Features

For the second straight year, an overwhelming number of Californians told pollsters they prefer to drive alone to work and live in a single-family home, two desires that often confound lawmakers trying to steer growth back into cities. 

While residents of the San Francisco Bay Area are the state’s most comfortable with a high-density urban lifestyle, 86 percent of 2,010 adults interviewed in a new growth survey by the Public Policy Institute of California said they want a house with a yard. 

Nearly four in 10 cited safety as the biggest reason. 

That’s nearly double the number citing schools or more space as the leading factor in choosing a neighborhood and home. 

Advocates of more mixed development say Californians haven’t seen enough good examples of compact urban living that compact urban living that emphasizes walking over driving. 

“I think that awareness does play a role in the Bay Area and other places where more people have seen what a denser, walkable neighborhood can look like,” said Steven Bodzin, spokesman for the San Francisco-based Congress of New Urbanism. “Anywhere with historic cities you have people who are aware.” 

Homebuilders say the survey bolsters their arguments against local and state moves to push most new development into older cities. 

“When we talk to the policy makers and some of them try to move us in a different direction, my standard statement is when you’re in business to build a product and sell it, you really want to give people what they want. And that’s what they want,” said Robert Rivinius, chief executive officer of the California Building Industry Association. 

Such resounding opinion also counters the so-called “smart growth” favored by three wealthy California foundations that commissioned the survey. They’ve seeded the emerging, but often embattled, development trend with millions of dollars, emphasizing transit, townhouses and apartments above stores to slow suburban growth in a state that loses 50,000 acres of irrigated farmland every year to development. 

Mark Baldassare, the PPIC’s survey director said he’ll present the findings Friday to the James Irvine Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the second year he’ll present sobering news about Californians’ attitudes on growth. 

“To me, it says there is going to be resistance to smart growth — and there is,” said Baldassare, a longtime monitor of California’s public opinion. “I don’t think the public has been provided with a vision that makes them feel comfortable with doing things differently than we have in the past 50, 60 years.” 

But the Irvine foundation is not deterred, spokesman David Shaw said. “We still believe there’s an untapped market of people who are looking for alternatives, whether that’s a townhouse near transit or apartments in the suburbs.” 

Survey respondents who called the standard single-family home their ideal included 80 percent of renters.