Abstract
In the United States, new environmental policy instruments have emerged to address some of the economic, social and environmental contradictions of neoliberal urbanism. Amongst these instruments, regional habitat conservation planning under the Federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) is becoming de facto a suburban growth management tool widely deployed across different parts of Southern California. One reason why speculator-developers, property owners, conservationists, planners, municipalities and other suburban interests have bought into this tool is due to the growing link between the federal protection of endangered species and the availability of voter-approved funds for major road infrastructure projects. Evidence of this link is examined in the context of two regional conservation planning processes underway in Riverside County. The paper argues that inadvertently the Federal ESA has been transformed from a species protection law into a regulatory tool with which to co-ordinate private land development, public infrastructure provision and habitat conservation in suburbanising regions.
Introduction
Throughout the United States, various new policy instruments have emerged to address some of the economic, social and environmental consequences of neoliberal urbanism and suburban sprawl. Amongst these instruments, smart growth and regional conservation planning have been widely applied in fast-growing city-regions facing significant environmental challenges. Whilst scholars have examined smart growth as a creature of the tension between neoliberal (entrepreneurial) urban development and environmental sustainability (Krueger and Gibbs, 2008; Dierwechter, 2008; Jonas and While, 2007), regional habitat conservation planning has become a de facto suburban growth management tool for various stakeholders across Southern California. This region is highly suburbanised yet also has significant concentrations of endangered species and ecologically rich habitats and ecosystems, which are threatened by future suburban development. Nonetheless, in recent years habitat conservation planning under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) has enabled municipalities and major land development interests across the region to engage proactively in regional planning processes which seek to reconcile the tension between unregulated private suburban development and public interest in protecting open space and sensitive habitat on private property (Beatley, 1994; Feldman and Jonas, 2000; Pincetl, 1999).
In this paper, we deploy the term ‘neoliberal suburbanism’ in order to capture the idea that since the 1970s and 1980s the federal government’s role in subsidising suburban development across Southern California has been significantly attenuated. Yet indirectly the federal ESA has come to play an important role in managing and curbing the more speculative aspects of suburban growth. Suburban land development has for many years been driven first and foremost by the actions of speculator-developers, landowners and growth-hungry municipalities. These interests have availed themselves of permissive land use policies and public infrastructure to develop master-planned communities, residential sub-divisions and retail developments throughout the region. Although voters often resisted the spread and encroachment of large developments on open space by passing local growth control measures, such measures failed to prevent region-wide suburban sprawl (Pincetl, 1994). As the suburbs have continued to burgeon, valuable environmental resources including habitat for native species of fauna and flora, have been threatened, triggering a new phase of federal intervention in the form of the ESA (Feldman and Jonas, 2000). The ESA was never intended to be a suburban growth management tool. Nonetheless, it has been transformed de facto into a mechanism by which habitat conservation planning can occur under a procedure which releases significant amounts of private land from conservation restrictions, streamlines environmental review processes, provides participating local jurisdictions access to public funds for transport infrastructure, and purchases land for future conservation purposes.
This paper examines two regional habitat conservation plans underway in Riverside County, Southern California (Figure 1) and discusses their growing influence on the politics and management of suburban growth. In the mid 1980s, the second conservation plan ever to be commenced and completed under the provisions of the federal ESA was for the fringe-toed lizard in the Coachella Valley in central Riverside County (Beatley, 1992). This was followed in western Riverside County by the listing of the Stephens kangaroo rat in 1988, which triggered a regional habitat conservation plan that was eventually approved in spite of local opposition from speculator-developers, farmers and private landowners (Feldman, 1995; Feldman and Jonas, 2000; Chiang, 1999). The completion of these single-species regional habitat conservation plans subsequently paved the way in the early 2000s for regionally integrated conservation measures covering multiple species and providing funds for transport infrastructure projects. Suburban land development in the county now takes place within a multiscalar planning and governance framework in which private developers, property owners, conservationists and other stakeholders work in partnership with local, regional, state and federal agencies to protect threatened habitats, control suburban growth and provide regional infrastructure.
The location of Riverside County in Southern California.
The gradual shift in the planning and governance of suburban development from local to regional scales in Riverside County has not been without conflict among the different levels and units of government and governance involved. Indeed, an important sub-theme in the ensuing discussion is that at the federal ESA has also engendered a new spatial politics of conservation planning (Evans, 2007), the outcomes of which vary across the region. Whereas in western Riverside County private developers, property owners and local politicians initially mobilised to thwart the impact of the ESA on land use and suburban development, in the Coachella Valley similar sets of interests worked together to ensure that regional solutions to land use, suburban growth and conservation planning gained some acceptance locally. Despite these local differences in spatial politics, the ESA has empowered a regional planning and governance dynamic both here as well as elsewhere in Southern California; a dynamic which owes its origins in part to the failures and contradictions of ad hoc local approaches to suburban growth management.
