide targets for addressing climate change.

In particular, the recent California state Senate bill 375 aims for transportation planning that reduces driving through better-coordinated land use planning. While the bill specifically discusses planning for housing, it is just as important for employment. We will not be able to reduce daily driving unless we investigate the matter of where jobs are located, and develop effective strategies to shift more work to locations that can be served by regional public transit.

In addition to its impact on the environment, the location of jobs is a key variable in the economic competitiveness of our regional economies. Long commutes on congested freeways reduce productivity. The spread-out pattern of work makes job access a challenge for people in lower-income households, who have fewer choices of where to live. Yet dense employment districts benefit employers as they share ideas, workers and clients. Proximity to other businesses — particularly in related industries — is an important factor in a firm’s competitiveness. This is best achieved when jobs and businesses are concentrated into centers.

This article outlines the problem of job sprawl, and offers a framework to address it. Our overall goal is to slow the continued outward growth of jobs from already developed employment centers, and to shift more commuters — wherever they work — into sustainable commute modes. We propose a four-part land-use solution to:

1. Shift more work back into traditional transit-served downtowns, such as the central business districts in San Francisco and Oakland.¹
2. Concentrate more employment at suburban transit stations in "edge cities" such as Walnut Creek, Concord, Sunnyvale and Mountain View.
3. Remake existing low-density office parks and scattered office buildings along highway corridors into higher density employment districts with the potential to be served by transit.
4. Reform the self-enclosed, car-oriented corporate campus into a more sustainable model that may include increasing employment density while also bringing in other uses, additional shuttles and new transit.

Achieving these four goals requires policy interventions that shift the incentive structure for employers, developers and individual commuters.

Ultimately, we envision a polycentric megaregion where the various employment centers serve different roles, yet are all connected in a transit network. The shifting of work to transit-served areas reinforces each center (including the traditional downtown) as more businesses become connected to each other. This vision recognizes the multi-centeredness that is a permanent feature of our megaregion, but tries to reshape this geography for a 21st century in which non-driving alternatives are increasingly important.

This graph is a jobs index comparing the jobs located more than 10 miles from CBDs to jobs located within three miles of CBDs. The dark blue sections show the difference in this ratio between 1998 and 2006. (For instance, the ratio for Phoenix is 1:1, meaning Phoenix experienced 100 percent more growth at its urban boundaries than it did in its city center.) The lightest areas show the values for cities within the Northern California megaregion.

Why the suburbs don’t have to sprawl

Suburbanization, or the outward movement of people and economic activity from central cities, has been a persistent feature of urban settlement for centuries. It is neither a contemporary problem, nor an issue specific to a certain city or country. But while every economically prosperous city in history has extended its boundaries by adding new residents and work settlements on its urban fringes, the first signs of suburbanization hardly resembled the low-density, auto-dependent and placeless pattern of development that we now know as sprawl.

By contrast, in the 19th century the suburbanization process was a logical extension of the city itself. While places like Brooklyn, New York and Lake View Township north of Chicago were initially located outside of the traditional city, by 1900 they were annexed by the growing city and no longer considered suburbs. Around the same time, many cities extended electric streetcar lines to residential communities called “streetcar suburbs.” These places were characterized by a streetcar connection through a main street commercial district. Parts of the inner East Bay such as Berkeley, Piedmont and the Rockridge neighborhood in Oakland were all streetcar suburbs. While these places today are praised for their liveliness and walkability, they facilitated an outward growth of metropolitan areas that helped fuel sprawl with the rise in private automobile ownership.

A more car-oriented era of suburbanization followed the declining use of streetcars. Before World War II, rising rates of car ownership fueled the development of suburban strip malls and manufacturing plants. (The issue of ‘whether jobs follow people or people follow jobs’ still remains unresolved. Some argue that the industrial jobs first left the city and then people followed the jobs — this was certainly the case for many of the Bay Area communities that grew to support shipbuilding industries during World War II.) Manufacturers were attracted to lower land and labor costs (particularly with the increasing advent of assembly lines) outside of city centers. And with the introduction of trucks, they no longer needed to be in city centers to utilize lower freight costs.

This pattern accelerated with the widening availability of homeowner subsidies and massive investments in highway infrastructure in the decades after WWII. Still, the most dramatic shift of employment centers occurred after 1970, particularly in office functions that had previously been located in downtown central business districts. As new service industries developed, locating employment in CBDs became unnecessary and expensive since most of the work could be done in remote office spaces using telecommunication technologies. As a consequence, many films built back offices in suburban sub-centers.

What is job sprawl?

