The Bay Region as an Ecosystem
The San Francisco Bay Region lacks regional governance appropriate to the size of its economy, which is roughly as large as the Netherlands. No single major city dominates the region, leaving decision-making to county and city governments, and a variety of regional and area-based authorities and jurisdictions. The Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), each with its own board, coordinate regional policy. The MTC board also oversees the Bay Area Housing Finance Authority (BAHFA), although it has a separate advisory board. ABAG and MTC’s boards are appointed by county and city governments. (Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin is ABAG’s President.)
Regional governance depends on mutual cooperation among a subsection of the elected leaders of Bay Region counties and cities. Only indirectly accountable to voters, ABAG and MTC lack political power, which leaves it to our counties and cities to respond to federal and state regulatory and legislative interventions when effective regional responses are needed.
How we define the Bay Region has a bearing on its governance. We could map it to its watershed or consider it as part of a megaregion that reflects economic ties and transit links across a much larger area. What’s needed is to provide governance at a level that suits the issues raised. If the region is defined by its watershed, then its stewardship as a watershed is crucial to its future. Responsibility for the watershed is shared by different agencies, each with its own agenda. Water is political, but should it be? Decisions about watersheds can have consequences for their regions centuries after they were taken and implemented. (The Venice Lagoon is an example.)
Taking stock
It’s important to recognize the remarkable attributes of the Bay Region as it exists. Tech here may be deflating, but it remains an important hub of that global industry cluster. The region is home to three leading research universities, two of which are public. Stanford in engineering, U.C. Berkeley in science and mathematics, and U.C. San Francisco in medical science give the region an international profile for basic and applied research. They underpin the region’s economy and its quality of life. While the region is subject to natural disasters, it has a temperate climate and a topography that shapes land use and gives it a stunning natural beauty — factors that still draw people here and induce them to stay.
The deflating of the Tech bubble echoes the dot.com bust in 2000. Such events are consequential, but their consequences aren’t existential. Things come back to earth and, if the region’s past is any guide, rise from that new floor. If office towers are trading at huge discounts, that’s not so different from the Savings & Loan crisis in the late 1980s. Housing is stalled by overbuilding and higher interest rates. This too will sort itself out.
As a region, we can impose fees and local taxes, but our public realm depends on patchworks of revenue. Public transit is in trouble because so much of its current funding comes from fares, and fares are down as commutes have vanished — the same phenomenon that’s emptied out downtown office towers. Yet we use public transit. In time, commuting will revive, but trips will be more balanced between peak and non-peak hours.
Our problem isn’t the market but our chronic condition of “austerity amid abundance,” a situation found in late-capitalist economies like the UK that fail to tax wealth at levels sufficient to finance a robust public realm. Like the Bay Region, the UK is no economic slouch, despite a relatively worse performance following Brexit. (Our state economy is now bigger than the UK’s.) But its public realm. like ours, is underfunded for an economy of its size. Singapore, in contrast, funds a robust public realm with relatively low but hard-to-avoid taxes on personal and corporate wealth. The cost of its public realm is shared equitably by individuals and corporations, whereas here, corporations are lightly taxed, while individuals have many ways to shelter their wealth from taxation. It’s left to property owners, employees, and consumers to pay for the public realm, and what they pay in total is insufficient for the public realm that an economy of our size needs.
I realize that Singapore is a city-state and the Bay Region isn’t, but San Francisco tried and failed to impose a corporate tax, quelled by lobbyists. Our lack of regional governance makes us vulnerable to interest group and corporate lobbying that threatens reprisals for taxes and regulations they can evade by choosing more business-friendly locations. Tech decamped for Austin and other cities, but those moves made it harder for them to attract talent. We appear to have more leverage than we realized. So, even if we lack the political apparatus of regional governance, can we nonetheless start punching at our actual weight? Let’s consider this.
