StrongTowns: Quibbling on the Details

 

Downtown Petaluma

To recapitulate recent posts, I continue to encourage North Bay readers to attend one or more of upcoming public meetings with StrongTowns and Urban3.  The meetings, which will be hosted by the Urban Community Partnership, will be the evenings of January 19, 20, and 21 in Santa Rosa.  Signups seem to be going well.  I note many familiar names among the RSVPs.  But I also don’t see some names I’d hoped would be there.  Please don’t miss the chance to become part of a critical mass.

StrongTowns and Urban3 will tell a story that will be worth the time of anyone with an interest in the financial health of our cities.  Further information, including a link to the RSVP site, is here.

For the past few posts, I’ve been writing about the StrongTowns philosophy, giving a flavor of it and also tying it to the North Bay.  (Links to early posts are provided on the information page noted above.)

Today, I’ll take a different angle.  To prove that I’m not a shill for StrongTowns, I’ll write about the points on which I may disagree with them.  It’s possible that the disagreements aren’t substantial, that I’m thinking too much about the end game at a time when StrongTowns is still trying to build early momentum.  But the apparent points of disagreement still seem worth noting.

I’ll start with a couple of points from the StrongTowns mission statement.

The first is that the StrongTowns approach “relies on small, incremental investments (little bets) instead of large, transformative projects.”

Long-time readers may recall that I’ve often called for incremental urbanism that allows for fine-tuned adjustments to market feedback.  My concern with the redevelopment of the former Candlestick Park is an example.

But a blanket disavowal of transformative projects is too strong.  Sometimes a large, transformative approach is the only approach that makes sense.

Looking at the Candlestick example, I’d never argue that San Francisco start by divvying up the site into one-acre chunks from which a development scheme could arise.  Instead, there had to be an overarching redevelopment concept for large-scale land planning and provision of infrastructure.  Within the concept, I still believe that the development should have been as fine-grained as possible, but there was nonetheless a need for a transformative concept.

As a North Bay example, the SMART train poses the same situation.  I agree that the details such as transit-oriented development and local transit connections should be fine-grained, but the train itself needed to be large and transformative.  A train from Petaluma to Cotati wouldn’t have garnered support or met a need.

Next, also from the mission statement, is the statement that the StrongTowns approach “is inspired by bottom/up action (chaotic but smart) and not top/down systems (orderly but dumb).”

I agree that I’ve seen many projects that failed to meet the needs of the community because the concepts were driven by the ego of a consultant or a city hall employee.

But I’ve also seen projects fail because they relied too heavily on the voices of citizens who lacked the knowledge to learn from earlier missteps in other communities.

The best approach is a balanced collaboration between leaders and citizens in which the leaders teach lessons from the past and the citizens impart knowledge about local culture.  This isn’t an easy approach to implement, requiring skilled facilitation, but it’s still correct.

Giving too much weight to bottom up planning would be a mistake.

Not specifically in the mission statement, but underlying much of the StrongTowns philosophy is a concern with “transfer payments”, money provided by higher levels of government that are often directed toward infrastructure projects that are ill-conceived and will either fail or will burden future generations with maintenance and replacements costs in excess of benefits.

Beyond the statement that the StrongTowns approach “is obsessive about accounting for its revenues, expenses, assets and long term liabilities (do the math)”, StrongTowns doesn’t specifically disavow transfer payments, but the general sense is that they find transfer payments to be problematic.

In at least two instances, I disagree and believe that transfer payments can serve a public good.

The first is during times of economic duress.  I believe that federal government has a positive obligation to ease the discomfort during recessions, dispersing funds from reserves that have hopefully been saved during good times to provide wages and business activity during bad times.

I don’t agree that those funds should go to building projects of dubious value, but the maintenance of existing infrastructure seems wise and prudent.  I remain frustrated that we’ve recently survived the worst recession in nearly a century and yet still have hundred-year-old water pipes in the ground, leaking away precious water during a time of drought, having instead spent our money on infrastructure expansions.

Several years ago, I had the chance to ask Chuck Marohn of StrongTowns about his thoughts on transfer payments as economic stimuli during recessions and the form they should take.  After a pause that was longer that I would have wished, he stated that infrastructure maintenance might be a good use of transfer payments.  So we seemed to be on the same page, although he may have been there reluctantly.

