Downtown Plazas: The Petaluma Challenge

A few weeks ago, I wrote a pair of posts about urban public places in Petaluma.  I listed the downtown public places that were already in use or well into the planning stage, along with the most evident shortcoming of each.  I noted that downtowns are best supported by strings of public places that fill slightly different niches.  And I suggested that, with some remediation, Petaluma might have a fine set of downtown gathering places.

I went on to suggest that at least one more major park was required, a park that could rival the community value of Healdsburg Plaza or Sonoma Plaza.  I suggested that this missing park be built on a portion of the current fairgrounds site.  I proposed that this new park, which I’ll call Petaluma Square, be edged by businesses showcasing local agriculture, to support local agriculture and to recognize the history of the fairgrounds.

I also proposed that the area around Petaluma Square be filled by multi-family urban development to provide a base level of activity to the square, to which the remainder of the community could add.

Not surprisingly, I received a number of comments.  Most were positive, but some also raised topics that seemed worthy of further response.  My thoughts follow.

Make park bigger: Some thought that I was shortchanging the community by proposing only a square on the fairgrounds site.  They suggested that it would be better to use the entire fairgrounds for Petaluma’s equivalent to New York City’s Central Park.

I appreciate the passion, but disagree.  For one, I don’t know if Petaluma could make good use of a park of that size.  I know that park enthusiasts believe that communities can never have enough park space.  But when I look around the town, I see existing parks that are underused, with far more folks enjoying culture, dining, or shopping.  (The one exception is athletic fields.  Petaluma, like pretty much every community, can use more athletic fields.)

Also, there’s the adjacency issue.  The fairgrounds site is large, but not big enough to hide that it’s tucked between a car-oriented shopping center, a construction yard, and a school bus yard.  Central Park can sell the concept of a wilderness in the city.  I don’t think the fairgrounds site can do the same.

But the biggest issue is financial.  With a long era of government austerity looming before us, it seems a dubious strategy to take a piece of property than can generate significant economic activity and to redirect it to a use that would require government support.  About the only way to make the dollars work would be voter approval of a tax increase that would pay any compensation due to the Fair Board, fund the construction and operation of the park, and make up for the lost revenue from other possible uses of the site.  I doubt anyone believes that’s possible.

Perhaps Petaluma can support its version of Central Park, but if so, it needs to be on the urban fringe, not on a site that can contribute so crucially to the local economy.

Reduce adjacent development: Some thought the idea of the square was okay, but didn’t seen the need for the surrounding retail or residential uses.  They weren’t even sure that the community needed more residential or retail.

To the first comment, I can only point to the squares in Healdsburg and Sonoma.  Those places are energized by the surrounding development.  Petaluma Square without adjoining development would be another Walnut Park, a nice place but without the vibrancy that could be possible.

To the latter comment, the Petaluma General Plan envisions growth to 80,000 people.  Where better to house and to provide services for those new people than in a walkable urban core around an active square?

Make better use of existing parks: Some thought that I was undervaluing the current parks, particularly Walnut Park.

I disagree.  I think I objectively laid out the value and shortcomings of each existing public place.  Walnut Park is a fine setting, but with the development currently surrounding it, it can’t rival the squares of Healdsburg or Sonoma.

Plus, there is a need for a range of public places, with different community events distributed according to the needs of each event.  Healdsburg is finding that their square is becoming overused and is looking to relocate some events.  I can foresee a future in which Walnut Park and Petaluma Square each host a range of events and activities.

Wake us when the date is closer: However, the biggest single response was that my 2035 date for having Petaluma Square in place was impossibly far away.  Those commenters couldn’t see a reason to pay attention to the opportunity for ten or fifteen years.

To which I can only point out that the City and the Fair Board have indicated a willingness to negotiate the future of the fairgrounds this year.  For all we know, the negotiations may already be underway.

I think the urbanist energies of Petaluma should be directed toward the Station Area for the immediate future, which is how I derived the 2035 date for Petaluma Square.  But unless we offer our thoughts and our visions this year or next, the opportunity for Petaluma Square may go away.

