Higher-density, transit-friendly development possibly coming to a small town in California wine country. One thing we don't necessarily give enough thought to is the extent to which increased density and small town living may be compatible. After all, it's not as if classic small town America was built during the era of the automobile. A small town can be small without being super-sprawly or organized in such a way that the only way to buy anything is to drive 30 miles to a mall.
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Density in Unlikely Spots
02 Jul 2008 04:27 pm
Comments (36)
One thing we don't necessarily give enough thought to is the extent to which increased density and small town living may be compatible.
Right. There's nothing more delightful than a smallish (but not tiny), highly walkable college town: plenty of shops, eateries, taverns, cultural amenities, businesses of every sort -- all tighly mixed in with eclectic residential buildings and all dispersed over a relatively small area -- and all of it conducive to lower stress, car-free living. Amherst, Ithaca and Hanover come to mind. I'm sure there are tons of examples (Matt, that might be a good future post: recommendations on high-quality-of-life small towns).
Sure, sure. It's all fun and games until Wal-Mart puts up a super-center out by the interstate.
Big waste of money! Everybody is moving to Phoenix, and you can't stop them!
I live in a town like this, it's called Lambertville, NJ. No college though, thank god.
It's densely built because it is very old (George Washington slept here!). It has attracted people like me who like being able to park my car Friday night and not worry about using it until Monday morning. If there were public transit to Trenton I wouldn't even have to use my car hardly at all.
And southpaw, there is a Wal-Mart nearby as there is every other type of big box store. Some how Lambertville has survived.
A small town can be small without being super-sprawly or organized in such a way that the only way to buy anything is to drive 30 miles to a mall.
A lot of small towns are already fairly dense, have sidewalks, walkable neighborhoods, etc... The trouble is, everybody left so they could drive 30 minutes to the mall. Well, the jobs left because the sock mill closed or the mine dried up. Anybody that could get out, did. The towns that made it because they were 30 minutes from jobs and malls became exburbs that are now dying or stayed small towns that are now dying. Its too early to scrounge up any data just yet, but there is plenty of anecdotal stuff out there that points to a new round of ghost towns dotting the landscape.
After all, it's not as if classic small town America was built during the era of the automobile.
But what other modern conveniences do such small towns lack. Were the even built in the era of electricity? In the era of mass industrialization (e.g. so people would have to go to work in the first place as opposed to essentially working out of their home, farm, etc)?
I can't tell whether DAS is trolling or not, but the thing about small towns - my model is the county seat - is that they're very flexible, because 19th century American town planning was simple and adaptable - the scale makes autos feasible, but in no way dictates driving for daily living.
I've pointed this out here before - before WW2, most county seats in America were linked by trolley to the nearest big city. County seats are still at least minor employment centers thanks to courthouses. The dense CBDs are still there, but usually at least a quarter vacant.
The big question is what needs to be done to allow such places to take advantage of the nascent demand for walkable, transit-oriented communities. What makes college towns work is a one-two punch of a big local employer (a small college with grounds will have nearly as many total employees as students) and a captive population. But even with these factors in their favor, they often struggle to maintain vitality in the face of the commercial strip at the edge of town. Maybe $5 gas will reverse the still-recent trend of auto ubiquity on campus.
Probably the simplest solution for non-college towns is recruitment of the kinds of businesses that til now have located in suburban office parks - drop a couple of 500 employee offices in the mid-height tower across from the courthouse, and you've got a daytime population to foster retail vitality, plus a group of people who have a huge incentive to live in town, or at the near margins. The business benefits from offering such a lifestyle to their employees, and, thanks to the courthouse, the necessary amenities for business are existing. The key is to keep the businesses from building massive parking structures (or worse, lots) - they would undermine the density of the town, while encouraging workers to live distantly, emptying downtown at sundown.
So the plan is:
1. Persuade the town council/county government to approve the construction of a couple of 500-employee office towers in the center of your small town.
2. Raise the money needed for construction and build the towers.
3. Prevent the construction of sufficient parking facilities for these new offices, so that people who work there will be forced to live within walking distance or use public transportation to get to work.
