Scenarios for San Leandro

Stories About Our Future

by Judi Clark and Fred Reicker,
with Ptah Asabi and Carolline Holanda

What are scenarios?

Scenarios don't predict the future so much as they illuminate it. They are also a powerful learning device since they let us envisage both welcome and unwelcome futures. They offer a way to plan positive change.[1]

Scenarios are used as part of strategic planning exercises to explore and develop a better understanding of various trends and interacting forces that are at work in our evolving business environment. Scenarios are devices for ordering one's perceptions about alternative situations in which one's decisions might be played out. They work as focused, divergent hypotheses through narrative form.

Why did San Leandro engage in this activity?

San Leandro is at a pivotal position in becoming a vital and thriving participant in a global economy that depends on and is driven by the high-speed transmission of data. To achieve its potential, the City's leaders and residents must understand some of the political and economic forces that can shape, or hinder, future development in this digital era, and the outcomes that can be anticipated in a given environment.

Toward this end, 28 members of the community, representing business, non-profits, neighborhood associations, schools and City government engaged in an intensive one-day scenario planning exercise which produced outcomes that may be considered in planning the City's future. This event was held on June 1, 2012, under the direction of Judi Clark, who has been working with scenarios and future-thinking for 14 years. The authors have discussed and prepared this report during the ensuing six weeks.

San Leandro has two sterling opportunities and a set of assets (discussed later) to both grow its business sector and spur the revitalization of the community and region as a whole: a confluence of major medical facilities that includes a new Kaiser Hospital in the city, and the San Leandro fiber loop. Therefore, the focal question for our scenarios, developed with City Manager Chris Zapata, was how to take best advantage of these world-class opportunities that are before us, especially in terms of the impact on the town's infrastructure (streets, utilities, environment and the marina), general sales and transportation taxes, reaching out to schools and our under-served population, creating welcoming public spaces, and our message and marketing as a City.

New Kaiser Hospital

Kaiser Permanente is building a new "green" hospital (designed for efficient water and energy use, and built from 97% recycled materials), scheduled to open in 2014. The impact of the new hospital in San Leandro will increase residency, as well as employee and patient traffic and parking. This increase also raises the need for better public transportation for employees to commute to work. The hospital's construction has created 3,000 new jobs for construction workers, and when complete it will have 2,500 hospital employees.

This new medical facility will create a host of supportive and related business opportunities for third parties. Many of these ancillary businesses will be heavy users of data services that are facilitated by the San Leandro fiber loop.

The San Leandro fiber loop

The fiber loop is a project of Lit San Leandro and San Leandro Dark Fiber, led by Dr. J. Patrick Kennedy, as a private-public partnership with the City. Its purpose is to modernize the City's digital infrastructure and engage in future-focused economic development of our high tech industrial and manufacturing resources. The project centers on the installation of a private fiber optic cable network[2] along an 11-mile loop around the City that will serve our manufacturing, industrial, and commercial areas with affordable, very high-speed connections to the Internet.

The benefits of the project are two-fold. First, it will provide needed ultra-high-speed Internet connectivity and flexible capacity for OSIsoft and other local, growing high-tech businesses, permitting major employers to remain in the City and expand their companies. Second, it will provide the foundation necessary to attract new businesses that might otherwise gravitate to Silicon Valley or San Francisco. Such businesses include software, graphics, technology and green-tech companies that may have an industrial or manufacturing component. These businesses will be a substantial source of jobs and revenue for the City going forward.

The San Leandro Fiber Loop

Scenarios for San Leandro

We are not yet living in the future. Making high-stakes decisions under conditions of uncertainty is aided by developing alternative stories about plausible futures. We can test our plans and strategies, and how well they will work in each scenario—much as an aircraft designer tests a new plane in a series of wind tunnels. By drawing on our heritage and strengths, we can shape the future to our advantage while the City strives to redefine itself after its manufacturing and industrial heyday.

It all started in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the local economy was fueled largely by agriculture, both crops and machinery."[3] San Leandro's first manufacturing cluster may well have been the San Leandro Plow Company on Davis St. It consisted of a foundry, machine shop, wood shop, plow factory and paint shop. Daniel Best acquired the business, renamed it, and began manufacturing a wide range of machinery used on the state's sprawling farms. His machinery, especially the huge, steam-powered traction engines, achieved international acclaim.

Daniel's son, C. L. Best, later orchestrated a merger with rival Holt Manufacturing in 1925. The newly formed company, the Caterpillar Tractor Company, was headquartered in San Leandro and became an icon in its industry.

Another surge of growth began post-war. Perhaps it was sparked by something as routine as a decision by the City Council in 1947. That January, the Council, for a fee, approved the use of the Davis Street sewer for a new Chrysler Company plant (a prophetic project analogous to the loop?). Residents soon thereafter approved a $900,000 sewer bond, and in July the City acquired a site for the first sewage disposal plant in this area.