Over the past few decades, employers have followed residents to the suburbs as the share of jobs in central cities has declined. In fact, most workers now live in one suburb and work in another, rather than commute back to the city. This process of job decentralization is the key factor that has facilitated job sprawl.
Yet what we call "job sprawl" is simply the spread-out organization of work into locations where the density is too low or that are too poorly designed to be effectively served with transit. As a result, the vast majority of commuters drive to work. Put most simply, the primary problem with job sprawl is that as work decentralizes, it puts more jobs in non-transit-served locations and means most commuters are unable to access work without a car.²

By contrast, when most jobs are in the core of a region, the "commute shed" — or the geographical area from which a region’s commuters originate — is fairly contained, and a higher percent of all commuters have overlapping commutes. Not only do most commuters live within a reasonable distance of their job (a commute of approximately 30 minutes), but many of them also have similar commutes, thus making transit investments highly effective.

But as more jobs move to the suburbs, each new job site has its own distinct commute shed. Suddenly, a "reasonable" 30 minute commute to this new suburban location can include a much more remote community now at the edge of the region. Because many of the edge communities have few economic development options, they often have city councils that are distinctly pro-growth and therefore willing to accept any development. In a region such as the Bay Area, where many of the core communities are generally anti-growth, pressure at the edge becomes even more intense. For example, as more work shifted to Concord and Livermore in the East Bay, commutes from places such as Brentwood, Antioch and Tracy became much more reasonable. The same holds true for job-rich Sacramento suburbs such as Rancho Cordova and Roseville, which makes living in the Sierra foothills viable.

Yet it is not the outward movement of jobs alone that is the problem. Instead, it is the disorganized, low-density form of employment that forces most people to use a car to make the trip between home and work. The more job locations there are, the harder they will be to serve efficiently with transit, particularly when the region’s commute patterns begin to look more and more like a spider web. In this situation, the most effective way to get from one place to another (or from home to work) is the private automobile. Public transit can almost never work where job density is too low and the residential origins are too scattered.

Over time, this process becomes self-reinforcing. As more jobs move to the suburbs, the commute sheds become more stretched out, and the edge sprawls farther out into farmland or natural habitats. And as workers increasingly move farther toward the edge of the megaregion, more employers will follow them and continue to perpetuate this cycle.

Today, the suburbanization of work is now a key driver of residential sprawl as the commute shed defines the edge or boundary of a megaregion. Reversing residential sprawl necessitates stopping job sprawl. Yet with more than half the U.S. population now working in the suburbs, stopping job sprawl is no longer about limiting the movement of work to the suburbs, but instead about reorganizing work within the suburbs to better meet the needs of a sustainable region.


Many of the jobs facing the highest decentralization rates nationally are key industries in the Northern California megaregion. For some industries, such as transportation and warehousing, decentralization is not surprising. But why are industries such as management, information and education moving away from central cities?

Why job sprawl is getting worse
As evidence that job sprawl is getting worse, we analyzed three trends: the decentralization of jobs, declining transit commute patterns, and increasing congestion and vehicle miles traveled.

Trend #1: There has been significant increase in job growth outside traditional downtowns
Since the 1990s, the share of jobs located within three miles of central business districts has steadily declined. Based on an analysis of the decentralization of work from the four central business districts or primary downtowns of Northern California (San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento and Stockton) during the eight-year period between 1998 and 2006, these CBDs experienced a net loss of more than 22,000 jobs, while jobs located 10 to 35 miles from these CBDs increased by more than 225,000.

Nationally, job growth out from the center has become a significant trend. Of metropolitan areas with more than 900,000 jobs within 35 miles of the central business district, all have experienced a decline in the share of jobs within three miles of the CBD and an increase in jobs 10 to 35 miles from the CBD.

Also, the rates at which jobs move outward in certain industries in the United States are increasing. Nationally, some of the most rapidly decentralizing industries are the same industries that are most important to the Northern California economy, and particularly to its traditional central business districts. Industries such as management, information services and education are experiencing the greatest share of relocation to areas 10 to 35 miles from CBDs. While it may not be surprising that manufacturing, transportation and warehousing are moving out into the suburbs and beyond, the trend of less cost-sensitive industries (for instance, knowledge services such as management of companies and finance) moving out poses yet another challenge for traditional downtowns, given that these are industries where the CBD is also most competitive. For example, nationally, 46 percent of jobs in "management of companies" and 42 percent of jobs in professional, scientific and technical services are located 10 miles or more from a traditional CBD.³


Over the last 8 years, central business districts in Northern California have lost over 22,000 jobs. Meanwhile the number of jobs located 10 to 35 miles from the CBDs has increased by over 225,000 (that’s more than half the number of jobs in downtown San Francisco).

Trend #2: The number of commuters who drive alone to work has increased dramatically.
The share of commuters in the Northern California megaregion who drive alone to work has been increasing since the 1980s. Even in San Francisco, where transit ridership is historically and significantly higher than elsewhere in the megaregion, the share of commuters who drive alone has grown. This increase is in part due to the movement of jobs from urban cores to suburban office parks that are not as easily accessible to transit. It is also due to the growing number of professionals living in San Francisco and commuting to information and technology jobs in the Peninsula and South Bay.

