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Editorial: Compete or retreat -- 'Smart growth' is smart business

Guardino is president of the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group, a collection of 160 top companies with a quarter-of-a-million employees living and working near the south end of San Francisco Bay. Members include the likes of Intel, Cisco Systems, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Microsoft, NASDAQ, eBay, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems.

Today, Guardino will speak to the Greater Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce and other business groups. Then he'll meet with the governor's cabinet and legislative leaders before addressing a public forum at Landmark Center at 4 p.m.

His message is plain: "Smart growth is smart business."

This is an increasingly obvious concept around the country but still encounters resistance here. Any mention of "sprawl" brings testy responses from those who think somebody is trying to take away their two-acre lot and force them onto mass transit. Business leaders are more sophisticated than that. But their competitive focus has been almost solely on tax issues rather than the broader quality-of-life agenda that the smart growth movement addresses.

That's not the case in Silicon Valley, where companies discovered the hard way that horrid traffic hurts business. So does poor education, lack of affordable housing, a deteriorating environment and wasteful, redundant development. Taxes still matter in the knowledge-based economy. But quality of life matters even more when your company's greatest assets are talented people who can work and create wealth wherever life pleases them.

Making their communities more livable and sustainable has become a priority for Silicon Valley companies. Over the past decade, the Manufacturing Group has emerged as a powerful business voice that not only studies these issues but campaigns vigorously for solutions:

•   It supported, for example, a half-cent sales tax increase to raise $1.4 billion to double the size of the San Jose area light-rail system and improve roadways. The reason was simple: Companies' productivity was being wasted in traffic.

•   It endorsed and testified before local zoning boards in favor of 78 infill housing developments, winning 77 of the cases. The result has been 24,000 new homes, many of them on compact lots, near transit lines and within walking distance of shopping. Why was this important? Companies need employees, preferably living close by.

•   It continues to work with school districts and cities to provide affordable housing options for teachers, a critical problem in Silicon Valley, where the average home costs a half-million dollars.

  The cost and short supply of housing remains a huge challenge in northern California. The South Bay added 250,000 jobs but fewer than 50,000 houses in the 1990s. Its big mistake, Guardino said, came 40 years ago when it chose not to hook into BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit rail system, and decided instead to rely solely on highways and far-flung housing that held down supply and pushed up costs for everyone, businesses included.

  "We missed the boat, and now we're having to pay more to catch up," he said. The key to success is not lamenting missed opportunities but moving ahead boldly, he said. Guardino has little patience for utopian planning or partisan squabbling. "We have no Republicans or Democrats in this group, only pragmatists," he said.

  Indeed, Silicon Valley corporate executives no longer regard issues like traffic, housing, education and the environment as "tax and spend" but rather as "invest and prosper," he said. "Looking only at the next quarter won't do your business much good unless you look also at the next quarter-century."

  In Minnesota, business has been largely absent from the smart growth discussion. Guardino's visit should help business leaders understand the importance of beginning now to offer the creative transportation and housing choices that the Twin Cities region needs if it hopes to compete in the years ahead

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