Also, I support transfer payments to support social equity.  I fear that the StrongTowns thinking, when abused by zealots without the sense of community of current StrongTowns adherents, could result in actions such as shutting down public libraries as unaffordable, only to open private libraries in the more affluent neighborhoods.

The U.S., despite a reputation for social mobility, has already slid down the social mobility scale compared to other western democracies.  An abuse of StrongTowns thinking to deprive youth of libraries, good schools, streets that can support commerce, and safe water (think Flint, Michigan) would further erode social mobility by robbing youth of the early sustenance needed to succeed in life.

So I support transfer payments to sustain reasonable standards of life regardless of the economic health of a community.  Of course, those transfer payments might also allow the community to rebuild itself.

Beyond these two cases, transfer payments might sometimes make sense, but always within the StrongTowns direction to “do the math”. 

Are my quibbles with StrongTowns significant?  Probably not, at least not today.  But I offer them as a reminder that no philosophy, no matter how well-founded, is beyond examining, which is all the more reason for folks to attend the StrongTowns/Urban3 meetings next week.

In my next post, I’ll finally move on from StrongTowns.  I’ll write about density and the relationship between urbanism and density, which is more complex than some wish to acknowledge.

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

Celebrating the North Bay Theres

Today, I’ll begin with scheduling notes.  The Sonoma Marin Fairgrounds update that I’ve been promising for the last couple of weeks has moved closer.  However, it’s still a step away from the news that I want to announce, so I’ll defer the update for another post or two.

Also, there is a recently published report on a regional transit strategy that is begging for my comment, so I’ll slide in that topic either before or after the Fairgrounds update.

The result of these adjustments is that I must defer the Petaluma SMART station update, which I had planned for today, until three posts hence.  It’ll be a good change.  There are ramifications to the SMART discussion that will take a couple of posts to fully explore.  It’ll be better to defer the conversation until I can give it the undivided attention it deserves.

Moving around the chess pieces resulted in today being temporarily without a topic.  I’ll use the free day to remind all of us that the North Bay is worth celebrating, both for the distinctive elements of the communities that have been preserved and for the geographical separations that remain.  The two combine to give North Bay communities individual identities, a reality that isn’t always true elsewhere in the Bay Area.

An El Cerrito reader emailed me a couple of months back.  She complained about the nearly continuous development from Richmond to San Jose and about how, although she personally walks for many weekly tasks, most of her neighbors rely on cars for their chores.  Although she didn’t quite connect the dots, I understood her points to be that she believed herself to be living in an urban setting and that she found her local urbanism physically and emotionally unsatisfying.

In my response I noted that having sprawling drivable suburbs bump into and overrun each other didn’t make a place “urban”.  I also suggested that had the East Bay developed with a walkable urban aesthetic it would look different than the current East Bay.  I congratulated her on her walking habit, but noted that unless non-car alternatives were the more convenient transportation alternatives, which clearly hadn’t happened in her neighborhood, the place isn’t urban.

I haven’t heard from her again, but hope she remains a reader and has begun to grasp how her community became the way it is and how it should begin evolving.

The exchange reminded me that I’m happy to live in the North Bay where most communities remain geographically separate.  I won’t claim that the North Bay community leaders of the 1950s and 1960s were smarter than those in the East Bay.  I’ve seen too many Marin County master plans with low-density subdivisions sprawling up hillsides to make that argument.

But the North Bay was spared some of the development pressure that was applied to the East Bay in that era, so it was also spared the legacy of built environments that were shaped by the ethos of the time.

(A couple of years ago, I engaged in a spirited on-line debate with Sonoma civic proponents over a point of land-use philosophy.  One of their arguments was that I had no right to express an opinion because I lived in Petaluma where the eastside sprawls, a development feature that Sonoma has largely avoided, and that I therefore had no credibility.

The argument was an easily dismissed ad hominem attack, but I also argued that the only reason Petaluma looks different than Sonoma is that Sonoma is further from the center of the Bay Area and was therefore less impacted by the pressure for drivable sprawl during the post-World War II era.  I doubted that there was much difference in the wisdom of the Sonoma and Petaluma community leaders of the time.

