Deep in the Mojave Desert, there is a little town with a big name and a bizarre history: California City. For decades, real estate developers have sold a dream here: if you buy land now, you'll be rich one day. Thousands of people bought this dream. Many were young couples and hard-working immigrants looking to build a better future. But much of the land they bought is nearly worthless. In this new podcast from LAist Studios, host Emily Guerin tells a story of money, power and deception.
Showing posts with label California. Show all posts
Showing posts with label California. Show all posts
19 September 2021
8 May 2021
CityLab: More Americans Are Leaving Cities, But Don’t Call It an Urban Exodus
A year into the Covid-19 pandemic, after much speculation about emptied downtowns and the prospect of remote work, the clearest picture yet is emerging about how people moved. There is no urban exodus; perhaps it’s more of an urban shuffle. Despite talk of mass moves to Florida and Texas, data shows most people who did move stayed close to where they came from—although Sun Belt regions that were popular even before the pandemic did see gains.
Across the U.S., the number of people making moves that they defined as permanent was up a modest 3% between March 2020 and February 2021. Even with that increase, national migration rates are likely still at historic lows. But zoom in to a few of America’s densest and most expensive metro regions and the picture is more dramatic, with the percentage increase in moves well into the double digits.
Those Americans who did move accelerated a trend that predates the pandemic: Dense core counties of major U.S. metro areas saw a net decrease in flow into the city, while other suburbs and some smaller cities saw net gains. In other words, people moved outward. Outward to the suburbs of their own core metro area, but also farther out, to satellite cities or even other major urban centers that might still give people proximity to their region. As CityLab contributor Richard Florida has noted, the pandemic compressed into a matter of months moves that might have happened in the next few years anyway. [...]
Even for people who said their moves were permanent, wealth was the dominant explanation for the jump in moves in New York City’s five boroughs. While people across incomes continued to move around as they had before the pandemic, it was higher-income zip codes that saw a sharp change in movement at the height of the pandemic.
14 September 2020
99 Percent Invisible: The Revolutionary Post
Benjamin Franklin, one of the early postmasters for the Crown, traveled to every colony to make improvements in the system. As he did so, he began to see the colonies differently. In 1754, at a meeting of colonial representatives in Albany, New York, Franklin proposed a plan for uniting the colonies and electing their own representatives rather than having them appointed by the Crown. Franklin’s idea didn’t go anywhere at the time.
Twenty years later, ideas about American self-governance were spreading, and revolutionaries in the colonies knew they would need something other than the Crown’s post (which could be intercepted by England) to communicate. In 1774, these American revolutionaries created the “Constitutional Post.” Before they had a Declaration of Independence or fought the revolution, before there was a constitution, Americans had the post. [...]
Women in particular became avid letter writers. As more women began using the post office, the place itself began to change. Post offices had historically been social spaces for men where it was not uncommon to find liquor, prostitutes, and pickpockets. Eventually, post offices added special “ladies windows” so that “ladies” could pick up their letters without coming into contact with these unseemly elements. Slowly post offices transitioned into more professional spaces.
10 May 2020
99 Percent Invisible: The Natural Experiment
Usually, Fournet relies on quiet periods in an individual day to try and understand how ship noise changes whale behavior. If she’s lucky she’ll get 6-7 hours of silence, but now the ocean was about to experience months of quiet. Fournet is all set to record an entire summer of whale sounds in strangely quiet seas, “This is the first time in human history that we’ve been able to listen to truly quiet behavior,” she says. “We will finally get a baseline for what the ocean sounds like in the absence of human activity.” [...]
The shutdowns have also been incredible to researchers who study air pollution, researchers like Sarath Guttikunda. Guttikunda says that in their work they are always looking to understand the baseline air quality, like what a clean air scenario looks like. Usually, they use rainy days to do this, but the problem with rain is that it doesn’t last. “When it rains, it’s clean for one day and then the build-up starts again. But what we are seeing here is a sustained period of low numbers.” And so this shutdown feels like the entire country is running an experiment for him… a forced experiment that shows what happens if you turn many of the major sources of pollution down basically to zero.
