After Community Announcements, April Fools’ Day – Part 1

Current Community Separator

Before getting onto today’s “business”, I have reminders of three upcoming meetings of potential interest to North Bay urbanists, particularly those in Petaluma.

Connecting with SMART – On Thursday, April 7 at 4:00pm in the Petaluma City Hall, 11 English Street, the Petaluma Transit Advisory Committee will take up the draft Short-Range Transit Plan.  A key element of the plan is the proposed rerouting of buses to strengthen connectivity with the coming SMART commuter train.

The meeting may sound dull and bureaucratic, but it’s truly thrilling to ponder a future, now only months away, in which Petaluma residents can leave their front doors and walk a block or two to stops from where Petaluma Transit buses will convey them to the SMART station from where trains can be taken to destinations from San Rafael to Santa Rosa.

Although I think the Petaluma Transit staff has done a fine job of framing the challenge and of developing bus route solutions, there remains an opportunity for local citizens to ask questions and to suggest even better solutions.  More details are in a post I wrote a few days back.

Connecting with SMART, Part 2 – On Tuesday, April 12 at 5:30pm at the Aqus Café, 2nd and H Streets, Petaluma Urban Chat will convene with much the same agenda as the Transit Advisory Committee, discussing the integration of Petaluma Transit and SMART.

Petaluma Transit will have a representative present, so for those who can’t attend 4pm meetings or are allergic to City Hall, this will be another chance to be heard.  I also wrote about this meeting in my earlier post.

Moving the Community Separators Ahead – On Wednesday, April 13 at 4:00pm at the Petaluma Community Center, 320 N McDowell Boulevard, Sonoma County Planning will convene a community workshop on community separators.

The separators are areas of restricted land use between communities, intended to keep cities from growing together.  The goal is to keep Sonoma County looking like Sonoma County, not the Los Angeles Basin or the South Bay where the only way to know you’ve moved between cities is a green traffic sign alongside a gridlocked arterial.

As I wrote several months ago, if you want Healdsburg, Windsor, Petaluma, and other character-filled Sonoma County cities to continue to feel like distinct places, community separators is a key element.

The separators are up for renewal and possible expansion.  The Petaluma workshop will be the third of three workshops that are part of the process.  The Greenbelt Alliance, which strongly supports the separator renewal, has written about the workshops.  Also, the Greenbelt Alliance regional director has made a Facebook page on which residents can indicate their intention to attend the meeting.  If you support the goal of community separators, you should attend the workshop.

I’ll attend all three meetings and encourage readers to join me.

Onward to the topic I’d intended for today, the recently passed April Fool’s Day.

Over the history of this blog, I’ve often touched on April Fool’s Day.  Although walkable urbanism isn’t necessary prone to pranks, normally considered the key element of April Fool’s Day, it can provide settings for whimsy, quirkiness, and fun, which I’m willing to connect to April Fool’s Day.

Early on, I wrote quarterly updates about April Fool’s Day.  But now I’ve transitioned to a giant annual April Fool’s Day blow-out, with all the fun, quirky, and whimsical stories that I found worth sharing over the past twelve months.

So, over the next four posts, including today, I’ll present the 24 best and oddest urbanist stories of the year, at least in my opinion.  The stories will be presented in the reverse order of my personal rankings, so today may start a little slow, but I find myself laughing out loud at the stories I’ll reach a couple of posts hence.

#24 Walkable Urbanism as a Party Game – Urban planners, recognizing that they sometimes talk in lingo intelligible only to other planners, have invented a game intended to introduce their terminology to the masses.  I suspect they’ll still only be understandable to each other, but at least they’ve found a fun way to do so.

#23 Mass Transit as an Art Form – Those who have visited London are familiar with the look and feel of a Tube station.  From the font on the signs to the station layouts, Tube stations are distinctive.  Which led artist Camilla Barnard to make a slightly off-kilter rendition of a Tube for her entry in the London Design Festival.  Is it truly art?  I don’t know.  But I find it both visually and intellectually intriguing.

#22 Reversing a Decision for Politically Forward-Thinking Pedestrian Signals – After following other Austrian cities in the adoption of pedestrian signals that acknowledge gay relationships, the city of Linz decided to remove the signals.  I don’t think I would have thought to use pedestrian signals to acknowledge the range of romantic preferences, but having done so, it seems small-minded to opt back out.

