Mortgage on America: Santa Clara County, California

A mustard-colored haze hides all but the shadowy outlines of the mountains on either side of the long, flat valley. Automobiles push and shove through crowded concrete corridors of stores, service stations, car lots, and taco stands. Isolated groves of the last surviving fruit trees fight asphyxiation from the polluted air and strangulation by the surrounding homes, shopping centers, factories, and freeways. The houses huddle together, back to back and side to side, in cities of subdivisions without open spaces, parks, or even sidewalks. Many homes just ten years old slouch in ready-built slums, their gravel roofs leaking, concrete slab foundations cracked, flimsy veneer doors and walls warped, stick fences rotting, and sparse dirt yards alternately flooding and heaving. This is Santa Clara County, California, a jigsaw puzzle of intertwined suburbs beginning forty miles southeast of San Francisco.

The once unusually fertile Santa Clara Valley stretches almost due south from the southern tip of the San Francisco Bay for about sixty miles between low ranges of wooded mountains. Its balmy Mediterranean climate has always produced sufficient rainfall in a few weeks each year for the thriving agriculture and left the sun shining warmly the rest of the time. Not so very many years ago, residents of Santa Clara County called it the "Valley of Heart's Delight," and not without good reason. "It was beautiful," remembered Karl Belser, who once was the county's chief land planner, "it was a wholesome place to live, and it was one of the fifteen most productive agricultural counties in the United States."

In a retrospective analysis written after he resigned his post in dismay over the ravages of suburbanization, Belser described in detail what the real estate speculators were destroying:

The land in the valley was of the very highest quality. Two alluvial fans had been laid down over the millennia by systems of streams which had coursed from the mountains to the sea during the rainy season, flooding the lowlands almost every year. Topsoil of fine loam thirty to forty feet deep in places overlaid water-bearing substrata of gravels and clays. A tremendous underground water storage basin with a capacity of roughly one million acre-feet spread itself out beneath this wonderful soil. In many places the water gushed forth from artesian wells. Here was nature's handsome gift: soils second to none in the state and perhaps the world, indigenous water enough, if properly used, to serve that soil adequately, and a mild climate with a year-round growing season.

For centuries this gift of nature was used appreciatively and conservingly by man, first by the Indians who fed off the land, then by Spanish settlers who grazed cattle there, and finally by European immigrant farmers who introduced into the valley grapes and prunes from France, and pear, apricot, and other fruit trees. For a time the valley produced a third of the world's prunes and became nationally known for its fruit and nut orchards. Its population of about 150,000 people in the 1920s and 1930s was divided primarily between those who tended the 100,000 acres of orchards and those who worked in the more than two hundred food-processing plants.

Although World War II brought many newcomers to Santa Clara's Moffett Field naval air station and the new electronics firms associated with the military and Stanford University, the county grew gradually and relatively smoothly. Its largest towns--San Jose, Santa Clara, and Palo Alto--expanded slowly without disturbing much of the agricultural area around them. Their residents took Sunday drives through the orchards when blossoms were in bloom. Early in the 1950s a book called America's Fifty Best Cities described the "verdant" valley as "one of the most beautiful in America" and growing San Jose as "a tidy, bustling metropolis of twentytwo square miles, but still a garden city famed for its liveability, hospitality and healthful climate."

At that time there still were only about 300,000 people living in all of Santa Clara County. But the valley's oasis reputation, unusually agreeable climate, and easily developed flat land beckoned to the suburban masses moving south from San Francisco, who had already filled most of the usable land in neighboring San Mateo County. Soon, 4,000 new residents a month were moving into the valley. From 1950 to 1960 Santa Clara County's population more than doubled to 640,000. By 1970 it exceeded 1 million people.

"Wild urban growth attacked the valley much as cancer attacks the human body," said Belser, who found himself virtually powerless to slow or channel that growth. "What so recently had been a beautiful, productive garden was suddenly transformed into an urban anthill."

Today the majority of the orchards are gone. The paving and building over of so much absorbent soil has brought about serious flooding of many populated areas during the rainy season, while the heavy demand for water the rest of the year threatens to exhaust the underground supply. The water table already is so depleted in many places that the land over it is sinking. The onceclean air has been discolored and poisoned by the glut of automobiles and some of the county's not-so-clean industry, and smog from San Francisco and Oakland, trapped by the mountains, adds to the pollution.