The Sonoma folks scoffed at my argument, but the loss of an educational moment was theirs.)

Combined with the geographical separation of North Bay communities is a thought that Kent Benfield of the Natural Resources Defense Council set forth in a 2013 article.

Using Gertrude Stein’s quote about Oakland as his jumping off point, Benfield argues that communities work better when they have points of enduring cultural reference.  These cultural references can be historic downtowns, stately churches, or beloved parks, but their continuing presence from generation-to-generation provides community focal points and preferred inspirations for new development.

Benfield suggests that it was a loss of the cultural references from her youth about which Oakland native Stein was complaining in her famous comment about there “being no there there.”

Here in the North Bay, we’ve retained and emphasized many focal points, from the main street of Calistoga with hilly vista points on both ends to the plaza in downtown Healdsburg to the Sonoma City Hall which may be my favorite sight in the North Bay.

Combining these retaining focal points with the physical separations between cities, many North Bay communities have separate and unique identities.  Novato is different from Petaluma which is different from Cotati which is different from Rohnert Park in ways with which Richmond, San Pablo, Albany, and El Cerrito can’t complete.  Nor can San Leandro, Hayward, San Lorenzo, and Castro Valley.  Or San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, and Campbell.  Or Millbrae, Burlingame, and San Mateo.

We have something remarkable in the North Bay that we should cherish.  But it can be lost, much as it was lost in the East Bay.  Urbanism is the path to protecting what we have, both the focal points and the separations.  It’s up to us to embrace the solutions that urbanism sets forth.  If you agree, I hope your keep following this space.

Next up will be either the long-promised Fairgrounds update or an analysis of a proposed regional transit strategy.

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

North Bay Great Streets: Petaluma and Cotati

I recently assigned myself a holiday task, searching the North Bay for great streets using the great streets criteria set forth by the Project for Public Places.  (If you haven’t read the original PPS article, I recommend it.)

The ten PPS criteria are:

·         Attractions and destinations

·         Identity and image

·         Active edge uses

·         Amenities

·         Management

·         Seasonal strategies

·         Diverse user groups

·         Traffic, transit and the pedestrian

·         Blending of uses and modes

·         Neighborhood preservation

With those criteria in mind, and with my additional standard that any street segment must be at least four blocks in length to be considered a great street, I began to plan outings through the North Bay.

I started simply, looking at my own community of Petaluma with the new perspective provided by PPS and also wandering downtown Cotati.

Petaluma: Two concepts, bypasses and jaywalking, became central to my observations in Petaluma and Cotati and will likely also apply to many other North Bay cities.

I‘ve long been puzzled by the conundrum of how to manage the evolution of communities that grew up nurtured by regional roadways.  At some point, the traffic volume grows too great to be accommodated in the downtown.  A bypass is the most common solution, but a bypass can undermine a commercial district that has been sustained by large volumes of traffic passing by its front doors.

And if stores close, the local residents who shopped at those stores are forced to find other shops, many of which wouldn’t be in the downtown.  The long-established main street can quickly wither, depriving the community of a needed element.

I’m convinced that an effective urbanism policy can help sustain a downtown after a bypass, but land-use policy is rarely a component of a bypass decision, which instead usually focuses on traffic counts and funding availability.

In Petaluma, the bypass decision was made years ago, with 101 removing regional traffic from Petaluma Boulevard.  Although it’s intriguing to ponder how Petaluma and the North Bay would be different if the main north-south traffic continued to flow through downtown Petaluma, I believe the decision was wise.

But the long-ago role of Petaluma Boulevard as a regional traffic route continues to affect the community.  The street pattern forces many local trips to make use of Petaluma Boulevard.  For many trips, there is no reasonable alternative.

Which brings me to my second concept, jaywalking.  I’m not going to encourage jaywalking.  In my personal rambles, I’m content to walk a couple of hundred feet out of my direct path to avoid jaywalking.  But I suspect that any street, to be great, must be a street where jaywalking, with a bit of caution, can be safely accomplished.   And I think that this idea is consistent with what PPS intends when they write of a balance of transportation options.