Neoliberalism, Suburban Development and the Spatial Politics of Conservation Planning
It has been suggested that cities throughout the US are increasingly under the sway of neoliberal rules and regulations with respect to how urban and suburban developments are resourced, managed and regulated (Brenner and Theodore, 2001; Hackworth, 2007). Arguably, one symptom of this trend is the intense competition that can occur among cities (often located in the same region) for investment, jobs and fiscal resources (Cox and Mair, 1988); a territorial competition which, in turn, is symptomatic of the declining role of the state in the provision of collective consumption goods and services, including public infrastructure (Ward and Jonas, 2004). For Castree (2008), however, ‘neoliberalism’ has become a ‘catch all’ term which is applied indiscriminately to a variety of new policy instruments seemingly irrespective of concrete specificities. Some neoliberal environmental policies do attempt to treat nature—like land and buildings—as a marketable commodity. Yet others require significant levels of state intervention since
the state cannot avoid taking some responsibility for the relationships between the capitalist economy, civil society and the natural environment (Castree, 2008, p. 148).
Southern California exemplifies the increasing challenges of applying the ‘catch all’ concept of neoliberalism to what are in fact complex and evolving relationships between capital accumulation, urban development, state intervention and the protection of natural resources.
Our argument is that the role of the federal government in shaping the suburban landscape in the region is certainly not new but its specific form has evolved over time. After World War II, an integral aspect of the mass production economy was the role played by the US (federal) state in securing economic growth and suburban development de facto via fiscal and regulatory incentives that helped to stimulate private housing development and supported the provision of regional infrastructure such as freeways (Harvey, 1975, 1985; Florida and Jonas, 1991). Like many burgeoning metropolitan regions, Southern California was dependent on the automobile, public spending on freeways and roads, and housing policies, such as federally insured, low-interest and fixed-rate mortgages. Relatively cheap land and good-quality housing became available on a mass scale, prompting many households to escape the overcrowding, high taxes and deteriorating services and living environment of the region’s major coastal cities. Inland cities and suburbs in Riverside and San Bernardino counties offered the promise of relatively stable employment opportunities as well as access to affordable living, open space and good quality public services—factors which speculator-developers used to good effect in marketing new developments to incomers. Accordingly, counties and municipalities across the region deployed permissive zoning policies to encourage large-area development as a solution for the growing demand for ‘affordable’ housing on the part of low- to middle-income families (Jonas, 1997). In summary, suburban sprawl was a by-product of a trajectory of economic growth and a mode of social regulation, which included de facto federal policies that favoured suburban growth over inner-city renewal (Harvey, 1975).
Environmentalism around the suburban living place was another by-product of this phase of de facto federal intervention. In the 1960s and 1970s, the economic benefits of federally subsidised suburban development were increasingly called into question by consumers as the energy crisis focused public attention on land speculation at the urban fringe and suburban sprawl (Walker and Large, 1974). For example, in many of Southern California’s cities and suburbs, anti-growth movements grew up around what were often very place-specific conflicts over land use and property rights. In some places, county or city zoning policies that sought to ‘open up the suburbs’ (Downs, 1973) to low-income households were opposed by those who wanted to preserve the social exclusivity and fiscal autonomy of suburbs (Hoch, 1984). Suburban exclusionary zoning, the construction of gated communities and the introduction of local growth control measures were amongst the many tangible outcomes of growing local resistance to suburban overdevelopment (Neiman and Loveridge, 1981; Pincetl, 1992). By the same token, environmentalism highlighted the very different experiences of low-income and minority households living in the established cities and inner suburbs (Pulido, 2000).
Our argument is that Southern California has now entered a new phase of suburban development, which might be described as ‘neoliberal suburbanism’. When compared with the earlier period of de facto federal urban policy, the new phase represents an intensification of the following prevalent attributes of suburban development.
First, there is widespread competition between suburban municipalities for tax revenue from new commercial and industrial land development to make up for shortfalls in local property taxes resulting from the impact of Proposition 13. Passed in 1978, Proposition 13 restricted increases in the local property tax to below-inflation rates and profoundly reshaped the state and local government landscape of California thereafter (Jonas and Pincetl, 2006).
Secondly, there has been fragmentation and privatisation of local government across the region as a result of the creation of newly incorporated municipalities, private or ‘gated’ residential communities and special purpose districts, each responsible for a specific service such as water, sewerage, parks, land use and education. These districts are examples of what has been called ‘hidden government’ in that they are not directly accountable to voters but are operated by commissions and boards under rules determined by local and state government (Gottlieb and FitzSimmons, 1991).
Thirdly, financial deregulation has led to increasingly speculative and risky private residential and commercial development at the urban fringe. Southern California has been at the forefront of successive housing market crises triggered by financial deregulation and federal cutbacks, resulting in mortgage foreclosures and job losses throughout the region and especially in the Inland Empire (Jonas, 1997).
Fourthly, there is a growing reliance upon local voter initiatives to fund services and plan growth, or what has been described as ‘ballot box planning’ (Calavita, 1992). Increasingly, fiscally stressed cities rely on tools such as revenue bonds and tax-increment financing of redevelopment to raise funds for infrastructure and attract private investment yet many of these tools are not subject to proper public scrutiny or accountability (Althubaity and Jonas, 1998).