Having this extended period of clean air is also allowing them to do more fine-tuned research experiments. Some of those experiments are chemistry experiments looking at particular pollutants like ozone. But they’re also trying to do a forensic accounting of where all this pollution is coming from because there’s actually a lot of confusion about that. And a big question people have is: is the pollution being generated inside the city, by things like cars, trash burning, and dirty cookstoves? Or is it floating in from outside sources, things like power plants and heavy industry outside the city, or farmers in the countryside who burn their fields before they replant? All of those sources are contributing to the problem but the uncertainty has allowed cities to throw up their hands and say this isn’t a problem we can solve. It allows people in power to pass the buck of responsibility. [...]
Westgate says that in the last two decades there has been a growing consensus that boredom is, in fact, a real emotion, like anger or sadness. And just like other emotions, it’s not intrinsically good or bad. Instead, it’s a signal telling you something is amiss with your situation that needs to be changed somehow. But when it comes to the question of “Why do we get bored?” — that’s where the scientific consensus ends. “When you get down to the nitty-gritty of what exactly is causing boredom, you’re going to start finding a lot of disagreement.”
15 March 2020
Freakonomics: Why Rent Control Doesn’t Work (Ep. 373 Rebroadcast)
As cities become ever-more expensive, politicians and housing advocates keep calling for rent control. Economists think that’s a terrible idea. They say it helps a small (albeit noisy) group of renters, but keeps overall rents artificially high by disincentivizing new construction. So what happens next?
27 February 2020
CityLab: How to Make a Housing Crisis
Contract cities aren’t the first thing that come to mind for most people when they think of the affordable housing crisis that many American cities now face—these suburban communities tend not to have many homeless people or renters at risk of eviction. But in desirable regions like coastal California, contract cities have played a huge role in exacerbating housing problems outside their borders. For over half a century, they’ve been all too successful at implementing their founding mandates: preserving their physical and demographic character, and delivering consistently rising home values to homeowners. [...]
Golden Gates is at its best as a history, whose breadth demonstrates the impossibility of silver-bullet housing solutions. One of many counterintuitive origin points for California’s current crisis was San Francisco’s freeway revolts that began in the 1950s, when grassroots neighborhood activists successfully prevented highways from being constructed throughout most (but not all) of the city. The revolts marked the beginning of the state’s anti-growth movement, which challenged California’s longstanding growth-for-growth’s sake philosophy. That doctrine had brought “urban renewal” projects that transformed minority neighborhoods into bombed-out shells of their former selves and inspired proposals to fill in nearly the entire San Francisco Bay.
Anti-growth activism began as a close cousin of the state’s environmentalism, but as time went on, “the good intention of stopping sprawl soon became cover for stopping everything,” Dougherty writes. The broad language of the California Environmental Quality Act enabled this conceptual fudging, granting ordinary citizens the power to halt coastal subdivisions and green urban infill projects alike. As land use and planning power devolved to neighborhood groups, city governments followed their lead by “downzoning” large swaths of their land to preserve the existing urban landscape, as if it were a pristine old-growth forest.
19 February 2020
99 Percent Invisible: Shade
Shade can literally be a matter of life and death. Los Angeles, like most cities around the world, is heating up. And in dry, arid environments like LA, shade is perhaps the most important factor influencing human comfort, “even more than our temperature, more than humidity, more than wind speed,” says Bloch. Without shade, the chance of mortality, illness, and heatstroke can go way up. People become dizzy, disoriented, confused, lethargic, and dehydrated — and for the elderly or people with health issues, that can tip into more dangerous territory, like heart attacks or organ failure. Shade can literally save lives. [...]
