Planning magazine — March 1980

Confessions of a Planner

By Lawrence Livingston, Jr.

Thirty years ago, armed with a government-financed MIT graduate degree and brimming over with an intoxicating blend of professional ambition and reformer's zeal, I embarked on a career in city planning, then a relatively new field. Today, looking back over three decades of service to local and state government agencies, as a public employee in the early years and as a consultant for the past 27, I find myself disillusioned by the consequences of city planning in general and by my own contributions in particular. Too often, planners' proposals have proved to be unjustifiably costly, ineffective, or, in some cases, even harmful to the public interest. The best that can be said of the mixed results of public planning is that the benefits probably have outweighed the costs by a slight margin.

Most of my work was done in California, the state that leads the nation not only in population growth and urbanization, but also in experimenting with planning solutions to its problems. California heads the nation both in number of planners employed and in the size of public planning budgets. In general, the consequences of the programs in California have been the same as in other heavily urbanized states. But, because of its size, population, rapid growth, and penchant for accepting planners' advice, the golden state has suffered more than most.

In fairness, it must be recognized that some far-sighted leaders of the profession and some critics and commentators have foreseen the consequences of ill-conceived planning policies and have warned against them. Most planners, however, have supported or at least have not opposed such costly and harmful programs as these: the sprawl-inducing freeway system; the California Aqueduct, which provides northern California water to the Los Angeles area and thus encourages growth; the establishment of new university and college campuses in outlying locations, where they have stimulated unwanted, costly growth, instead of in urban centers; and downtown redevelopment projects that have destroyed the homes of thousands of low-income residents and, more often than not, still failed to restore the health of the CBD.

The recent taxpayers' revolts are signs that voters in California and elsewhere have finally recognized such costly, socially harmful mistakes. But the message seems to have been heard only dimly in Washington, and vast sums continue to flow to the states and local governments for the same sorts of public programs. Unfortunately for the cause of reform, most of the federal assistance programs that make it possible to translate planners' proposals into action are administered by HUD, the agency with probably the worst record of effective problem solving in the entire federal establishment.

Now, I must confess that I share the blame for the failures of city planning in California. While in some cases I foresaw the adverse consequences of planning programs — such as those that fostered suburban sprawl — I was unable to block them, sometimes because I did not present my case convincingly, and sometimes because the odds against me were too great. On one occasion I advised a Bank of America executive to halt mortgage lending in badly located, poorly designed subdivisions. He refused on the grounds that a change in lending policy might undermine public confidence in the bank. In other cases, I myself was one of the villains, and I must accept my share of the blame for the results.

BART

My first commission as an independent consultant in 1953 was to assist what now is the Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) in planning the rapid transit system. From my student days, I had been an enthusiastic advocate of rail mass transit as the solution to urban traffic congestion. Now my great opportunity had arrived! With the other planners working on the job, I concluded that the system should connect the core areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley with outlying residential districts and suburbs, thus facilitating commutation and strengthening the dominance of the central cities. We purposely did not plan to provide service to outlying commercial and industrial centers.

While this choice was theoretically sound, the results were not exactly what we foresaw. San Francisco's dominant role as the regional headquarters indeed has been reinforced, but reinforced to the point of generating justifiable opposition to further proliferation of closely packed high-rise buildings. Many city planners agree with the environmentalists' battle cry, "Stop the Manhattanization of San Francisco." Further, downtown Oakland and Berkeley have gained relatively little strength from rapid transit service. And the suburban shopping centers and industrial parks, unserved by BART, have become focal points of traffic congestion with impacts far beyond their immediate vicinity.

To minimize costs and community disruption, BART lines followed existing rail rights-of-way wherever possible. In order to maintain high average train speeds, planners located stations at widely spaced intervals. Most BART patrons drive to the stations and park all day. Thus, the typical BART rider is an affluent suburbanite who travels to his downtown white collar job on a heavily subsidized transit system, while blue collar workers whose jobs are in outlying areas share the cost through their sales taxes and receive few benefits.

Market Street

I was retained in 1962 by the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) to head a team, including landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and architect George Rockrise, to develop a concept for the rejuvenation of Market Street, the city's run-down main business artery. The assignment was timely because the street was about to be torn up for construction of the underground BART line and a local subway. In our report, What to Do About Market Street, we proposed eliminating two traffic lanes; widening sidewalks; creating plazas at the new BART stations; and embellishing Market Street with ornamental paving, landscaping, lighting, signs, kiosks, benches, and other street furniture. We envisioned Market Street as San Francisco's Champs Elysees.