Among counties in the Northern California megaregion, San Joaquin County in the Central Valley and San Benito County south of Santa Clara County stand alone in experiencing a decline in the share of drive-alone commuters — due in no small part to the advent of transit access in these areas. San Joaquin County saw a significant increase in transit ridership following the 1998 creation of the Altamont Commuter Express, which links Stockton to San Jose with daily rail service. San Benito County also experienced an increase in the number of commuters who use transit to get to work, once Caltrain was extended to Gilroy in 1992 and transit from San Benito County to the station was introduced. This suggests that improving transit access to areas where it previously did not exist can have significant impacts on commuter travel behavior.

Despite the increase in drive-alone rates, there is hope. More than 30 percent of commuters who live within half a mile of a regional rail station take some form of public transportation to work. Improving transit access for commuters, on both the home and work trips, can have major impacts on traffic congestion, the number of vehicle miles traveled, and greenhouse gas emissions throughout the megaregion.

Trend #3: There has been a rise in VMT and traffic congestion across the megaregion.
The spreading of jobs across the megaregion has led to major increases in daily freeway vehicle miles traveled, the percent of commutes spent on congested roadways, and the personal cost of congestion that those who drive alone to work must bear. In 1982, only 35 percent of peak hour travel in the megaregion was congested. Today, that number is closer to 80 percent. Congestion costs each peak hour traveler more than $1,000 a year in wasted time, fuel and resources. As jobs continue to move farther away from both central business districts and transit nodes, this trend is only going to get worse.

Increasing congestion has been a consistent feature in Northern California commutes. Not surprisingly, the total transit ridership per capita has scarcely changed. With future population growth, just maintaining our current high levels of congestion will require shifting many more people and jobs to places served by transit.

How to solve job sprawl
While reinforcing traditional downtowns is a key goal of the megaregional planning agenda, suburban job locations increasingly are a part of our economic landscape and thus invariably a part of the solution. Job sprawl cannot be stopped or reshaped without acknowledging this and finding a way to make more suburban jobs transit-accessible.

We propose four solutions:

1. Put more jobs into existing transit-rich downtowns.
2. Shift more work to suburban transit-served employment centers, often in or near "edge cities."
3. Remake multi-tenant suburban office parks and scattered office buildings along highways corridors (our "edgeless cities") into more clustered, transit-served destinations.
4. Redesign the corporate campus to accommodate significantly more work and to further reduce drive-alone rates.

All four of these land-use approaches are necessary to reduce the harmful impacts of job sprawl. But each also has limitations.

Solution #1: Put more jobs into existing downtowns with high transit ridership.
First, the simplest solution is to create more jobs and encourage more businesses to be situated in downtowns that already have high transit ridership, mixed uses, mobility and infrastructure. This was the argument SPUR made in its "Future of Downtown" policy paper. In Northern California, San Francisco and Oakland are the best examples of downtowns with healthy transit ridership: San Francisco has more than 50 percent and Oakland around 24 percent. Downtown Sacramento and San Jose trail significantly, but are ideal places to add jobs, particularly because both are investing heavily in transit and asserting themselves as the economic and cultural centers of the surrounding areas.

The key to making this model work is the right combination of transit infrastructure, market-based parking pricing, good urban design, a well-maintained pedestrian environment and, depending on the city, the overcoming of other non-physical business-climate issues — such as perceptions about Oakland’s public safety or San Francisco’s costs.

This approach is easier said than done.⁴ It is very rare in American urbanism to successfully restore a continuous pedestrian fabric to central city landscapes that have already lost their historic buildings and replaced them with blank facades and surface parking lots, but that is the ambitious planning agenda we call for. This approach also requires significant investment in peak-hour transportation infrastructure, keeping in mind that it is generally less costly than the auto-centric infrastructure required by other employment models. The successful central business district model of good transit and a pedestrian environment with limits on parking is the most successful and proven way to get commuters out of their cars.

While some may argue that the idea of shifting more jobs back downtown is an attempt to return to the pre-automobile pattern of the early 20th century, when each region had a more monocentric form with a single large downtown, our notion actually is more of an acceptance of the polycentric form of the contemporary region. Given the three types of downtowns considered in this essay, the solution of adding more jobs to downtowns results in a widely differentiated set of transit-served downtowns that range from Oakland to Berkeley to San Mateo to San Rafael.

But today, this model must coexist with other ways of organizing work.

Solution #2: Channel more suburban jobs into transit-served nodes and edge cities.
The second-best locational solution to job sprawl is to shift more employment adjacent to rail or regional transit stations in the suburbs. Suburban transit-oriented development nodes are emerging and have created the foundation for increased transit commuting to suburban job destinations. This can be achieved through a variety of strategies, such as building on surface parking lots next to stations, rezoning nearby areas and reworking the street grids, and ultimately by influencing more businesses to locate near these established nodes.

