Idea gridlock
Guest commentary by Matthew Sewell

Recent actions by the Citizens to Preserve the Ojai have dramatically underscored the problem of traffic congestion in our town. Their proposed salvos, however, appear to be a veiled attempt to end development in the city and its areas of interest. I have no doubt that they believe their methods will mitigate traffic; but the unintended consequences of such methods can have quite the opposite effect. I believe that their agenda rests on three dangerous fallacies.
The first fallacy is that development causes population growth. The truth is more complex than this. Our population growth is caused by people's desire to live here (demand). It is not caused by development (supply). Supply is a factor in creating growth because it lowers prices as a natural adjustment to the supply/demand ratio. This is not a causal relationship, though.
The real danger of this fallacy is that population growth will continue even if there is a complete moratorium on all development. One might ask how this is possible. The answer lies in basic human nature. The restriction of any product or activity causes an illegal market for that product or activity. The Ojai Valley is rife with illegal development and "black market" housing.
Several economic factors exacerbate this situation. The shortage of housing coupled with increasing demand in the Ojai Valley has caused a rapid increase in the price of houses. This causes a commensurate rise in the cost of rent.
Homeowners, faced with an already high cost of living, will look for ways to defray their own housing costs. Housing is a commodity and, as such, people will find ways to capitalize on it. An easy way to do this is to convert a garage into living space. Other people rent out a room or several rooms. In some extreme cases, people inhabit sheds with illegal electricity hook-ups.
Here's a real example. A local property owner has a three-bedroom, single-family home with two one-room outbuildings in the back yard. This property owner recently moved to a nearby city with a lower cost of living. She now rents out each room and outbuilding piecemeal to five different adults. Each adult owns a car. Since there is no extra room on the street, there are several cars parked in the front yard.
This is happening all over our town because there is a wide disparity between housing demand and supply. The result is nothing less than exploitation of the poor who are forced to live in sub-standard and often dangerous conditions.
Obviously, this is not the sort of growth that benefits our community; especially the poorest of our community. Growth is inevitable. The key to our future standard of living is how we respond to that growth.
The second fallacy is that population growth causes traffic congestion. The 2000 Census revealed that the communities of Ojai, Mira Monte, and Meiners Oaks saw a combined net gain of 121 people between 1990 and 2000. If we assume that two-thirds of these people are adults who drive, we have added only 81 drivers to the system.
It is true that the population growth was probably higher than reported. People who live in illegal situations are historically undercounted. They are also less likely to drive.
Population growth is only a small factor in congestion. According to the Surface Transportation Policy Project California, recent research by the U.S. Department of Transportation found that only 13 percent of the increase in driving is attributable to population growth. What, then, are some other factors that contribute to traffic congestion?
One obvious problem is the imbalance between jobs and housing. Many Ojai residents travel outside of the Ojai Valley to work, travel and shop. This is even further compounded by the fact that tourism is a major industry here, adding extra cars that are driven by people who don't know the area very well.
More children are being driven to school (or driving themselves to school) than just 10 years ago. Fewer children are cycling or walking to school because of safety concerns. This, of course, makes the traffic situation even worse.
The biggest factor in traffic congestion is people's driving habits. These habits are formed by economic pressures and can only be effectively solved by development or redevelopment. We must be able to make the transition into a more self-contained and efficient city. This can only be done through careful planning and strategic redevelopment that creates an environment where all of a citizen's needs for employment and procurement can be easily met by walking and biking.
The third fallacy is that a majority vote can effectively decide development issues. This is extremely dangerous. Traffic patterns form a highly complex system with many known and unknown variables.
One could form the analogy that making development decisions is like playing hundreds of games of chess in which a move in one game influences some or all of the other games. To do this, a prudent person would rely on sophisticated computer simulations, the advice of experts, and very careful consideration and diligence. Imagine what would happen if, instead, each move was decided by a majority vote by people who didn't know how to play chess in the first place!
Clearly, if the CPO manages to freeze development and redevelopment, the traffic situation will become worse. Rezoning and redevelopment are the most effective tools that the city possesses when it comes to mitigating congestion. Taking those tools away would rob us of an efficient, prosperous and free future.
Matthew Sewell is a lifelong Ojai resident, local businessperson, and an advocate for social, political and economic freedom.

To listen and learn
Bret Bradigan, OVN publisher

Ojai is sealed off from the rest of the universe at large in important ways. And we need to keep it that way. I've been around plenty of small towns, and few can marshal the impressive resources of community commitment that we do.
This lesson I learned early after my arrival, being inundated with people's hopes, their fears, and their passions.
It was while sitting at this desk, after one rancorous venting from a disgruntled reader, through which I sat with saintly patience, if I do say so myself, that I realizedthat many, if not most, people out there harbor a deep-seated conviction that they could do my job much better than I. And I had the parallel, if unsettling, realization that they were right. At least in the collective sense. For a newspaper's excellence is merely a reflection of its community. If we do our jobs right, we become a mirror.
Now many of these people, from my long experience on the receiving end of vituperation, are job seekers of the "You suck. Hire me and you'll suck less." Even they add something of value to the endless dialogue that is Ojai, because they enter the fray with some plan. I can honestly, if painfully, say that I have rarely received criticism that didn't actually make the newspapers I've worked at better. Even the most vicious, mean-spirited jerks are expressing something of substance, coated as it may be in the vitriol of their pettiness.
On occasion, there are suggestions of supreme good sense, which, for purposes logistical or financial, we cannot implement right way. One suggestion among many of this category that I was given upon my posting to the Ojai Valley News was to do an annual survey of what issues are most important to our citizens.
We are beginning the process of fashioning some low-cost mechanism for garnering this information. It will most likely take the form of a postcard mailer insert in the newspaper, listing a variety of questions about Ojai and the newspaper. What we do with it then remains to be seen, but in other places I've been, the community newspaper can then use these concerns as the basis for sustained coverage.
For instance, we could have monthly updates on gang prevention, on traffic calming, on hospital improvements, on Arcade redevelopment, on open space issues, on whatever it is that you, our readers, find of compelling interest. It is a launching point for the kind of issue-intensive journalism in the public interest that is so sadly, if understandably, lacking in small community newspapers.
This is just to give you a heads-up. Because, after all, it is your newspaper, and has been for the past 111 years. We who have the privilege of working here are merely its stewards. And if we modestly submit to you that we are doing a pretty good job of keeping up with what's going on, it's only because you, our readers, make sure of it.

© 2002 The Ojai Valley News

Return to editorial search

Back to the news