Publication Date: Wednesday Feb 11, 1998

Market Forces Can Serve Residents Too

Your January 28 cover story ("Squeezed out of downtown") and follow up editorial spoke to our concerns that the pendulum needs to swing back toward the interests of people who live here. To be sure, cities have only limited control over regional growth issues. But look at the marked contrast between neighboring towns like Redwood City and Atherton. We do have a surprising level of control over what type of environment we live in.

Yet your editorial warns that "attempting to interfere with market forces is a perilous exercise not to be undertaken lightly". Sorry, but it is false to use "faceless market forces" as the reason for Palo Altans to throw up their hands and say we cannot keep back the flood of changes washing over our city.

We're losing independent and locally owned stores operated by people who live here. Instead we're getting more "monster" houses built to maximize square footage. More buildings encroaching onto our open space. And more of these so-called "planned community" zones that increase density while failing to cap the adverse impacts on the residents of this city.

The Palo Alto Civic League was created two decades ago to protect the residential quality of life here, while acknowledging that society and the local economy must and do change over time.

So we need to spotlight two big flaws in the prevalent thinking that we are helpless in the face of market forces.

Flaw Number One is to pretend that the City isn't already shaping market forces. We must differentiate development and rent pressures which come from an overall increase in value-added economic activity, from pressures which come from city decisions to "upgrade" zoning, or just as importantly, an anticipation that greater intensity will be allowed in the near future.

The concept of floor-to-area ratios, or "FARs", is probably quite abstract to most people, but applying it to the typical Palo Alto house will help us understand its compelling impact. A 10,000 square foot lot with a 0.4 FAR will allow a 4,000 square foot house to be built. If the city increases the FAR to 3.0, it allows 30,000 square feet to be built.

We can ask the city council to rezone this land to allow multifamily housing, and redevelop our little plot of land to build quite an apartment complex. Of course there will be more cars, but why pay for garaging their cars when we can ask the City to donate land and air-rights to build a parking structure for the new residents and their visitors. Of course we'll need to encourage our current tenants to move out of the 4,000 square foot house, but that's what rent increases are for. Build up the land, jack up the prices, run the traffic through the adjoining neighborhoods, move ourselves to Woodside and congratulate ourselves.

Voila! We didn't interfere with any market forces, right?

Flaw Number Two is to pretend that residential values cannot be protected by enforceable standards because we are moving away from a "command and control" system to a market based system. We need not dictate exact solutions----and we probably do not want to----but it is imperative that we develop and defend performance standards that put measurable benchmarks on dimensions that our community values. Palo Alto residents value open space, clean air, quiet, safety, convenience, walkability, and a representative government which works. We shouldn't need to beg for the City to act on debris blowers or open space encroachments or traffic relief.

As a community, we may in fact choose to allow FARs of 2.0 or even 3.0 in our downtown area, but not until we can trust the city council to protect our environmental standards.

We are very much in control of our own quality of residential life, and market forces will work in whatever channels and flood canals we build for them.

Yoriko Kishimoto, Rick Ferguson, Janet Dafoe and other members of Steering Committee, Palo Alto Civic League, were contributing writers for this Guest Opinion. 

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