To the Editor:

I recently attended the “You Choose Bay Area” meeting in Berkeley, part of a series of meetings organized by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. I found that while they purport to offer us a choice they present the most important choice as a simple assertion: Bay Area population will grow by 2.2 million people by 2035.

It is not inevitable that Bay Area population grows so much. What if voters stand up against this massive development scheme and don't allow 900,000 more housing units to be built? Do you think all those people will materialize on the streets like Kirk and Spock from a Star Trek transporter and mill about with no place to live? No, if we don't build those units, the population will not grow.

So the important question is do we want the population to grow that much?

If it does, the quality of life here will fall against a backdrop of strained resources, congestion and bulky new high-rise apartments. Our roads, downtowns, parks, transit resources will all be more crowded. As our streets are lined by 6 and 7 story buildings, we will loose the sense of being surrounded by the hills and the Bay.

Most importantly, our Global Footprint (our resource use and carbon emissions) will rise. Each person requires a certain amount of productive land world-wide to support their lifestyle. Most of that has to do with food, clothing, shelter and waste processing. Only a small amount has to do with transportation.

These developers claim that “transit based development” will magically reduce our global energy use. But adding 33% more people to the Bay area will vastly increase our Global Footprint, whether by 33% or some slightly lesser amount.

Let's not yield to the green-wash of "transit based development". Come to the next meeting and witness the smoothly-wrapped campaign for yourself at 5:30pm on Tuesday, May 24 at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission Auditorium, 101 Eighth Street, Oakland.

You can choose Bay Area.

Searle Whitney
HowMany.org