But things changed drastically in LA after the advent of cheap electricity and the completion of the Hoover Dam. The city rebuilt itself around controlled air conditioning and car culture. Palm trees became an LA calling card. “As Mary Pickford said, [palm trees are] very good for window shopping from the seat of your car because the tree trunks aren’t that robust,” notes Bloch, but they’re also “as one essayist said, about as useful for shade as a telephone pole.” [...]
But the sidewalk isn’t the only place where LA has a shade problem. The public parks also provide very little refuge from the hot sun. Pershing Square, for example, used to be full of shade trees. But after a new underground parking structure destroyed the root system, the thick, dense tree canopy was replaced. Other parks lack trees because of a strategy Bloch has reported on called crime prevention through environmental design. In LA, there is an idea that increased visibility in public spaces will lead to higher levels of public safety. In several instances, it’s believed the LAPD has installed pole cameras in parks or in public housing projects and cut down mature trees to give the camera a clear sightline.
2 February 2020
CityLab: The Spine of San Francisco Is Now Car-Free
But the vehicular frenzy is ending, in part: Starting Wednesday, private vehicles—meaning both passenger automobiles and for-hire ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft—may no longer drive down Market, east of 10th Street. Only buses, streetcars, traditional taxis, ambulances, and freight drop-offs are still allowed. The closure to private vehicle traffic heralds the start of a new era for the city’s central spine, and perhaps for San Francisco at large, as it joins cities around the world that are restricting cars from downtown centers. [...]
After decades of debate, the vision for a car-free Market Street has arrived at a remarkable level of support among activists, politicians, planners, and businesses. (Especially compared to the rancor and legal challenges that greeted New York City’s long-delayed effort to create a car-free busway along 14th Street in Manhattan.) In October, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s board of directors voted unanimously in support of a $600 million “Better Market Street” capital construction plan. Ground is set to break on construction for a protected bikeway, repaved sidewalk, fresh streetscaping, and updated streetcar infrastructure by the start of 2021. [...]
San Francisco’s car-free move is part of a wave of cities around the globe pedestrianizing their downtown cores and corridors, from New York City to Madrid to Birmingham. And there are signs that SF’s effort will not end at Market Street: Local officials in the city are calling to remove cars from other sections of the city.
12 January 2020
Vox: Teaching in the US vs. the rest of the world
Teachers in America have a uniquely tough job. But it doesn't have to be that way.
From hours worked to pay rates, countries like Finland, Japan, and South Korea make teaching a more respected and sustainable profession.
25 September 2019
Vox: The gun solution we're not talking about
It seems like after every mass shooting, politicians talk about expanding background checks for gun buyers. But background checks don't actually do a great job of keeping dangerous people from getting guns. What does? A licensing system, where before you can buy a gun, you need a license from the state.
1 August 2019
Vox: The Gilroy, California, shooting highlights a big hole in Trump’s logic about gun violence
It wasn’t as though officers were lucky to be in the area of the gunman when he started shooting. According to CNN, security at the festival was “present and conspicuous.” It included a police compound on site, officers on horses and motorcycles, bag searches, and metal detector wands. But none of that was enough to stop the gunman, who gained entry to the festival by cutting through a back fence before opening fire at random. [...]
But none of those proposals would’ve helped in this case. A San Francisco Chronicle report finds the shooter had no criminal record, and he circumvented California’s strict gun laws by obtaining his WASR 10 legally in neighboring Nevada. [...]
The Democratic-controlled House has passed a number of gun control bills this year, only to see them wither in the Republican-controlled Senate. So unless some Republican senators change their minds, it’s unlikely the loophole exploited by the Gilroy shooter will be closed anytime soon.
