Planning For A Much Closer Future
Is Sonoma’s new 20-year General Plan already obsolete?
If you feel as if things are changing so quickly you can’t keep up, you’re not alone. The pace of change really is happening faster, driven by technological advances that themselves spur yet faster change.
The introduction of the Internet and nearly instant global communications twenty-some-odd years ago was transformational. Combined with digital technology, it’s created a world that only science fiction writers once imagined.
With Artificial Intelligence (AI) we enter yet another epoch of change, one that portends a stunning transformation of industry, manufacturing, communication, jobs, education, transportation, food production, medicine and warfare; in short, nearly everything. And yet, life is still lived on a human scale, including the ways we plan for the future.
For example, the City of Sonoma is currently engaged in a revision of its General Plan. The State of California requires all jurisdictions, both cities and counties, to prepare General Plans. These typically cover twenty or thirty years into the future; the City is creating a 20-year plan, addressing areas such as housing, land use, local economy, and environment. The cost of this process is $500,000. Our question is, given the current pace of change, is it really sensible to develop a 20-year plan? And to spend $500K to do it?
The Covid epidemic experience provides a piece of the answer. Working remotely from home is now an acceptable, often preferable, choice. Using high-speed Internet connectivity, work habits changed overnight, and along with them the economics of office buildings were disrupted. Buildings in many cities are now 50 percent vacant. Few foresaw that kind of sudden change, and certainly did not plan for it.
Take parking standards, for instance. Development codes require provisions – garages and parking lots – for cars and other vehicles. But given the development of autonomous vehicles – driverless Waymo taxis are already carrying passengers on the streets of San Francisco – will people use cars differently in 2 years? We think so. If people can request an autonomous vehicle to arrive at their door in five minutes, what is the need for garages or parking lots? How do we plan for that?
The scale and pace of technological change is ever faster, but human life still passes day by day. In some sense, however, we each must become enslaved by technology or effectively be left behind. Things many of us consider ordinary – cash, checks, cars, school, careers – will be transformed within lifetimes, some in a few years or even months. Planning for 20 years used to be sensible, the timeframe of a generation, but no longer.
General Plans, which review current conditions to evaluate future needs, are practically outdated as they are written. The human element is more important than ever. Wildfires and evacuations have never played a major part in a General Plan, but obviously now need to. Government needs to stop pretending that things will predictably take 20 years to change. From climate to the economy, sudden transformations will happen, and our government needs to become increasingly nimble and resilient.
The forecasting models of 20 years ago are obsolete, and perhaps the style of government is obsolete, too. Yes, we need to plan – for today, next month, next year, five years – but planning for 20 years? It makes no sense. The city’s approved Housing Element plans for eight years, which is much more realistic; we suggest General Plans should cover 10 years at most.
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agreed, the city’s Housing Element needs to be opened back up and revised to properly calibrate the intent of state Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing law, with more accurate and fine-grained local demographic info