There are some drawbacks to the suburban transit-oriented development approach. Even a successful suburban job center likely will not approach the density levels of a traditional downtown, and thus it will be hard to achieve high transit ridership. Further, commuters will be coming from scattered places, thus making it easier and faster to go from home to work via car, even if work is at a suburban TOD. Ultimately, the level of transit ridership to these places will be based on the availability and price of parking at the job center, the pedestrian experience from the station to work, and the density and transit accessibility of the commuters’ homes.

Solution #3: Create denser suburban job corridors.
The third locational solution is to remake existing car-oriented employment centers. These places are the low-density office, lab, retail and industrial spaces that spread along or near highway corridors and proliferate throughout suburbia. The places include buildings such as the Zhone headquarters along I-880 or Vacavalley Business Park. These edgeless areas are the hardest to address, in fact, because their employment densities are low and their employees are spread out. Additionally, in some places the land values are low, thus making it harder to increase densities.

Some of these edgeless cities do not have any rail transit today, but may be getting close to appropriate levels to support it. According to a well-known 1977 study, 8,000 people per square mile is the minimum residential density necessary to support rail investment.⁵

Solution #4: Reimagine the corporate campus.
The fourth locational solution is about remaking the traditional corporate campus, which is typically a relatively dense job center with a single tenant. There are several ways to accomplish this. First, there should be an expansion of the successful shuttle programs of employers such as Genentech, Apple and Google. For example, as many as 50 percent of workers employed at these companies (who live in San Francisco) take shuttles to work. This rivals the share of commuters taking transit to downtown San Francisco.

Second, there should be an increase in the number of jobs at each campus by building on the seas of parking and landscaping that surround existing buildings. With less parking, companies could begin to charge for parking and provide the revenue to transit commuters. Less parking and landscaping is also a cost-saver to the company. As employment density increases over time, new transit could be brought to the campus.

Third, the self-enclosed design should be opened and better integrated with the surrounding community. University campuses remain places of innovation and intellectual protection while also being more open to outsiders. This remaking of the campus could also involve integration of other uses such as retail and even housing to the campus and the areas immediately around it.


The number of Northern California commuters who drive alone to work has been steadily increasing since the 1980s, except in areas where regional transit access has been improved. For example, after the creation of the Altamont Commuter Express (ACE), transit ridership in San Joaquin county rose by 1,137 people daily. Similarly, when Caltrain was extended to Gilroy in Southern Santa Clara County — with shuttles linking San Benito to the station — ridership in San Benito jumped from 302 to 2,248 commuters per day.

Conclusion
As this article argues, solving job sprawl does not involve a single approach. We live and work in a polycentric region with a wide range of employment locations, each with a slightly different opportunity to capture future job growth. We also cannot be naíve and assume that the traditional central business districts will regain a majority share of regional jobs, even if this would be the most effective strategy to reduce overall driving. But we certainly can push to make sure that employment throughout the region shifts to more appropriate places. This strategy is the only viable approach to solving the worsening challenge of job sprawl, which in turn is one of the major causes of residential sprawl. Over the next year, SPUR will explore this issue further, refining its approach and developing policy solutions. If we are serious about stopping sprawl, we need to be just as focused on jobs as we are on housing.

ENDNOTES

¹ See "Recentering Work: The Future of Downtown San Francisco," March 2009, where we argued for channeling job growth into transit-rich cores, like downtown San Francisco.
² We are focused primarily on office sprawl. While many jobs in an economy do not require offices (retail, distribution, construction, production, etc.), the majority of work in the megaregion is directly tied to an employment center that is primarily a collection of office buildings.
³ Kneebone, Elizabeth. "Job Sprawl Revisited: The changing geography of metropolitan employment." Brookings, 2009.
⁴ An example from the City of Oakland demonstrates the challenge of increasing parking prices. When prices were raised to help fill a budget hole, local businesses staged a strike by shutting down their businesses, thus forcing the City Council to reverse the parking rate increases indefinitely. While well intentioned, this approach of ramping up parking costs can backfire if residents and local business owners perceive the increase to be more about paying local salaries and less about managing congestion or ensuring that there is always a free parking space. Reversing a poorly executed increase in parking prices can push back an improvement to parking management for years.
⁵ See: Pushkarev, Boris S. and Zupan, Jeffrey M. Public transportation and land use policy, 1977.

About The Authors

Egon Terplan is SPUR’s regional planning director. Graduate students Shelma Jun and Lesley Miller, and Ph.D. candidate Bige Yilmaz, assisted in research and writing for this article. Research for this article was funded with generous support from the Clarence E. Heller Foundation and the Wallace A. Gerbode Foundation.