Financial deregulation and fiscal austerity create a challenging context for the new generation of urban design principles which have arisen in reaction to suburban sprawl, such as smart growth and the New Urbanism (Katz, 1994). Advocated by leading architects and national organisations such as the Urban Land Institute, smart growth and the New Urbanism try to encourage more dense, compact and fiscally efficient urban forms in established cities and suburbs. Such approaches often rely upon private investment and market-based solutions to produce, amongst other outcomes, a greater social mix in suburban land uses, integration of open space and green infrastructure into suburban design, better connections to transit-orientated developments and regional environmental sustainability (Calthorpe and Fulton, 2001). However, smart growth and the New Urbanism have often been criticised for preserving socially privileged and exclusionary suburban developments at the expense of a genuine concern for protecting the regional environment, fostering social equity and encouraging sustainable urban redevelopment (Jonas and McCarthy, 2009; Talen, 2005). By the same token, new market-based environmental policy instruments, such as the provision of ecosystem services and mitigation banking, have been associated with the rapid development of wetlands and other sensitive habitats in and around urban areas (Robertson, 2004). Likewise, attempts to protect biodiversity at the urban and suburban fringes by establishing wildlife corridors, renewing and expanding urban parks, planting trees and purchasing land for preserve areas have proved vulnerable to changing housing market conditions, business cycles and urban politics (Feldman and Jonas, 2000; Pincetl, 1999).
In this context, Evans (2007) argues that contemporary approaches to urban sustainability could give rise to a new spatial politics of conservation planning. New conservation planning tools, concepts, discourses and measures have empowered stakeholders in cities and regions to mobilise around the various levels of government and governance either to support or to oppose habitat conservation planning. We now turn to Riverside County in Southern California and examine the surreptitious role of the federal ESA in triggering a new spatial politics of conservation planning and transforming approaches to suburban growth management throughout the county and the wider region.
Recent Patterns and Processes of Suburban Development in Riverside County, Southern California
Southern California’s built-up area extends from Los Angeles County into western and central parts of Riverside and San Bernardino counties. This vast suburban region—also known as the Inland Empire (see Figure 1)—has been identified in several studies and reports as a ‘worst case’ scenario in suburban sprawl (Fulton and Shigely, 2002; Wolch et al., 2004). Already containing well over 2 million residents in 1990, the region grew in population by 20.1 per cent between 2000 and 2005, as compared with 4.4 per cent in Los Angeles County and Riverside County itself grew to nearly 1.9 million residents in 2005 (California Statistical Abstract, 2006). The Inland Empire has been prone to cycles of growth and crisis, most notably in the early 1990s when the regional housing market went into a severe decline and federal defence spending cuts contributed to a high rate of unemployment (Jonas, 1997). Figure 2 shows the trend for residential building permits issued between 1994 and 2007 in Riverside County. After peaking in 2004–05, building activity declined very sharply, reaching a level similar to such activity in the early 1990s.
New housing construction permits authorised, Riverside County, 1994–2007. Data source: California Statistical Abstract (2009, Table I-6).
The land development process in Riverside County has been driven by speculator-developers, many of which are nationally and internationally recognised commercial builders and housing developers. This is especially true of western parts of the County. Due to its low prices as compared with the rest of the region, new-build housing in western Riverside County remains attractive to first-time homebuyers, many from neighbouring Orange and Los Angeles counties. However, there is a trade-off between provision of regional infrastructure and access to an ‘affordable’ suburban lifestyle, a factor that regional planners tend to highlight by referring to the Inland Empire’s jobs/population imbalance. Both the western and central parts of Riverside County continue to grow, adding nearly half a million people since 2000. However, development patterns and institutional structures in the central part of the county are different from western Riverside insofar as the Coachella Valley’s development industry has retained a strong local presence and, as we shall argue, was an early participant in regional conservation planning processes.
Table 1 represents a snapshot of population growth across the county for the years 2004 and 2005. It reveals that, while most municipalities have grown, some have actually lost population. Significant population growth has also occurred in unincorporated areas, which are remote and poorly served by infrastructure. Furthermore, these areas are vulnerable to changing land use designations if subsequently annexed or incorporated under rules and procedures stipulated by the State of California. For example, the City of Moreno valley in western Riverside County grew from an unincorporated area of 30 000 residents in 1980 to an expansive new city of well over 170 000 residents in 2010. Yet growth has come at a cost. The City Council of Moreno valley has frequently turned to the local voters to pass tax increases to fund services and infrastructure (Jonas, 1999). Indeed, most cities in Riverside County are now dependent on non-property sources of revenue, including sales taxes collected and redistributed to cities by the state, and user fees.
Population change in western Riverside County and the Coachella Valley, 2004–05
Data source: California Statistical Abstract (2006).
County and municipal land use policies have encouraged new residential and retail developments because development fees and sales taxes are crucial sources of funds for planning and regional infrastructure. Whereas development fees fund planning, sales taxes provide additional funds for roads and other regional infrastructure, but only if publicly approved. In November 1988, Riverside County voters approved Measure A, which was an increase in the sales tax by 0.5 per cent over a 20-year period. This money was to be used only for transport purposes, thereby demonstrating that ‘neoliberal suburbanism’ often involves a narrowing of the public interest. To put this another way, the increasing reliance on local voter initiatives rather than direct state or federal funding for infrastructure means that the public—or, at least those who are able and choose to vote—can place severe restrictions on how the money is raised and where it is eventually spent. In the case of Measure A, a further restriction was that any additional sales tax revenue generated from new development in a specific geographical area had to be applied to finance transport infrastructure projects within that same area. In a context where both the county and municipal governments are under extreme fiscal stress, Measure A has since become an important source of regional transport infrastructure funds for areas in Riverside County now undergoing regional conservation planning.