29 June 2019
Jacobin Magazine: The Two Faces of Kamala Harris
Over her time as DA and, later, as California attorney general, she took a number of progressive stances. She opposed the anti-gay Proposition 8, helped defend Obamacare in court, supported an undocumented immigrant’s bid for a law license, sponsored legislation that increased transparency around websites’ data collection, opposed California’s despicable “shoot the gays” ballot initiative, and filed a brief in the Supreme Court encouraging it to allow public universities to consider race in admissions. Under her direction, the state’s justice department adopted body cameras, California police were made to undergo implicit racial bias training, and her office received an award for accelerating the testing of rape kits.
Harris also had a respectable record of standing up to corporate malfeasance. She filed a friend-of-the-court brief signed by thirty-one other state attorneys general in 2011 in a Supreme Court case looking to end the practice of drug companies paying competitors to keep generic versions of their drugs off the market. In 2012, she set up a privacy enforcement protection unit in the attorney general’s office, which at one point fined a company for surreptitiously installing spyware on its customers’ computers. [...]
The limits of Harris’s approach are likewise evident in her actions on police shootings. She did back a bill that required reports on officer-involved shootings to be posted publicly online and mandated bias training and that justice department agents wear body cameras. But as district attorney, she refused to hand over the names of police officers whose testimonies had led to convictions despite the officers’ arrest records and histories of misconduct. As attorney general, she also opposed instituting police body cameras statewide and stood against a bill requiring her office to investigate fatal police shootings. [...]
Harris has shown the capacity to be moved leftwards when pressured by activism. This is no small thing. But you can’t pressure Harris — or any other politician, for that matter — without having an understanding of her record beyond the fuzzy PR that Democratic loyalists are currently trying to substitute for actual political discussion. Perhaps Harris will end up the 2020 nominee. Then it’s all the more important we understand her inadequacies.
28 June 2019
Curbed: The rise and fall of Laguna Beach, a gay California hotspot
What I didn’t know was that, a decade later, the city that was once known as “San Francisco South” and “the Provincetown of the West” would be no more. From the late 1990s to the 2010s, through a combination of AIDS-related deaths, ’80s-era conservatism, and skyrocketing home prices, the rainbow-hued city lost its gay shine. Today only the Main Street Bar and Cabaret, a festive but small underground bar, remains from among those original venues. [...]
It is, by all appearances, an idyllic California town, the type of place people from elsewhere conjure up when they think “Southern California.” The town also has long been overwhelmingly white—84.2 percent caucasian, according to Statistical Atlas. Diversity and acceptance outside of artistic communities, while hard fought, has never been in Laguna Beach’s DNA. [...]
During the height of its popularity among the LGBTQ crowd, the city elected one of the country’s first openly gay elected officials, Bob Gentry, a former associate dean of students at University of California at Irvine, who served as mayor and councilman from 1982 to 1996. [...]
When the new millennium approached, Laguna Beach’s latest identity began to crystallize in the form of well-to-do, lovelorn teens, as seen in Laguna Beach, an MTV reality series that put the city’s privileged youth front and center. Neither the town’s gay community nor the wide swath of death caused by AIDS two decades prior was ever mentioned. But the message was clear: youthful, healthy, rich, heterosexual, unapologetically white. LC, Lo, Talen. That was the new Laguna Beach.
17 May 2019
Los Angeles Times: States with the worst anti-abortion laws also have the worst infant mortality rates
States with the largest number of abortion restrictions such as mandatory waiting periods, counseling and ultrasounds; restrictions on insurance coverage for abortions in public or private health plans; and unnecessary standards on ambulatory abortion clinics tended to have the fewest number of supportive policies, the survey found. Those included Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act; family leave; sex- and HIV education programs; and good access to children’s health insurance programs. [...]
These statistics should give the lie to legislators’ arguments that their anti-abortion measures are somehow good for women’s health or aimed at protecting their rights. A 2017 study by the Center for Reproductive Rights and IBIS Reproductive Health, a healthcare think tank, found that hostility to reproductive rights tended to go hand-in-hand with a lack of state-level policies supporting women’s and infant health. [...]
