Between the end of fall semester at Yale and the beginning of spring semester at UC Berkeley, we had time to drive across the United States, spend a few days at our Oak Grove home that was still for sale, find housing in the Bay Area, take a trip to the Oregon Coast, and move the things we needed from Oregon to our temporary home in Walnut Creek. I had looked for housing in Berkeley and quickly decided that housing on the other side of the Berkeley Hills in Contra Costa County was more affordable. I lucked out in finding a serviceable home that was scheduled to be torn down and replaced with apartments, so the owners rented it for a reasonable price.
This meant that, for the first time since high school, I commuted by transit instead of by bicycle or foot. From the house in Walnut Creek, I walked a short distance to the BART station and took the train to Berkeley. With a change of trains, I could get off within two blocks of my office. If I took my bicycle, which was allowed during non-rush-hours, I could avoid the change of trains and cycle about two miles to the office.
On the walk to the BART station I passed through a neighborhood of pre-war homes that realtors would describe as cute or cozy. Most were about 1,000 to 1,600 square feet on small, irregularly shaped lots. A few for-sale signs indicated asking prices of around $400,000, which seemed astounding for someone used to Oregon’s prices. However, I learned, that was only the starting price, as the homes sold rapidly after bidding wars that could easily add $100,000 to the price. This was the result of the urban-growth boundaries in Contra Costa and all other Bay Area counties (except San Francisco, which was entirely urbanized).
Of course, I knew that Oregon’s urban-growth boundaries were driving up Portland-area housing prices too; we were hoping to sell our home for double what we paid for it, while inflation would have increased the price by only a third. But our Oak Grove house was bigger than the Walnut Creek homes and selling for a much lower price.
As it turned out, our realtor informed us that the house sold right after we moved to Berkeley. The buyer had looked at the house during the few days we were there; we wondered if our presence had given the home a lived-in looked that was more attractive than just bare walls. In any case, we would need a place to live after my Berkeley fellowship.
We had looked at a couple of homes during our trip to the Oregon Coast, so we made an offer on a house in Bandon and it was accepted. Though not an oceanfront home, it has an ocean view that often appears in the Antiplanner masthead. It is also much bigger than our Oak Grove house. Of course, it cost more than we received for the Oak Grove house, but after seeing the Walnut Creek homes it wasn’t hard to agree to pay it. People in the Bay Area were paying more for empty lots carved out of someone’s backyard than we paid for our Bandon home.
We didn’t move into the Bandon home until March’s spring break. In the meantime, I settled into an office that Sally Fairfax provided, sharing it with one of her graduate students, Ann Brower. Coincidentally, she had been at Yale when I was there; though she hadn’t taken my class, she came to many of the guest lectures. Today, she teaches at University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, where she has had some of the worst and best luck of anyone in the world.
Ann was unluckily riding a bus in Christchurch when the 2011 earthquake struck causing a building to fall on the bus. Ann suffered a broken pelvis and other serious injuries, which turned out to be lucky because everyone else on the bus died. She then became something of the poster child of the earthquake, and was introduced to Prince Charles, the Dali Llama, and many other celebrities who came through to visit the earthquake damage. She used her fame to promote earthquake safety standards. Her university research has also promoted reforms of New Zealand’s public lands policies.
The University of California offered me much better research sources than Yale, mainly because the former had an active transportation engineering department and one of the nation’s oldest urban planning departments. While some of the planners were leaders in the smart-growth movement, others were skeptical, particularly Melvin Webber, who edited the University of California Transportation Center‘s magazine, Access. Of course, many of the people in the transportation engineering department, including Marty Wachs, who headed the Institute for Transportation Studies, were also skeptics of the latest urban planning fads.
One of the books I had read before going to Yale was Joel Garreau‘s Edge City, which showed how many American cities had suburbs that had more jobs and other economic activities than the downtowns of those cities. The suburbs were also lower in density, which meant that they couldn’t easily be served by transit. Garreau admitted that, when he started writing the book, he believed that Americans lived in suburbs because they were “forced” to do so and that America’s streetcar systems had been lost to a General Motors conspiracy, but he realized neither of those were true.
Garreau cited at length a sociologist named Herbert Gans, who in the 1950s had spent a year living in a dense, inner-city neighborhood and then a year living in a low-density suburb. Gans disagreed with urban planners of the day who said that the dense neighborhoods were slums that should be cleared. But he also contradicted the claims of many of today’s urban planners when he concluded that the dense neighborhood did not have a greater sense of community than the suburb, nor was the suburb full of boring conformists.
