The Dougherty Valley Dilemma

Contra Costa County, one of California's original 27 counties, is a massive, fragmented, and diverse set of political, cultural, and physical lines that is a microcosm of regional fragmentation. It has also become one of the great battlegrounds in the planning fights of late twentieth-century California. Environmentalists and developers battled to an expensive and politically costly draw over a development in the heart of the county called Dougherty Valley. In the end, little progress was made in the deeper struggle against the unsustainable, unequal, and rapidly resegregating region, in part because no matter which side had “won” the battle over Dougherty Valley, the region and those impacted by its fragmentation and segregation would have lost. This is the so-called “Dougherty Valley dilemma,” which is the focus of this chapter.