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Saturday, February 04, 2012
Feature: September 2007
Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
Creating communities takes more than buildings and people
Story by Mark Larson
It has homes with big front porches on tree-lined streets and sun-dappled sidewalks. It has a nearby corner store, school and park. Cars don’t drive through it at high speeds. Plenty of bicyclists stroll by and pedestrians saunter about.
Such is the neighborhood that architects and urban designers are seeking to recreate. It’s a new take on old neighborhoods in both urban cores and suburbia.
In the wake of decades of car-centric sprawl afflicting Sacramento and beyond, there’s growing demand for places to live that aren’t dominated by cars, places that offer nearby stores and services, and bundles everything into a welcoming, crime-free atmosphere.
“A neighborhood is a place where we feel a connection, where there are riches of activities and a certain amount of opportunity for walking more than driving,” says Saxon Sigerson of Sigerson Architects in Fair Oaks.
Off the top of his head, Sigerson lists a few local neighborhoods: Curtis Park, Land Park, Alkali Flats, East Sacramento and Fair Oaks Village.
These communities have attributes of New Urbanism, which typically refers to livable, compact communities in new developments. However, some established and redeveloping communities were originally built with features now associated with New Urbanism — and they’re reaping the benefits.
At the other end of the spectrum, Sigerson says, are Douglas Boulevard in Roseville and any major thoroughfare in Carmichael.
Sigerson teaches an annual high school architecture class in which he asks students, “Where is the heart of Carmichael?” then adds, “If you can’t find one, create one.”
Nationally, the idea of New Urbanism has been popular for more than a decade. The Congress for the New Urbanism was formed in 1993 to promote well-conceived infill and neighborhoods meant to be more eco-friendly than auto-based suburban development. Laura Hall is a Santa Rosa-based urban designer and member of the Chicago-based national organization.
“Studies show places like Portland or the historic neighborhoods of Sacramento are friendly, safe, and you can get to corner stores easily,” Hall says. “You shouldn’t have to suffer to get exercise. Walking should be the most effortless [way to get] around.”
Well-built communities include shops at the sidewalk level, residential windows and doors facing the street, and interconnected blocks not separated by alleys. Such neighborhoods don’t have dead-end streets or sound walls.
“People will walk a quarter-mile without thinking,” says Hall, noting that’s the distance at which we can see another human and amounts to about a five-minute walk.
To Sacramento architect Peter Saucerman, standout neighborhoods are those built at the pedestrian level.
“A lot of neighborhoods have been defined by freeways that preserve one side while the other side withers,” says Saucerman, a principal with Dreyfuss & Blackford Architects.
He points to Land Park, where a walk can get residents watch repair, dry cleaning, access to several restaurants and other retailers. Fair Oaks Village is another neighborhood, he says, that allows its residents to get around by foot.
No such walking incentives exist in car-oriented suburban landscapes, he notes, neither here nor in such sprawl zones as San Jose or the San Fernando Valley.
But these days, the effects of sprawl are shaping demand in the residential market.
“As fuel gets more expensive, people are aware of the costs of continuing to drive cars,” Saucerman says. “The ability to walk or bicycle somewhere becomes more and more attractive.”
“A neighborhood is a place where we feel a connection.”
— Saxon Sigerson, Sigerson Architects
In addition to the layout of a community, the design of the individual homes plays a role in building a neighborhood. David Piches is a Roseville-based architect who has worked on residential and small retail projects with the cities of Sacramento and Roseville.
He sees the placement of garages, front porches, windows and doors as home-design elements that help people interact in a neighborhood. The idea, he says, is to move away from the isolated, private backyard, which has become common, to the more social and neighborly design for the front of the house.
A garage should be set at the rear of the lot, Piches says. Many suburban homes have been designed with garages up front to save lot space and make for a less expensive, shorter driveway.
Front porches, he says, should be among the prominent features of a home’s front. “The front porch is a real symbol of friendliness,” Piches says. “Unfortunately we don’t always use our front porches.” He’s seen the inclusion of 3-foot fences in front of a porch to promote privacy from the community rather than interaction.
In suburban tracts, Piches has found that residents living in cul-de-sacs interact more with their neighbors than residents who live on traditional streets. And he’s found some people in car-oriented neighborhoods use their garages like an outdoor living room. They open up the door and use it as a modern-day front porch to interact with neighbors.
But locally, says Saucerman, there are plenty of housing tracts that really don’t work as neighborhoods because of the lack of amenities within walking distance.
“Campus Commons is a planned community,” he says. “But it’s not a neighborhood. It’s a cluster of housing units.”
Saucerman grew up in a post-World War II subdivision in San Diego with “identical pastel houses.” While he had a good time there as a kid, whenever it was time to shop or go to school, “Everything had to be done by car.”