But jaywalking on Petaluma Boulevard isn’t a reasonable option, even with caution.  The traffic volumes are too great and the average speed too high.  For that reason, I tried to convince myself that Kentucky Street, parallel to Petaluma Boulevard and one block further from the Petaluma River, was the nearest thing Petaluma had to a great street.

There was much to recommend Kentucky.  It’s the street most frequently used for street fairs.  It has a number of gracefully aging buildings.  It’s the street where my wife and I are most likely to amble in an evening, compared to Petaluma Boulevard where we’re more likely to be destination-driven.  It’s the street where I’m more likely to bump into folks I know.  The jaywalking is easy.  And even the one unfortunate gap in the heart of Kentucky Street, the A Street parking lot, gives a glimpse of the historic A Street neighborhood a block away.

I was prepared to anoint Kentucky as Petaluma’s great street until I took another walk along it.  The segment of Kentucky that I enjoy is only two blocks long, from B Street to E. Washington Street.  Further north, the street features a Bank of America parking lot and an oddly awkward transition between a hotel and a stretch of historical homes.  To the south, where Kentucky has become Fourth Street but is the same street, is a hardware store that is beloved locally but doesn’t offer much of an amenity to Fourth Street and a strip mall, auto parts store, and bank, all of which are behind parking lots.

As much as I like the central two blocks of Kentucky, the remainder of the four-block segment undermines its candidacy as a great street.  I was forced to return my vote to the segment of Petaluma Boulevard from E. Washington Street to D Street. 

Not that Petaluma Boulevard is a bad candidate.  Once one acknowledges the heavy traffic and the dampening effect on streetlife, there is much to like about Petaluma Boulevard.  The activity in Putnam Plaza engages a more diverse crowd than Kentucky.  The architecture is better than Kentucky.  The recently-built Theatre Square, with its interior plaza, provides a community meeting point.  The Great American Mill and other historic structures have been lovingly maintained.  The Petaluman, the proposed boutique hotel at the corner of B Street, will hopefully provide another element to energize the street life.  (Disclaimer: I’m a member of the development team for The Petaluman.)

Petaluma Boulevard won’t get top marks on all of the PPS criteria, but it does okay.  I’d prefer to see less and better mannered traffic.  And I like to see more residences in the downtown core.  (The vacant lot between the McNear and Lanmart Buildings is an interesting site for five stories of downtown apartments.)  But overall Petaluma Boulevard works well enough.  And it’s only a block away from Kentucky Street.

Cotati: Within Cotati, the only reasonable candidate for a great street is Old Redwood Highway.  And the best four blocks of Old Redwood Highway is the segment between Page Street and the second crossing of La Plaza. 

But this segment of Old Redwood Highway, despite being the best that Cotati has to offer, illustrates another aspect of the bypass issue.  When the regional traffic was moved to 101 a few blocks away, the downtown stagnated.  It’s a pleasant place, but lacks the vitality of downtown Petaluma and other North Bay cities.

Cotati tries, they really do.  The Accordion Festival is a marvelously quirky event of which they should be proud.  But on a December Sunday morning, the street is nearly somnolent.  Jaywalking is easy, not because the traffic is well-regulated but because there is little traffic.

There is a relatively new building at the corner of Old Redwood Highway and Park that might have acted to bring energy to the street.  But there’s a gap between the remainder of downtown and the new building, a gap that includes a bridge over Cotati Creek which effectively acts as a ceremonial entrance into downtown, effectively putting the new building outside of downtown.

Overall, it’s a shame.  I want to like downtown Cotati.  Indeed, I do like downtown Cotati.  But in the way of great streets, Cotati doesn’t offer much.

When the weather and my schedule allows, I’ll wander further afield looking for great streets in the North Bay.

Calendar Notes

As a final reminder, the next meeting of Petaluma Chat will be Tuesday, December 9.  The topic will be a continuation of the well-attended November meeting on the Sonoma Marin Fairgrounds. 

As always, all are welcome, even if you haven’t participated before.  We’ll meet in the backroom of Taps, 54 E. Washington Street, Petaluma.  We’ll convene at 5:30 and conclude around 7:00.

Next time, I’ll write about a couple of items in the most recent Petaluma paper that touched upon urbanist issues.

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

Searching the North Bay for Great Streets

I’ve often written that the blog is about urbanism in the entire North Bay.  And yet, when I focus on site-specific topics, most are in Petaluma.