It’s the nature of long-range planning for all land uses, but particularly for urbanism.  Sometimes we must plant the seeds for a crop that a future generation will harvest.

I believe in the vision of Petaluma Square.  But getting from today to the square will be a slog.  It’ll have long periods of inactivity, interspersed with opportunities to make key comments or offer crucial support.  And this year may be one of those opportunities

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Long-Range Planning Shouldn’t Be Overlooked

Cities and counties provide two levels of planning service.  They review land-use applications and they set the rules by which applications are to be judged.  To repeat an analogy I’ve used before, long-range planners define the strike zone and application-review planners are the umpires who judge the individual pitches.  (Of course, it’s developers who throw most of the pitches.)

I note the distinction because the long-range planning function is often overlooked by the general public.  If we think of recent North Bay planning controversies, most are about pending applications, not long-range planning issues.

I’m not saying that long-range planning never attracts attention.  I’ve heard stories about the tension before the 2003 adoption of the Central Petaluma Specific Plan.  And the OneBayArea plan has certainly attracted controversy.

But long-range planning hearings are usually attended only by planning junkies and a few folks with specific issues.  It’s land-use entitlement hearings that fire up entire neighborhoods and force city halls to accommodate overflow crowds.

And that’s a shame because much of the framework of our communities is set by long-range planning.  Land-use applications, even those that a large segment of a community find objectionable, are usually submitted in response to implicit encouragement in a long-range plan.

A Petaluma example illustrates my point.  The most cantankerous recent land-use process has been the review of the Draft EIR for the Red Barn project, a proposed single-family project at the western end of D Street.  Davidon Homes is the applicant.

Many opponents are infuriated that a developer would propose single-family homes on the site.  But only a few folks objected when the Petaluma General Plan was adopted in 2007 with a general plan designation of single-family for the site.  It seems a little ridiculous to accuse the developer of subverting the will of the community when the proposed land use was specifically envisioned in the General Plan.

(Those familiar with the Red Barn proposal will note the irony of referring to the 2007-2025 General Plan.  The Davidon proposal was deemed complete by the City in 2004 under the General Plan that was adopted in 1987.  But the project went quiet during the recession and has now resumed after the adoption of the new General Plan.  The question of which General Plan should be applied to the project has become a source of local controversy.

However, City legal staff has noted that it makes little difference as the two General Plans applied virtually the same standards to the Red Barn site.  The only difference is in the historic preservation standards.

And even though the Davidon project has been deemed complete, people could have still objected to the general plan designation on the Red Barn site during the General Plan process.  Few did so.)

There are numerous reasons why long-range planning usually doesn’t evoke the same level of awareness as entitlement planning.  For one, long range planning often sets forth scenarios that never come to fruition.  To become invested in the vision of a long-range plan is often to be disappointed.

And then there’s the problem of visualizing the future.  How many people can truly believe that a grand vision of the future will actually happen?  Fifteen years ago, how many Petalumans would have believed in Theatre Square?  Or today, how many believe that the parcels adjoining the SMART station will one day be filled with multi-story mixed-use?

It’s the same reason that flood control planning often occurs with little public notice.  On a sunny afternoon in May, it’s hard to conceive of a wintertime flood.  Which is why more of us end up filling sand bags than attending flood control hearings.

But the biggest reason that long-range planning is often undervalued is that it looks twenty or more years in the future.  Again using Red Barn as an example, the General Plan that set the standards by which the project was configured was adopted 26 years ago.  In a world where homeowners move every seven years and renters even more frequently, many of us have a hard time caring about our communities 26 years in the future.

Even mortality has a role.  Of the people currently living in a community, what percentage will still be living there 26 years from now?  Including relocation and mortality, perhaps 30 percent?  Most communities will have largely new populations in 26 years.

But none of those are valid reasons to overlook long-range planning.  Even if neither we nor our descendents will be living in our communities in 26 years, we owe it to the folks who will be living there to take long-range planning seriously.  To grasp the land-use issues that will define the 21st century and to be a part of creating a good direction.

I know that long-time readers won’t be surprised by these comments.  But I’ve recently read a few dismissive comments about planning horizons of twenty years or more.  It seemed a good time to offer a reminder about the value of maintaining a long perspective.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Historic Downtowns Needn’t Be Museums

Perhaps the most surprising discovery during my peripatetic spring was downtown Lodi.  I’d heard rumors that Lodi had a historical downtown with a good sprinkling of retail and restaurant activity, but I hadn’t expected to feel as immediately comfortable as I did.

The downtown is approximately two blocks wide by five blocks long, anchored by a railroad station on the east.  It also has a pair of entrance arches, one of which dates from 1907 making it truly historic.  The other arch is a more recent addition, but it a quiet elegance which complements the downtown.  (Pleasant Hill should take note.)

Nor I am the only one to be beguiled by downtown Lodi.  The San Francisco Chronicle recently lauded it.

And the town of Lodi is unusually well-configured to support a downtown, with a compact development pattern that puts much of the community within easy biking or walking range of downtown.  The downtown has reacted with popular retail, dining, and tasting room opportunities.

But there are potential shortcomings in downtown Lodi.  From observation and from an internet search, there are few residential or lodging opportunities in the downtown area.  Only three hotels are within the downtown core, all of which seem to be budget options.  For one, the only on-line review refers to bedbugs and the lack of fire escapes.  Without people who have money to spend residing or staying downtown, maintaining an active street life is difficult.

In many communities, an absence of needed downtown elements is a sign that the city is being

overly protective of its historical district, effectively placing a bell jar over it.  But there was a clear sign that Lodi is willing to allow downtown development.

Near the north end of downtown, N. School Street looks the same as the other downtown tree-lined street.  But at the corner of W. Elm is a surprise.  A contemporary multiplex cinema occupies the northwest corner.  It’s in an architecture style that offers only a nodding acknowledgement to the nearby buildings, but is sufficiently screened by the trees to be acceptable.

I won’t defend the architecture of the cinema.  I would have preferred different materials and a stronger acknowledgement of the historical downtown.  But if I assume that the city exacted the best architecture possible from the developer, then I’m willing to accept the cinema as better than non-development.

I hope that the cinema is a precursor to other downtown projects, perhaps more architecturally advanced projects, which will buttress what is already working in downtown Lodi.

Although my Lodi visit was brief (I didn’t want to get stuck there), it appeared that the city was reaching for the necessary triad of downtown urbanism: respect the past, acknowledge the present, and build for the future.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Trying Too Hard and Trying Too Little Are Both Flawed Approaches

I recently made a day trip to the East Bay.  My business required only a couple of hours, so I stretched my outing to look at the downtowns of Pleasant Hill and Pleasanton.  The choice of destinations, which was based a bit on logistical convenience and a bit on alphabetical proximity, was fortuitous because it illuminated two approaches to urbanist design.

In a conventional sense, Pleasant Hill doesn’t have a real downtown.  The town came into full existence during the era when strip malls and housing tracts were the development norm.   But a few years back, a developer tried to fill the void with Crescent Drive, a faux downtown near the center of the community.

The impulse was reasonable, but the execution missed the mark.  In an era when we’re rediscovering knowledge about how downtowns work, the lessons were ignored in Pleasant Hill.

There isn’t a residential component to add life to the streets.  Instead, the land uses closest to Crescent Drive are mostly parking lots for Crescent Drive shoppers.

Walkability is limited to the pedestrian routes between the parking lots and the shops.  Outside of Crescent Drive, much of the existing development is pedestrian unfriendly big boxes and strip malls.

What remains is attractive but generic architecture, banners describing the area as “downtown”,

and an arch above the entrance announcing “Pleasant Hill”.  I can be a fan of entrance arches.  When they look authentic, they create a warm feeling about the community.  But authenticity is hard to achieve in faux downtowns.  And, like the rest of Crescent Drive, it wasn’t successful here.

I sympathize with the problem faced by the developer.  It’s hard to create a downtown decades after the town came into existence.  But an incremental approach would have been better.  (Although I’ll acknowledge that financing would have been difficult.)  Crescent Drive feels like an attempt to be too much too soon.  Which resulted in a development that is little more than inadequate and quickly aging eye candy.

Pleasanton is on the other end of the scale.  It’s a marvelous downtown that clearly dates to the early days of the community.  The arch sign, even with the retrofitted neon tubing, feels authentic.  The storefronts are varied and interesting.  And the perfectly preserved filling station is guaranteed to evoke smiles.

But it seems that little beyond preservation has been done to make downtown vibrant.  It has an oddly linear configuration, only one street wide and about a half-mile long.  It may be the best location in the Bay Area for a small town parade, but it’s not convenient for pedestrians to explore, with the only route being up and down the same street.

The linear downtown reminded me how much I enjoy the North Bay cities like Sonoma, Santa Rosa, Healdsburg, Napa, and Petaluma that offer multiple routes for a downtown amble.

There are charming residential neighborhoods in Pleasanton, but they’re too far from downtown to be readily convenient on foot.  Nor does there seem to have been any effort to widen or to strengthen the downtown.  Underutilized parcels exist only a block away, but there was no evidence of an attempt to add residential to enliven the downtown or commercial to enhance the pedestrian experience.

I didn’t research the municipal planning documents to see if there was a vision that hadn’t yet reached the ground.  But my observation of downtown showed a place that was resting on the laurels that came from preservation and hadn’t yet grasped the problem of making the downtown truly vibrant.

Creating a functional downtown is a challenge that must be met with both enthusiasm and restraint.  Neither Pleasant Hill nor Pleasanton seems to have found the right balance.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Circling Back to a Good Idea Isn’t Trivial

During its early history, many criticized new urbanism as a mere recycling of old land-use ideas.  I never understood the disparagement.  Shouldn’t effective public policy mandate the use of good ideas regardless of the provenance?   Nonetheless, the recycling criticism seemed pertinent to many.

In recent years, I’ve heard the denigration less frequently.  Perhaps folks have begun to grasp the unjustness of the complaint.  Or perhaps I’m associating with a more thoughtful group of people.  But in case pockets of the resistance remain, let me enumerate my top three reasons why new urbanism shouldn’t be subject to the petty compliant of plagiarism.

First, new urbanism is a solution to more complex problems than were faced a century ago.  Although the results of new urbanism often look like the land uses of the early 20th century, the modern land-use issues being addressed have more facets.

The biggest single difference is the automobile.  Building a workable town center when most people will arrive on foot or by trolley is very different from building the same town center when most people will arrive with 3,000 pounds of metal, plastic, and glass that they expect to stash in a convenient location.  And that they can use to move to a different place if this place doesn’t hold their interest.

Nor is the automobile the only difference.  Technology has a multifarious impact on cities, from offering information on a range of different destinations for outings to encouraging people to stay home where they can enjoy electronic experiences.

Many people could have designed livable town centers in 1913.  It’s a different, and more complex, task in 2013.  That fact the a good town center in 2013 might look much like its 1913 counterpart speaks to how both meet a underlying human need, not a lack of originality.

Second, to return to a past idea and then to seek to improve upon it isn’t a simple or trivial task.  Indeed, it’s contrary to some primary impulses of group thinking.

Whether at government, business, or family levels, decision-makers often come in two forms, those who wish to constantly push onward to new and improved ideas and those who wish to cling to the comfortable ideas of the past.  To argue that a past concept was a good start, but still needs enhancement is to antagonize both groups.

Far from being a simple-minded regurgitation of the past, new urbanism has gained ground because it’s a good solution and because its proponents have been remarkably persuasive in overcoming institutional resistance.

Third and last, just because an idea was used previously doesn’t mean it was used optimally.  There are always opportunities to improve on the ideas of the past.  And to make them more truly our own possessions.

In the words of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer, artist, and politician, “All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience."

So, while the new urbanism may have some similarities to the urbanism of a century ago, it’s a different and more evolved creation.  Anyone eager to disparage new urbanism as mere recycling is just plain wrong.  And you may tell them that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe says so.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Promoting Fine- Grained Neighborhoods

A large mixed-use project on the Oakland waterfront, Brooklyn Basin, was recently announced with great fanfare.  Politicians from Oakland Mayor Jean Quan to Governor Jerry Brown lauded the proposal, which will be built with extensive foreign capital.

Urbanists promptly weighed in with their thoughts on the plan, offering cogent analyses of the strengths and weaknesses.

I find myself holding an opinion that is contrary to both sides.  Regardless of the planning issues, regardless of the foreign capital, regardless of the jobs and economic activity that the project would create, I hope the project goes away.  My reason is that it’s a monolithic project.

Jane Jacobs argued that cities should be fine-grained, by which she meant that development should occur in small, discrete chunks, constructed by different developers for different uses using different architects at different times.  One of her primary arguments is that a neighborhood needs a supply of older buildings with lower rents to act as incubator space for new businesses.

There are other arguments that can be added to hers.  A friend recently wrote that he and his wife had chosen a fine-grained residential neighborhood (which usually means pre-World War II) because they hoped it would lead to a heterogeneous group of neighbors.  Their expectation was met.

I’ve often made the argument that a fine-grained neighborhood encourages reinvestment.  At a residential level, consider a homeowner who lives in a housing tract from the 2000s and who wishes to remodel his kitchen.  He’d better enjoy cooking because it’ll be hard to capture the value of a remodel when his resale competes directly with nearly identical homes up and down the street.

But put the homeowner in a fine-grained neighborhood where the homes are all different, and it will be easier to recapture the value of the remodel.  The fine-grained neighborhood encourages reinvestment and continual revitalization.

And now we have a further reason to support Jacobs’ theory.  Eric Jaffe of Atlantic Cities reports that Duke sociologist Katherine King studied Chicago neighborhoods to find if a fine-grained development pattern improved the social ties in the neighborhood.  Interestingly, she inverted my friend’s assumption about a fine-grained neighborhood leading to a heterogeneous group of residents.  She used age diversity as a proxy for fine-grained development.

King found what Jacobs would have expected fifty years ago.  Fine-grained development, as represented by age diversity, leads to stronger social ties.

Which brings us back to Brooklyn Basin.  I’m supportive of developing the site as a mixed-use project.  But under the current planning concept, I think the mostly likely results in fifty years are “gracefully aging but economically stagnant neighborhood” or “slum”.  Neither is acceptable.   But the uniform, undifferentiated nature of the plan will constrain the possibilities for adjusted visions and reinvestment as the project ages.   Plus it appears that it will also lack good social ties.

To me, the preferred fifty-year future is “economically active with constant reinvention and new uses”.  To achieve that goal under a single developer is difficult and unusual.  The better way to achieve it is to incorporate multiple developers.

There are large projects for a single developer is required to implement overall site planning or infrastructure needs before allowing individual developers to tackle individual parcels within the project.  The master developer concept works well for this situation and I would have favored it for Brooklyn Basin.

But I also understand why the master developer concept is infrequently used.  Under the current land-use paradigm in which more and more infrastructure is required while cities are less and less able to participate in the infrastructure costs, a developer must often fully build-out the site himself to recapture his infrastructure investment.  It’s an unfortunate situation, but there’s no obvious solution in sight.

And so Brooklyn Basin moves ahead and we once again fail to leave to the next generation what we should, land-use patterns that are conceived to regenerate and to renew themselves for a century or more.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

 

(Note: Rendering is from Signature Development.)

Balancing Vision and Expediency

A pundit in a local newspaper recently penned an opinion piece about the pending Petaluma Station Area Plan.  In it, he called for “flexibility” in the implementation of the plan, suggesting that earlier land-use plans had languished in the absence of flexibility.

