Walkable Urban Hotels and Sonoma's Measure B

The joint meeting of City Repair Petaluma and Petaluma Urban Chat is finally behind us.  It was an enthusiastic and productive meeting.  I’ll offer a summary in my next post.

For now, I’ll return to the subject I’d broached before City Repair began my primary focus, tourism versus urbanism.  To recap, I expressed the concern that well-functioning and attractive urban places become a magnet to tourists.  The possible result is that a wash of tourist feet and dollars undermines what initially made the places well-functioning and attractive.  (It would be a variant of Yogi Berra’s purported line about a popular restaurant, “Nobody goes there anymore.  It’s too crowded.”)

In that opinion, I shared the concerns of the backers of Ballot Measure B in the City of Sonoma.  However, I didn’t agree with the wording of Measure B, finding that it was too blunt an instrument, an opinion to which I clung despite determined attempts by Measure B backers to sway my thinking.

But the dialogue caused me to think about fine hotels I’ve seen in walkable urban settings, particularly settings that have a look and feel similar to the Sonoma Plaza.  (I’ve stayed at some fine value hotels in New York City, but that’s a different topic.)

Two hotels came to mind, one in the Mid-South and the other in the Upper Sacramento Valley.

I haven’t yet stayed there, but as soon as I realized what the developers had done, I fell in love with the River Inn of Harbor Town, in Memphis, Tennessee.   Harbor Town is an urbanist community which I reviewed early in the history of this blog, here and here.  Although nominally located in the city of Memphis, Harbor Town is on an island in the Mississippi River, across from downtown Memphis, so functions as its own community.

The photo above shows what appears to be a small hotel office with a very few hotel rooms upstairs.  But the hotel is more expansive than that.  Hotel rooms are located above several storefronts along the main retail street of Harbor Town.

The diffuse location is probably a management challenge.  During my brief visit, I watched a crew wheel a cleaning cart down a sidewalk.  But the configuration doesn’t interfere with the neighborhood retail core either architecturally or functionally.  It’s a brilliant concept that I’ve love to see elsewhere.

I didn’t note a parking location for the River Inn, but suspect that parking is provided by street parking and use of the retail center parking lot a short distance away.

The Hotel Diamond in Chico, California takes a different, but still effective, approach.  A complete reconstruction of a historic hotel that had a brief period of prominence early in the 20th century, the Hotel Diamond occupies a narrow lot, but incorporates a fair number of rooms into a four-plus story building on a deep lot.  Parking is provided in a municipal garage on the other side of a pedestrian alley.

Although the Hotel Diamond is a relatively massive building for downtown Chico, it’s location a half-block from the downtown couplet mostly hides that bulk.  From the city plaza only a few hundred feet away, the only visual evidence of the hotel is the quirky widow’s walk atop the structure.

Although every community is different, it’s worth looking at the River Inn and Hotel Diamond versus Sonoma’s Measure B.  The River Inn has 28 rooms and the Hotel Diamond has about 40 rooms, so both would be prohibited under Measure B.

Neither Harbor Town nor Chico has the tourist load of Sonoma.  The River Inn is the only lodging in Harbor Town, so most folks on the sidewalks live in the community.  There a couple of budget lodging options in downtown Chico, but most of downtown pedestrians are either Chico State students or local residents.  So neither the River Inn nor Hotel Diamond is facilitating a tourist overload.

On the other hand, from my casual observation, the tourists in Sonoma do seem to be pushing the  locals away from the plaza.  I was in Sonoma for brunch last Sunday.  Obviously, I didn’t wander the restaurant checking on zipcodes, but my sense was that the establishment was largely filled with folks who didn’t call Sonoma home.  And the same was true of the sidewalks.

A couple of example hotels and an unscientific assessment of a Sunday afternoon outing don’t prove anything.  But neither do they shake my initial concerns about Sonoma.  There is a legitimate worry about the local flavor being lost among the tourists.  But a cap on the rooms in individual hotels is the wrong tool.

Given the forces that work against urbanism, it is crucial to devise urban preservation tools that are carefully crafted to achieve the desired effect.  Whether through citizen backlash or court challenges, poorly crafted urbanist tools may create more problems than they solve.  Measure B still feels like trying to repair a fine watch with a ballpeen hammer.

In other North Bay hotel news, the Kessler Collection has withdrawn their proposal for a new Healdsburg hotel.  They report that they intend to rework the site plan before resubmittal.  From the rendering that was offered, I hope they can find a way to make the look less formal, to make it more compatible with the small town feel that Healdsburg hopes to retain.  Perhaps the River Inn or Hotel Diamond can offer useful hints.

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

Can Urbanism and Tourism Coexist?