 There are two reasons for being Petaluma-centric.  First, I live in Petaluma and am active in some lesser arenas of city government, so Petaluma issues are constantly parading before my eyes.

Second, it can be hard to get traction on the local affairs of other North Bay cities when not in the community on a daily basis.

In a small way, I’ll try to tackle the second of those hurdles with a 2014 holiday season initiative.

The Project for Public Places (PPS) has a reference article about what makes great streets, places that serve the transportation needs of a community, including vehicular, bicycle, and pedestrian, while also providing a place for folks to gather, to chat, and to engage in commerce.

The moderately long article is worth your time.  I recommend reading all of it.  But in case you don’t, these are the two excerpts that struck me most forcefully:

“Transportation is a means for accomplishing important goals—like economic productivity and social engagement—not an end in itself.”

“Transportation professionals can no longer pretend that land use is not their business. Transportation projects that were not integrated with land use planning have created too many negative impacts to ignore.”

The article concludes with ten standards with which to measure possible great streets: Attractions and destinations, Identity and image, Active edge uses, Amenities, Management, Seasonal strategies, Diverse user groups, Traffic, transit and the pedestrian, Blending of uses and modes, and Neighborhood preservation.

With the possible exception of the last point (I’m not convinced that the line between residential neighborhoods and downtowns needs to be distinctive), I’m in full accordance with the list

I’ll use the list as basis for holiday time visits to the cities of the North Bay.  While on my day trips, I’ll look with a critical eye at downtown streets, using the PPS standards as yardsticks.  My goal is to identify the best street in each community, with the results reported here.

In addition to the ten standards, I’ll also require that a street segment must be at least four blocks in length to be considered.  Much like the proverbial blind pig, any city can stumble into a great city block or two, but four blocks is long enough to hopefully indicate good planning more than good luck.

Given other scheduled posts, I probably can’t fully report on my observations until well into the winter, but my intention is to complete all trips by Epiphany, January 6.  Seeing the streets in their seasonal finery will provide a common reference point.

This exercise will also force me to define what I’ve meant by “North Bay”.  I’m thinking all of Marin, Sonoma, and Napa Counties, along with the western portions of Solano County.  But if someone has a different definition, please share.

Given the winter weather pattern that seems to have reestablished itself, and having no interest in photographing great streets on rainy days, I’ll be flexible in my schedule, setting aside other tasks and hitting the road when a sunny day offers itself.  (It’ll be like living in Seattle again.)

Lastly, this task needn’t be a solo effort.  If you live near Petaluma and would like to accompany me on an outing or two, let me know.  And if you live in another North Bay city and would like to show off the favorite streets in your city, and perhaps grab a meal in a downtown diner, let me know.

I’m excited about this effort.  I’m looking forward to the travels and to sharing the results.

Next up, I’ll introduce Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a philosopher/writer with a perspective on current events and history that provides an unexpected justification for urbanism.

Schedule Notes

As a reminder, the next meeting of Petaluma Chat will be Tuesday, December 9.  The topic will be a continuation of the well-attended November meeting on the Sonoma Marin Fairgrounds.  Having settled upon a package of uses for the possible redevelopment of 30 acres of the Fairgrounds, we’ll tackle the question of which 30 acres it should be.

As always, all are welcome.  Even if you haven’t participated before, you’re still welcome to join us.  We’ll meet in the backroom of Taps, 54 E. Washington Street, Petaluma.  (Across the parking lot from Dempsey’s and not far from the east end of the Balshaw Bridge.)  We’ll convene at 5:30 and conclude around 7:00.

Also, in more of a milestone note, this blog was begun on the Monday after Thanksgiving 2011.  So today marks the beginning of year four.  Thanks for hanging out with me as we try to change the world, one urbanist advance at a time.

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

Would Regional Olympics be a Better Urbanist Solution?

The Olympics closing ceremonies are behind us and the City of Sochi is beginning to ponder what to do with $51 billion of streets and stadiums that were built for a now concluded two-week party.

It won’t be an easy task for Sochi.  A report by a South Carolina television station provides a short summary of the fate of past Olympic host cities.  There are a few bright spots, but the overall picture is bleak.

