Most of the towns
along the San Francisco peninsula are lined up along a north/south
road called El Camino Real ("The King's Highway"), which runs
the length of California as US Highway 101. When I was very young,
open fields or orchards separated those towns from one another.
Driving by in the springtime, you could look between the trees
down long rows filled with bright green grass and yellow mustard
and orange poppies and blue lupine, all spread out under the pink
or white blossoms of the trees above. It was a lovely sight. By
the time you got close to San Jose, there were only orchards for
miles and miles on each side of the city.
Then World War II came
along, and California's population boomed as people came west
to work in the shipyards and the defense industry. After the war,
they not only stayed: they also invited their relatives to come
out and enjoy the good weather, and the relatives stayed, too.
Rather quickly, El Camino became one long strip of auto repair
shops, hotdog stands, small businesses, factories, warehouses,
etc.
By the time I left
for college in the mid-'50's, the roadside views down the long
rows between fruit trees had all but disappeared, and the urban
sprawl that is now The Bay Area and Silicon Valley had taken over.
When I moved to North
Carolina in the late 60's, I was delighted to see that the towns
were still largely self-contained, separated by open countryside
or small farms. As the population grew, however, those towns soon
faced the kind of urban sprawl that California had seen. Surely,
I thought, people have observed and learned a lesson from the
large urban areas in the northeast and far west - but no, our
small cities have replicated the poor planning and nutty zoning
that have allowed the destruction of roadside beauty all over
the country. We're right up there with the big guys. The roads
that lead into our towns and cities are lined with fast-food joints
and factories and car dealerships and shopping centers, so that
reaching the center of town seems to take f-o-r-e-v-e-r.
Worse yet, when you
get to the center of the town, there's often no there there. In
far too many cities, stores and office buildings are shabby and
deserted. Where has commerce gone? The answer is that commerce
hasn't gone; it's in a state of flux as it moves farther and farther
out of town. Radiating out from the edges of the city, like the
circles of hell in Dante's Inferno, are shopping centers in various
stages of desertion, decay, full service, or a-building.
The big towns and cities
speak bravely of revitalizing their downtown areas. Commissions
and committees of local citizens are appointed to consult about
the problem. Sometimes outside experts are hired. All too often
they come up with plans that fail or simply are never implemented.
Perhaps there's a simple
answer for why they fail. The word is greed. Americans are stuck
in the pioneering frame of mind that tells us we have a right
to the land: a right to seize it, to own it and to do with it
as we like.
Our suburban spaces
give evidence of this greed in the proliferation of developments
of what some wit has called McMansions, homes that are huge boxes
sprawling into the countryside. Local landowners, many of whom
are leading citizens, are only too happy to sell their families'
farms and estates that lie on the edges of our cities. Those developments
demand more shopping centers (heaven forbid that people who own
two or three cars should have to use one of them to drive a few
miles into the city to shop!) and lots of pavement.
The landowners and
the developers wield enormous clout, and continue to obtain permits
for their ever-expanding properties. Don't they ever look over
their shoulders to see the mess they have left behind? At what
point will we demand that they assume responsibility for the damage
they've done as they press ever outward into what's left of our
country?
I don't mean to imply
that there's an easy answer to the problems of a burgeoning population.
But when the private rights of a few trample on the community's
right to clean air, clean water, and access to preserved esthetic
spaces, surely the greater good should prevail.
So what can we do to
enliven our cities and stop the sprawl? How long will it take
us to learn that there's a difference between growth and improvement?
Can we change that pioneering mindset? It will mean realizing
that we need to stop building far afield, and start figuring out
how to renovate or preserve what we have. If our downtown buildings
aren't worth preserving, let's tear them down and build new ones
on the same spot. The wise reuse of space already committed to
commerce seems to me like a no-brainer.
It is painful to observe
the failing shopping centers. The supermarkets are usually the
first things to pull out. Their empty shells remain, paint faded
and windows taped. They stand in large, mostly vacant parking
lots, with perhaps a few small surrounding shops still open, shops
whose owners are tied to leases or unable to afford higher rents.
The centers that have been totally abandoned are the creepiest:
a montage of peeling paint, broken windows, trash scattered about,
parking lots that are used once a year for Christmas tree sales
or charitable donation centers. They really do look like something
from one of the rings of hell.
Alas, everyone seems
to give lip service to the idea of city planning without following
its precepts. In our area, a 40-acre tract of pines, old hardwoods,
streams and a pond has just been destroyed by the bulldozers to
make way for more offices and stores, right next to the "in" area
of malls and roads, five miles from the city's center. Traffic
there was already a nightmare; now, it will be a disaster.
It would be nice to
think that our city Fathers could step back and observe the irrevocability
of their actions. Once the trees are gone, they're gone. Once
the land is graded, it's graded, that is unless someone is willing
to spend considerably more than it cost to do the damage, to undo
it. And a fat chance there is of that.
I know that there must
be cities out there that have done a good job of urban renewal
(San Luis Obispo, CA, comes to mind). Recently, the consultants
for our latest downtown project have touted Memphis's Beale Street
as something that our city should emulate. This seems to me to
be a classic mistake, because what makes one area special doesn't
necessarily transfer to another (and our area has a lively identity
all its own). But at this point that's moot, because until we
can stop the proliferation of those rings of hell, the shopping
center syndrome with its pattern of build-and-abandon will ensure
that any of our Downtown Revitalization plans have as much chance
of success as an ice cube in you-know-where.