From THE URBANIST Issue 485 • September 2009

• 
  Job Sprawl in the Megaregion

Marinwood-Lucas Valley can Learn alot from Sugar Hill New Hampshire

Editor's Note: Whether or not you agree with the town of Sugar Hill, NH 's activism, you must admire their independent spirit and government "by the people, for the people".  ABAG, MTC and the County of Marin should take heed to the local population before acting rashly with housing plans that fundementally transform a community to a Urban "Transit Village".  Local control is a core democratic right which should not be altered for the ambitions of regional planners and politicians.

 

Rebel Towns 

Barry Yeoman

January 16, 2013   |    This article appeared in the February 4, 2013 edition of The Nation.

 

• 
  Sugar Hill, New Hampshire. Courtesy: Anthony Quintano
   
  The 600 residents of Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, have done a laudable job of keeping the vulgarities of modern life at bay. There are no fast-food restaurants, no neon signs. Instead, the former iron-mining town has rambling country inns and a main road lined with Victorian and Arts and Crafts houses. Locals gather for breakfast, as they have since 1938, at Polly’s Pancake Parlor, which grinds its own corn and wheat and uses syrup from the sugar maples that give the town its name. With tourism driving the economy, the village’s biggest assets are its fall foliage, fields of lupines and uninterrupted views of the snow-capped White Mountains.

About the Author

Barry Yeoman

Barry Yeoman is a freelance journalist living in Durham, North Carolina. His work has appeared in The New York Times,...

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Each March, Sugar Hill’s voters gather at the white meetinghouse—a converted church built in 1830 with a trio of gold-leaf clocks on its steeple—for their annual town meeting. Anyone who collects enough signatures can place an item on the agenda to be voted into law. That New Englander impulse toward self-government, combined with the feistiness that led Sugar Hill to secede from a neighboring town in 1962, might explain its residents’ sweeping response when they learned in 2010 that an international electric consortium has proposed a high-voltage transmission line that would slice through the village like a giant zipper.
The Northern Pass, if built, would enter New Hampshire at the Canadian border and bisect some of the state’s most intact forestland as it connects Quebec’s hydroelectric dams with New England’s power grid. Steel towers, some exceeding thirteen stories in height, would line the 180-mile route, which snakes through ten miles of protected national forest and seven miles of Sugar Hill. Conservationists say the project is unneeded and could degrade waterways and fragment wildlife habitats.
But what New Hampshirites fear most is that the Northern Pass will disfigure the state’s visual landscape. “It could destroy our economy,” says Dolly McPhaul, a lifelong Sugar Hill resident. “If people don’t build their second homes here, where are the builders going to get their money? The plumbers? The grocery store that feeds these people?” McPhaul and her neighbors were particularly disheartened to learn that the Northern Pass required federal and state permits—but no local permits at all.
“You’re shocked to find out you have no say,” says Nancy Martland, a retired child-development researcher who moved to Sugar Hill in 2007. “Even your whole town. Even at town meeting. Even your Select Board. You have no power. People in New Hampshire—maybe everywhere, I don’t know—we want to stand up for ourselves.”
So they did. Last year, Martland and McPhaul campaigned for a local ordinance that would ban corporations from acquiring land or building structures to support any “unsustainable energy system.” The ordinance stripped those corporations of their free-speech and due-process rights under the Constitution, as well as protections afforded by the Constitution’s commerce and contract clauses. Judicial rulings that recognized corporations as legal “persons” would not be recognized in Sugar Hill. Any state or federal law that tried to interfere with the town’s authority would be invalidated. “Natural communities and ecosystems”—wetlands, streams, rivers, aquifers—would acquire “inalienable and fundamental rights to exist and flourish,” and any resident could enforce the law on their behalf. “All power is inherent in the people,” the measure stated.
Sugar Hill’s attorney suggested this was folly; local governments can’t override state or federal law, much less the Constitution. Such an ordinance could attract a lawsuit, which the village could ill afford. McPhaul, a Republican and a charity volunteer and self-described “goody two-shoes,” also worried about litigation. “But what is your option?” she asks. “To lie down, play dead and let them destroy your town?” After a two-month public-awareness campaign, Sugar Hill’s residents took up the ordinance at their 2012 town meeting. It passed by a unanimous voice vote.
Thus, Sugar Hill became one of dozens of communities nationwide—mostly villages but also the city of Pittsburgh—that have reacted to environmental threats by directly challenging the Constitution and established case law. The leading champion of this confrontational strategy—which has its share of critics, even among progressives who share the sense of desperation that is driving it—is a bearish 43-year-old attorney named Thomas Linzey. These skirmishes, Linzey believes, are the first steps in a long campaign to wrest power from corporations and strengthen American democracy. He refers to the strategy as “collective nonviolent civil disobedience through municipal lawmaking.”