The cost of borrowing money to rapidly install sewers, pave streets, build and staff schools, and provide police and fire protection for so many people over so large an area has put the county and several of its cities deeply into debt and burdened their residents with steadily increasing tax bills. No money is available, for instance, to pay for a mass transit system that could eliminate some of the automobile congestion. The welfare rolls are lengthening with the names of fruit packers, canners, and other low-paid and otherwise unskilled agricultural workers who cannot find jobs in the county's new highly skilled, technical economy. Crime has increased so much that all of the county's jails are overcrowded, and its officials have borrowed space in an underused facility in San Mateo County.

The views of the mountains, the deep green of the orchards, and bright colors of the fruit blossoms have almost completely disappeared, and little public park land has been developed to replace them. Indeed, the most scenic spots left in the valley may be the carefully tended and regularly watered tropical greenery along the shoulders of the county's many freeways. A private park advertises its trees and flowers for those who wish to pay to wander among them for a few hours. Otherwise, only the giant, enclosed shopping center of Eastgate, with its artificial climate, gaudy metal sculpture, concrete and tile terraces, and man-made fountains is left for families who once enjoyed weekend drives through the lost outdoor beauty of the "Valley of Heart's Delight."

Santa Clara County has become the mass media's favorite symbol of the evil of rapid suburbanization. "Urbanists cite it as the archtypal slurb, a sprawling confusion," Business Week noted. "Growth came so fast . . . and with such disastrous results," Newsweek concluded, "that the experience serves as a dire warning of what can happen if residents fail to watch what is happening to their community."

Yet what has happened in Santa Clara cannot be neatly explained by the clichés of suburban sprawl. The county is not a single-dimensional bedroom community for San Francisco; Santa Clara has its own industry and other economic resources, including the huge plants of Ford, Lockheed, General Electric, and IBM, which Nikita Khrushchev toured during his 1958 visit to the United States. The valley was not unused, valueless land before the speculators arrived; it was one of the most productive and profitable agricultural regions of its size in the world. The rapid residential and industrial development of the valley has not taken place in a vacuum, without governmental planning; Santa Clara County and several of its cities have had strong governments, model planning and zoning laws, large staffs of professional planners, and citizenries that include academic leaders at Stanford, top corporation executives, and a highly skilled, well-paid labor force. Tract houses and cheap apartments alone have not filled the county; there are also whole communities of substantial homes costing $50,000 to $100,000 and up on lots of one-half to several acres each.

Even if Santa Clara could not have escaped some degree of urbanization, the process need not have destroyed the valley and its agriculture. One study has shown that all the county's growth since 1947 could easily have fitted into 30 square miles with residential densities no greater than they are now; vast orchards and open space could have been saved, and the cost of public services for a more compact urban area would have been lower. But because development jumped from here to there as the speculators found farmers who would sell their land quickly, there is now a subdivision, factory, or shopping center on nearly every one of the approximately 200 square miles of once premium soil on the valley floor. Scattered throughout the county are swatches of barren vacant land, passed over by the developers for one reason or another and now orphaned from nature by the development all around them.

What happened in Santa Clara is that speculators, developers, other entrepreneurs and homebuyers systematically ravaged the valley for their own benefit. And government at all levels helped them. The large planning staffs and powerful governments of Santa Clara County and San Jose--now by far its largest city, with a population of 500,000--reviewed and approved all the rezonings, annexations, and building plans that were necessary before the land could be developed and the big profits realized. Independent water and sewer agencies extended the utilities the developers needed into previously untouched areas. State and federal officials located and paid for the freeways that crisscross the county. State and federally supervised savings and loan associations and banks provided the financing for developers and homebuyers, and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Veterans Administration guaranteed thousands of those loans and approved the houses they paid for. As a Stanford University study concluded about San Jose's apparently chaotic growth, Santa Clara County is not an "unplanned" suburb, it is "a misplanned one."

The officials who could have planned it differently were under great pressure from speculators who looked at the flat valley of spindly fruit trees and imagined huge profits. Little investment was needed to clear or level the land for construction. The mild climate eliminated the need for basements, so thin concrete slabs served as adequate, cheap foundations. Nor were expensive heavy insulation, elaborate roofs and eaves, or weather-resistant exterior finishes necessary. One builder, who cut his costs and increased profits by substituting cheap flat tar and gravel roofs for the conventional built-up, peaked, and shingled variety, set a Santa Clara Valley trend and earned for himself the nickname "Flattop Smith."