Experts have connected the dots between abortion restrictions and maternal and infant health problems. Limits on access to legal abortions can prompt women to choose unsafe alternatives. Indeed, the reported rate of maternal deaths in Texas soared from 72 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2010 to 148 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2012, a trend that some experts attributed to the state’s closing of abortion clinics and cuts in funding for Planned Parenthood and other family planning services during the same period.
6 May 2019
CityLab: Texas High Speed Rail Faces a New Threat: Semantics
The terminology is important for reasons beyond its own sake. Being a railroad or not determines whether Texas Central is entitled to use eminent domain as it surveys and acquires property. State law allows railroads and certain other private companies to use eminent domain to seize land for projects in the public interest. But in February, in response to a lawsuit by a landowning couple in rural Leon County, a district court ruled that Texas Central did not have that right. The firm is “not a railroad or interurban electric company,” the judge stated, because it hasn’t laid track or run a train yet.
Texas Central contends that it is indeed a railroad, and points to an earlier court decision from Harris County where a judge said so. The company says it would prefer to acquire privately held land through amicably struck commercial sales, and has already secured more than 30 percent of the land in its preferred right-of-way. But in the all-but inevitable event that it can’t seal 100 percent of those deals, it plans to keep fighting the Leon County case in court to secure those eminent domain rights, Holley Reed, the managing director of external affairs at Texas Central, told CityLab. [...]
But the Texas Central project differs from California’s high-speed rail in many ways. Chiefly, it is an investor-backed undertaking, not a publicly subsidized project. Texas Central has said that it plans to spend more than $15 billion to build and run its planned 240-mile route from Houston to Dallas, in partnership with Central Japan Railway, which will help implement the shinkansen technology. Construction won’t begin until funding in full has been raised among investors, the firm promises (one bill moving through the Texas legislature would codify that promise in law). Citigroup and Mitsubishi are advising its intricate financing structure, and Renfe, the Spanish rail operator, has signed on to run the trains. Texas Central company might apply for federal loans, but the project won’t be funded by state or federal grants. [...]
It’s hard to dispute that the project is indeed risky in some basic respects, though. The United States has never seen a privately operated high-speed rail line; Florida’s partially opened, investor-backed Brightline project in Florida—now dubbed Virgin Trains USA—is the closest example, but it has the major advantage of using an existing right-of-way and is still a ways from judgment. And it’s true that few rail lines around the world operate successfully on ticket sales alone. (Even Japan’s rail systems, which are unusually profitable, make a big chunk of proceeds from shrewd station planning and advertising.) In the U.S., the best-performing passenger train routes link the densely packed cities of the Northeast Corridor, which have extensive public transit networks. Neither Houston or Dallas particularly qualify on that front. “This is Texas. People have pickup trucks and want to drive cars,” Workman said. “This is the recipe for the worst, most colossal failure financially.”
6 April 2019
The Guardian Longreads: Dirty lies: how the car industry hid the truth about diesel emissions
And, as it turned out, Volkswagen wasn’t the only one evading the law. Less flagrantly, but to similar effect, the vast majority of diesel cars were making a mockery of emissions rules. In the wake of the revelations in the US, European governments road-tested other big brands too. In Germany, testers found all but three of 53 models exceeded NOx limits, the worst by a factor of 18. In London, the testing firm Emissions Analytics found 97% of more than 250 diesel models were in violation; a quarter produced NOx at six times the limit. “As the data kept coming in, our jaws just kept dropping. Because it is just so systematic, and so widespread,” German says. “VW isn’t even in the worst half of the manufacturers.” With a few honourable exceptions, “everybody’s doing it”.
In the US, where only around 2% of cars are diesel, the rule-breaking had an impact. But the health consequences have been far more severe in Europe, where drivers had been encouraged for years to buy diesel cars – when the scandal broke, they accounted for more than half of all sales. In 2015 alone, one study found that failure to comply with the rules caused 6,800 early deaths. To put it more plainly, tens of thousands of people had died because carmakers felt so free, for so long, to flout the law. [...]