* * *

Linzey runs the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, a Pennsylvania nonprofit that advocates for local self-government and the rights of nature. CELDF comes into threatened communities, educates residents about US legal history, and trains them to advocate for “rights-based ordinances” like Sugar Hill’s. About thirty municipalities in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio and New Mexico have enacted such measures, according to Linzey, following an earlier round of over 100 more modest laws. CELDF’s organizers have helped citizens fight frackers, coal companies, factory farms, big-box stores, water bottlers and sewage-sludge dumpers. They’ve campaigned to overhaul the city charter in Spokane, Washington. And they aided the successful effort to confer rights on nature in Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution. Linzey, whose baritone voice is filled with populist fire, has crafted a message whose appeal brings together liberals distrustful of big business and conservatives distrustful of big government.
Linzey’s approach has evolved dramatically since 1995, when the organization he co-founded started assisting Pennsylvania communities that were battling polluters and developers. Newly admitted to the bar, the young Alabaman initially put his faith in the regulatory system. “It seemed to us at the time that people needed lawyers,” he recalls. “The problem was not that we didn’t have good environmental laws. The problem was, the world has gone to shit because we didn’t have enough people enforcing those laws.” So Linzey applied what he’d learned in law school. Faced with a proposed incinerator or landfill, “we would take the 400-page application and try to find places where it was deficient—gaps, omissions, those types of things.” Based on these bureaucratic challenges, CELDF’s clients often won their first rounds.
“Then the community group would have a victory party,” he recalls. “Everybody would pat each other on the back and say the system works. Meanwhile, thirty, sixty days from then, the corporation would come back and submit a new and improved permit application, and the project would move forward. So we weren’t stopping anything.”
The attorney wondered what he was accomplishing by working within the system. “In many ways, the regulatory process is intended to exhaust communities, because it does not recognize—and neither does the broader structure of the law recognize—that communities have any power to make those fundamental decisions about energy or transportation or agriculture.” Citizens could delay but not stop projects; the law was “merely regulating the rate at which the environment was being destroyed.”
Behind Linzey’s epiphany is almost 200 years of jurisprudence giving both constitutional rights and legal personhood to corporations. The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which used the First Amendment to permit corporations unlimited independent political spending, is just the latest in a chain of such rulings. Most famous is the 1886 case Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific, in which a railroad company argued that a particular tax law violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause. “The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the [clause] applies to these corporations,” Chief Justice Morrison Waite said from the bench. “We are all of opinion that it does.” Since then, courts have also used the Constitution’s Fourth and Fifth Amendments, and its commerce and contract clauses, to expand corporate rights. Linzey believes these rulings are rooted in the very structure of the Constitution, which he says “puts the rights of property and commerce over the rights of people, communities and nature.”
The Constitution also concentrates power by declaring itself, along with federal statutes, “the supreme law of the land.” And starting in 1868, a judicial doctrine known as Dillon’s Rule held local governments subservient to state legislatures, which “breathes into them the breath of life, without which they cannot exist,” Linzey adds.
With communities holding so little authority, Linzey and his colleagues decided that the only way to fight environmental threats was through open defiance. He compares this to Northern jurors who refused to convict defendants in fugitive slave cases, suffragists who risked arrest to vote and African-Americans who sat down at segregated lunch counters. “Change does not happen by silver-tongued lawyers going into courthouses,” he says. “The only way law changes is through disobedience.” There was no reason, he concluded, that disobedience couldn’t come from local governments—and he found eager allies in Pennsylvania’s Republican-leaning farm country.

