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Guest Opinion | Prasan Samtani: Pasadena Should Be Pushing the Accelerator on Development, Not Slamming on the Brakes

Published on Sunday, October 31, 2021 | 3:39 pm
 

Pasadena prides itself on being an innovative and welcoming city, and indeed the people of the city are genuinely wonderful. It is heartening to see signs around the neighborhood proclaiming that “Everyone is welcome here”. However, in order to match our actions to our words, we need to resist the temptation to pull up the drawbridge on development. Instead, we should use our advantages of climate, location, beauty, and world class technical institutions to the benefit of the public at large by accelerating the city’s development instead of slowing it down.

In response to the state’s massive housing crisis, California state lawmakers have wisely decided to force cities to relax zoning laws in order to allow more housing units to be built. Pasadena will be required to update its Housing Element and adjust its zoning laws to permit the building of at least 9400 additional units of new housing over the next eight years. Instead of seeing this as a burden, we should see this as a great opportunity to further develop and improve our city. By focusing on urban infill, we can not only make the city more economically productive and generate tax revenues to build great public works, we can also make the city more walkable, locate housing close to jobs, and create an environment where everyone can thrive without suffering soul-crushing commutes.

While the idea that increasing density can be good for the environment might appear counterproductive, research indicates that this is not the case. Density means that people are located closer to each other, and to their places of work. It also means that infrastructure costs, which often scale with distance, are shared by a larger number of people, making them more economically sustainable as well. A recent UN climate report entitled “The weight of cities”, explains this clearly:

“Optimizing densities and reducing sprawl also improves the sharing of resources (e.g. shared walls and roofs in apartment blocks) and reduces the distances that need to be covered by infrastructure networks (e.g. shorter pipes), allowing for savings in the materials and costs associated with service provision.”

Paraphrased, there are economies of scale that arise from density that allow us to more efficiently use the resources we possess.

Additionally, in the last two years, we’ve discovered just how essential certain classes of workers are – among them grocery workers, food distribution workers, nurses, hospital staff, and several other city employees. Yet, because our city has chronically underbuilt housing for decades, a disproportionate number of them have to commute from hours away just to get to work. Do we believe it is just to mandate that the very people we rely on to survive in a pandemic are forced to endure horrifying commutes just so we can preserve our aesthetic preferences of low-slung development? Of course not. We should aim to create a city that is genuinely welcoming, both to prospective new residents, and to the people who already work here but are priced out of the housing market. The only way to do that is to greatly increase housing supply by allowing new development.

For inspiration, we need only look across the Atlantic to the great European cities of Paris and Barcelona, both of whom have transformed in just the last decade to become denser, yet more beautiful, less polluted, and more pedestrian-friendly. There’s no reason we should not aspire to also be a similarly great city, instead of persisting in the delusion that we are still a sleepy town (which may have been true a hundred years ago, but certainly isn’t today).

For inspiration even closer to home, we should just look at the amazing transformation of Old Town Pasadena. As Marsha Rood wrote in her wonderful opinion piece proposing a new Central District, Old Town Pasadena has been transformed into the most vibrant and walkable part of the city, and also the most economically productive. Tax revenues from Old Town development are regularly used to subsidize the suburban parts of our city and keep them afloat. This is because our suburban model is fundamentally unsustainable. It requires too much in terms of infrastructure, and simply does not generate enough in tax revenue to pay for it. By allowing more housing and business development in more areas of the city, we will ensure that other parts of the city can gain some of the vibrancy and economic sustainability of Old Town Pasadena. By building strong, interconnected, protected, pedestrian networks – we can ensure that this happens without additional traffic or pollution. Cities in Europe have successfully done this in the last decade, and we can follow their example.

It is time for our city to stop seeing growth as a negative, instead – to fully embrace it, and use it to transform our beloved home into something more beautiful and sustainable than what exists today. No city can stagnate forever – it either grows or it dies. If we embrace growth and do it intelligently, all of us, and our children, will benefit from it.

This was submitted by Prasan Samtani, Pasadena resident and a Software Engineer at Google.

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One thought on “Guest Opinion | Prasan Samtani: Pasadena Should Be Pushing the Accelerator on Development, Not Slamming on the Brakes

  • Well said. Pasadena has tried foot dragging and pretending the housing crises would go away but, of course, it hasn’t. It’s finally time to embrace development for what it is – a necessity in order to deliver to our residents the basic requirements of life. Pasadena isn’t a museum. Let’s grow in a way that makes our future city a beautiful, vibrant community that real people can actually live in.

 

 

 

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