A recent article in the OC Register provides a good example of why certain decisions should be made at the state level:
Mission Viejo City Council members have scrapped plans for a new Department of Motor Vehicles site in the Kaleidoscope shopping center due to traffic and safety concerns.
The DMV — which would have been the city’s first — was initially approved by the city’s planning commission for a vacant site in the Kaleidoscope shopping center near Crown Valley Parkway.
But on Tuesday, June 11, the city council rejected the plans after a flurry of disapproval from residents and apprehension from council members.
The city government has expressed concerns about traffic.
I was pretty disappointed with this decision, because it means I’ll have to travel a much longer distance when I need to renew my driver’s license. Last time, I had to go to a crowded DMV center in Santa Ana, where there was an extremely long line. This means that the decision will actually increase traffic congestion in Orange County, even if it reduces congestion in Mission Viejo.
This problem has become endemic in areas of California near the coast. The same problem as the OC Register Here’s another example of NIMBYism in action:
A proposal from Toll Brothers to build a 2- to 5-story apartment complex with 306 units and an attached six-story parking garage in Doheney Village is scheduled to go before the Dana Point City Council on Tuesday, June 18.
The city’s planning commission’s approval of the project earlier this year is being appealed by Supporters Alliance for Environmental Responsibility, or SAFER, a California public benefit corporation that argues that environmental studies conducted as part of the mandatory development review failed to meet health and environmental requirements.
Even if this project is ultimately approved, the development barriers created by “environmental groups” block many projects and ultimately harm the environment. People who can’t live in this 306-unit complex will likely end up somewhere else, almost certainly somewhere worse from an environmental standpoint. They might be forced to move to the cheaper Inland Empire, where people use much more air conditioning to cool their homes and travel much longer distances. Or they might move to Florida, Texas, or Arizona, which also have worse environmental records than coastal California.
In California, local governments that restrict urban development usually end up harming the environment and/or traffic. Only a state government can “internalize the externalities” in these decisions. This is why most NIMBY policies are implemented by local governments, and most of the recent opposition to NIMBYism comes from state governments.
PS. The term “Inland Empire” refers to the counties of Riverside and San Bernardino, located just east of Los Angeles. Today, they have a population of nearly 4.7 million.
PPS: Here is a picture of Dana Point:
