#development

We’re staying in West Hollywood with a good friend, and the back garden of his 1920s bungalow is bordered by an unexpected diagonal wall. It’s an odd angle that traces the boundary between this house and the next property.

On the other side of a large nearby street at the end of this quiet block, the diagonal transect continues, seemingly cutting a small property there like a wedge of cheese.

It’s not just the result of a whimsical land surveyor or careless property division.

It’s a bit of urban archeology, visible to all.

Pacific Kit Homes, 1925
Source: The Daily Bungalow

Back when Los Angeles was first being expanded over a century ago, smart real estate developers built streetcar lines from the established part of town out into the stretches of land they’d bought but which had no roads or reason to live there.

They’d sponsor ‘lunch and lecture’ events out in the middle of nowhere (relatively speaking), offering a free streetcar ticket, a lunch, and a real estate pitch for one of the new, modern ‘streetcar suburbs’.

The view of Hollywood and Cahuenga, not too far from where we’re staying circa 1906.
Source: Water & Power Assc.

As for the homes being sold on land carved out of the desert and farmland, many of them were pre-fabricated catalogue homes, shipped in kits by railroad and assembled on the spot. They were modern in the sense that they had indoor plumbing, central heating and electrical wiring.

And in neighbourhoods like Spaulding Square in West Hollywood, these charming little homes survived a century of ups and downs and assorted earthquakes. There are a number of neighbourhoods around LA that feature these catalogue homes, and many of them have been or are being renovated and restored to a charm that doesn’t seem dated at all.

A Spaulding house.
Source: LA Office of Historic Resources

The streetcar lines weren’t so long-lived. The rise of the personal automobile and car economy had begun. Once the LA real estate had been parcelled and sold, the costly and profit-depleting streetcar lines were shut down, one by one. Los Angeles became the epitome of automotive triumph (or disaster, depending on how you choose to view it) that it is today. There’s a nice piece on the rise of roads versus rail here.

A gated entryway that was once a streetcar line.
Photo: PK Read

The diagonal alleys and odd property lines around the area are the remnants of old rights-of-passage maintained for a time, just in case the streetcar lines were revived. But by the time public transportation became a burning topic again, these old lines were mostly blocked off, too narrow to use again, or completely paved over.

The old alleyway that’s in my line of vision as I write this is a fossil, a small layer in the sedimentation of urban and commercial interest and investment.

Retired LA streetcars.
Source: Inhabitat

Draining swamps and wetlands has, over the course of human civilization, been seen as a way to grasp land from the greedy waters that cover most of the Earth’s surface.

Add to this that much of the drained, reclaimed land is then conveniently located on prime river or coastal property, and the terrestrial inclination to dry out wetlands makes even more sense. There’s gold in them there swamps.

A MODIS image from NASA’s OceanColor Web shows floodwaters and sediment emptying into the Gulf.
Source: PennNews/NASA

Conservationists usually look at the loss of ecosystems, plant and animal life, habitat degradation and so on. But the real price of the gold rush mentality is slowly revealing itself.

The impact of river levees on flooding has become well known over the past couple of decades. Heavily developed rivers areas around the world experiencing regular and expensive inundations when water flow in flooded rivers is blocked from flowing into tributaries, marshes or swamps.

I found a report from 2005 that shows the impact of land drainage on Florida – not in terms of habitat loss, but in terms of local and regional climate change.

Human influence has transformed southern Florida. The transformation occurred not only on land converted to cropland or cities, but even in protected and undeveloped areas like the Everglades. Changes in water flows transformed deep-water sloughs into drier sawgrass marshes, and mangrove forests have shrunk dramatically. Source: NASA

A multi-disciplinary team examined historical land cover and climate evidence from pre-development Florida (i.e. 19th-century), and found that in comparison to a drier, drained modern Florida, local climates were cooler and wetter in summer, and warmer in winter. The lack of local water cover changed local climate patterns.

This begins to get at the argument made by Sandra Postel, Director of the Global Water Policy Project, in a recent piece in National Geographic, namely, that wetlands in their watery form are worth more than the land we take from them.

She cites a new study in the journal Global Environmental Change, which shows that “the global area of freshwater wetlands and floodplains shrank by nearly two-thirds between 1997 and 2011, from an estimated 165 million hectares (408 million acres) to 60 million hectares (148 million acres).”

We’ve never been very good at weighing intangibles against objects of immediate human value, like land. But Postel makes the argument for putting wetland and watershed services in a language we understand: Money.

Landsat images clearly show different types of landcover in southern Florida.
Source: NASA/Robert Simmon

Citing the role of wetlands, like those that have been drained in Florida, as well as coral reefs, marshes and tropical forests, in mitigating flood and drought, the research team put together a list of water ‘services’ provided. These include recharging groundwater and filtering water in lakes and rivers, maintaining water levels that facilitate shipping, and several other long-term uses.

The total value of global ecosystem services to humans was evaluated at $120 trillion/year (for 2011). This is compared to a global GDP of $75.2 trillion/year for the same year.

Now, the question is this:

If we look at everything through the lens of cost effectiveness, do we really believe humans can provide all the same services at a better price, even assuming we could develop the technology to do so?

Is a new condo development, mall, golf course or business center really the most cost efficient way to make use of the golden value of the world’s wetlands?

Source: Texas Living Waters

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