Line in the Sand

This week, after years of anticipation, I received my Hawaii Five-O first season DVD set. Depending how things go, hopefully the powers that be over at CBS DVD recognize the sagacity in releasing the subsequent seasons of the hit crime drama starring Jack Lord that ran from 1968 to 1980. Throwing in the first of the seven-disc set, I started watching the episode entitled “Strangers in Our Own Land,” a nod to the lament of encroaching development in the islands, to which the show greatly contributed. People watching the beauty and mystery of the islands wanted to see them in person, which stimulated a boom in hotel, commercial and residential building across the archipelago. There was a poignant moment during this episode which points to a specific issue still raging in land use circles today. Simon Oakland, playing the Hawaiian Benny Kalua, looks over a vantage point in the backyard of a home in the hills above Honolulu. He motions towards the then-new towers of Waikiki Beach, showing the clear divide between the retained greenery in the hills and the concrete jungle shoved along the narrow manmade beach below. Hawaii, buoyed by its need to preserve the natural beauty of the islands, has since instituted strict land use controls over its territory. It rides a careful balance between the demands of its tourists for amenities and natural resources. But what about elsewhere? How do other locales draw their own lines in the sand?

One example is the Urban Growth Boundary of Portland, Oregon, a line that keeps development, to a large extent, within the metro area’s borders. Other localities around the country have adopted similar measures, including Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Lexington, Kentucky. The same is true on the eastern side of the country in Miami-Dade County, Florida, where in 1983, county officials drew a line to stem the tide of development in the fast-growing area. This month, the county will release a new report that will support the preservation of the Urban Development Boundary, or UDB as they call it, until at least 2025. The line encourages development inside its orbit, while beyond it a hefty five-acre minimum lot size is required for new houses. Those on the outside looking in have voiced a common complaint over these lines in the sand, seeing an opportunity to revisit the county's UDB. Watching neighbors on the inside reap the benefits of selling off their holdings, and seeing the resultant big box stores and housing developments rising above their crops, these property owners, oftentimes farmers, wonder why they shouldn’t participate in the bonanza. This question will continue to rage amongst those most closely impacted by where the line is drawn. But just like any land use regulatory framework, think the lines dividing zoning districts, the boundaries have to go somewhere.

The farmers of south Florida cannot compare to those that simply choose to disregard such lines in the sand. It shouldn’t be a surprise that one of these mavericks is Google, the internet giant based in the Silicon Valley of California. The San Francisco region has several of its own urban growth lines, in an attempt to bring order to its explosive growth. Google has decided to ignore them, operating in an industry where lines matter less and less. To attract the top workers from the area, Google now offers an expansive shuttle bus service, which services 1,200 of its employees a day across 230 miles of routes. The buses offer comfortable seating and wireless internet access, so that "Googlers" can keep on working before and after they’re in the office, and more importantly from a land use perspective, decide to live just about anywhere they desire in the region. “Googlers” are locating around the shuttle stops dotted across the metropolitan area, to take advantage of the huge perk in a traffic-snarled region. Flying along in the high occupancy highway lanes, these vaulted workers pass across a multitude of lines evicerated in the process. Sure, carpooling is a laudable approach, people should have the right to be mobile and the housing situation in Silicon Valley is well-chronicled as almost impossible, but is Google's approach a model to follow or a luxury reserved for megacorporations? Does it help or hinder attempts to preserve the integrity of the lines in the sand?

The simple truth is that despite the value of drawing lines in the sand, ultimately, someone is going to come along with a way to exploit them, or bypass them altogether, exhibiting little regard for their careful placement. Then what is the answer to halting the march of new development in a carved-out enclave? The answer may lie in bypassing the question altogether, and rather than trying to keep the strangers out altogether, find a way to integrate them into the existing framework. Hawaiians seemed to have found that careful balance by welcoming newcomers, within defined parameters. Likewise, in Portland, the Urban Growth Boundary has been periodically readjusted to allow for more acreage to fall within its orbit. With principled flexibility, the new and old can come together to create a whole new place, that retains the kernel of the original, and prevents any worries of being “Strangers in Our Own Land.”