Saratoga News

We can learn from past mistakes

By Pamela Montgomery

As a child growing up in Los Angeles during the 1950s and 1960s, I witnessed the overdevelopment and deterioration of huge areas of land. From San Diego to the San Fernando Valley, urbanization proceeded at a reckless pace. Little or no thought was given to the long-term effects of such developments--pollution, traffic, environmental destruction, the diminished quality of life of people isolated from natural surroundings.

I moved to the Bay Area in 1968 and was delighted by the orchards, vegetation and open spaces still existing among developed lands. I soon realized, however, that the process I had seen in Southern California was occurring rapidly in this region as well. City planners and local governments did not seem to have learned from what had happened elsewhere.

Wallace Stegner, in his forward to the book Passing Farms: Enduring Values, chronicles this loss:

"We heard how many thousands of acres annually were going out of orchards and into subdivisions and shopping centers, we watched the electronics factories spring up like mushrooms from Redwood City to San Jose, and we did not in the least realize or understand the magnitude of the transformation. Then one spring we drove through and the endless froth of blossoms was no more than local patches. One summer we found that there were no longer any orchards where we could pick our own apricots at a pittance a pailful. The valley was cut by tangles of freeways, we no longer knew the way to anywhere. . . .

"The moral is that, given a second chance anywhere else, our migratory people might do a little better, save a little more, develop institutions and tax laws that would permit the saving of productive and edenic valleys like that of Santa Clara from what happened here." (Jacobson, 1984, x-xi).

Saratoga still retains some of the beauty lost in nearby cities--open spaces, majestic trees, natural creeks, scenic hillsides. Unfortunately, this community is not immune from the forces that have destroyed the balance between development and preservation elsewhere. There is a tremendous push to change current zoning policies so that residential and open-space land can be converted to commercial or high-density residential developments.

I ask myself and others if we can learn from past mistakes. Can we prevent Silicon Valley urbanization from destroying the surviving elements of Saratoga's past? Can we think of future generations as well as our own?

I believe that the Saratoga Neighborhood Preservation Initiative, Measure G, is an attempt to answer my questions affirmatively. Rather than take away homeowners' rights, I think it will protect us from the deterioration of our neighborhoods and community. The measure gives residents a voice in land-use decisions and offers the potential for conscientious planning.

Pamela Montgomery lives on Charters Avenue.