POST - "Landscapes" Newsletter

"Landscapes" Newsletter

A study, conducted by Stanford’s Bill Lane Center for the American West, found that land-saving efforts have not, as some have argued, reduced the housing supply in Silicon Valley because most of the land protected has been rural, rugged areas unsuitable for dense housing developments.

To learn more, we asked the center’s executive director, Jon Christensen, who was one of the study’s authors.

Q&A with Jon Christensen, Executive Director of Bill Lane Center for the American West

Jon Christensen (JC): It was really a combination of fortunate events. One was finding out about the wonderful database that Green Info Network has compiled with information from local conservation organizations, of protected lands around the San Francisco Bay Area. The second was a map that the United States Geological Service created of development in the Bay Area from the mid-1800’s to the present, which included Silicon Valley. These resources gave us the ability to look at how conservation and development shape each other. We knew that conservation has been shaped in relation to development patterns and development threat, but we wanted to delve more into how development has been shaped in interesting ways in response to conservation. Our goal was to bring a kind of spatial analysis into thinking about the relationship of conservation and development.

Once we began down that path, it became apparent that one of the questions that we could address was this old debate about whether conservation limited housing supply in the Bay Area, particularly in Silicon Valley. We felt like this was an argument that had not been examined carefully, and we had the opportunity to try and do that.

JC: The most surprising thing was how strong the signal is that conservation has not visibly affected the housing supply in Silicon Valley. What this means is that the old debate of how conservation limits housing development can be taken off the table, and we can concentrate on the ways in which conservation and development really go together in creating the kind of communities we want to create.

POST: So even though your study found that conservation efforts have not significantly affected housing supply, you did find that preserving land has been effective in other ways. What are they?

JC: Our study is basically a “what if” study. We looked at the lands that have been conserved and then looked at the factors that led to the pattern of development that we see. Then, if we apply those same factors, like proximity to transportation and proximity to water, what would have been the density of housing had the land not been conserved? Because we’re sampling the historical landscapes, we’re also sampling the history of conservation. That’s where it gets really interesting because different land gets conserved for different purposes over time.

The earliest conservation efforts in the Bay Area were to protect watersheds for clean water. Then during the post-WWII-era housing boom in Silicon Valley, parks and recreation areas were created. Back then the conservation goals were as much about conserving the well being of people as they were about protecting nature. Later, we saw major conservation efforts focus on protecting land along the bay and in the foothills, which was often about aesthetics and views, having those big open spaces as part of our communities. Now much of conservation is motivated by protecting habitat and biodiversity. So if we look back over that history, we can see that even though these ideas changed over time, they all contributed to constructing this landscape that has parks and recreation areas, and open spaces that offer habitat protection and views. I’m not saying that this is a perfect result by any means, but we do live in a very beautiful metropolitan area that gives us a lot of access to nature’s benefits. Our hope is that if we use all of those ideas from history going forward, it will give us a richer palette to think about the relationship of conservation and development.