Voters approved a $25 million Market Street bond issue in 1965, although it took more than a decade to complete the improvements. Halprin was a member of the team that proposed the final designs, which, for the most part, were consistent with the concepts outlined in our report.

No expense was spared: brick sidewalks with granite curbs, double rows of sycamores, refurbished light standards (originally installed during the 1915 World's Fair), granite benches, bronze trash receptacles and bicycle racks, handsomely lettered street signs, and specially designed traffic signals. The city banished all overhanging signs, even theater marquees. But, despite these improvements, the landscaped plazas of the new office skyscrapers in the financial district, and new construction and remodeling in the retail sector, the basic character of the Market Street area remains unchanged. The amusement sector, with its X-rated movie theaters, pornographic bookstores, and penny arcades, is as tawdry as it ever was.

The obvious fact, overlooked by the planners, is that improving a street's appearance does not change the uses of adjacent properties in the absence of economic demand for new development. The people who use the street are still those who patronize its businesses and amusements. Market is still the people's street.

The growth of the city's low-income minority population is reflected in the character of Market Street. Public spaces like the plaza at the Powell Street BART station have become havens for down-and-outers, unemployed youths, and street entertainers. The new landscaping and street furniture have been vandalized, the walls defaced with spray paint, the brick sidewalks littered with trash. Unhappily, but inevitably, the cosmetic surgery on Market Street has cured no basic ills.

Yerba Buena Center

A year after the Market Street report, my firm was hired by Justin Herman, the dynamic director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, to plan the South of Market Redevelopment Project, later renamed Yerba Buena Center. Herman had strong ideas about the future uses of the redevelopment area, the central feature of which was to be a convention complex and adjacent sports arena.

Our plan called for clearance of virtually all buildings in the project area except historic St. Patrick's Church and a few industrial buildings in the south portion. Studies prepared by other consultants gave assurance that adequate housing was available to relocate the 300 families and 3,000 elderly single men who lived in the project area. But because I had some reservations about moving the single men into residential hotels in the sleazy Tenderloin district north of Market Street, I proposed construction of 400 units of public housing for the elderly within the project area. This done, I pretty much dismissed my concerns about relocation and enthusiastically addressed myself to designing plans for transforming the area to accommodate Herman's development proposals. I assumed that demolition and reconstruction would be under way within a few years.

Yerba Buena Center moved more slowly than I had anticipated. Support from City Hall was not strong, primarily because of justified doubts that the convention center could be self-supporting. The federal money needed to buy and clear the land was slow in coming. When it did become available in 1969, Herman launched an all-out effort to get the convention center built, retaining the world-famous Japanese architect, Kenzo Tange, to head a team to design a detailed development plan for the central blocks of the project area. I was a member of the team, along with architects Gerald McCue and John Bolles and landscape architect Lawrence Halprin. The Tange plan and the public relations campaign that accompanied it won city approval of the convention complex, and site clearance was accelerated.

We should not have been surprised — but we were — when residents of the area organized to oppose the project. While the Redevelopment Agency insisted that it met all legal requirements governing relocation, some of the elderly hotel tenants were displaced summarily. Represented by public interest lawyers, a group called Tenants and Owners in Opposition to Redevelopment (TOOK) went to court, demanding construction of 2,000 new low-rent housing units. That court case, a subsequent lawsuit based on failure to comply with environmental impact assessment requirements, plus financing problems and controversy over design of the convention center, delayed construction until 1979. One newspaper observed that it took longer to build than the Panama Canal.

In retrospect, it is clear to me that, while the Yerba Buena Center was a sound proposal, the project should not have been undertaken until relocation facilities had been provided for the low-income residents of the area. This means that relocation housing should have been built both inside and outside the project area, and the entire relocation process should have been handled with greater sensitivity and humanity.

Palo Alto foothills

One final example of a planning project that yielded mixed results is a study I led in 1969 and 1970 to determine the best use of some 7,500 acres of undeveloped land in the foothills of Palo Alto. After annexing the area 10 years earlier, the city had purchased 2,500 acres for a rural park and installed water mains and sewers on more than half of the remaining land.

The city had little interest in any type of commercial or industrial development in the foothills. Palo Alto already contains a highly successful regional shopping center, office park, and industrial park, all on land owned by Stanford University. But the city is plagued by severe traffic congestion and a chronic shortage of moderate-price housing. Our study examined 20 different residential patterns from all the standpoints now required in environmental impact assessments.