In any case, while perusing the Berkeley library, I found Gans’ review of Jane Jacobs’ book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which was published in Commentary magazine. Gans was probably the only critic who saw the flaws in Jacobs’ book: while she was right in saying that urban planners didn’t understand how cities worked, she was just as wrong in saying that she did understand cities. She failed to understand that the neighborhood that she thought epitomized a “great city,” Greenwich Village, was in fact merely a working class neighborhood of that city.
“Mrs. Jacobs not only overestimates the power of planning in shaping behavior,” wrote Gans, “but she in effect demands that middle-class people adopt working-class styles of family life, child rearing, and sociability.” Even Gans was somewhat wrong: the difference was not that some neighborhoods were working class and others were middle class but that working-class people in Manhattan couldn’t afford large homes and so did all of their entertaining out on the streets. This made for the “lively streets” that Jacobs praised, while the fact that middle-class people lived in larger homes meant that they entertained indoors or in their backyards, which made their streets seem boring to Jacobs. However, as soon as working-class people moved into larger homes, they entertained indoors as well; for example, the suburb Gans had studied was a working-class suburb.
Gans was right, however, to say “that the areas about which Mrs. Jacobs writes were built for a style of life which is going out of fashion with the large majority of Americans who are free to choose their place of residence.” Gans feared that Jacobs’ book would lead urban planners to try to recreate Greenwich Villages everywhere, which is exactly what has happened. In 1999, when I was in Berkeley, Gans review was hard to find; fortunately today, it is available on the internet.
Another thing I did in Berkeley was take advantage of university internet connections. We still had dial-up in Oak Grove, which meant that downloads were tediously slow. At Berkeley, I was able to download large amounts of data from the Census Bureau’s web site and put that data into spreadsheets that were easy-to-read (at least if you familiar with Excel) and distribute them to others who were interested in urban issues. These spreadsheets compared densities with driving, transit ridership, and other factors. In a sense, that was really the beginnings of the Antiplanner.
I also attended a UC-sponsored international conference on sustainable transportation. Although some of the skeptics who I admired were at the conference, the title was a giveaway: “sustainable transportation” meant “transportation without automobiles.” Many of the conference speakers came from Europe; one wryly admitted that flying to Berkeley used up a couple of years’ worth of greenhouse gas emissions that Europeans were supposed to limit themselves to under the Rio de Janeiro climate treaty of 1992.
I rarely attend conferences unless I am a speaker because I don’t trust what people say; I’d rather see it in print and then verify it with my own research. I received a clear example of this when a speaker from the University of Stockholm gave a presentation about her search for “the world’s most sustainable city.” The search included cities in the United States such as Phoenix and Salt Lake City, which must have been included solely for contrast, as well as several European and other cities.
The most sustainable city she found was Halle-Neustadt, a German city in which people lived in apartments surrounded by beautiful green spaces and took transit to work. People were allowed to own automobiles but few of them did and the ones who did were required to park them in garages at the edge of the city.
I was intrigued enough by this to ask her for a copy of her paper, which she gave me. Again, this was before the era when everything was distributed electronically; the paper she gave me was literally on paper and rather thick besides.
Reading the paper, I discovered she had left something out of her presentation. Halle Neustadt, which as the name implied was a new city built in the 1960s, had been a sustainable city, by her definition, until about 1990. Then Germany reunified and residents of East Germany, where Halle Neustadt was located, were able to trade in their worthless East German Deutschmarks for value West German Deutschmarks.
The first thing many of them did was buy cars. Since there were only a few garages at the edge of town, people turned the green spaces into parking lots. Even with that, many people complained there was still a parking problem as there wasn’t enough green space to park the cars of every resident of the mid-rise and high-rise buildings. Meanwhile, half the residents moved out, many into new single-family homes built in nearby communities. This created a problem for the government, which couldn’t demolish the mid-rises and high-rises fast enough to keep up with the people moving away.
In short, the key to sustainability is poverty, and governments that want to keep people on transit and out of cars need to also keep them poor. The Stockholm researcher admitted all of these problems in her paper, but that message didn’t quite come across her presentation or any of the others at the sustainable transportation conference.
While Berkeley was great for my research, it wasn’t so great for my class in incentive-based conservation. The first problem was that the head of Sally Fairfax’s department didn’t want to let me teach a class because I didn’t have a Ph.D. He changed his mind after I met with him and (probably) Sally twisted his arm. “He’s just jealous that you’ve published more than he has,” she told me.
