What I Noticed
During my daily virtual field trip through the news, I noticed an article on a website about San José, California, and the city’s effort to make it easier to build small multifamily housing in existing residential neighborhoods.
There are plenty of stories these days about communities trying to increase housing supply, so that alone probably would not have caused me to stop.
What caught my attention were the exceptions.
What the Article Was About
San José is considering a process that would make some small multifamily housing projects easier and faster to approve. But the city is not proposing to treat every residential parcel exactly the same.
Properties in certain flood-prone areas, along riparian corridors, in environmentally sensitive locations, or containing significant historic resources would continue to receive additional review.
That made me stop.
San José has more than 30 streams and roughly 136 miles of riparian corridors. Those narrow pieces of land beside streams may perform several functions at the same time. They can carry and temporarily store water, provide wildlife habitat, support vegetation, influence water quality, offer recreational opportunities, and affect what happens upstream and downstream during heavy rainfall.
Yet on a zoning map, the same piece of land may simply look like a parcel where someone could build another home.
What It Made Me Wonder
That made me wonder whether one of the problems we sometimes create for ourselves begins with how narrowly we define an asset.
If we look at a piece of property only as a potential building site, then the obvious question becomes:
How much can we build there?
But what if the same land is already doing several other things?
What if it helps carry stormwater?
What if it provides room for a stream to move?
What if trees growing there help cool a neighborhood?
What if it provides wildlife habitat?
What if it contains something historically significant?
Suddenly the question becomes more complicated.
Maybe the first question should not be:
What could we put here?
Maybe it should be:
What is this place already doing?
What I Am Pondering
This does not mean that San José should not build more housing. Housing is also an asset, and communities have legitimate reasons to consider how existing neighborhoods can accommodate more people.
But perhaps good stewardship begins with a more complete inventory.
Before changing an asset, do we understand all of the functions it currently performs?
Who benefits from those functions?
What would be lost if they disappeared?
Could some of those functions be replaced somewhere else?
What would replacement cost?
And are there things that cannot easily be recreated once they are gone?
The same questions could be asked about a wetland, an old building, a golf course, a farm, a vacant lot, a neighborhood park, or even an apparently unused piece of land.
There may also be another important question:
Are we solving today’s problem in a way that unnecessarily limits the choices available to people tomorrow?
That does not mean preserving everything exactly as it is.
It means noticing what is already there before deciding what it should become.
What This Might Mean in Anyplace, USA
San José may be hundreds or thousands of miles from where most of us live, but the stewardship question is not really about California.
It could apply in Anyplace, USA.
A town wants more housing.
A developer wants to build on a wet field.
A community wants to widen a road.
A school district owns unused land.
A golf course closes.
An old factory becomes vacant.
A stream runs through property someone wants to develop.
A wooded parcel looks like an obvious place for another subdivision.
Before deciding what comes next, perhaps we should stop long enough to notice what is already there.
Not simply what we call it.
Not merely what the tax map says it is worth.
But what functions it performs, what history it contains, who depends upon it, and what choices changing it may eliminate.
That seems like a pretty good place for stewardship to begin.
Question to Ponder:
Before we decide what a place should become, have we taken the time to notice everything it already is?
Read the Article Yourself
This Field Note began with something I noticed while reading about San José’s proposed changes to its housing and land-use policies.
Don’t just take my word for it. Read the source material yourself. You may notice something I didn’t, wonder about something different, or come away with an entirely different perspective.
Click Here to read the plan.
Then ask yourself:
What did you notice? What did it make you wonder about?
Come wander and wonder with me.
Each day I take both real and virtual field trips looking for Notice Moments—things that cause me to stop, become curious and ask questions. Sometimes I find them along a trail or roadside. Sometimes I find them while reading the news. I don’t share them because I already know the answer. I share them because they seem worth noticing—and because you may notice something I missed.