In California, cities and counties are required to develop general plans which serve as the ‘constitution’ for land use regulation in the state but also have important implications for local tax revenue and the preservation of open space (Curtin, 1995). Achieving consistency among complex state and local planning processes and fiscal tools can lead to conflict between private suburban development interests, landowners and environmental groups (Fulton, 1991). Proposition 13 placed strict limits on local property tax-revenue raising capacity, forcing cities and counties to adopt policies such as tax-increment financing of redevelopment to attract new commercial development (Althubaity and Jonas, 1998). Redevelopment is further symptomatic of what we have called ‘neoliberal suburbanism’ insofar as local redevelopment agencies rather than local governments capture the increase in tax revenue resulting from commercial redevelopment. This, too, is a factor contributing to the shortage of county and municipal funds for regional infrastructure.
In recent years, regional infrastructure projects have become flash-points of endangered species conflicts, which in turn potentially jeopardise capital improvements and bond financing because local governments must now comply with the federal ESA. This unusual conjuncture of fiscal constraints, infrastructure shortfalls and endangered species conflicts has driven the search for new institutional and governance approaches to land use, infrastructure and conservation planning throughout Southern California. Riverside County has become an important testing ground for new approaches to suburban growth management that seek to integrate regional conservation planning with transport infrastructure provision.
Controlling Suburban Growth: The Unexpected Role of the Federal Endangered Species Act
The 1973 federal ESA passed with nearly unanimous approval of the Congress. The Act forbade the ‘taking’ of listed species, which was generally thought to be limited to killing of big mammals such as grizzly bears and birds such as golden eagles on public lands well away from cities (for example, national parks). It certainly was not seen to have an impact on smaller and less charismatic species; nor for that matter on non-federal lands and private property in urban and suburban areas. However, by the late 1970s, the federal courts began to interpret ‘taking’ to include the destruction of the habitat of any listed species and that this could conceivably apply to private property in suburbanising areas of major metropolitan regions (Houck, 1993). This generated an upsurge of opposition to the ESA because its enforcement increasingly conflicted with suburban development, especially in areas like Southern California where new and future developments encroached upon unprotected habitat and as ESA species listings became commonplace (Beatley, 1994).
With hundreds of species qualifying for listing under the ESA, landowners and speculator-developers in Southern California feared that species could be listed one-by-one so as to delay or stop projects. This was a situation that conservationists used to their advantage. As the regional building cycle became more volatile in the 1980s and early 1990s, and more species were listed, large development projects became increasingly risky ventures. Conservationists realised that the ESA could be invoked as a law to stop development altogether, triggering a flurry of federal Supreme Court cases in which the legal requirements of the ESA were tested against constitutional amendments pertaining to the role of the federal government, private property rights and the public interest (Feldman and Jonas, 2000). The ability of the ESA to stop permitted projects created uncertainties for developers, who hoped to profit from land banks and development agreements. 1 The need to re-establish certainty became a critical factor in subsequent legislative reforms promoted by developers and their legal representatives (Thornton, 1991). In the process, the federal ESA was transformed, from a law that could be invoked to stop development altogether, de facto into a land use policy that required local governments and landowners to develop habitat conservation plans whenever a listed species was discovered on private property within their jurisdiction (Batt, 1995; Feldman, 1995).
In 1982, Congress amended section 10(a) of the Act to allow the taking of listed species otherwise deemed incidental to lawful activity on non-federal land. In order to receive a 10(a) permit, a habitat conservation plan (HCP) must be developed and approved by the federal government. HCPs permitted some habitat destruction whilst not jeopardising the existence of the species under consideration (Thornton, 1991). For many municipalities and counties in Southern California, the allocation of ‘incidental take’ permits was an important early incentive for participation in the HCP planning process, albeit suburban officials still complained about the lack of federal funding and lengthy approval and permitting processes. More generally, there were concerns about growing encroachment of federal government in local land use planning, a much cherished function of local government in Southern California (Fulton, 1991; Jonas, 2002). In the event, few HCPs were developed during the 1980s and those that did covered species that were already listed as threatened or endangered. This left developers in suburban areas perpetually vulnerable to new listings. This was the case in Riverside County, where there was a sequence of new species listings in the 1980s (Feldman and Jonas, 2000).
Identified as a ‘global hotspot of biodiversity’ by scientific studies of species distributions (Dobson et al., 1997), Riverside County was one of the few locations in the entire country in which HCPs were first attempted. The potential for a development threat to endangered species and habitats in the county became more likely in the 1980s due to an upsurge in the rate of construction of single-family homes and proposals for improving regional infrastructure. The county’s permissive land development regime involved large tracts of developable open space and agricultural land, as well as zoning laws and development agreements that encouraged high-density housing development with only minimal restrictions and requirements (Jonas, 1999). Whereas other Southern California counties and municipalities did have growth controls in place, Riverside and its cities had few such controls and those that were passed proved relatively easy for developers to circumvent by building either in unincorporated areas or places where annexation to a growth-friendly jurisdiction was likely to be approved by the county (Warner and Molotch, 1995). Unplanned development, problems of attracting inward investment and associated pressure to invest in infrastructure including roads and freeway interchanges, led to increased conflict over land use and open space (Jonas, 1997). At that time, few could have anticipated that regional conservation planning under the federal ESA would provide a means for participating local jurisdictions to unlock access to increasingly scarce funds for strategic infrastructure. If anything, the development of regional transport was likely to trigger endangered-species-related conflicts and delay future planned developments.