Developers found they could supply new housing quickly in Santa Clara County, and buyers, attracted by the reputation and climate of the valley--and not realizing that the orchards they expected to see would be replaced by other newcomers' homes-created a spectacularly heavy demand. One builder sold 2,000 houses in Santa Clara with only a model on the roof of Macy's department store in San Francisco. Speculators rushed to every corner of the valley to buy land from farmers and turn it over at a big profit to onrushing developers.

The farmers were more than willing to accept $2,000, $3,000, and more per acre for ground that had seemed valuable at $400 and $500 an acre. Many of them also were experiencing financial problems at the time: The groves in some parts of the valley were a century old and were due to be torn up and replanted. For some farmers that meant living off their savings, or going heavily in debt, until new trees matured and produced profitable harvests. Other orchards were being threatened by an unusual fungus that attacked and killed pear trees. Many farmers, moreover, were hurt by the higher tax assessments on their land after lots near them sold at comparatively high prices to speculators; older men feared that death taxes on the higher paper value of their land would make it impossible for their heirs to hold onto it. "Everything," Karl Belser said, "worked against saving the land."

So more and more farmers took the speculators' profitable offers. The speculators, in turn, sold the land for up to $10,000 an acre to developers, who parceled it out in lots to homebuyers at prices equivalent to $20,000 and more per acre. "It was not unusual," Belser remembered, "for land to double in price while changing hands in a single day. Everybody wound up speculating in land."

Speculating in land also meant speculating in official planning and zoning decisions that allowed agricultural land to be developed with houses, stores, and factories. Determined officials could have used their power over these decisions to carefully stage the valley's development, shape it along the lines of a rational master plan, and conserve more of its open space, orchards, and natural assets. A fierce struggle between these officials and the greedy land speculators and developers should have occurred. But it never did, because they were never really opposing interests. With few exceptions the local officials were also involved in real estate speculation, had other vested interests in the rapid development of the valley, or, like Karl Belser, as he later admitted, simply were unable to make a strong stand against the powerful development interests and their allies in local government.

Belser remembered how his county planning office was overwhelmed with requests for its preliminary approval for zoning changes all over the county. "Every day, someone would come in and say, ' Karl, you have to approve this because it's good for the county.'" What was "good for the county" was what was most profitable for its speculators, developers, realtors, and merchants, who contributed heavily to the political campaign funds of local officials supporting rapid growth.

The chamber of commerce of Santa Clara County campaigned hard to convince unknowing voters to repeatedly approve bond issues to borrow money for the installation of the water lines, sewers, and streets needed for sprawling new development. The voters were not told about the heavy property taxes that would have to be levied to pay off those bonds. One of the most persistent supporters of these bond issues and development generally was the county's largest newspaper, the San Jose Mercury. Its publisher, when asked some time ago why he so strongly supported the rapid growth that was destroying the valley's orchards, replied in a widely repeated quote, "Trees don't read newspapers."

Continuing breakneck development also meant windfall profits for many of the local government officials themselves. The Stanford researchers found from city records that four of the five members of the planning commission in San Jose from 1950 to the early 1960s had financial interests in the development boom: One was a realtor, another a general building contractor, another an electrical contractor, and the fourth a two-time president of the San Jose Merchants Association, a vociferous booster of continued San Jose population and business growth.

San Jose's city manager for its two decades of most rapid expansion was A. P. Hamann, who openly admitted that he speculated in real estate in and around the city during the boom years and used his position to promote untrammeled growth of San Jose. "They say San Jose is going to become another Los Angeles," he once testified before a state board. "Believe me, I'm going to do everything in my power to make that come true." Again and again in the official annual reports he wrote for the city, beginning in 1950, Hamann emphasized his belief that even wider expansion was needed "if San Jose is to fulfill its appointment with destiny."

