OAKLAND — One after another, they stepped to the lectern, pleading. Don't take the land, they told City Council members. Don't put houses on it. If we lose it, it's gone forever.
This wasn't a scene from some Central Valley agricultural town, with fecund acres being gobbled up at a rapid pace. This was a bustling urban enclave in late January, and the appeals came from anxious residents and business owners demanding that city officials protect factories, not farms.
"Many businesses, even small businesses like mine on a half an acre, give you 40 good jobs," Bob Tuck, owner of Atlas Heating and Air Conditioning Co., insisted at the packed hearing on Oakland's land-use policies. "If you pave over our business land, it's never going to give you another economic crop. Let's make sure that it doesn't become a residential zone."
Large tracts of land are increasingly hard to find in California's crowded cities. Freeways are more congested than ever. Elected officials and environmentalists are clamoring for developers to build new houses within existing urban boundaries instead of fostering more traffic and sprawl.
At the same time, California lost nearly 340,000 manufacturing jobs in the last five years, making some industrial zones look like remnants of a more vibrant age.
So what's a canny developer to do? Put new homes in old manufacturing zones, of course.
But as a flood of houses and condominiums has been proposed over the last several years where smokestacks once belched, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and other cities in California and throughout the country have been pressed to protect the ugly ducklings of urban land use -- industrial neighborhoods.
Existing business owners want to guard livelihoods, urban residents want good jobs close by and many cities hope for an infusion of cleaner enterprises, such as biotechnology firms or solar panel makers.
This spring, as plans to protect industry take form throughout the state, civic leaders are debating the very shape of the American city in a new century. They must ponder whether allowing family houses near warehouses will drive out industries with well-paying jobs. And if new, clean manufacturers will come if land is saved for them. Or if preserved land will end up as a lose-lose proposition: No new industry and no new homes.