* * *

Linzey had started receiving calls from elected supervisors worried about the arrival of factory hog farms in their rural townships. The officials had tried to stave off the invasions by strictly regulating manure disposal, only to find their efforts pre-empted by Pennsylvania law. Now some were willing to butt heads with the state government. Linzey drafted an ordinance that would ban corporate farming altogether, drawing from similar laws passed by nine Midwestern states. About twenty townships enacted the measure, he estimates, followed by eighty that banned the importing of corporate-hauled sewage sludge for use as fertilizer on farm fields. (Despite industry assurances, some scientists consider the noxious sludge toxic. Two Pennsylvania teens had recently died after exposure to such sludge.) A few townships went further, refusing altogether to recognize the personhood of corporate sludge haulers.
Predictably, Pennsylvania’s state government invoked its supremacy. It passed a law in 2005 empowering the attorney general to sue local governments that restrict “normal agricultural operations,” then took legal action against two townships, East Brunswick and Packer. Both withdrew their sludge bans, though Packer’s supervisors voted not to recognize the attorney general’s authority to restrict their autonomy. A court voided that measure.
News of the Pennsylvania rebellion reached other places. In Barnstead, New Hampshire (population 4,600), a home-schooling mother named Gail Darrell, who lives in a Revolutionary War–era cabin with her piano-tuner husband, watched with alarm as a water bottler called USA Springs announced plans to extract 310,000 gallons a day from three bedrock wells in nearby Nottingham. A report by civil engineer Thomas Ballestero warned that the operations could deplete and contaminate the local water supply. Yet the project seemed to be moving forward.
Darrell had never been involved in local politics. But her children were getting older, leaving her with free time. So she volunteered to sit on a committee studying how Barnstead could protect its own water. There she learned about CELDF and invited Linzey to speak to the town’s selectmen. Linzey’s call to outlaw corporate privilege found a receptive audience in freedom-loving New Hampshire. (The state constitution authorizes its citizens to form a new government when the existing one starts serving private interests.) “It’s always been a bit ornery up here,” says Gordon Preston, who chaired the board of selectmen at the time. Preston had reservations about CELDF’s approach: “The biggest fear of a small town is that they get their asses hauled into court and have little or no money to defend themselves.” But he also shared Linzey’s concern about corporate power and supported the principle of local self-government.
Darrell worked with the selectmen to put an anti-bottling ordinance on the 2006 town meeting agenda. Shortly before the vote, Linzey and historian Richard Grossman came to Barnstead to teach CELDF’s Democracy School, an intensive seminar that traces the history of corporate and government power. It was a clarifying moment for Darrell. “I didn’t really understand about the Constitution till I went through the school—that it wasn’t about freedom,” she says. “We grow up with that IV drip in our arm that tells us that we live in the greatest democracy that ever was.” The seminar gave Darrell the momentum she needed to defend the ordinance, which passed overwhelmingly at the town meeting and was strengthened two years later. Barnstead not only banned corporate water withdrawals and stripped bottling companies of their presumed constitutional rights; it also threatened secession from any government that tries to overturn the ban or “intimidate the people of Barnstead.” The measure was among the first to confer civil rights on natural systems like aquifers and rivers. Nottingham, which had initially rebuffed CELDF, followed suit with a similar measure.
“New Hampshire has always had an independent spirit,” Darrell says. “The soil here is crap, and you really have to work hard to farm. When people came up here to settle, they were coming into no-man’s land. You had to have enough gumption to stick it out, to stand up for yourself, and to make it through the winter. That spirit has carried out into the way we treat government. We believe that we have the inalienable right to govern ourselves. So to hear the language of the ordinance—that didn’t seem foreign to people.”
USA Springs later filed for bankruptcy, so it is hard to know whether these ordinances had any impact. But Darrell, who became CELDF’s New England organizer, claimed a more tangible victory in Shapleigh, Maine, where residents passed a rights-based ordinance in 2009. Their target, the Nestlé subsidiary Poland Spring, pulled up its test wells and left four months later. “Without the town’s permission to proceed on that project,” says Mark Dubois, the company’s natural-resource manager, “we had no project.”
Nestlé’s withdrawal felt particularly sweet because Shapleigh’s citizens had defied both the company and their own elected officials. When the board of selectmen refused to put the rights-based ordinance to a public vote, calling it unconstitutional, bottling opponents convened their own town meeting and passed it 114-66. “Nobody is covering our asses out here,” says Charles Mullins, a retired machinist who later served one term as selectman. “When the people up high don’t do their jobs, then we’ve got to get out in the streets and do it ourselves.”
Victories like Shapleigh’s have inspired other threatened communities, but they’re not really part of CELDF’s long-term game plan. For Linzey, disobedient lawmaking is an organizing tactic, not a legal one. He knows municipalities violate the law when they assert supremacy over state and federal governments. He expects “lawsuits galore” and assumes judges won’t permit these affronts to the Constitution. But he also believes that every courtroom defeat will trigger a bigger backlash against the status quo, leading to more municipal defiance. Over time, he expects to build the critical mass necessary to amend state constitutions and eventually the federal one.
CELDF considers this the only path to environmental sustainability, and its leaders freely criticize liberals who believe otherwise. “We’re seen as not able to play well with others,” says Ben Price, who leads the nonprofit’s efforts in Pennsylvania. He admits that CELDF’s uncompromising style can be off-putting, but he doesn’t care. “Frankly, I’m not willing to suggest that the traditional progressive strategy is just as good” as the one CELDF is pursuing, and “we’re just giving another tool in the toolbox—I don’t agree with that. If trying to regulate the rate of destruction was working so well, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in environmentally.”
Price says that when he chats with mainstream environmentalists, “what I constantly hear is, ‘We need to have a seat at the table. If we’re not sitting down when they’re talking about these rules and regs, we’re left out. Is that what you want?’ My answer is yes. We need to stop legitimizing what they’re doing by being invited to the table of power, and then having no power.”
The criticism, though, runs both ways. Some progressives call CELDF’s tactics pie-in-the-sky at best, dangerous at worst. “I’m concerned about how this can suck energy out of other avenues for change,” says Jon Snyder, a Spokane City Council member who believes the resources spent on a CELDF-sponsored ballot initiative cost his council the chance for its “first progressive majority.” The 2011 measure would have amended the city charter to strip rights from corporations and give them to waterways, neighborhoods and workers. It lost by 1,000 votes out of 58,700 cast. That’s a thin margin, but wider than the eighty-nine votes that would have elected a fourth progressive to the seven-member council. The liberal bloc has lost 4–3 votes on marriage equality, saving union jobs, utility rate reform, historic preservation, alternatives to incarceration and job-placement services for the poor, Snyder says.
Constitutional scholar Kent Greenfield believes CELDF’s shortcomings go beyond misplaced energy. “I totally understand people’s revulsion against corporations’ misdeeds,” says the Boston College law professor. “I think, though, that we shouldn’t be squandering this political moment on organizational tools that, if implemented, would be a disaster. The reason we have a national government is because there are certain things we ought to decide at the national level and we can’t let people opt out of.” America’s racial history, he says, is exhibit number one; if Barnstead can threaten to secede, so can a town that wants to resegregate its schools. “This is what we fought the Civil War over, for goodness’ sake. This is what the civil rights movement was about. We cannot let the George Wallaces of the world stand in the schoolhouse door and say, ‘Our community norm of segregation is going to control here in the face of the national norm of equality.’ The assertion of power to rewrite the Constitution within one’s own community is a nonstarter—and ought to be.”
Linzey has heard the racial analogy before and rejects it. He argues that CELDF’s ordinances expand rights, at least to flesh-and-blood humans. The Constitution and federal laws should be used, he says, to overturn local restrictions of rights. “Vehicles are only as good,” he says, “as the values that animate them.”