4. Persuade a few large white-collar employers, or lots of smaller ones, who would otherwise have opened offices in suburban office parks to open them in your new small-town parkingless office towers instead.
Good luck. Sounds like "business plan most likely to fail" to me.
Given that Mixner is the strongest contrarian signal I have ever seen, I think we can guarantee that this plan will be a smashing success.
Once gasoline breaks the $5 barrier and starts rocketing toward $10, Mixner, don't be shocked to see that business plan start working. It's going to be increasingly difficult to attract employees to work at offices which require long, car-dependent commutes - particularly for low-wage janitorial/secretarial positions. The math starts to break down when you have to spend a quarter of your take-home pay just to get to work and back.
Given that Mixner is the strongest contrarian signal I have ever seen, I think we can guarantee that this plan will be a smashing success.
I grew up in such a town. The public transit wasn't awesome, but it was pretty good for a town it's size. Most of the residents live within a few mile radius. Also, the Wal-Mart that recently went up is actually in a location that is walkable to a sizable population. It's a reasonable bike for probably a quarter of the city's population. And it's 30 minutes from reasonably decent malls in two directions (in cities of about 100k), but its 2 hours from the nearest 200K+ size metro area. It's also west of the Mississippi.
Odd little place.
First, who is this "we"? Lots of us with experience living in small towns have already been thinking about this.
Anyway, as others have noted or implied, the problem with small towns in general these days is jobs. Of course there are still jobs in college towns, government seats, tourist destinations, bedroom communities, and so on. And I could see some people moving from less walkable/dense exurbs to more such exurbs. But in general, a lot of jobs that once supported small towns were agriculture-related, and those jobs aren't going to be coming back.
(1) I get around the country a good deal. I have not seen a county seat that didn't appear at least to be stable. (There are no doubt exceptions in some areas out on the plains where there are hardly any people left at all.) Smaller towns have been declining for a long time, ever since the farmers got cars and the road got paved.
(2) Another factor that gives a big boost some exceptionally attractive and/or historic towns is that people with money retire there. I am personally familiar with a couple of them: Lexington, Virginia, and Lewisburg, West Virginia.
I was a resident of Sonoma County and have been to Sebastopol many, many times; I lived just outside a town much like it.
Apart from the obvious point of note about the politics of town councils vs county boards of supervisors in rural California (the former tend to be liberal and represent few people and the latter to be conservative and represent a lot more people) the fact of the matter is that almost every metro area in the country and a whole lot of other areas have master plans for development that are routinely violated in practice. The fact is if people don't want it the developers won't build it and if the developers won't build it it probably doesn't matter.
There are other points of note here too. Sebastopol has food stores, cafes, kitschy tourist shops and little restaurants - even a cool book store (or at least did; don't know if it still does). What it doesn't have is a lot of the other things people need. Chances are you need to go (as in drive) to Santa Rosa to buy clothes or furniture, see a doctor or dentist, buy a car or even a lawnmower. And of course you may well work there too.
Chances are too: you don't live in the town limits of Sebastopol but outside the town and need to drive even into town.
Sounds like "business plan most likely to fail" to me.
Looks like ixnermay beat you to it.
3. Prevent the construction of sufficient parking facilities for these new offices, so that people who work there will be forced to live within walking distance or use public transportation to get to work.
Define "sufficient." Go ahead. I dare you.
Tell me what the sufficient number of parking spaces is for, say, the Empire State Building. Or the Hancock Building(s).
How many people will be using your "sufficient" parking spaces when the typical ca. 2007 car commute costs $8/day in gas alone, setting aside fixed costs of ownership?
The reigning paradigm is failing; you're welcome to go down with the ship, Mixner. Some of us are thinking about how to make things work going forward.
PS - If you go to my blog, you'll see a version of my comment with a link to a successful example of exactly this business plan - it's almost like somebody who disagrees with you might know what he's talking about!
Define "sufficient." Go ahead. I dare you.
Oooh, you dare me.
Let us know when you've found a working example of your plan.
