Planning Larger Projects in California
We’ve made progress in small scale development. We need the same energy for bigger projects.
In my first newsletter, I listed 12 ideas which I think are important for California housing in 2022, and which I promised to write about in more depth. This is #9 - not bad for a first year. The missing three - implementation, a fiscal new deal, and housing data infrastructure - will come in 2023. If you have priorities for my 2023 list - coming in early January - email me or leave a comment!
CA Housing 10: Where We Go From Here 16
At the beginning of January, the Concord City Council will make an important choice. It’s a choice that impacts the entire region, and in many ways the entire state.
For more than a year, City staff have been negotiating a ‘Term Sheet’ with a group of developers for the redevelopment of the Concord Naval Weapons Station (CNWS). The term sheet from Concord First Partners (CFP) lays out a basic framework for the redevelopment of the 2,275 acres site - more than 3.5 square miles - on Concord’s northwest side. It would build a new city within the city, adding more than 15,000 housing units + office and commercial space, educational and recreational facilities, and much more.
If the city approves the term sheet by the end of January, they will then start negotiations with CFP on a slew of legal and development documents which would begin the formal entitlement process over the next 2 years - for a project currently planned to take 40 years. If they don’t approve the term sheet, or extend the negotiating period (again), the initial agreement signed in August 2021 that designated CFP as the ‘Master Developer’ would expire.
This project, like so many of our military base reuse projects, has been languishing for more than a decade. CFP is the second Master Developer. The previous deal with Lennar fell through after years and years of meetings and consultations. People and organizations are tired and anxious, and we’re nowhere near development. They are scared about the development happening as is, and equally scared about this falling through yet again.
No matter what the City of Concord decides, the CNWS will be a long way from becoming a place where any of us can live, work, learn, play or wander about. This isn’t just because of what’s in (or not in) the Term Sheet. The process we have in California for projects of this scale isn’t designed to actually produce what we need.
The most important project in 9 counties
As I wrote in Road to Resegregation, and have said to anyone anytime I had a chance, this is the most important project in the Bay, and not just because it is the biggest.
Where it is located is essential. It is on a BART line. It is far from SF/Oakland/Silicon Valley, but close to where so many people from those communities, especially people of color, have moved over the past four decades. It can be a bridge to East County and Solano County, and could be a lynchpin for more ambitious water and rail transit that connects the underinvested Cities of Carquinez to each other and the rest of the Bay. It could also provide these communities with much improved access to higher education and jobs, reducing the need to commute so far for such essentials.
It is also a huge opportunity to develop new ways of planning and building places - or at least ways that would be new to California, but are standard practice in the rest of the world. We don’t actually plan much in California, at least not in the way that this needs to be planned and built - i.e. with coordinated, state-supported infrastructure and contributions from every level of government, including neighboring cities.1 This is a massive piece of publicly owned land, a place that is large enough to build differently. It could change how we finance infrastructure, how we negotiate and think of ‘community benefits’, how we address social, environmental and economic goals together.
In size, scope, ambition, location, and impact, this is an immensely important project for the Bay Area and the State, not just the City of Concord. Yet what is currently ‘feasible’ at the CNWS station is based entirely on what a few for-profit developers and a fairly small jurisdiction can foresee doing on their own. All the hopes and dreams and demands of residents, housing organizations, environmental groups, labor unions and more are dealt with as ‘community benefits’, rather than as good planning. With no outside money or support, there is no way the math will ever work for a complete, equitable and sustainable community, and it’s a hugely risky and way-too-slow proposition as it stands.
We can redevelop CNWS into something more than what is in the Term Sheet. But to get there means changing how we do megaprojects.
Planning megaprojects (and just large projects) better
No wealthy country would ever plan a place of this size and scale in the way we do it. We’ve (once again) set ourselves up for failure in California.
It starts with the ridiculous idea of having a consortium of private developers serve as the ‘Master Developer’. In our current (non-planning) system, the public jurisdiction in charge has no capacity to manage a major redevelopment project. They thus farm out everything they can to a Master Developer, who then has to design the project, do all the community input, secure financing, get it through entitlements, etc. This is how you end up with a project with questionable affordability,2 shaky infrastructure finance, with an unplannable 40-year time horizon, and constant political strife that could derail this project at any time.
In most other systems, national, state, regional and local governments all play a much stronger role in large scale projects. For a project like this, there is usually a Development Authority set up. This is generally a public-private partnership, with all key stakeholders represented, including all those various governments, private developers and the myriad nonprofits and community groups which are key stakeholders. It is this Authority which is charged with entitlements, with securing finance for infrastructure, for master planning that lays out all the things that need building and chops them up into bite-sized chunks that then get bid on by different types of builders. Responsibility for design, community engagement, financing and the politics rests with this quasi-governmental entity - not with any of the individual developers. The individual developers do what they do best - they bid and they build. Period.
This way of doing business makes much more possible. It is a pathway for national and state governments to finance major infrastructure - whether parks or transit or utilities. It reduces risk across the board because no builder is too exposed - and if someone runs into trouble, there are plenty of other builders. It helps make sure that certain key public amenities that benefit the wider community - not just the new residents - get built first, which makes people happy and gets them to see all those new homes as an asset not a strain. After all, it was those new homes that made the new parks and transit and other goodies possible.
I watched this system work over and over in France. The Batignolles project in Paris’ 17th arrondissement is an amazing project built on an old rail yard that doesn’t compromise on social or green goals, doesn’t choose between new residents and old ones in terms of who benefits. I lived in the shadow of the massive Bassins a Flot project in Bordeaux for years, watching a series of different developers build a tram line, housing for all kinds of folks, a new commercial district, an epic public market, two new museums, and more. The tram line was built first, so that longtime residents in a lower-income neighborhood saw the benefits long before the first newcomer moved in. This was one of three projects of its size running at the same time in Bordeaux, on a 15-year timeline, not the absurd 40 years imagined for CNWS.3
Everywhere in both projects you see parks, affordable housing, schools - not ‘community benefits’ extracted from a reluctant for-profit developer, but just proper community-building guided by a cross-sector collaboration where everyone gets that we need these things. They are just part of good planning.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t fights or inequalities or issues, or that plans don’t have racist, exclusionary, gentrifying or just plain ridiculous components. These are challenges everywhere. But the system at least allows the possibility of good planning. In Concord, the possibility of good planning was never possible.
State Action on Megaprojects (and just plain large ones)
We actually understand this model a bit here in California. San Francisco’s Treasure Island is being rebuilt closer to this model. The Treasure Island Development Authority is a pretty good approximation of what other countries would do - if it had a lot more voice and financial and technical support from County, Regional, State, and Federal governments. We have seen the Presidio Trust and other partnerships change the way we build parks, and we can do it as well for large projects.
What is needed in 2023 is for State and regional agencies to be empowered to create these development authorities for large projects, as part of a new statewide legislative push for larger projects. We’ve made immense progress on small-scale sites - although far more is needed - and we need a similar multi-year legislative effort on large projects.
The legislature could create the framework for these kinds of development authorities for projects of a certain size, commit real State resources to those that set them up, and make them mandatory for public lands like CNWS. We have existing streamlining programs and funding sources that could be reused for this purpose - including some like AB73 (Chiu & Caballero, 2017) and SB540 (Roth, 2017) which are underutilized, or AB900, which was just extended as SB7 in 2021. It would mark a sea change in how the state deals with ‘projects of State interest’, which is a declaration California should be able to make for large projects meeting key criteria where extra engagement and funding is needed.
This approach to large projects should also have smaller corollaries for smaller redevelopment projects on old commercial sites like Northgate Mall in Terra Linda, or the Ridge project in my neighborhood in Oakland. These aren’t large enough to warrant a development authority, but they are large enough that we can’t just do the standard ‘big developer proposes what it wants and then everyone tries to extract what they want and the whole thing takes forever and produces less than it could’ system which we have had for decades. Cities would be the main player here, as part of the movement to (re)build a fiscally and environmentally responsible and actively anti-racist redevelopment in California. This work is even more important given the passage of AB2011 last year, which on its own is just a beginning. Without financing and other reforms, we won’t see the changes on the ground that we need.
I fully understand that for many housers, megaprojects just seem insane. Everything about California history since most of us have been alive suggests we can’t do big things. If you are doing ADUs and small sites work, keep going, as it is critical and we have a long way to go. But this is a both/and world. If California is going to tackle the heady mix of housing, inequality and climate crises, we need to make more possible for projects big and small. CNWS is an opportunity to actually plan, just like most other countries have figured out how to do.
This is what planning should be. What planning is is a very different story.
The project has officially committed to 25% inclusionary, which would be a lot by local standards. There are questions about the quality of the commitment in the Term Sheet - i.e. can we rely on this to actually get build - about who will build it, and about the tenure and AMI levels of what is planned. But the biggest problem is that all affordability has to be extracted under the current regime. A different way of planning, where accessibility and affordability were core goals, would have a very different discussion. There are plenty of ways in which affordable housing activists also need to be pushed when it comes to the vision of CNWS, but when we draw the lines like we do, this won’t happen, as folks have to dig in and fight for the whatever they can get.
15 years is a plan. 40 years is not.