A more serious problem was that Berkeley was a far more exciting place than New Haven, with lots of activities going on all the time. This meant my guest speakers faced a lot more competition. After a couple of embarrassing situations, such as when just six people attended a presentation by a former director of the Park Service, I realized I would need to bribe people to attend. So I offered free lunches, ordering in pizzas, sandwiches, or other lunches from local restaurants. This upped the attendance and accomplished the goal of exposing more students to new ideas.
Berkeley students were also more jaded than those at Yale, possibly because Yale mainly offered just master’s degrees in forestry while Berkeley had undergraduate, master’s, and Ph.D. students. While free markets and incentives were something that Yale students had heard of but hadn’t previously learned about in detail, many students at Berkeley felt like they had heard all of the debates between markets and government regulation. Thus, they weren’t as impressed by the ideas I was presenting.
Students in my course, for example, were required to do a project applying incentive-based tools to some conservation problem. While the Yale students made a sincere effort, many of the students at Berkeley seemed to take it as their mission to find a problem that couldn’t be solved with markets in order to prove that markets didn’t work. That is sort of like engineering students finding a problem that can’t be solved with engineering and submitting it as their class project.
Free-market advocates freely admit that some problems can’t be completely solved with markets. The big one is public goods, that is, goods that one person can consume without reducing the amount available for others and that people can’t be prevented from consuming. Since people can’t be prevented from consuming the good, they can’t be charged for it. While free-market advocates admit that markets don’t work well for such goods, they also point out that government doesn’t do much better.
A student who was sincerely interested in learning about incentives, or at least getting a good grade, wouldn’t pick such a good for their project. But the course was pass/fail, so they probably didn’t think there was much cost to them for picking a problem that can’t be solved.
As at Yale, I took the students on a field trip which included meeting with members of the Quincy Library Group. But the highlight of the trip for me was a visit to Collins Pine, which owned 94,000 acres of land in northeastern California. The Collins family purchased the land in 1902 and hired a forester from UC Berkeley to write a plan for the forests. Since then, the forests had managed exclusively with selection cutting, and up to that time every tree cut had been selected by a graduate of UC Berkeley. The forests were beautiful and made me feel that, perhaps, Gordon Robinson had been right all along. At least, if the Forest Service had continued using selection cutting, instead of switching to clearcutting, it would have avoided nearly all of the controversies that ended up reducing its timber sales by 75 percent.
At the end of the semester, Randy Simmons, who was the head of the Utah State University political science department, invited me to do a fellowship at Utah State, but initially he didn’t have any funding. I asked my funder, who said he was only interested in funding fellowships at top-tier universities such as Yale or UC Berkeley. So I spent another semester at UC Berkeley in the fall of 1999, returning again for one more semester in the fall of 2001.
In the fall of 1999, I again lived in Walnut Creek but in 2001 we chose to live in San Ramon, a large part of which was a master planned community developed in the 1970s by Western Electric. As the headquarters of Chevron and home to the Bay Area’s largest office building, San Ramon was a classic edge city. It wasn’t served by BART, however, so I got to bicycle at least partway to work, and thereby discovered that I could bicycle faster than BART.
BART had a line to Walnut Creek, which was 13 miles north of San Ramon. BART also had a line to Dublin, which was only 6 miles south of San Ramon. Moreover, if I took the Dublin line, its trains would take me to within two blocks of my office in Berkeley, whereas if I took the Walnut Creek line, I would have to either change trains or bicycle another two miles in Berkeley. Most of the route in both directions was on a rail-trail built on a former Southern Pacific branch line. Despite the extra miles, I soon discovered that the fastest route was via Walnut Creek.
When BART trains are above ground, they sometimes go as fast as 75 miles per hour, encouraging people who are stuck in traffic on adjacent highways to switch to transit. But underground is a different story, especially in Oakland, which the Dublin trains passed through on the way to Berkeley. The problem is the Oakland Wye, where three lines meet and some trains have to cross over other lines to follow their routes. Trains in the Wye are limited to 18 miles per hour, and Wikipedia describes the Wye as a “speed bottleneck for the whole system.”
While we were in San Ramon, I was invited to speak to a homebuilder’s association in Bakersfield on September 11. I flew to Bakersfield on the 10th and woke up to see the World Trade Center collapse in New York City. I still gave the presentation, though it was somewhat somber, especially as I had a good friend who I knew worked at the World Trade Center. (It turned out he worked in a different building that survived the attack.) Afterwards, with the planes not flying and Amtrak trains being full, I rented a car to return to San Ramon.
In between the fall 1999 and fall 2001 fellowships at Berkeley, Randy Simmons managed to find some money to bring me to Utah State in the fall of 2000. That will be the subject of the next chapter.
