Colin Fiske, Executive Director
As an environmentalist “development” has long seemed like a dirty word to me. I spent a lot of my childhood in a suburban environment on the East Coast where development meant, to paraphrase Bill Vaughan, cutting down forests and naming the streets after them. As a young adult, I worked for several years in Florida fighting the spread of that paradigm of sprawl, the big box store. At the time, I was known to say that there was almost no new development worth building. The costs, I thought, almost always outweighed the benefits.
Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate that there is, in fact, some good development. My change of opinion is largely due to my increasing understanding and appreciation of a different kind of development – the kind that’s often called “infill.” In other words, development doesn’t have to mean paving over the fields and forests. It can instead mean building new things in existing communities that really need them.
Don’t get me wrong: not everything called “infill” is great. And all development does come with environmental and social costs that have to be factored into any analysis. But sometimes, the benefits clearly outweigh the costs. That’s particularly true in many modern American communities, including those here on the North Coast, which were either poorly designed and built in the first place, or were built for the wants and needs of a different era. If we want more humane, equitable, healthier, vibrant, and lower-carbon communities, we’re going to have to do a fair amount of development. It just has to be the right kind, and in the right places.
That’s why CRTP has come out in strong support of some local development plans, like the City of Eureka’s plan to build much-needed housing on downtown parking lots, the densification of McKinleyville’s Town Center area, and Arcata’s new bike and pedestrian-oriented Gateway Area Plan. It’s clear from soaring home prices and the number of people living outside or crashing on friends’ couches that we need to build more homes in our area. It’s also clear that the built environment we’ve inherited from twentieth century planners and builders will not allow us to reduce our driving, reduce our carbon emissions, and improve our health and safety nearly as much as we need to. These kinds of plans address all of those challenges at once.
I’ll be honest: I still feel a little uncomfortable going to a public meeting and speaking out in favor of a new development. I still have qualms about the environmental impacts of construction, and I still have problems with the system of private, for-profit building that dominates American development, even with all our plans and zones and regulations. But this is a moment in history when our communities need some significant changes in order to meet our collective challenges, and new development is the only way that’s going to happen. So I hope you’ll join us in supporting the positive development plans that are currently being considered in our area—including “parking lot housing” in Eureka, a denser McKinleyville Town Center, and the Gateway Area Plan. Whatever else you can say about it, development tends to take a while, and we don’t have time to waste.