Let us know when you've found a working example of your plan.
Wow, you're just as stupid as everyone portrayed you.
Maybe you thought the PS was for somebody else.
But I tell you what: don't bother. Please. I'd hate to think what would happen if you were faced with facts.
JRoth: Mixner really is always wrong. It's eerie. He's like a leading indicator that the price of oil is going up. If only I had known before. The day he switches sides, and proclaims that peak oil is here, I'm shorting every share of oil company stock I can.
You do have to give him credit for consistency, though. The world as he knows it is dying right before his eyes, and he still keeps repeating the same tired points. A lesser man notices when history has proven him wrong decisively.
Sebastopol! I grew up in Sebastopol. The one wrinkle I'm most curious about is flooding. The high density is to go between the Laguna and downtown? When I was in high school there was a rain that flooded the Laguna to within a block of downtown. It's one of the reasons development in the Laguna area has been controversial.
Sebastopol is fairly walkable, and there are dentists and doctors and grocery stores, even an independent bookstore. As a kid I remember thinking if only Sebastopol had a movie theater there would be something to do there. Shortly after I went off to college they built a movie theater. I don't know if I were a teen growing up in Sebastopol that that would be enough ... Yes, most people have to work outside town and much of the patronage of the businesses in town is from out of town, but if one lived in town it is (was?) possible take care of most necessities close to home. That got worse in some ways (last I looked the only remaining clothing stores were boutiques), but maybe better in others.
Sebastopol is increasingly built up ... I'm not surprised the city council is thinking of encouraging building UP as well.
Sebastopol! I grew up in Sebastopol. The one wrinkle I'm most curious about is flooding. The high density is to go between the Laguna and downtown? When I was in high school there was a rain that flooded the Laguna to within a block of downtown. It's one of the reasons development in the Laguna area has been controversial.
Sebastopol is fairly walkable, and there are dentists and doctors and grocery stores, even an independent bookstore. As a kid I remember thinking if only Sebastopol had a movie theater there would be something to do there. Shortly after I went off to college they built a movie theater. I don't know if I were a teen growing up in Sebastopol that that would be enough ... Yes, most people have to work outside town and much of the patronage of the businesses in town is from out of town, but if one lived in town it is (was?) possible take care of most necessities close to home. That got worse in some ways (last I looked the only remaining clothing stores were boutiques), but maybe better in others.
Sebastopol is increasingly built up ... I'm not surprised the city council is thinking of encouraging building UP as well.
Yes, "Walt." The world of cars and airplanes is dying! They're paving over the highways with new light-rail systems as we speak. Subways tunnels are at this very moment being dug across our glorious land. I have been "proven" wrong. "Decisively," no less.
What color is the sky in your world? No, I mean really. What color is it?
Ah, very non-sequitur, Mixner. Nobody said anything about ripping up the Eisenhower Interstate System.
But in November, the voters of California will have the opportunity to tell the state to build a publicly-financed high-speed rail system, and I wouldn't be betting against it right now.
Posted by Linus | July 2, 2008 10:11 PM
Chances are too: you don't live in the town limits of Sebastopol but outside the town and need to drive even into town.
Precisely ... to make this work to best effect, we have to break the mindset of uniform zoning areas, and generate clustered infill development neighborhoods around transport corridors coming into town ... say, 1/4 mile of allowed lot-by-lot multi-use redevelopment around a standard transport stop, and 1/2 around a designated key transport interchange.
Aerial photo here of Port Grimaud - a speculative development of the 1960s, a few miles down the French Riviera from Saint-Tropez. Actually it's rather nicer.
Aerial photo here of Port Grimaud - a speculative development of the 1960s, a few miles down the French Riviera from Saint-Tropez. Actually it's rather nicer.
Several small suburban towns in Puget Sound are considering going directly from basically one-story development to 20 or 40 story towers. Apparently the thinking is to improve the tax base and retail sales by replacing parking with residents and business.
Puget Sound may be more sensitive to these issues because for 40 years we have watched sprawl destroy our lifestyle, and a lot of the sprawl has been driven by well-to-do immigrants (commonly yclept 'Californians') who like the scenery, liberalism, and mild climate.