I’ve often suggested that a rotation of Olympic sites might be a reasonable way to control costs and to minimize the civic disruptions of massive Olympic construction.  (The British Open uses a similar “rota” of golf courses and has been an admirable success for more than 150 years.)  Perhaps the four most recent Summer and Winter Olympic host cities, with one site added for geographical balance, could be the start of a conversation.  The quadrennial Olympics would return to each host city every twenty years.

But even that concept seems troublesome.  Perhaps sufficient uses can be found for the athletic venues in the twenty years between Olympics, but what about the other Olympic necessities?  How does one build an Olympic Village that can sit idle for two decades without becoming a wound in the civic fabric?  If the Olympic Villages are converted to housing, how does the host city evict the tenants for two weeks during the Olympics?  Or must new Olympic Villages be built every twenty years, stretching the urban area?

Writing in Next City, Will Doig suggests a possible solution, allowing Olympics to become more regional. 

Olympics have always been somewhat regional, particularly the Winter Games.  The alpine venues for the Sochi Olympics were about an hour from Sochi.  The same hour of travel applied to Vancouver.

But the Summer Games can also have a geographical spread.  I attended the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.  The first event I watched was a soccer game at Stanford Stadium in Palo Alto.  The next was rowing on Lake Casitas in Ventura County.  I was well into my Olympic experience before I even reached the Los Angeles Basin.  And once there, I watch water polo in Malibu and basketball in Inglewood.  The only Olympic sport I watched in the City of Los Angeles was baseball at Dodger Stadium.

But Doig takes the concept to a higher level.  Among other ideas, he suggests a possible Ohio Olympics that would include events in Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland.

I find great merit in the concept.  The disruption to each of the partial host cities would be reduced.  It would be a shame to lose the concept of the single “Olympic Plaza” in the host city where all can mingle, but sacrificing that element to the long-term health of our cities seems a reasonable tradeoff.

So, what might a Northern California regional Olympics look like?  And could the North Bay participate?

To begin, I would expect to have major pods of activities in San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and Sacramento.

The Opening and Closing Ceremonies could be at the new stadium in Santa Clara.

The last time San Francisco looked at an Olympic bid, the proposed rowing venue was Lake Natomas on the far side of Sacramento.  Perhaps gymnastics could be put in whatever basketball arena eventually results in Sacramento.

San Jose was a long-time site of a professional tennis tournament.  It could presumably host the tennis competition.

And so on throughout Northern California.

And what about the North Bay?  Could we fill a gap?  If memory serves, the Olympics include road racing and velodrome racing for bicycles.  I suspect that a fine road course could be found through the vineyards of Napa and Sonoma Counties.  And I wouldn’t be surprised if Napa could also make good use of a velodrome, perhaps complementing the wine and food attractions of the region.

And I would certain hope that a marathon course could begin in southern Marin County before crossing the Golden Gate Bridge.

A regional Olympics isn’t going to happen for awhile yet, probably not in my lifetime.  The current model still has too many potential host cities happy to willfully harm themselves for two weeks of glory.  But the regional model makes a lot of sense as fiscal and urbanist realities become more evident.  And it’s always good to have a new model to replace a failed model.

Meanwhile, it’s onward to Rio 2016.  Today is the official start of the “Will Rio be ready?”and “Can Brazil financially survive the Olympics?” worry fest.

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

Is Urbanism Legal in the North Bay?

In “The Smart Growth Manual” by Andres Duany and Jeff Speck with Mike Lydon, Point 1.13 is “Legalizing Smart Growth”.  The authors write “Suburban sprawl must be recognized as the default development pattern. … the principal cause is that in most places smart growth is technically illegal.”  They go on to argue that urbanism* must be made legal.

Which poses the question for North Bay readers, is urbanism legal in the North Bay?

The answer seems obvious.  We occupy one of the more progressive corners of one of the more progressive regions of one of the most progressive states in the union.  How could urbanism not be legal?

Except that it might not be quite that easy.

Because I live in Petaluma, I’ll write about that city’s regulatory approach to urbanism.  To my knowledge, most North Bay cities have regulatory approaches to urbanism that are similar.  But I encourage others to comment below on their own cities.  