Nonetheless, the federal ESA has since evolved, from a law having the potential to stop growth on a species-by-species and project-by-project basis, into a tool for comprehensive regional planning, thereby indirectly shaping suburban development but potentially also regional infrastructure. A key issue here is designing multispecies regional conservation plans that provide incidental take permits and also avail revenue-hungry suburbs of access to publicly voted infrastructure funds. The ESA devolves responsibility for the development of conservation planning measures to a wide range of local governments and regional agencies, albeit under federal supervision. While all HCPs are theoretically voluntary agreements and could be led by developers and private companies with large landholdings (for example, a major utility or transport company), they are much more cost-effective approaches when negotiated on a regional basis rather than project-by-project negotiations.
Throughout Southern California, landowners, developers and utilities have been pushed to participate in regional conservation planning because without such plans the project-by-project approach to mitigation required by state and federal law means that road and interchange projects and utility extensions could be delayed for years at a cost of tens of millions of dollars. Moreover, under California’s direct initiative democratic process, voter-approved bond issues and tax increases for infrastructure can now be linked to spending in local jurisdictions already engaged in regional conservation planning. If the federal ESA has served as the regulatory ‘stick’ with which to force local governments and private landowners to comply with conservation guidelines, then making access to infrastructure funds contingent upon participation in regional HCPs has come to represent the fiscal ‘carrot’. In this respect, HCPs are better characterised in terms of being a particular response to the real-concrete needs of organised suburban development interests rather than representing the much more abstract idea of ‘neoliberal’ environmental governance.
The Uneven Urban Impacts of the ESA: Towards Regional Habitat Conservation Planning in Riverside County
Riverside County is not a homogeneous suburban region, undifferentiated by ecology, economic development, class or politics. In reality, there are important differences in the ways the ESA has evolved into a growth management tool for different areas in the county. The first species in Riverside County to receive federal protection was the Coachella Valley fringe-toed lizard, a species which was reliant on sand dunes vulnerable both to changing climate conditions and suburban development (Beatley, 1992). At least half of the valley’s sand dunes had already disappeared by the early 1980s when the lizard was listed as threatened under the federal ESA. Further dunes were threatened by suburban sub-divisions, which encroached on areas not already protected. Without protection of the sand sources, the lizard and its habitat would not survive. In 1986, the Fringe-toed Lizard Habitat Conservation Plan was approved by the federal government (Beatley, 1992). The plan included property acquisition, land management and limited provision for growth management outside the jurisdiction of the regional joint powers authority, the Coachella Valley Association of Governments (CVAG). Since there were no additional land use restrictions in the valley, and many cities were hungry to annex land for proposed new developments, the lizard preserves were known to face future problems that would have had to have been addressed in any case. The lizard HCP was completed in a few years through a process that was generally considered highly collaborative and involved local developers, the local chapter of the Building and Industry Association and landowners (Beatley, 1992). In 1994, a major regional habitat conservation planning process was started with a view to protecting multiple species in the Coachella Valley. This was also led by CVAG with the expectation that a collaborative process would bring about a quick resolution. In reality, the plan was not approved for another 13 years (Alagona and Pincetl, 2008).
In a parallel yet unconnected process, Western Riverside County’s efforts at habitat protection began with the placement of the Stephens’ kangaroo rat (a rare mammal unique to this region) on the endangered species list in 1988. This listing allowed the federal government to impose interim land use controls as studies were carried out to assess the presence of kangaroo rats and to identify suitable habitat areas for protection (Beatley, 1994; Feldman, 1995). These controls were seen as necessary in light of the failure of existing growth control measures to stop development of unincorporated areas adjacent to local municipalities. Moreover, the county had already entered into development agreements that in the longer term would have allowed development in unincorporated areas. Since the interim land use controls delayed development projects at the height of a building boom, and also impacted future development agreements, the county was forced to develop quickly a habitat conservation plan. In 1990, Western Riverside County and eight cities formed the Riverside County Habitat Conservation Agency to develop a long-term conservation plan for the kangaroo rat (Feldman, 1995).
It turned out that the western Riverside HCP covered only a fraction of the total habitat conservation needs of the kangaroo rat and failed to provide for dozens of other species already listed or under consideration for listing. Ultimately, it proved to be expensive, time consuming and deeply unpopular, especially with landowners and farmers (Feldman and Jonas, 2000). The conflict focused on whether the plan constituted a taking of private property and also whether there should be the prompt establishment of a permanent and well-defined set of reserve boundaries which would be delimited by the direct purchase of private property. The HCP enraged property owners and did not address the pressing issues of gridlock on major regional freeways. Furthermore, it created uncertainties for farmers, developers and local governments alike. In the absence of comprehensive regional planning, development continued but in an unco-ordinated fashion, often driven by the pressures of speculator-developers eager to capitalise on pre-existing land development options. Competition between cities for revenue and annexable land was only intensified by the shortage of funds for regional infrastructure. New incentives had to be found to release areas from conservation restrictions that otherwise fell outside the incidental take provisions of existing HCPs. One solution was the development of multispecies HCPs that could somehow conjoin regional habitat conservation and the availability of funds for regional transport infrastructure.