While the US is, in so many ways, an environmental laggard compared to Europe, air quality is a glaring exception. The EPA has, over the years, built up tremendous legal and technical expertise. At least until its evisceration in the Trump years, the EPA was known for its diligence in supplementing regulations with circulars and advisories that precisely defined every term, clarifying ambiguities and laying out what was allowed and what was not. The result was a system that, if not watertight, was a lot less leaky than elsewhere. In Europe, while the rules might look similar, no one goes to the trouble of making clear exactly what they mean, so polluters provide their own interpretations. Its atrocious air offers a cautionary tale that those undermining US regulation would do well to heed. [...]
I learned to my astonishment that some in power knew about the consequences all along. I spoke by phone to Martin Schmied, an official at Germany’s federal environment agency. His department, he told me, had been taking cars on the road for 25 years to measure emissions – and publishing the results. Year after year, they found diesels producing NOx above the legal maximum; six times, in one recent test. I asked him to clarify: Germany’s government, and anyone who read its public reports, has known for decades that automakers were flouting the rules? Schmied responded that as long as emissions went down when limits were tightened, his department didn’t mind they were many times higher than allowed. “We publish this data,” he said. “In principle, this is nothing new.”
24 February 2019
99 Percent Invisible: Beneath the Ballpark
But a lot of the reason why they were so independent was that they had to be. In the early 1900s, racial covenants limited where people of color could actually purchase property. From the 1910s throughout the 40s, Chavez Ravine was one of the few places in Los Angeles that non-white people could actually own a home. [...]
The city selected Chavez Ravine to be the site for 3,600 new units because the City Housing Authority had determined it was a “slum.” The CHA claimed that it was infested with rats, homes lacked electricity and toilets and argued it was actually in everyone’s best interest that the community be outfit with newer, more modern housing. Most former residents disagree with this characterization. “We had flushing toilets everywhere. We had some lights … and we had a lot of things that would not mark us as slums,” argues Carol Jacques. [...]
At the same time, though, a lot of people were opposed to the deal for reasons that had nothing to do with Chavez Ravine. Not everyone in L.A. was excited about the city subsidizing a private business, even if that business was baseball. The opposition was so intense that the city decided to put the deal up for a referendum. This meant that the contract would be placed on a ballot and the citizens would get the chance to vote on the new stadium. In the end, voters came out in the Dodgers’ favor, but just barely. The Dodger contract passed by a narrow margin of about 52% percent out of almost 700,000 votes. [...]
These images were all over the front pages of newspapers at the time. They dredged up memories not just of the failed housing project years earlier, but of an entire history of racial discrimination that Latino and Chicano Americans had been experiencing in Los Angeles for decades. Mexican American history in the United States is full of stories of conquest and land dispossession, and seeing this scene broadcast on television hit a nerve.
20 January 2019
CityLab: What Cities Are Getting Wrong About Public Transportation
If you peruse this data-dump every year, you’ll probably notice something: Despite the tireless efforts of transit planners, bike-lane boosters, and other actors in the mobility arena, the mode-share percentages don’t seem to budge much in the any given growing city as they add more people, despite massive investments in transit infrastructure. Take Dallas, Texas, for example: In 1996, that city opened the first stage of its light-rail network, which has since grown into the largest system in the U.S., at a total cost of something around $5 billion. But the share of commuters in the city who ride transit has remained below 6 percent since 1990. [...]
A weighted-index does not quite get at why only 30 percent of Seattleites took sustainable transportation in 2015 when 91 percent of its jobs are within 10 minutes of what the report considers “frequent service,” where any stop is serviced an average of 5 times an hour between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m. But there’s a mismatch in accessibility: Only 10 percent of Seattle residents were reachable within 60 minutes by walking, biking, or public transit. Even the city’s successful rapid-transit options only reach 7 percent of its population. [...]
