Land Use: Housing and Open Space

Arthur Warmoth

[Excerpted from a longer paper, "The Economic Metacrisis in Sonoma County,"
written by the author in 2001]

The housing crisis that is rendering home ownership impossible for the working and middle classes in Sonoma County is an acute symptom of the larger issue of sustainable land use. The preservation of open space, traffic, pollution control, and the conservation of agricultural land are other aspects of this problem.

Affordable housing, along with access to good jobs, good schools, and open space, is a quality of life factor that makes a community attractive. If left entirely to the play of market forces, however, the combination of well-paying jobs and free floating housing prices will lead to suburban sprawl and to squeezing the lower middle and working classes out of the housing market. Left to market forces and the piecemeal planning represented by twenty year urban growth boundaries and hit and miss open space acquisition, the economic forces for transforming Sonoma County into a Santa Clara Valley North over the course of the next century are virtually unstoppable.

A whole systems strategy for channeling these forces in a more hopeful direction would include several elements. The core element would be a comprehensive long range plan for high density living while preserving the quality of life. The development of such a plan would require the participation of a variety of stakeholder groups, including business and political leaders, real estate brokers and developers, environmentalists and agriculture groups, transportation planner and providers, and affordable housing advocates. The goals would be to create a shared vision for the sustainable development of the region that would be created through an inclusive democratic process and which would therefore be supported by the majority of citizens.

An element of a long range development plan needs to be a safety net for the working poor. In a labor market structured according to the principles of modern industrial capitalism, which among other things requires a certain level of unemployment to control inflation, it is unlikely that the value of labor at the lower end of the market will ever be sufficient to permit the working poor to purchase all of the necessities for a decent standard of living. (It should be noted that in the housing market that currently exists in Sonoma County, law enforcement officers and entry level university professors are part of the "working poor" by this definition.) An adequate safety net for this group would include guaranteed access to affordable housing and health care, as well as unemployment insurance.

The economic component of sustainable land use planning was provided by Henry George (1979/1879) in the last century. George pointed out that land is a God-given natural resources, but that it has economic market value according to its use. He also observed that most of that economic value is created by the ways human beings put the land to use. The value added by human creativity explains the high value of urban land. For example, the value of the land under the Transamerica Pyramid is largely a function of the goods and services produced by the financial district and by the urban complex of the city of San Francisco.

George's proposal, therefore, was a land value tax that would recover some of this community-created value for community purposes. George's land value tax was fundamentally different from conventional property taxation, as only the value of the land would be taxed, not the value of improvements such as houses, office buildings, or farms. George believed that land value taxation would be sufficient to pay for all public services and to eliminate poverty. For this reason, his proposal was labeled the "single tax," and it was the basis for a large scale political movement at the end of the nineteenth century. (There is still an active organized movement promoting George's ideas today, which includes the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation which keeps his works in print.) While in a complex modern economy George's proposal is probably not the panacea he envisioned, it does offer promise of rationalizing the economics of sustainable development. In the few jurisdictions where it has been tried, it appear to have the effect of reducing the negative effects of suburban sprawl and inner city decay.