Towards Regional Integrated Planning in Western Riverside County
Figure 3 shows development patterns in western and central Riverside County between 1984 and 2006. Western parts of Riverside witnessed spectacular growth in the 1980s but much of it occurred outside the jurisdiction of local cities and in unincorporated areas. Symptomatic of the poorly planned character of suburban land development, Riverside County’s General Plan was regularly amended in the 1980s and 1990s. This not only allowed piecemeal project-by-project development to take place, it also contributed to loss of habitat, some of it deemed ‘critical’ to species recovery. At this time, county-level planning was influenced by smart growth and some cities experimented with New Urbanist principles of urban design. Mixed-used developments began to appear both in the established cities as well as in newly incorporated suburbs like Moreno Valley (Jonas, 1999). However, comprehensive planning in the faster-growing unincorporated areas was by-and-large ignored (Sullivan and Scott, 2000).
Urbanisation, 1984–2006, in Western Riverside County and Coachella Valley.
In the early 1990s, there was an effort on the part of a small group of elected officials and planners to impose urban growth limits in western Riverside County. This took the form of the Blue Line Map. The map indicated where development was being approved and where future infrastructure could be provided. It also designated the natural resources, and agricultural lands to be protected (County of Riverside, 1991). However, the Blue Line Map coincided with an economic downturn and, in any case, developers opposed the proposed land use designations on the grounds that a downturn was not a propitious time to impose regional growth controls. Local cities also opposed the plan as it limited their growth potential. Despite support from the local chapter of the Building Industry Association, county-level ballot initiatives, which would have released public funds for land preservation and open space, failed. 2 Meanwhile, development agreements first introduced by the county in the 1980s began to attract renewed interest from those speculator-developers that had survived the property-market recession (Jonas, 1999).
As a result, demands for infrastructure and services grew as development continued to occur in county unincorporated areas; yet local cities remained fiscally stressed, unable to get local voters to approve raises in utility charges and tax increases. Around this time, the regional water provider, the Metropolitan Water District, embarked on a major new water infrastructure project known as Diamond Valley Lake. In a complex multi-agency effort that included public- and private-sector partners, 3825 acres were acquired for conservation mitigation for the new reservoir project. The Diamond Valley regional water project provided a further impetus for the development of regional integrated planning in western Riverside County.
In the late 1990s, the county took the lead on developing a multiple species habitat conservation plan, which would ultimately integrate conservation measures with smart growth and regional infrastructure provision. This became known as the Riverside County Integrated Project (RCIP). One of the County Supervisors, Tom Mullen, determined that it could be politically feasible to get local cities to agree to participate in conservation planning in exchange for vital infrastructure construction (personal interview, 31 July 2007). County officials therefore linked a voter-approved sales tax increase for transport funds—Measure A—to a habitat preservation plan. Cities could receive road transport improvement expenditures only if they participated in the HCP. The RCIP sought to integrate land use, transport and conservation planning by developing a consensus among diverse stakeholders—developers, property owners, farmers and local governments—for the future development of Riverside County. 3
In November 2002, Riverside County voters approved a 30-year extension of Measure A, allowing the programme to run until 2039. The extension included provision for levying a Transportation Uniform Mitigation Fee (TUMF) on developers. The TUMF operates in a similar way to a development impact fee in that, under the TUMF, developers of residential, industrial and commercial property would pay a fee to fund transport projects necessitated by new development. Impact fees provide for general public facilities like libraries and schools. However, if a city wished to receive Measure A funds, it had to agree to the development of a multiple-species HCP. The linking of Measure A to conservation in this manner was backed by a broad coalition, including developers, landowners, environmentalists and farmers. These were the same groups that had bitterly opposed the kangaroo rat HCP. The lack of clearly defined funding mechanisms—including those for infrastructure—was another reason for the ultimate failure of that HCP. Measure A addressed that problem by ensuring that any funds raised from new developments in an area would ‘return to source’ or, in other words, be spent on transport projects in the same area. By the end of 2010, some $100 million had been raised from the TUMF to be reinvested in regional infrastructure.
The coupling of infrastructure with conservation became the key mechanism for driving the RCIP effort forward and was therefore crucial to embedding regional planning in the governance landscape of suburban development. The western Riverside Multiple Species Habitat Conservation Plan (MSHCP) relies on a mitigation fee of approximately $1651 per new dwelling unit and $5620 per acre of new commercial/industrial development, thereby funding preservation through development. The plan also requires the county and cities to impose density fees and comply with the requirements of the MSHCP. The MSHCP identifies approximately 300 000 acres of private land of which approximately half can be developed subject to complicated rules based on the science of conservation biology.
Western Riverside’s MSHCP was approved by the County Board of Supervisors on 17 June 2003. It is important to note that the MSHCP had to have backing from Congressional leaders in Washington, DC. In other words, the success of the plan required a new trajectory in the spatial politics of conservation planning. Despite earlier opposition to habitat conservation planning in western Riverside County, Supervisor Mullen was able to mobilise a major lobbying effort to ensure that the MSHCP was approved (personal interview, 31 July 2007). A parallel plan in the Coachella Valley was premised upon a very different spatial politics. Here, the lead was taken by a joint powers authority and the federal government proved more obstructive.