The key element of urbanism in Petaluma is the Central Petaluma Specific Plan (CPSP).  The CPSP and its accompanying form-based SmartCode set the land-use rules for a 400-acre area in the heart of the city.  The land-use approach is formulated around urbanist concepts.  However, the total area of Petaluma is over 9,000 acres, so the area in which urbanism is strongly encouraged is less than five percent.  Yes, it’s five percent that is centrally located with the city, but five percent remains a small amount.

Outside of the CPSP, urbanist projects can certainly be proposed, but the path to entitlement would be difficult.  As a thought exercise, consider a small urbanist project, perhaps a moderately-sized two-story structure with a small neighborhood grocery downstairs, a pair of apartments upstairs, and no parking lot.  And let’s put it on a residentially-zoned corner lot where it would be surrounded by the single-family homes that it would serve.

Now, name a neighborhood in Petaluma in which that structure could be proposed without raising strong neighborhood opposition.  Personally, I’d love to have the building in my neighborhood, even on the corner lot next door to mine, but suspect that I’m atypical.

Even if the neighborhood could be mollified, the City would likely deem the project so inconsistent with the zoning code that an application couldn’t be submitted.  Even a passel of variance applications wouldn’t be enough.  The project would probably require a text amendment to modify the zoning code before it could proceed.  So in 95 percent of the city, the hypothetical project is currently illegal.

But at least we have the five percent in the CPSP, right?  Well, sort of.

Like all California land use, the CPSP is subject to the environmental standards of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).  And CEQA, not surprisingly given its roots in the 1970s, was written as if drivable suburban was the only expected land use.

The CEQA process requires assessing the environmental impacts in various areas and proposing mitigations if the impacts exceed acceptable thresholds.  Which seems a reasonable approach.  But what if a project achieves significant positive environmental impacts, such as the reduction of greenhouse gases, while failing another standard, such as traffic?  There are few provisions in CEQA for weighing positive versus negative environmental impacts.  But those kinds of trade-offs are often what urbanism is about.

Also, CEQA measures the expected impacts on the day the land use is completed.  But urbanism is about creating a setting in which impacts such as traffic can be reduced over time as further urbanist projects are added to the mix.  CEQA isn’t written to measure that possibility.

CEQA doesn’t bar urbanism.  Indeed, the CPSP plan has already been subject to CEQA review and approval.  But CEQA forces urbanism to pass through a sieve that was constructed with sprawl in mind, altering the concept of urbanism in myriad ways.

Nor is CEQA the only set of land-use rules that were written with drivable suburbia in mind.  Impact fees, the charges that cities collect to cover the cost of providing infrastructure to new development, have a strong suburban cast.

Let’s consider that an urban developer has 3,000 square feet of space that can be used for residences.  He could create either a single 3,000 square-foot super-apartment or three 1,000 square-foot regular-sized apartments.

There is room for reasonable debate of the relative infrastructure impacts of the two options.  The three smaller apartments would likely use more water and more road miles than the larger apartment.  But they’re not likely to use three times as much of either.

And to the extent that the smaller apartments lead to a critical mass that supports a walkable neighborhood, it’s even possible that the road miles of the smaller apartments wouldn’t be much larger than those of the larger apartment.

However, there is no debate on the city impact fee chart.  The three smaller apartments are each charged the same impact fee as the single larger apartment.  The financial motivation to the developer is for the larger apartment, which is the anti-urban direction.

Impact fees join CEQA, even in the CPSP, in a strong lean toward drivable suburban development.

So, if Petaluma can be used as an example, is urbanism legal in the North Bay?  Yes, it is.  But it’s not nearly as legal as sprawl.  Which is unfortunate.  It’s also a large part of the reason this blog exists.

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

* - Usage note: Regular readers know that I prefer not to use the term “smart growth”, but instead use “urbanism”.  Both refer to the same type of development.  But I believe that describing one’s position as “smart” comes across as condescending.  It’s also a poor way to begin an attempt to convince others of the failings of sprawl.

The authors of “The Smart Growth Manual” express the same concern about the term “smart growth” in their introduction.  However, they judge that the battle between “urbanism” and “smart growth” has been lost, so they surrender and use the latter.  I haven’t yet surrendered, so always use “urbanism” except when I quote others.