Economic Development and Smart Growth

By Charles Stone

Belmont should utilize smart growth principles to develop our economy while preserving our open spaces and core characteristics.

The Bay Area is expected to grow by two million people by 2040, creating a challenge to manage growth in smart and reasonable ways. Belmont is not alone in facing this challenge and Belmont cannot succeed alone. While we must resolutely preserve key components of our community, we must also work hand in hand with our partner communities and other governmental entities to attain a synergistic symbiosis. Belmont needs leaders with vision to guide it through the coming growth.

Belmont is a beautiful city embodying many of the best features of California living. Few communities can claim the excellent educational community, natural beauty, and engaged citizenry that Belmont can. Our unique and wonderful characteristics combined with our prime location have us perfectly situated for prosperity. But prosperity requires good infrastructure and our restrained economic development is impairing us; look no farther than our aging and poorly maintained roadways for proof (our roads were ranked 94th out of 109 Bay Area jurisdictions.) We must attract innovative businesses, and that requires smart, managed, and transit-oriented development.

It is important to understand that I am not talking about developing open space. New development should be concentrated away from open space. We should applaud the leaders of yesterday for fighting against sprawl and pursuing open spaces. But now we need to ask ourselves what comes next and the answer is smart, measured growth. We should be focused on development that invites innovative businesses that can drive the growth of resources for infrastructure improvements. We should be centrally locating such development and businesses where people can easily interact with each other and have good transportation access. We have the ability to incorporate a "complete neighborhoods" approach in our transit oriented planning and we should take advantage of it. Walk-able neighborhoods are not abundant in Belmont. Creating walk-able neighborhoods will help ensure that our senior residents can remain in Belmont.

There are many benefits of smart growth, and we can look at our sister communities to see that it is possible to adopt smart growth policies to revitalize communities and build tax bases without losing core characteristics. These decisions are not always easy and they inevitably generate passionate debate. But rather than simply say "no" to all development out of fear that a few people will be angry, leaders must help their communities anticipate and prepare for the future by working toward appropriate and smart development.

It is also good to remember our past and to utilize institutional memory. Reflection is valuable and provides important context for our present. But if we focus only on the past, our decision-making will be reactive rather than proactive. Instead, we should use the past to help us recall the opportunities we missed. We must focus on transit-oriented development, but we cannot turn down smart, green, appropriate, and economically lucrative developments as we did with the Crystal Springs Uplands School project. And while we talk about developing our economy and engaging in smart growth, we should not forget our existing business. We should work hand-in-hand with the Belmont Chamber of Commerce to help our existing businesses succeed while we attract new businesses.

I want to engage our present and future in a proactive and dynamic way to achieve the best possible outcome for all of Belmont. It is costly to miss opportunities. We can no longer stand by and refuse to engage in controlled development that will increase our tax base. We must instead be proactive about our growth and use it to create the future that we want. We should embrace the opportunity to utilize smart growth to improve our economy and generate a larger tax base to help address our aging infrastructure while also providing housing for those who need it and innovative business opportunities for those who want them.