The Coachella Valley Multiple Species Habitat Conservation Plan: Towards Regional Growth Management
The Coachella Valley (300 square miles) contains nine separate municipalities, including the cities of Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Indio and Coachella, and seven native Indian tribal reservations. The valley is bounded to the north, east and west by dramatic mountain ranges and to the south by the inland Salton Sea, all of which give a quite distinctive pattern to suburban development, with a more pronounced transition between the built-up area and natural lands (Figure 3). Like western Riverside County, the Coachella Valley experienced very rapid growth in the 1980s and 1990s. The total population of the Coachella Valley cities grew from 103 000 in 1980 to 350 000 in 2005 (California Statistical Abstract, 2006; Table 1). Yet, when compared with western Riverside, land development in the Coachella Valley has remained more concentrated along the southern portion of the valley, leaving the unincorporated county lands sparsely built. This pattern is in part due to the Coachella Valley’s relative isolation and distance from the urbanised Pacific coast. It is also due to there being a lack of available infrastructure for development in the more remote portions of this part of Riverside County.
The Coachella Valley’s historical pattern of development lends itself to a large-area preservation plan. Since most of the urbanisation and agriculture had developed to the south of the major regional freeway, Interstate 10, this left undeveloped most of the unincorporated county lands in northern portion of the valley either already in federal ownership and managed by the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, or under county jurisdiction. This has proven fortuitous since those were the most important lands to preserve as they contained the source of the sand dunes that were considered essential for the survival of species such as the fringe-toed lizard. Finally, there remained vast lands that could be urbanised in the southern area, including undeveloped lands within city jurisdictions and agricultural lands.
Unlike western Riverside County, home building in the Coachella Valley has been less dominated by large builders and speculator-developers. Indeed, many developers have a strong local commitment to the Valley. This is partly due to the wealth of some local communities, which want well-planned development. Yet in addition there is local demand for the provision of affordable low-income housing for the valley’s resort and agricultural workforces. Despite fairly strong if patchy support for growth management among member cities of CVAG, there has nonetheless been very strong support on the part of the local chapter of the Building and Industry Association for regional conservation planning. With one or two notable exceptions, all of the cities in this part of Riverside County have supported integrated regional planning. The exceptions have by-and-large been those cities with aggressive economic development and annexation plans, and where speculative development has been encouraged.
The major development impediment for the Coachella Valley in the past has been inadequate transport infrastructure and CVAG has acquired a crucial role in regional transport planning. In this respect, CVAGs leadership of multiple species habitat conservation planning was a departure from the traditionally rather narrow function of a regional joint-powers authority that relies on federal funding. Yet the Coachella Valley Multiple Species Conservation Plan nevertheless has had the support of the key state and federal agencies, including the US Forest Service and Park Services, the US Bureau of Land Management, the State Department of Fish and Game, CalTrans (the State transport agency) and Riverside County. However, in this instance the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) proved less supportive, as we will explain.
Throughout the process, the CVAG-led multispecies conservation plan received informal input from government biologists, private consultants and academic researchers, as well as from the public (Alagona and Pincetl, 2008). Yet the USFWS—as the agency ultimately responsible for final plan approval—was often obstructive and disagreements occurred over the science used to determine reserve areas and habitat corridors. Problems were also created when one of the member cities of CVAG, Desert Hot Springs, voted against the plan. There were disagreements associated with the city’s plans to annex lands for a proposed new development, which was highly speculative in nature. In the event, financial irregularities, intervention by the county and a change in local administration forced the city to cooperate with the plan. Perhaps more crucially the Coachella Valley MSHCP did not have the same level of lobbying and political support at the federal level that marked the corresponding efforts in western Riverside County. CVAG instead relied upon a consensus model of regional governance which respected the authority of locally elected officials and tried to include all interested local parties in the planning process. A factor in explaining this difference could be the perception of a need to preserve the identity of the Coachella Valley as a region separate from western Riverside and as a place where local cities and residents were generally committed to local growth control.
Nonetheless, following years of delay, the Coachella Valley MSHCP was approved by participating local governments in October 2007 and finally permitted in October 2008. 4 The participating local jurisdictions make up approximately 16 per cent of the MSHCP planning area. The remaining 84 per cent is unincorporated and roughly 41 per cent of the land covered by the MSHCP is under private ownership. Not included in the planning area, native Indian reservations are also not formally enrolled in the MSHCP. The plan protects 240 000 acres of open space and 27 species. A quarter of the acreage has already been acquired and vast areas of already public lands are included in the plan.
Crucially, the MSHCP allows the Coachella Valley to invest in much needed transport infrastructure improvements. The plan protects endangered species under Section 10 provisions of the ESA, which permits ‘incidental take’. This allows freeway interchanges and road-widening schemes to be built without each project having to mitigate impacts on endangered species, and which otherwise would be nearly an impossible task. To finance this ambitious planning process, several funding streams were created. These include a Development Mitigation Fee that starts with $5730 per acre with a per unit fee for residential development pegged to density. This rewards higher density development with lower per unit fees. In addition, fees are levied on commercial, industrial and waste-tipping activities. Nevertheless, the Coachella Valley MSHCP relies on new suburban development for financing the plan. The neoliberal paradox of using private development to fund public conservation remains central to the planning process in this region.
Conclusion
This paper has argued that, in suburban areas of Southern California, new linkages between habitat conservation planning under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) and regional growth management and infrastructure provision have emerged in what is otherwise a highly permissive regulatory context for suburban development. Evidence of this growing link has been provided from an analysis of two regional planning processes underway in Riverside County. Both plans have sought a compromise between regional conservation goals, on the one hand, and suburban growth interests (developers, property owners, local governments, etc.), on the other. Despite lengthy, and at times very contentious, planning processes (which in turn have underpinned quite distinctive spatial politics of conservation planning), the new regional arrangements for suburban growth management have proven more enduring and comprehensive than earlier sporadic local growth control measures. Paradoxically, the federal ESA has grown in importance precisely because of the failure of previous local attempts to regulate and manage suburban sprawl.
We suggest that integrated regional conservation planning represents a new and quite distinctive era of de facto federal involvement in growth management in the region. In characterising this as something different from ‘neoliberal suburbanism’, we want to emphasise the role of the state as an important part of the overall picture. We further propose that the growing importance of the federal ESA represents not so much a clean break with the past as a subtle shift in the institutional and regulatory trajectory of suburban development across this and other parts of Southern California, where new linkages are being forged between regional environmental governance and public infrastructure provision. We have identified some key conditions for the emergence of this multiscalar landscape of suburban growth management. Crucial to the success of these plans has been the political agency of various stakeholders and how these agents have interfaced with rules and resources distributed across state and governance hierarchies and scales. These stakeholders include several different groups.
First, there are developers having strong local commitments which extend beyond land speculation into issues like preserving good relations with local public officials in order to access local knowledge about market conditions, land use regulations and public funds for infrastructure (Cox and Mair, 1988). Developers profit from investing in developments that have access to open space and habitat reserves, but the key mechanism in this instance is the link between planned new housing developments and future spending on transport infrastructure.
Secondly, there are private landowners wanting some—if not all—of their property released from ESA-related land use restrictions or, alternatively, a fair market price for land sold for conservation purposes and a more predictable regulatory environment.
Thirdly, there are the utilities and other non-transport infrastructure providers, which want long-term investments protected, projects permitted and regulatory uncertainty minimised. Direct access to regional transport infrastructure funds is less of a concern for these stakeholders. These agencies have often taken the lead in designing regional solutions to problems of conservation and infrastructure provision.
Fourthly, the county government has a number of issues of concern. These include maintaining economies of scale in the provision of services and infrastructure, retaining control of land use planning and development especially in unincorporated areas, and earmarking future revenue for regional transport.
Fifthly, the municipal governments, which in the case of some fiscally stressed cities are reluctant participants, want orderly development and infrastructure to fund local services; wealthier cities are supportive but nevertheless worry about federal and state intrusion in local land use authority.
Sixthly, locally elected federal, state and local politicians depend on local voters for support and seek to secure public expenditures and grants for their local constituents. The capacity to lobby federal and state governments for access to funding depends on mobilising cross-party and cross-interest-group support for regional conservation and infrastructure provision.
Next, local voters are supportive of suburban living place issues like open space and quality of life, yet also recognise the need to create local jobs, fund local services and improve local infrastructure. In some suburbs, there is on-going resistance to low- to moderate-income housing developments as well as concerns about tax increases. Public support for tax increases to fund regional conservation and infrastructure has come with the condition of ensuring that the funds are spent on local projects back in the jurisdictions where voter support is registered.
Finally, there are environmental organisations and conservationists concerned about habitat protection for the long term, yet fearful of public backlash against the ESA.
Above all else, perhaps the key reason why developers, property owners, voters, local politicians and other interests in suburban development have come together and bought into regional conservation planning is the fact that access to state and local public funds for major infrastructure projects is contingent upon participation in such planning processes.
In Riverside County, the regional conservation plans developed under the federal ESA have become comprehensive infrastructure and land use plans that could have far-reaching implications for how future regional economic growth is managed even under conditions of ‘neoliberal suburbanism’. They reduce some of the uncertainty and lack of co-ordination associated with traditional local growth management approaches, not least the fickle nature of local voters and haphazard suburban growth control measures. In effect, these plans amount de facto to a federal reregulation of suburban development, at least in the highly restricted sense that future developments depend on participation in a federally approved conservation plan. Nonetheless, this form of de facto federal intervention remains a source of tension between both proponents and opponents of regional conservation planning alike; the federal ESA was never intended to be a growth management tool, even if organised suburban development interests have worked to transform it into such a tool. A key issue is whether these new regional arrangements can embed nascent linkages between endangered species protection, transport infrastructure and suburban growth management over the long term. Arguably endangered, it is perhaps too premature to pronounce the final death knell of ‘neoliberal suburbanism’ and herald the rise of a new era of federal suburban growth management.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the referees for their incisive comments and the Special Issue Guest Editors for inviting their contribution. The authors have been involved in various capacities as academic researchers, policy advisers and planners for regional conservation planning in Riverside County since the early 1990s. They are grateful to many individuals throughout the county and the wider region for sharing their thoughts and expertise over the years. The authors alone are responsible for the findings and conclusions of this paper.
Funding
The funding of the National Science Foundation is gratefully acknowledged.