Planning in a Century of Limits

In a recent editorial, Mark Primack has his glasses on upside down, his hat on his feet and his hair shirt buttoned in the back instead of the front.

Primack places the blame for Santa Cruz housing ills on single-family
home planning, while at the same time lauding unelected city planners
as wise keepers of knowledge of what is good for Santa Cruz residents.

He identifies local single-family home residents as “moneyed and
privileged,” while ignoring millions of dollars changing hands among
real estate speculators, developers, suppliers and manufacturers of
things domestic.

In short, Primack ignores the reality of the corporate consumer
economy that both benefits from and drives rampant growth and
construction in Our Fair City and County.

To suggest that the 831 Water Street monstrosity is in any way
“appropriately scaled” is the heighth of self-serving misinformation.
Blaming local families for not accommodating the current influx of
newcomers piles insult on unfeeling disregard for local residents who
like Santa Cruz the way it is and have no desire to live in San Jose,
South.

It is not families in single family homes who disregard reality, it
is growth maniacs and their minions who attempt to disregard the world
of finite resources that we, and all other life, inhabit. There really
is a finite limit to growth in Santa Cruz County, with availability of
potable water as the leading growth limit that cannot be violated.
Despite wide-eyed optimism expressed by the Director of the City Water Department,
we have already spent all of our per capita water efficiency chips, and
increasing local population will quickly overcome future technological
improvements, if any.

The Covid-19 pandemic we are now experiencing has demonstrated
unequivocally that increased housing density and global travel make us
vulnerable to even modestly virulent disease. We are not suited to
long-distance commuting and life in multi-story tower blocks, as has
been demonstrated internationally by failure of other human termitaria
such as Pruet-Igo in St. Louis.

More importantly, concentrating human housing in central urban areas
results in increased impacts to the natural world, both within the city
and in outlying natural areas. Slathering concrete and asphalt over the
denuded landscape removes any possibility of natural habitat for the
other life that shares this world with us. Food and resources must be
grown, mined and pumped from natural habitat elsewhere and transported
long distances to urban residents. Energy must be produced elsewhere,
destroying additional natural habitat, and transported in fragile
infrastructure to satisfy growing urban energy demands. Increased human
infrastructure requires increased taxation to support increased
maintenance needs.

In another example of misplaced, upside down thinking, Primack
praises the state for taking planning powers away from local
communities! We have learned through long past experience, that
centralized state and federal government planners do not and cannot
adequately plan for conditions in local communities.

Why should we be expected to tolerate a state or federal
legislature’s demands that local government conduct itself in ways that
are antithetical to local conditions and local preferences? We do not
elect our representatives to be our minders and bosses, we elect them to
represent our needs and desires based on our local conditions.

This is the 21st Century, not the 20th. This is the Century of Limits,
not the Century of Growth and Profligacy. We have learned that we
cannot grow indefinitely in a world of finite resources. We have learned
of the serious consequences of overshooting natural limits on resource
consumption and habitat destruction. We have learned that we cannot
continue to ship food and materials thousands of miles to satisfy a
phantom global economy.

It’s time to turn our backs on the real “privileged exclusivity”
Primack decries, that lives not in the modest homes that house long-term
residents, but in the opulent offices and board rooms of those who seek
to profit on human greed.