A Not New but Welcome City Blueprint

Last August, the city of San Diego hired planning guru Peter Calthorpe to draft citywide development guidelines for dense new pedestrian-friendly communities close to bus and trolley lines that could drastically reduce our reliance on cars.

His guidelines for San Diego are finished now, in the form of an 88-page document to be considered by the city’s Planning Commission and City Council during the next few months.

For those who have followed the work of Calthorpe, the charismatic 42-year-old San Francisco planning consultant, there is nothing especially new in these “new” guidelines.

Calthorpe’s philosophy is a return to basics, to the qualities that gave neighborhoods built during the 1920s and 1930s much of their charm. He advocates narrower, tree-lined streets that slow auto traffic and invite people out of their houses for a stroll to a convenient market or neighborhood park. He favors houses with front porches to enhance a neighborhood’s social appeal and garages placed behind houses to de-emphasize the presence of automobiles.

He paints a seductive picture of the future, but the real test of his sensible ideas will come as city planners seek approval from their higher-ups, and beyond that, from developers and others who would put Calthorpe’s ideas into action.

Already, the city is in the midst of presenting the guidelines to roughly 40 San Diego community planning groups, a process that began in January and will continue through April. Meanwhile, Calthorpe is getting ready to make recommendations on how his ideas can be implemented.

In Calthorpe’s ideal “TOD” (transit-oriented development) all residents would be within 2,000 feet--easy walking or biking distance--of a mass transit station. By creating new mixed-use neighborhoods, near to mass-transit, that provide essential services within walking distance, he believes we can reduce our travel from 85% auto-based to something closer to the European standard of 40%.

He sees tremendous potential for TODs in San Diego. Areas being considered for pilot programs include University Towne Center, Pacific Beach, City Heights and the area surrounding a the Palm City trolley station in South Bay.

Calthorpe’s guidelines might seem, at first glance, like an expensive (he has a $90,000 contract) and superficial rehash of earlier Calthorpe reports and lectures, filled with neat, generic diagrams and broad statements.

But Calthorpe and senior city-planner Linda Schwarz, who is managing this planning effort on behalf of the city, say the new document is tailored thoroughly to San Diego. It came after months of workshops with a 120-member “Land Guidance Steering Committee” representing a range of San Diego interests, from developers to community planning group leaders and architects.

“We’ve been really pleased with the amount of time he and his project manager have spent here,” Schwarz said. “They’ve attended more meetings than their contract required, and you never felt like you were on a stopwatch with them.”

Anyway, Calthorpe contends, these initial guidelines were never intended to be very specific.

“We did start with our prior work,” he acknowledged. “But we went through and added to and modified each guideline to match the nature, intensity and structure of San Diego. It was gone over with a fine-tooth comb. For example, density underwent serious discussion, and I think you’ll find that every single guideline has been modified through this planning process.”

But are San Diego’s leaders, developers and citizens ready for Calthorpe’s TODs? If his guidelines are endorsed by a council resolution this summer and eventually become a formal part of the city’s General Plan, will they really lead to new neighborhoods that are more inviting and at the same time effectively reduce auto use and provide developers with the necessary profit?

Calthorpe thinks so. His ideas are already gaining acceptance among some local developers. CalMat Properties Co. hired him four months ago to help the company develop plans for 68 acres in Mission Valley.

“I think developers are always looking for new and progressive things we can do to provide better products,” said CalMat Vice President Don Cerone. “We knew of the city’s thought to hire Peter, and our Rio Vista West project is designated as light-rail trolley stop, so we had been designated as a potential TOD site.

“If you look at the concept, it’s progressive in some ways, but in a lot of ways it’s looking at what always worked for cities, some of the things we lost, specifically in California where the car so dominated urban and suburban design that it got a little out of whack.

“For us, trying to do a mixed-use community with residential and commercial really makes a lot of sense. High-density development works in this environment, and is encouraged by the city and embraced by the community. It’s what people expect and want to see.”

Beyond the private sector, Calthorpe believes his ideas will gain broad public acceptance in San Diego if they are embraced by community planning groups, and if the groups begin to apply his guidelines to specific community plans.

He holds up Laguna West, a new community that began construction in Sacramento last summer, as an example of how rapidly his ideas can gain both public and private favor.

Home builders have quickly warmed to the Sacramento development, which will eventually include 1,800 single-family and 1,500 attached homes. Already, four builders have projects underway.

At Laguna West, Calthorpe claims, homes with porches out front and garages in back are outselling conventional porchless, front-garage homes three-to-one.

Not quite, said Susan Baltake, marketing director for River West Developments, the master developer of Laguna West. But home buyers do seem to prefer the old-fashioned designs.

Baltake also said that, in Sacramento, builders, architects and once-skeptical county officials like Calthorpe’s ideas.

“We found that builders and especially their architects were excited by the idea of doing something different,” she said. “Architects found it freed them to do more with the homes to have garages out of the way in front. Second, the county people were skeptical, but once they talked to Peter and to Phil Angelides (River West’s president) and saw how it could work, they got very excited.”

But for Calthorpe’s plan to become a truly effective city policy, it will have to be formally incorporated into zoning codes and the General Plan that guides development. Some City Council members remain relatively uninformed about TODs and want to be convinced of their merits.

“It’s a great idea,” said Nick Johnson, speaking for Councilman John Hartley. “The problem is that, while they allow great density and get people out of cars, concern is that you have a situation that can wreak havoc in surrounding neighborhoods until you get people into mass transit. You have parking problems and more people and cars in that area, and the resulting impact on the surrounding neighborhoods is not necessarily positive.”

Planning Commission Chairman Karl ZoBell hasn’t read Calthorpe’s plan yet. He favors some of the ideas, but emphasizes that many of them aren’t new, and wonders why they would succeed now when they haven’t succeeded in the past.

“The mixed-use idea seems to be problematic,” said ZoBell, an attorney who lives in La Jolla. “In one or more community plans (in San Diego), that’s been recommended for over 20 years, and they haven’t had a real history of working well economically. The La Jolla Community Plan calls for residential (uses) over (ground-level) retail downtown. I’m told by those who have developed those projects that they tend to work for one of the uses but not the other.

“But maybe the mass (of such projects) in La Jolla just hasn’t been great enough. Maybe if there were transit serving the community, we could do something better.

“The step between articulating an aspiration for a new town and causing it to occur in an existing city--there’s a big gap in between.”

Calthorpe’s ideas may not be revolutionary or even without flaws, but they offer new hope for a better future in a city marred by unappealing, poorly planned tract developments and crowded, smoggy freeways. If Calthorpe can use his charisma to get something formal adopted by the council, he will have earned his keep.