Planners talk a lot about plans – and a lot about implementing plans – and a lot about projects. But they rarely talk about the relationships among all these things.
A new study of Ventura County by Solimar Research Group and the Reason Public Policy Institute (RPPI) attempts to make this connection by examining what happens to "the best-laid plans" when projects are actually proposed and approved. The answer is not surprising: No matter what the plan says should be built, in the end, the approved project is usually a lot smaller.
The Solimar/RPPI study was an attempt to determine whether Ventura County is likely to accommodate future housing demand within the urban growth boundaries adopted as part of the Save Open space and Agricultural Resources (SOAR) initiatives of 1998. The study examined the capacity for new housing development in the county under existing general plans and existing (or draft) housing elements. Not surprisingly, the capacity was not very large. In a county that currently has about 250,000 housing units, the additional capacity appears to be somewhere between 40,000 or 50,000 units – approximately a 15% to 20% increase.
But the study also tried to link plans and implementation by examining what happens in the actual project approval process. This link between planning and implementation has almost never been examined. In fact, to the best of anybody's knowledge, only one previous study has been done – a study in Portland in the late '80s, which found that single-family projects were approved at 66% of planned densities, while the figure for multi-family projects was 90%.
The Ventura County study found some similar results – a pretty dismaying prospect for practicing planners who believe in general plans. To conduct the analysis, Solimar and RPPI looked at 126 different residential projects that had gone through the approval process in nine different cities in Ventura County between 1996 and 2001. The important findings:
* On average, residential projects were approved at about 55% of general plan capacity. The general plan capacity for the 126 projects was about 22,000 units. The approved projects totaled about 12,000 units.
* Compared to actual zoning and specific plan capacity, projects were approved at about 80% of capacity. Capacity under zoning and specific plans (as opposed to general plans) was about 15,000 units.
* Most surprisingly, almost all the difference between the plan and the project approval did not occur in the public approval process, but in the pre-application stage. All told, the 126 project applicants applied for only about 12,500 units – 56.8% of general plan capacity. The public review process only knocked out another 500 units, or 4% of the total general plan capacity.
* However, it's interesting to note a few exceptions to the rule. Affordable housing projects and multi-family projects tend to be approved at close to plan densities – as do residential projects in specific plan areas.
So what's happening? The researchers could not say for sure, but it seems likely that the developers bring in projects at well below general plan capacity based on conversations with the staff planners, who provide their best guess as to what the political tolerance for the project is likely to be. Interestingly, the planners' best guesses appear to be almost exactly on target – as the project for which developers apply is almost always what gets approved.
These research results raise a troubling question for "smart growth" advocates. The smart growth ideal is to channel development into designated areas and, therefore, rearrange development rather than suppress it. But, clearly, Ventura County has only half of the equation. Its planning policy channels growth into specific areas through the use of urban growth boundaries, but actual planning implementation inside those boundaries is reducing housing densities.
The entire Solimar/RPPI report can be downloaded from www.solimar.org or www.rppi.org.
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