A month later, far-sighted City officials annexed the first of more than 80 industrial properties which were to boost assessed valuation to about $250 million during the next 20 years. The higher valuations generated the revenues to pay for the growth in city operations and services, while taxes went down.[4]

San Leandro's business and manufacturing community flourished. Between 1947 and 1956, the City attracted 255 new companies that employed 15,000. Its roster of major employers included Caterpillar, Dodge/Plymouth, Friden Calculator, California Packing Corp., General Foods, Kellogg, Western Electric and Hudson Lumber.[5]

San Leandro's great assets were an inducement for investment: prime real estate, the sewer plant, rail and utility services, freeways, proximity to Oakland's marine terminals and airport, and a skilled workforce. The Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART, has since joined the mix.[6] Industrial development made sense. It still does.

Even though many businesses have moved or closed, San Leandro still has its many assets, notably including our central location in the Bay Area, proximity to three major airports and Oakland/San Leandro's Free Trade Zone, and an abundance of well-located, affordable, under-utilized properties that can be repurposed to attract investment by the next generation businesses. Most importantly, the City's service infrastructure is being augmented with the fiber optic loop required by businesses involved in large, high-speed transfers of data. Big data, says tech journalist and author Michael Malone, "offers measuring precision in science, business, medicine and almost every other sector never before possible. It could ultimately have an impact as great as mass production did more than a century ago—creating a new world of mass personalization of products and services."[7]

We're not there yet. Obviously, a shift in priorities is needed and is underway.

A supporting perspective was offered at a San Leandro by Design presentation on June 12, 2012. A team of graduate students from Cal State University-East Bay reviewed the results of a semester of field work and research that showed the great array of businesses for which San Leandro, with its fiber optic loop, can be the preferred location. Additionally, urban design expert Greg Tung emphasized the potential and necessity for transforming dated industrial and business park areas into Workplace Districts to "capture the 21st century." This transformation is consistent with the City's long-standing conviction in the value of its industrial lands and the value that industry brings to the Bay Area.

The City now faces an incredibly exciting but largely unknowable future. Whatever we think the "official future" is, it will not happen. There are too many competing influences. But there are driving forces we do know and must consider as we develop the scenarios of how the City might look if certain trends were followed to their logical ends under certain conditions.

The Quadrants from our one-day exploration

In a thoughtful and wide-ranging discussion, the scenario planning team identified scores of drivers of our City that could be grouped under one of five broad categories: social forces, changes in technology, the local, regional, state and national economy, environmental concerns, and politics.

The many drivers, forces of different kinds of change in each category, were then assigned a priority by the individual votes of each scenario planning team member. What emerged were a few forces that had higher priority for the group. These forces generally fell into two categories that we considered as most urgent: a functional political system, and access to capital, which we positioned as X and Y axes. That created four quadrants or four environments used to imagine how the future might emerge.

The City is at the intersection of the axes, where we are right now in time. During the next several years, we expect to move into various aspects of these quadrants, driven by a combination of events. The extremes of each axis are illustrative and not necessarily representative of San Leandro.

Time and circumstances will move us in one direction, then another. The national and State economy will not be financially supportive over the next few years as global resources are in short supply. We can contemplate our feet and suffer the consequences, or choose to look forward to innovation, investment, and challenges from new developments, evolving technologies, and alternative sources of capital. Our stories attempt to capture the possibilities that are realizable within the next 3-6 years--each are foreseeable futures.

Overview of This Landscape

Quadrant 1: Our Home Town
Functional governance but bad investments: revenues are limited, government can't do much.

Quadrant 2: West Side Story
Functional governance and investments: a productive partnership among business, government and the community.

Quadrant 3: No "There" There
Fractious governance but good investments: money funds undesirable politics and policies; special interests are catered to.

Quadrant 4: Potterville
Indifferent governance and investments: revenues are being siphoned off and poorly spent. Special interest money is inordinately influential and damaging.

Each of the following four scenarios is inhabited by "residents" whose lives and attitudes reflect the environment in which they live.

Footnotes

1. McCorduck, P., & Ramsey, N. The Futures of Women: Scenarios for the 21st Century. (1996) Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
2. Fiber Optic systems transmit data along glass "wires" with pulses of light from lasers, offering speeds that are at least 100 times as fast as the level of broadband service typically offered to homes. Existing City conduits will carry most of the network, which will be the only one of its kind in the East Bay. A link with BART's telecommunications infrastructure will connect the loop and surrounding communities to the Internet and the outside world.
3. A Garden Grows in Eden. San Leandro Historical-Centennial Committee (January 1, 1972). San Leandro, CA. p. 83.
4. Ibid. p. 129.
5. Research report by Don Colberg, History Research Volunteer, San Leandro Public Library, June 26, 2012.
6. A full overview of the City's assets and resources are described in Lit San Leandro's whitepaper, Introducing Lit San Leandro, An Overview for Real Estate Professionals. http://www.litsanleandro.com/storage/downloads/LSL-Overview-RealEstate.pdf (accessed 1 July 2012).
7. Michael S. Malone. The Sources of the Next American Boom. Wall Street Journal, Opinion. July 5, 2012. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304141204577508403022406864.html
8. Creative Commons offers an alternate intellectual property framework, which "develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation." https://creativecommons.org/