He visited the old neighborhood about three years ago and found it hasn’t aged well. “It just looked shabby,” he says. “It never really coalesced. It seemed so isolated.”
Over the past 150 years, says Hall, old neighborhoods have gone through boom and bust periods, but some just keep making comebacks.
“The urban fabric is too strong,” she says. “A person can fix up those houses and have a wonderful lifestyle.”
But traditional suburban developments built for cars, Hall says, can’t be easily converted to pedestrian environments. “Once you’re in your car, you will go to places easily accessed by cars,” she says.
Over the years in suburban development, says Hall, “We just supersized everything. Schools are these huge institutions that take up one or two city blocks surrounded by parking lots. No one’s going to walk through that parking.”
The high-density housing infill being built in Sacramento’s urban core and around the country won’t automatically work, says Hall.
“A lot of neighborhoods have been defined by freeways
that preserve one side while the other side withers.”
— Peter Saucerman, principal, Dreyfuss & Blackford Architects
“You’re not just packing more people into a given area,” she says. “How it’s all laid out is really critical.”
Hall believes it’s a good idea to copy the design of old, well-liked neighborhoods that have become among the most popular places to live.
“You need to code it based on something that has evolved,” she says.
Saucerman doesn’t think appealing neighborhoods have to be modeled after old homes to be attractive. Nationally, he’s seen mixed-use infill in urban areas of Washington, D.C., and Denver, which have convinced people to live in what had been considered industrial or less than desirable areas.
Locally he’s watched the placement of new high-density housing in Sacramento amid established neighborhood settings with myriad stores and services within walking distance. He points to the L Street Lofts and other projects in midtown.
“Midtown is just such a good infrastructure to start with,” he says. “It has a great feel. You can get various services you need on foot. You get exercise and walk with neighbors and strangers.”
Nationally, about 50 percent of New Urbanism projects are taking place in urban infill, says Hall, and the other half in outlying areas.
For the past 15 years, Seattle has made an intense effort to make new development compatible with the look and feel of its many distinct neighborhoods.
Tom Hauger, manager of comprehensive planning for Seattle, says guidelines were established for development in each neighborhood to be compatible with the surrounding city, and the neighborhoods themselves have developed their own architectural standards for new projects.
For each of the city’s eight areas there is a three-member design-review board, each with a volunteer citizen, architect and developer, which preview plans submitted to the city. Any changes are hashed out before the project moves toward city approval.
“At the outset, developers and architects were skeptical about the design-review process,” says Hauger. But several years after its inception, it scored highly in a city evaluation, even among the early critics.
“There were fewer surprises,” says Hauger, once the projects were approved. “Projects were appealed less, and it costs less because they didn’t have to be designed twice. It has improved the quality of designs, and we’ve gotten rid of the worst projects.”
Hall believes Seattle has the right idea.
“The more open participation you can have before it’s all designed, the better it is,” she says. “More trust is engendered and you can typically do things more quickly.”
Locally, Sacramento has a joint-powers agency, the Capitol Area Development Authority, looking to redevelop 42 blocks of state-owned property south of the Capitol. CADA, which brings together the city and the state, has worked toward redevelopment for three decades.
A local pioneer in New Urbanism principles, its plan calls for the area to be redeveloped as an urban village of state offices, housing, retail and parking, with walking and bicycling options for residents to get to work or entertainment. So far, about 500 dwelling units have been built in the zone. whose boundaries were expanded five years ago to include the R Street Corridor between 10th and 19th streets.
Executive Director Paul Schmidt says there are two key factors when CADA considers residential projects: They must be affordable, and they have to minimize the time it takes to get to work, restaurants and retail.
People opting to live in a high-density urban development, he says, are likely to get out regularly because they’ve discovered “There’s something else beyond the world of TV.”
New urban infill isn’t limited to the downtown Sacramento area, notes Schmidt, pointing to “regional subcenters” such as Davis and Roseville, which have their own projects.
He’s optimistic that car-oriented suburbs can accommodate New Urbanism development if the land used for existing parking lots is put into play. There has to be alternatives to traditional car-based suburbs, he says.
But architect Piches doesn’t hold any high hopes that house-only, garage-dominated tracts can be retrofitted to be more pedestrian friendly.
“It’s very difficult to do that,” he says. He figures some of the tract homes would have to be torn down to allow space for more parks, grocery stores, retail shops and community meeting areas.
And urban designer Hall isn’t optimistic about the long-term outlook for car-based suburban tract homes.
“Once they start degrading, it doesn’t seem like they’ll be coming back anytime soon,” she says. “They don’t ever grow up.”
And that, she says, doesn’t bode well for them over the long term.
“I predict over the next 50 years they will become affordable housing. People with a choice, especially as the population ages, will choose a place where they can lead dignified lives on foot. More people can walk at an older age than can drive.”