Think 2030, not just 2050
In the midst of the pandemic, ABAG and MTC adopted Plan Bay Area 2050, which sets out their regional ambitions for the midcentury. The plan was criticized on its debut as a “camel,” a typical product of a large committee, with something for everyone and very few specifics. But 30-year plans are like this by definition. Their generality can still be useful if the goals they set out reflect broad consensus. A precise road map is less helpful — that is, more likely to be wrong — than a sense of overall direction.
My longtime writing partner, Professor Richard Bender, pointed out that 30 years is a good timeframe to consider future significant change. Plan Bay Area 2050 was in some sense anticipated in 1990, so what changed over these 30 years that we would deem significant? And what hasn’t? This thought exercise reminds us that many of our challenges recur, even as they take new forms. (“Resolving” speaks to their episodic nature.)
The big changes we hope to see in 2050 will likely result from incremental changes we manage to accomplish along the way. We need five- and 10-year plans to reflect what we failed to anticipate. If reality prompts us to shift our priorities, we can do that — we’ll do it anyway, of course — but following up, tracking how our plans are unfolding, adjusting our strategies and reallocating our investments: this is how it works. ABAG and MTC are well positioned to lead this, tapping the best minds, of which we have many.
Think like an ecosystem
Left to their own devices, cities respond to urgent matters by looking for immediate solutions. They may seek community input and expert opinion, but the measures taken often fail to anticipate the problems they create. And because city budgets are limited, the burden of compliance usually falls on others. Cities will also try to solve problems unilaterally that are better tackled with other cities, their county, and/or their region involved.
To think of a city as an ecosystem is to see it holistically and remind its districts and neighborhoods to take a similar view. Each level matters, but the boundaries we set between them are artificial, porous, and sometimes wrongheaded or even impossible. Thinking of a city as an ecosystem makes us ask “What time is this place?” and consider the different tempos of change. Nuances surface that help a city avoid acting too narrowly and expecting results that its actions are unlikely to deliver.
Thinking of a region as an ecosystem helps make it clearer what a healthy ecosystem looks like. When the pandemic cut traffic drastically across ours, for example, everyone noticed that the air immediately cleared up.
An ecosystem provides feedback. Sometimes it’s staring us in the face; other times, it has to be monitored and measured. Accepting that our region is an ecosystem gives us a framework for facing its challenges before they become crises. It suggests that governance in its different forms is ultimately a dialogue among different actors at different levels, not excluding those parts of the ecosystem that can’t speak for themselves, but need spokespeople who track their well-being and alert us to problems.
Parts of this framework are in place already, but it’s not yet instrumental to this dialogue, nor have we experimented very much with fostering it. We lapse too often into top-down actions taken for the sake of acting. The success stories in our region reflect the harder work of engaging with relevant communities to reach an actionable consensus. It’s a constant process because a region is in constant motion. A framework helps us see the interconnections and interdependencies, the gaps and disconnects.
Regional governance’s most important role may be as the region’s steward. Our research universities can support this, providing the science and tech needed to monitor the ecosystem and inform public policy. They can convene discussion, promote dialogue, and keep the longer term in view.
Politics, “the art of the possible,” as Willie Brown put it, is messy and short-term, but benefits from seeing the bigger picture. Denial and resistance accompany significant change as voters wrap their heads around it and weigh the political response. An informed electorate is better at working through this, responding to problems and pressures in real time and real life. Ordinary people can prompt innovation and breakthroughs, if heard.
We can qualify Brown’s truism by adding that politics is the art of constant persuasion. Ignoring this, a very common act of hubris on politicians’ parts, is ultimately perilous if the electorate is unpersuaded. Even in authoritarian states, the potentates can push their luck only so far before people hit the streets. When it comes to significant change, persuasion in both directions is absolutely crucial. A healthy ecosystem depends on it.
Sources
My writing partner Emily Marthinsen suggested the idea of the region as an ecosystem in a paper we wrote together in 2016 for the Univer-Cities Conference in Newcastle, NSW, Australia.
The reference to levels comes from John Habraken, who argued (in his book Supports) that each level should make decisions in conversation with the levels above and below it. I think an ecosystem is broader than this, but his point’s taken about the need for consulting bottom-up and top-down.
