The Environmental Protection Hustle
Frieden, Bernard J.
THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION HUSTLE Bernard J. Frieden / MIT Press / $12.50 Steven Lagerfeld In the early 1970s, the voters of Marin County, the famously wealthy San Francisco suburb, rejected...
...More than half have postgraduate educations...
...Many of the crops that flourish in the coastal climate are specialty items, such as artichokes, asparagus, and avocados, that will not do very much for the hungry overseas...
...Frieden had adopted even a slightly more conciliatory stance toward them...
...The board promptly declared a moratorium on new connections to the system, effectively ending new housing construction in the area...
...He focuses on the suburban counties around San Francisco, where he has uncovered a good number of environmentalist excesses...
...Among all suburban residents there is a concern that the conditions they left behind- the crowding, traffic, noise, and general hubbub of the city-will follow them...
...Xhe first lesson to be learned from Steven Lagerfeld is a consultant with the Institute for Educational Affairs...
...As Frieden puts it: "There is almost no connection between housing and the big environmental issues of our times-use of toxic substances, nuclear radiation hazards, conservation of natural resources...
...The Environmental Protection Hustle is that when environmentalists wrap themselves in the cloak of the ' 'public interest" one should immediately begin looking for flashes of naked self-interest...
...These make a series of case studies reminiscent of William Tucker's celebrated Harper Particle, "Environmentalism and the Leisure Class...
...Frieden's particular concern is with housing and the attempts, too often successful, of anti-growth environmentalists to stop its construction...
...Opponents of a new housing proposal for a large number of moderately priced units will very often chip away at the plan until it is utterly transformed...
...Frieden cites several cases like this, such as the "planned unit development" outside Oakland that called for over 2,000 units at an average price below $30,000...
...It was, one must admit, a devilishly ingenious strategy -so devilish, in fact, that before long it left the Mariners themselves high and dry...
...First, there is the simple constriction of supply: Frieden estimates that "between 1970 and 1977 local regulation in the San Francisco suburbs may have stopped the equivalent 6f as much as a year's normal volume of housing...
...It is difficult for intellectuals-who are overwhelmingly urbanites and notoriously out of sympathy with suburbia, whatever their political disposition-to comprehend the suburban anxiety...
...The argument was about growth...
...The plan protects all farmland or even land that might be used for farming: The plan cites several reasons for this policy-including world food shortages, rising prices, and the economic value of agriculture-but presents no supporting information or argument on these points...
...By the time opponents got through with the plan, less than 300 units remained and the lowest-priced was $40,000...
...They feel they have bought not merely a house, but a way of life...
...JLhose who perceive the presence of the new class in these events are en-tirely correct...
...To begin with, it is not (except perhaps in San Francisco) entirely class-based...
...Perhaps it is time for a pro-growth environmentalism...
...The California Coastal Plan was designed to channel development very narrowly into already built-up coastal areas, where, not incidentally, the resistance to further development was most organized...
...More often, opposition to new housing has a preservationist impulse-preservation, that is, of the open space, scenic beauty, and secure social status of suburbia for those who have already "arrived...
...Anyone who has ever attended a suburban zoning hearing knows that the most hysterical opponents of new housing are often the least well-off, the most recent urban emigrants...
...THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION HUSTLE Bernard J. Frieden / MIT Press / $12.50 Steven Lagerfeld In the early 1970s, the voters of Marin County, the famously wealthy San Francisco suburb, rejected two bond issues that would have financed an expansion of the local water supply system...
...There is another dimension to the problem, however, in the particular strategies of the anti-growth environmentalists...
...almost half the units sold for $100,000 or more...
...They carried not only the bond issue votes, but elections to the local water district board as well...
...And they have a high-minded ideology to make this nervous self-protection seem like civic virtue...
...Quite obviously, it is the anonymous "housing consumer," but increasingly this means the middle-income family, which is simply being priced out of the market...
...they are lawyers, doctors, professors, teachers, executives, and the like...
...When a third bond issue came up for a vote soon after, the voters had a change of heart...
...Who pays...
...And there are even a few signs of an emerging suburban blight...
...The "preservation of farmland" is a case in point...
...Especially inventive foes of growth have even managed to get public money-federal, state, and local-to purchase sites threatened by development...
...Still, Mr...
...Whatever his reason, I think that on several counts it is a fortunate omission...
...Of the Sierra Club, a perennial opponent of housing in the cases he describes, Frieden writes that two-thirds of the members are in typically upper-middle-class occupations...
...Unfortunately, Nature cannot always be relied upon to chastise her errant, overzealous protectors as she did in Marin County...
...The intelligent thing to do now would be to address such anxieties in other parts of the country before they are transformed into rampaging radical environmentalism...
...The Environmental Protection Hustle is an excellent account of what can happen when these anxieties get out of hand...
...Other, more common, ways of stopping new housing include the use of special zoning powers, excessive regulatory requirements that delay or discourage builders, highly discretionary and lengthy review processes, and, of course, that old favorite, litigation...
...In the same period, the average home price in the area nearly doubled, giving San Francisco the dubious distinction of being the most expensive housing market in the nation...
...The opponents of the bond issues had argued that new water meant new homes and environmental ruin...
...Indeed, I wish that Mr...
...Indeed, as Bernard Frieden shows in The Environmental Protection Hustle, these modern knights errant enjoy almost unchecked influence in some areas, and their influence is spreading...
...To have portrayed all conflict in the suburbs in purely ideological terms would have been to paper over a number of very legitimate concerns of suburbanites...
...By 1977, after two years of drought had drained the stunted system, water in Marin County was selling at a premium and it was rationed-47 gallons per person per day...
...And there is good reason to feel that the suburban way of life may be imperiled...
...What was once a project for middle-income families becomes a preserve for the well-to-do...
...The plan establishes no connection between coastal agriculture and food price levels, and despite claims of great economic value for farming, the authors find it necessary to recommend state financial help to keep farmers in business...
...Some of the older suburban boom-towns of the 1950s, for instance, have already come to resemble urban residential areas, with all their attendant problems...
...Unlike their antecedents, the simple suburban snobs who excluded the poor and the black, the environmentalists want to exclude everybody, on the grounds that their private enjoyment of the suburban environment would otherwise be inhibited...
...Frieden never uses the term "new class...
...And, as if to twist the knife, he writes, "When asked, 'Should the Club concern itself with the conservation problems of such special groups as the urban poor and ethnic minorities?' 58 percent of the members answered that they either strongly or 'somewhat' opposed such involvement...
...In other times, the expansion would have been routinely approved, but the argument this time was not the usual one about cost...
...The book, thcri is an excellent primer on the excesses of environmentalism...
...In one Long Island town, for example, the Department of Housing and Urban Development recently saw fit to make a few small suburban "revitaliza-tion" grants...
Vol. 12 • December 1979 • No. 12