#21 Steampunk Condos – In a decision that seems dubious at best, a New York City condo is being marketed with a steampunk theme, that puzzling celebration of industrial revolution meets Victorian England.  I fear what will come next, evocation of Dickensian slums or the Roman estates of 2nd century Gaul?  Personally, I’m fine if we leave one-off historical architectural knockoffs to Las Vegas.

#20 Bridge to Nowhere – A Danish architectural firm has built a 200-foot diameter circular bridge, without handrails, over an arm of the North Sea.  It’s visually appealing and might be fun to walk a couple of times, but I don’t see any longevity to the concept.  And the absence of handrails would drive an American building inspector crazy.

#19 Error 404 Tree Not Found – Today’s offerings will end with a bit of whimsy from a concerned citizen who used internet lingo to alert the city to a tree that had gone missing.

When I next write, it’ll be to offer items #13-18 on my April Fool’s Day list.  And perhaps also to note some news from SMART.

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

Putting Up a Strawman Inside the Community Separators

I’ve previously written about the Sonoma County community separators, delineated areas between towns in which only limited land use development is allowed, permitting the towns to retain distinct identities.  Supporters of the separators, of whom there are many, point to the undifferentiated development of the South Bay and the Los Angeles Basin as the fate they’re trying to avoid in Sonoma County.

The photo is of the current separator between Petaluma and Penngrove.  It was taken from the window of an office I once occupied and demonstrates the soul-calming value of maintaining pastoral viewsheds.

The effort to renew the Sonoma County community separators achieved a milestone a few days ago.  After extended public comment, the Sonoma County Supervisors voted to place the renewal on the November 2016 ballot.  Also, the Supervisors agreed to continue consideration of expansion of the separators administratively, by amendment to the Sonoma County General Plan.

I wasn’t present for the hearing or the Supervisors’ decision, being away visiting family in Watsonville and also nearing my annual quota of public meetings, so am relying on press coverage and the personal accounts of others for my understanding of the meeting.  But I seem not to have missed any fireworks.  Given the significance of the subject and the contentiousness that characterizes many land use actions, it seems to have been a relatively affable meeting.

In my view, the biggest question to be settled by the Supervisors was whether to go to the voters only for renewal of the current separators, a measure that polling shows is likely to be approved, or to risk asking for enlarged separators with possibility of coming up short at the ballot box.

Faced with that choice, the decision by the Supervisors to put the current separators on the ballot and to consider expansion through administrative action for which they’d act as the point seems to have been positively Solomonic.

With the Supervisors’ action, the community separators decision seems have become a land use action that achieved the rare goal of nearly everyone walking away content.

Thus, it was with surprise and consternation that I read the opening paragraph of the coverage in the local newspaper, the Press Democrat:

“Amid rising rents throughout the North Bay and mounting pressure to build new housing, Sonoma County supervisors on Tuesday said they will seek a ballot initiative next year extending open space protections on 17,000 acres in between urban areas to fend off potential large-scale development.”

There are an astounding number of false implications within that sentence.  Let me try to enumerate just a few of the strawmen arguments.

1 – There is an implication that a battle is brewing between pending development and the separators.   However, the North Bay Association of Realtors specifically disavows that possibility elsewhere in the article.  The separators are more about shaping long-term development patterns rather that stymieing pending projects.

2 – There is an implication that more housing can only occur by pushing into the community separators.  But every Sonoma County city has standards that encourage infill and walkable development.  Some of those standards aren’t implemented as aggressively as I would wish, but no one is disavowing the goal of more urbanism.  On the summary of constraints on Sonoma County growth, water is probably at the top.  Land is well down the list.

3 – There is an implication that development at or beyond the urban fringes would somehow relieve the financial pressure of life in Sonoma County.  But we know that the cost of living, considering the costs of both housing and transportation, is often higher at the urban fringe.  What we must do is create moderately priced housing in settings where families can function with fewer cars.  And we don’t need the land in the community separators to meet that goal.

 If the Press Democrat wishes, they may certainly oppose the community separators.  It would a position that would seem to be contrary to the general public, but newspapers have the duty to sometimes be contrary.

But the position, if the Press Democrat chooses to adopt it, belongs on the editorial page, not set forth as dubious implications folded into a news article.

The public deserves not to be manipulated by strawmen.

Earlier this year, I introduced to this blog the concept of missing middle housing, supplemental housing units that add walkability-sustaining density without changing the fabric of the neighborhood.  Not only was it a popular post, but it made me more attuned to spotting the missing middle housing hiding in plain sight in my neighborhood and town.  I’ve been spotting many instances of missing middle housing that I’d been overlooking.  I’ll share photos in my next post.

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