For the last
few posts, I’ve riffed on arguments made by Jeff Speck in his book “Walkable
City”. It’s been a remarkably easy way
to write, because Speck offers a wealth of riff-worthy arguments.
I’ll
continue on this path for today before leaving Speck for awhile. But I will return to “Walkable City”. It’s a remarkable book that I continue to
recommend highly.
Speck argues
that the battle between urbanism and sprawl is tending different directions in different
places. There is much confirmation to be
found. Kaid Benfield of the National
Resources Defense Council looks at the numbers and points to places where
sprawl seems to have the upper hand. Closer
to home, Sacramento County has recently approved a project that appears to be
textbook sprawl. Ultimately, I’m thankful
to live in the North Bay where we haven’t been as fully seduced by sprawl.
From Speck’s
introduction:
“We’ve
known for three decades how to make livable cities – after forgetting for four
– yet we’ve somehow not be able to pull it off.
Jane Jacobs, who wrote in 1960, won over the planners by 1980. But the planners have yet to win over the
city.
“Certain
large cities, yes. If you make your home
in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, or a
handful of other special places, you can have some confidence that things are
on the right track. But those locations
are the exception. In the small and
midsized cities where most Americans spend their lives, the daily decisions of
local officials are still, more often than not, making their lives worse. This is not bad planning, but the absence of
planning, or rather, decision-making disconnected from planning. The planners were so wrong for so many years
that now that they are mostly right, they are mostly ignored.”
Benfield concurs, looking in depth at where
sprawl continues to be the predominant form of new land use. Consistent with Speck’s observation, Benfield
finds sprawl occurring not in metropolises, but in the hinterlands.
Closer to the
North Bay is a recent land-use approval in Sacramento County. On a controversial vote reported in the Sacramento Bee, the County Supervisors
approved an 8,000-home master plan on 2,700-acre site, which is a disheartening
3 homes per acre. The approval was based
on the hope of a university occupying a portion of the land, an anticipation
that, if not a complete pipedream, is at least unlikely.
Luckily, the
North Bay, although not yet a bastion of urbanism, hasn’t been as badly seduced
by sprawl. Perhaps “stroads” function as
our canary in the mineshaft.
Chuck Marohn
of StrongTowns writes about stroads, a coined word for a roadway that a part
rural highway and part city street, usually an overwhelming width of pavement
with too many driveways, often accessing outsized retail, and providing an inhospitable
environment for bicyclists and pedestrians.
Folks in the North Bay sometimes ask me to point to a stroad in our part of the world. I struggle with the question. Perhaps South Santa Rosa Boulevard in Santa Rosa? Or maybe Soscol Avenue in Napa? But neither is nearly as bad as the Midwest examples to which Marohn points.
One of the
North Bay folks recently took a trip to Albuquerque. He reported back that now he had truly seen what
a stroad was. And that he was thankful
to live in the North Bay where we didn’t have stroads.
He’s right. The North Bay wasn’t as fully seduced by
sprawl as many other places. Benfield
doesn’t list the North Bay among his worst sprawl offenders. But Speck would put us among the places where
there are lessons still to be learned and minds to be changed.
The transition
to urbanism will be easier for the North Bay.
But it’s a transition that still must be made. The North Bay may have a competitive
advantage over other regions because we have a headstart on urbanism. But it’s a headstart that we can squander if
we don’t pay attention.
As always,
your questions or comments will be appreciated.
Please comment below or email me.
And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)
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