Even those who are slow to grasp urbanism as a setting for daily life are often eager to be urbanists while on vacation.  It’s appealing to check into a hotel, to toss one’s car keys into the room safe, and to spend several days wandering by foot and by transit.

A few years back, I met several friends in New York City for a week of baseball and beer.  We stayed in a mid-town hotel and rode Amtrak, the Long Island Rail Road, and the subway to thirteen ballgames in eight days.  We used rubber-tired vehicles for only five short trips, four cab rides and a jaunt in a police cruiser.  (The last is a story for another time.)  It was a week of being committed urbanists and loving it.

But a key part of an urbanist vacation is rubbing shoulders with people who live there.  On our baseball trip, it was essential that we ate in restaurants, drank in bars, and cheered at ballgames with people who were living their lives in the cities we visited.  The trip wouldn’t have been the same without the conversation with the group of women baseball fans in a Philadelphia bar or being surrounded by observant Jews in New York’s Citifield.

There can be tourist settings where all the other people in the shops and restaurants are also tourists.  Disneyland is a good example.  But Disneyland isn’t where I choose to spend my vacation time.  I prefer authenticity.  And I’m not alone in that preference.

However, authentic walkable urbanism, if too attractive, can be drowned by a flood of tourists.  There can be a fine line between a place that is a marvelous spot to live and a place that is overrun by outsiders.

This issue is currently causing controversy in Sonoma.  A ballot measure has been proposed that would limit the size of new hotels and modify the approval standards.  The Press Democrat recently offered a report on a town forum about Ballot Measure B and an in-depth look at the how the debate is roiling the community.

In general, I’m sympathetic to the attempt.  I love downtown Sonoma and want it to remain the place where Sonomans go to enjoy their community.  And, even though I might be considered a tourist, I love hanging out in Sonoma Plaza.

But I have concerns with how Measure B is written.  For one, it limits new hotels to 25 units or fewer.  But 25 units is below the economic threshold for most hotel models.  Perhaps the only lodging formats that work at or below 25 units are bed and breakfast establishments and lodges for the uber-rich.  That seems an odd pair of exclusions.

Also, most of the Measure B standards apply until the average occupancy for a year reaches 80 percent.  For a town place with many weekend visitors, 80 percent seems unlikely.

Given a blank slate, what rules might I propose to protect a walkable urbanist setting?  I suggest three.

First, I’d bump the room count restriction to 75.  That number would allow more formats while still excluding stultifying mega-hotels.

Second, no hotel would be permitted if, in an average week, the people who pass along the sidewalks of a walkable urbanist core are more than 25 percent hotel guests or more than 40 percent hotel guests plus day visitors.  This standard would allow the locals to continue to feel as if the community is theirs.

Also, this standard would continue to allow hotels that serve people who are only looking for a place to sleep with no intention of sampling the community and hotels that serve people who are in the town for work and go directly to an office.

Lastly, recognizing that hotel entries can be pedestrian dead zones, no hotel would be allowed to occupy more than 100 feet of street frontage unless it provides amenities, such as restaurants, pubs, or shops, that can be reasonably expected to also serve the local community.

I’ll admit that only the first standard is fully objective.  The latter two are subject to interpretation and alternative judgments.  But both get to the core of the concern about community preservation more than Measure B.

I’m not a Sonoma resident.  But if I were, I’d probably vote against Ballot Measure B.  And then I’d encourage the proponents to try again with a better crafted measure.  What they’re trying to preserve is worth saving, but the effort must be more skillful than the current attempt.

Tourism and urbanism can coexist, but the relationship must be managed with care.

Other Hotel News

This topic of tourism versus urbanism has been on my schedule for several weeks.  But it’s coincidental that its time rolled around today.  Several months ago, I wrote that I had secured a consulting role on a proposed hotel in downtown Petaluma.  That hotel, which is now called The Petaluman, has taken major steps forward in the past few weeks.

The developer submitted the application to the City of Petaluma yesterday afternoon.  There are still issues to be resolved, but yesterday was is an important step.

The current proposal for room count is 54, with the both hotel guests and local residents able to enjoy a lobby bistro, a rooftop bar overlooking Petaluma Boulevard (prime seating for Butter and Eggs Days), and an underground bar for late night music.

As those who follow California land-use planning know, application submittal is a milestone, but it doesn’t mean that shovels will be turning dirt any time soon.  One observer of the city process estimated that securing entitlements would take eleven months.  We’re hoping to do better, but understand the possible timeframe.

As much as I can without divulging strategy points or undermining important negotiations, I’ll keep you informed on the progress of the application.

By the way, The Petaluman will comply with all of the tourism versus urbanism restrictions that I suggest above.

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