In my college philosophy class, we learned of the famous dialectic, a method by which a person can synthesize two seemingly different ideas and come up with something agreeable to all parties involved.
Basically, it goes like this. Party A argues for their thesis.
Party B argues the antithesis.
And after much debate we finally get around to the synthesis, the solution to the “conflict between the thesis and antithesis by reconciling their common truths, and forming a new proposition.”
What’s this have to do with One Valley, One Vision, the joint City/County long-term planning document that’s open for public review this week at City Hall and which is already becoming controversial? Well, witness the thesis/antithesis/synthesis play out in the opening pages of OVOV’s Land Use document, the document at the heart of the SCV’s future:
The diversity of settlement patterns within the Santa Clarita Valley is viewed as a positive aspect of the community, an acknowledgement of the area’s history and topography, in recognition that the Valley can accommodate and provide diverse areas suitable for different lifestyles. However, the benefits of a unified approach to good planning cannot be ignored in favor of diversity. It may appear that Valley residents desire two seemingly inconsistent goals: maintenance of diversity and community identity, and a coordinated approach to orderly development. It is the aim of the One Valley One Vision planning effort to bring these two goals together into two workable planning policy documents, the City’s General Plan and the County’s Area plan.
If there is one thing to understand about OVOV, it is the quote above. There is a conflict in this community. On one side we have residents -newcomers and oldtimers alike- who like the SCV just as it is, thank you very much. They like the small town vibe, they like the character of Valencia, or Newhall, or the rustic environment offered in parts of Canyon Country. They naturally want to preserve that feeling and way of life we have here.
And then on the other side, we have a few demands from those residents and some unpleasant truths. The same residents who want the City to preserve the SCV and keep it from developing too much also complain that there aren’t enough jobs or things to do in town (only 25% of respondents were satisfied with the amount of jobs in the SCV in the City’s winter 2010 survey). They also say they want the City to manage growth. And the unpleasant truth has to do with the fact that we live in a free market society in which land owners (ie developers) enjoy the freedom to build the things they want on the land they own and in which free individuals can move to places they like and buy the real property they want.
It is the City’s job to synthesize a solution out of these two contradictory and inconsistent realities. And the City’s solution is generally OVOV, and more specifically, the widely-mocked but poorly understood “Valley of Villages” concept in which the City tries to preserve the feel of certain neighborhoods while strategically managing growth in a free market and providing jobs and things to do for its residents.
That’s what OVOV is about. OVOV is not about the City building houses and high density apartments for an additional 200,000 people; it is about managing that growth which comes from private citizens exercising their own free will to move here and private companies which profit from building houses for those people. The City can no more control that dynamic than it can control the weather. What it can do, however, is manage that dynamic in such a way that the outcome is better for all than if we were to just let the market determine our growth.
So if I could offer a word of advice to passionate SCVers it is this: recognize that OVOV is an honest and, yes, open effort to strategically map out the SCV for the next 20-30 years. Recognize that there is good will and good faith behind the documents. Recognize too that without this document, this 10 year long planning effort, there would be little to no control over what developers do.
Attack the plan if you must, but attack it on what it actually is trying to do, do not attack it based on the scary headlines, half-truths and blog posts (yes, some even here) that will play out in the SCV media over the days and weeks to come.
Whatever your opinion of the City, they deserve, in my view, a clean slate as it relates to OVOV. Let’s be reasonable and rational adults when discussing the future of the SCV.
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