A few years ago, Hamann, other San Jose officials, and various local developers were found to be meeting regularly in a local hotel for what they called literary discussions. It turned out, however, that they were trading information about where the next public improvements, zoning changes, and development starts were to be. These "book of the month club" meetings, as they came to be popularly called, caused some scandal at the time, but Belser, the Stanford researchers, and a Ralph Nader task force study of Santa Clara County all place relatively little blame on outright illegal activity for the rape of the valley.

"We believe that less blameworthy motivations have been the cause," the Stanford researchers wrote. "Human beings tend to sympathize with those with whom they deal . . . planners, engineers, planning commissioners and councilmen deal daily with people who represent development interests. Advocates of the public interest are rarely seen."

A master plan was drawn up for Santa Clara County, but only after a state law was passed requiring it. Although the plan itself consisted primarily of vaguely worded platitudes about orderly growth and loosely mapped suggestions of land uses for various parts of the county, Belser's staff used it as an excuse to recommend against many of the requested zoning changes. Nevertheless, they were nearly always overruled by the planning commissioners and the county's board of supervisors.

Exasperated farmers finally decided to act on their own to protect their orchards. They lobbied successfully for a change in the county's zoning laws that authorized the planners to designate large sections of the county "exclusive agriculture," putting them off limits to everyone else, as long as they were controlled by county zoning. The speculators and developers then turned to the officials of the proliferating cities in Santa Clara, who simply annexed and took over all zoning control of areas where the developers wanted to build.

In this way, during Hamann's twenty years as city manager, San Jose alone annexed hundreds of parcels of land and multiplied its area more than eightfold to 137 square miles. Because developers searching for the cheapest land they could find often went far beyond the nearest built-up or incorporated area, San Jose simply annexed whichever street led from its existing outer boundary to the noncontiguous piece of land, along with the parcel itself. The map of the city became an irregular spider's web reaching far out in all directions with large gaps of unwanted, unincorporated territory left inside it.

Other Santa Clara cities, concerned that San Jose would gobble up everything, joined the annexation competition. They began relaxing regulations on lot sizes, site preparation methods, sewage disposal, industrial pollution, and store locations to attract more developers and their unannexed land holdings. In the rush, many $100,000 homes were built with septic tanks instead of sewers. Residents of areas that did not want to be swallowed up by one of these bigger cities incorporated themselves as municipalities instead.

Soon Santa Clara County had fifteen cities of widely varying sizes and populations--San Jose, Santa Clara, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Milpitas, Los Altos, Mountain View, Los Altos Hills, Cupertino, Saratoga, Campbell, Monte Sereno, Los Gatos, Morgan Hill, and Gilroy--wrapped around each other and still unincorporated county areas in a cartographic confusion with no discernible boundaries or, for many residents, any sense of community. To this day, many residents have admitted not knowing in exactly which city or unincorporated part of the county they live, work, shop, or vote. In a survey of 250 residents made for a Ralph Nader task force study, Land and Power in California, most respondents living in unincorporated areas mistakenly thought they lived in a nearby city where their post office was located. And only one-fourth of those respondents who lived in one of the cities knew the form of their local government and the name of one member of its governing body. Santa Clara's geographical and political chaos thus effectively prevented many of its citizens from exercising any real control over their local officials.

Among the choicest land parcels for municipal annexation were the sites for industrial plants and stores, since this meant expansion of the community's tax base. In the end officials rezoned so much of the valley for industrial use that 3,000 acres of this ground now stands empty, much of it neglected patches right in the middle of built-up areas. On the other hand, so many stores, small businesses, and shopping centers have been built in strips along main traffic arteries in the county that the equivalent of a new strip seventy miles long is added each year.

"This offends more than aesthetic taste," the Nader task force report concluded.

First, it is wasteful in terms of transportation. Businesses are not clustered in available centers for easy pedestrian access after parking. Second, it is wasteful of land. For example, everyone must have more parking facilities to satisfy possible store capacity. More total land must be concretized for parking . . . than if stores were clustered with one lot serving them all. Third, it is extremely dangerous. Every twenty feet there is a possible entrance or exit from the main thoroughfare.

El Camino Real, the old Spanish road that connected the missions along the California coast and now runs through most of Santa Clara's larger cities, has been transformed into a linear parking lot flanked by strip development. It and so many other old thoroughfares in the county became so congested in this way that it has been necessary to pave over 40 per cent of the valley with more streets and parking lots.

Source: Mortgage on America