Traditionally, small towns in Washington were very badly governed, by locals who struck deals with developers to preserve the appearance of 'prosperity' and, incidentally, to subdivide and sell their parents farms or timberland. Perhaps this kleptocracy has been eroded by the immigration tide; in any case, there has been a marked uptick in efforts to save the salmon, tidelands, and farmland and forests.
Mixner is probably unaware that, in addition to the literal millions of tons of pollutants pumped into the atmosphere, sprawl drains and oozes thousands of tons of deadly poisons into streams and aquifers each year. It turns out- who woulda thunk it?- that flora and fauna exposed to these poisons in the embryonic stage do not prosper. One of the end-results has been a ten to twenty-fold increase in the price of salmon, which may seem reasonable to New Yorkers, but does not seem reasonable to those of us who know why the salmon runs have disappeared.
So, in Washington, especially with the redevelopment of rail transportation (and ferries) the dense small town is making a strong comeback.
Mixner is probably unaware that, in addition to the literal millions of tons of pollutants pumped into the atmosphere, sprawl drains and oozes thousands of tons of deadly poisons into streams and aquifers each year. It turns out- who woulda thunk it?- that flora and fauna exposed to these poisons in the embryonic stage do not prosper.
Mixner surely is aware of these facts, but chooses not to touch upon them. We hear his constant referral to the fact that gasoline taxes pay for highway construction and maintenance, which allows him to argue that highway spending survives C/B analysis (unlike, transit, as he argues). But we never hear him addressing the costs of the myriad spillover effects of our dependence on cars.
We hear his constant referral to the fact that gasoline taxes pay for highway construction and maintenance, which allows him to argue that highway spending survives C/B analysis
Mixner's arguments sound a lot like the reasoning that we should buy a house without a kitchen because it's more cost-effective to buy your meals from McDonald's every day than it would be to have a nice kitchen where you could prepare good food for yourself.
Little piece of Sebastapol legend: it's the home of Peanuts. Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Snoopy...
A very unfunny comic, but memorable holiday specials on tv.
Why do people automatically assume that there's no middle ground between five-acre ranchettes and 40-story high-rises? What Sebastapol is doing only follows in the footsteps of what Petaluma, down the road, built next to its downtown: 4-6 story buildings with shops, restaurants, and a cinema.
As for jobs, the northern Bay Area (including Sonoma) has plenty of them, partially thanks to one of the few agricultural uses which can economically compete with sprawl: wine.
And for those who think Sonoma County (yes, where Charles Schulz inked "Peanuts" and where it was Morning in America) is too un-American, I refer you to Woodstock, Georgia, population 10,000, and 30 miles north of Atlanta. A developer there is extending Main Street by a few blocks and adding nearly 1,000 new homes - a mix of detached houses and apartments up to five stories. The initial idea came from the town, although the regional planning agency helped with the plan.
Very, very cool:
http://htaindex.cnt.org/map_tool
An interactive map detailing housing and gas costs by region, comparing 2000 costs with 2008 costs.
Not really relevant here, but those interested in these issues would probably enjoy playing around with it.
"stuck in traffic"
But we never hear [Mixner] addressing the costs of the myriad spillover effects of our dependence on cars.
And I've never heard you addressing the costs of the myriad spillover effects of transit. How much energy did it take, and how much CO2 and other pollution was produced, in the construction of, say, Portland's new urban rail lines during the past 20 years? What effect did they have on congestion? Housing prices?
Mixner, the transit is what the people of Portland built after they added up and contemplated the "spillover" costs of the alternatives before them.
You, of course, are free to live in Alameda County, where the costs of starting a BRT system have bankrupted the AC Transit agency and caused the loss of six million riders as the agency has discontinued routes to deal with the high costs of BRT. In fact, I would encourage you to live in Alameda, or anywhere, in fact, that is not the PNW.
Comments closed July 16, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
It's hard to beat the density in the Atlantic editor's meeting.
Posted by James | July 2, 2008 4:49 PM