But making progress on these indicators does not necessarily mean having to overhaul your public transit options or build new systems from scratch. Consider Minneapolis and its progress on biking. If you factor in improvements in bike infrastructure, the population living near frequent transit jumps 9 percent, rising from 64 to 73 percent. “We only included protected bike lanes as a way to travel by bike in the transportation network,” says Chestnut. “It goes to show that number of people who have access to frequent transit can be improved without having to put in vast sums of money.”[...]
Another avenue where each city has room for improvement is with providing better transit service to people living in low-income households that earn less than $20,000 a year. Los Angeles may not reach as much large of a share of its total population with frequent transit in its car-centric sprawl, but where it does reach matters to a larger share of low-income households that rely on it compared to say, Atlanta. The indicators make that task appear not as difficult as you might think: Transit networks do reach where low-income people live; it is just that service needs to be more reliable.
8 January 2019
Quartz: One of America’s most progressive new political leaders is a white, middle-aged man
According to the New York Times, Newsom’s first budget will include a proposal to give families six months of paid leave after the birth of a child, by far the most generous offer among US states. (There is no federal paid parental leave in the US; five other states offer it, as well as the District of Columbia, offering between four and 12 weeks.) [...]
For now, these are just proposals; the test of Newsom’s mettle will be to see what he can fund. He has other major problems to deal with, including the fact that California has the highest poverty rate in the US, massive income inequality, and a rapidly growing homelessness problem. Nor is he not the first to push for additional early childhood funding in recent years: As the LA Times points out, that has been a key demand of the Legislative Women’s Caucus. However, one lawmaker pointed out that Newsom’s early focus on families is promising: “Quite frankly, to start out with a January proposal that includes that investment in California’s children reflects a new day,” state senator Holly J. Mitchell (D-Los Angeles) told the paper.
California already offers six weeks of partially paid leave for parents, and an additional six weeks of disability for birth mothers. The leave is funded with employees’ payroll taxes. But families need more. As James Heckman, a Nobel laureate in economics, has shown, investing in kids early has a far higher rate of return when compared to trying to “fix” drop-out rates, crime, incarceration, and the physical and mental health toll of poverty and exclusion.
14 November 2018
CityLab: How One City Kickstarted the Ozone’s Recovery
Then-mayor Larry Agran, who championed the move, estimated that it would affect about 500 of the city’s 5,000 businesses, and that the reduction of CFC emissions in the city would fall between 20 and 50 percent. But even if Irvine were to eliminate all of its CFC emissions, it would only account for 1.5 million pounds a year—less than 1 percent of the world’s production of CFCs.[...]
The latest assessment, released Monday by the UN and organizations like NOAA and the World Meteorological Organization, reveal that through the collective effort, the ozone layer in different parts of the stratosphere are on a path to full recovery, healing at a rate of 1 to 3 percent per decade. By 2030, researchers expect the layer in the Northern Hemisphere to fully recover, followed by the Southern Hemisphere in the 2050s, and the polar regions by 2060. [...]
With that, Irvine took a more drastic step in hopes that other cities would follow suit. The city was home to several high-tech industries, from computer hardware and software to biotechnology and medical devices. Not surprisingly, business owners opposed the ordinance, warning the city council that complying with the law would either make services and goods costlier for consumers or drive business out of Irvine. Agran and his team disagreed. [...]
Data from individual companies were limited, but in a 1992 report in the Journal of the Air and Waste Management Association, Brown and then-city manager Allison Hart said the ordinance was effective in spurring action even before it was fully implemented. In anticipation of the vote, they wrote, managers began looking into alternatives and companies were trying out new, cleaner technology in their production process. For those who couldn’t immediately eliminate the use of CFCs, they were committed to at least reducing it. “It was really all about getting compliance without getting out the hammer,” Hart told CityLab.
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