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In the decade since it first took aim at corporate privilege, CELDF has jumped beyond its rural roots. It crossed the Rubicon in 2010, when Pittsburgh’s City Council unanimously passed a rights-based anti-fracking ordinance. “It was a very, very assertive bill,” says sponsor Doug Shields, who has since retired from the council. “It didn’t mince words. And there was talk that if you do this, you’ll be challenged the day after your vote.” Sure enough, last year Pennsylvania’s legislature passed a bill nullifying almost all local regulation of oil and gas extraction. (The state’s Public Utility Commission says this includes the Pittsburgh ordinance.) The new law is currently in litigation.
Even before the Pittsburgh foray, CELDF started working internationally. After a handful of townships had given civil rights to “natural communities and ecosystems”—an idea floated forty years ago by legal scholar Christopher Stone in an essay titled “Should Trees Have Standing?”—CELDF was invited by an NGO to help draft a similar provision in Ecuador’s Constitution. “Ecuador has been treated by multinational corporations as a cheap hotel,” says associate director Mari Margil. “They come in, they make a giant mess, and then they leave.” The new Constitution, adopted in 2008, gives nature the right to “respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles.” Courts have used that provision to crack down on illegal mining and road construction. Yet resource extraction continues, including the opening of 8 million acres of unspoiled rainforest to oil drilling. Margil and Linzey have also talked with activists in Nepal, Italy, India and New Zealand.
The heart of CELDF’s work, though, remains in small American communities like those affected by the Northern Pass. Besides Sugar Hill, two other towns outlawed unsustainable energy projects by popular vote last year. Three others rejected or tabled the ordinance. For all of New Hampshire’s iconoclasm, not everyone wants to register dissent through a vehicle that could be overturned in court. “Unfortunately, the state trumps anything the towns do,” says Tom Mullen, developer of a resort that lies in the transmission line’s path. “I want to focus on things that will stop this project now.” For Mullen, that means working with the state government, which in 2012 led to a victory: legislators banned the use of eminent domain to obtain right-of-way for unneeded transmission projects.
Still, CELDF keeps minting activists who want nothing to do with government as usual. Alexis Eynon, a middle-school art teacher, started attending Democracy Schools—following them around New England—when she learned the Northern Pass would come within a mile of her home in Thornton. Eynon built her house from straw bale, framing it with salvaged timber from her five wooded acres and heating it with a geothermal pump and a wood stove. “The original concept was to disturb the land as little as possible,” she says, which makes the nearby utility corridor that much harder to bear. “It takes a spectacular treasure that to me seems so rare in our country—these untouched places—and makes it mundane. It becomes like every other place that’s been destroyed by some kind of industrial project.”
Hearing Linzey speak, and attending the Democracy Schools, convinced Eynon that “nobody’s going to help us here. We have to help ourselves.” In March, she plans to present the rights-based ordinance at Thornton’s town meeting in the hope that it will follow the lead of Sugar Hill, thirty miles away. Eynon knows that some of her neighbors are wary of a lawsuit and that others support the Northern Pass outright. She still considers such ordinances New Hampshire’s only hope.
“The whole regulatory business feels like being a hamster in a hamster wheel,” she says. “I want to put my track shoes to the pavement and just start running.”