We also looked at what would happen if the foothills remained entirely undeveloped. Our calculations assumed that if the land were to remain in open space, the city would have to buy it at fair market value and repay with interest the taxes levied for the water and sewer lines that already had been installed. We found that the open-space alternative actually would cost the taxpayers less over a 20-year period than any of the development alternatives, despite the high cost of purchasing the land and repaying the taxes.

After months of debate, the city decided to turn down a pending planned unit development to be built in the foothills and to preserve the entire area as open space. When the necessary funds were found to be unavailable, the city rezoned the land as an open-space district, permitting only certain agricultural and open-space uses or residential development at a maximum density of one house per 10 acres. The applicant for the planned unit development sued the city, claiming inverse condemnation (taking of his land without payment) and won a $7.5 million judgment, although of course the land is worth far more today. Another inverse condemnation suit by an owner who had never proposed any type of development is pending, but a recent California supreme court decision indicates that the outcome is likely to be in the city's favor.

Palo Alto's action received widespread national publicity, both in professional planning publications and in the popular press. Conservationists were particularly delighted by our finding that in Palo Alto open-space preservation was financially as well as environmentally advantageous. Unfortunately, many zealots hastily concluded that what is true in Palo Alto must be true anywhere, overlooking the fact that residential development in Palo Alto is unusually costly to the taxpayers because of the city's lavish public service program and excellent school system.

As a result of the Palo Alto study, I received dozens of invitations to talk about urban planning and open-space conservation. On each occasion I stressed that Palo Alto is a special case and that open-space preservation results in a net cost to the taxpayers in cities with lower levels of public services. But people typically hear only what they want to hear, and, without real justification, I became a minor hero to many conservationists. On the strength of an undeserved reputation as an uncompromising advocate of open-space preservation, I received commissions to prepare comprehensive plans for such environmentally sensitive areas as Santa Barbara and Jackson Hole. Some residents of these areas were disappointed when the plans I prepared did not rule out all development possibilities. They were unable to accept a balanced view of the consequences of urban growth.

In retrospect

In most instances, the disillusionment I describe here did not set in until many years after the job was completed. In some cases, such as the BART plan, our mistakes did not become apparent for as long as 15 years. These time lapses help to explain why I enthusiastically embarked on project after project with a conviction that the public would benefit from my efforts. My optimism was neither unreasonable nor totally unwarranted. To some degree the public interest was well served by the assignments I have discussed, and there were many others where the benefits clearly outweighed the negative results.

In a sense, a public planning project is like a war. Either a good cause or an unworthy one may prevail, but there is certain to be a substantial number of innocent victims. It takes a considerable degree of foresight to decide whether the purpose of a major planning project is justifiable in terms of the public interest. If justification is seriously questionable, the planner should decline the assignment. I have done this a number of times.

It is much more difficult to judge how harmful a project's side effects will be. For instance, it is tough but not impossible to foretell whether a central district redevelopment project will revitalize an area. But deciding whether the results are warranted in the light of the human suffering and the financial cost involved is far more difficult.

My inability as a planner to make sound, far-sighted judgments on such side-effects issues is primarily what accounts for my frustration with the profession. I find it hard to believe that other planners do not have the same problem. As time passes and mistakes become evident, it seems logical that the mistakes will not be repeated. In many instances, however, logic does not prevail. I was dismayed to learn in 1979 that Houston is planning a rapid transit system and basing its decisions on many of the same erroneous judgments we made 25 years ago.

Like elected officials, public planners make decisions that cause some people to be winners and some to be losers. If there are too many losers, the public official eventually goes down to defeat. The public has no such protection from the mistakes of planners. Only an obvious, outrageous error or a long chain of errors with disastrous, cumulative effects discredits a planner.

In fairness, it must be granted that planners have tried to devise systems to evaluate the inevitable tradeoffs implicit in their proposals. Statistical matrices, computer models, and a host of other devices have been utilized in attempting to measure just how much the winners will win and how much the losers will lose. None of these attempts has been fully successful.

Perhaps I am being unrealistic in seeking foolproof answers to such complex questions as are involved in most major public planning projects. But 30 years of seeing human values ignored, individuals unfairly treated, and public funds misspent have convinced me that planners must be held accountable for the consequences of their proposals. Planners must seek and find an accurate way to gauge the gains and losses that will stem from their proposals and identify unmistakably who will reap the gains and who will suffer the losses.

A voter or an elected official who is presented with such an accounting and who knows that it is valid then can accept or reject the planner's proposal with confidence. Until such an analytical system becomes available, plans made by planners should be treated with skepticism, ranging, as is appropriate in each case, from caution to distrust.

Lawrence Livingston, Jr., AICP, is the head of a San Francisco-based city and regional planning firm.