I wrote a response that acknowledged common ground and areas of possible disagreement.  I concurred that flexibility in looking at alternative ways of meeting the community goals was to be encouraged.  But using flexibility to disregard community goals was a poor idea.  Regarding the latter, I noted that “After decades of that kind of flexibility, we’re largely locked into land uses that are car-dependent, that have increasingly ominous environmental consequences, and that we can’t afford to maintain.”

My concluding paragraph was “Flexibility to draw on the creative ideas of multiple people to implement the core values of the community?  That’s a fine idea.  Flexibility as an excuse to again bypass those core values?  That idea should be a non-starter.”

The timing of the exchange was prescient.  Within days, the City of Santa Rosa was faced with a pair of decisions for which they had to balance immediate development versus long-term community goals.

The first decision was about the future of the New Railroad Square mixed-use project, once a highly-touted transit-oriented development adjoining the Railroad Square SMART station that will be in operation by 2015.  Due to a weak economy, the loss of California redevelopment, and other changing conditions, the proposed project had been greatly scaled back and now included only a small portion of the units initially intended.

By a 4-3 vote, the Santa Rosa City Council decided that what little remained of the New Railroad Square project wasn’t worth continuing.  Instead, they felt it was better to await better economic conditions when a more comprehensive project might again be feasible.

Barely had that decision been made before a similar conundrum was posed in downtown Santa Rosa.  A developer had proposed to reconfigure the former AT&T building into ground floor public space, with office and residential on the floors above.  Now, faced with a looming deadline and an increasingly convoluted financing package, he was proposing to eliminate the floors that would have included the residential.

The two decisions posed the same question of balance.  Given a long-term vision of what the community wants to become, the short-term economic issues that delay that vision, and the desire for economic activity to keep the local work force employed and cash registers clicking, what are the best decisions for public bodies?

Before offering my thoughts, let me say that I sympathize with the public bodies that must make these decisions.  The choices are impossibly multi-faceted.  It’s hard to believe that people actually compete to occupy the hot seats.

With that said, I think a key factor in the decision must be one’s belief in how land-use patterns will evolve over the next ten or twenty years.  If one believes that the status quo will be maintained indefinitely, then going for the immediate development makes sense.  Why delay the inevitable?

But if that is what someone believes, they haven’t been paying attention for the past decade.

I visited about urbanism with a number of engineering professionals in 2001 and 2002.  They felt urbanism was a fad that would make a few inroads, but not dramatically change the faces of our cities.  They were wrong.  Urbanism is the now the predominant form of growth in metropolises and is gaining on drivable suburbia elsewhere.

And those successes have been achieved despite the institutional biases against urbanism.  The growth of urbanism would certainly have even faster if gasoline prices had reflected the true economic and geopolitical cost of oil, if the construction liability laws had been revised to make multi-family development less troublesome, and if mortgage lending standards had ceased favoring single-family homes.

So I suspect that the Santa Rosa City Council got the New Railroad Square decision correct.  I don’t have all of the data that they did, but if their decision was based on the expectation that urbanism would continue to grow, giving the opportunity in a few years for a project that would meet all of the initial goals, it was likely a good decision.

And I hope that the City Council reaches a similar decision on the AT&T building.  Adding residents to downtown is too important to let an opportunity slip away.

In both cases, I feel sympathy for the developer and the development team.  I’ve been on teams that didn’t receive approvals.  It’s not an enjoyable experience.  But the long-term good of the community is what ultimately matters.

However, I must close with a note of caution.  Although I believe that putting a finger on the scale to tilt land-use decisions toward urbanism is correct, it must still be a balance.  Urbanists who would deny every project until it achieves their perfect vision of urbanism are equally in the wrong with those who would approve every project in the name of economic activity.  Good public service requires considering all factors, including one’s beliefs about where land use is going, and then making solid, balanced decisions.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)