Can Required Porches Prod People Into Neighborliness? : Cities: San Luis Obispo considers an unusual step in the name of ‘social ecology.’ Many won’t take it sitting down.

There are streets here where the porches are deep, the shade is cool and the spring flowers billow thick as clouds, where old men doze over the Sunday paper and children build castles out of sheets and sagging wicker lounges.

And then there are the suburbs of the last 10 years, largely populated by fleeing Angelenos, where certain houses have “a double garage door and a blank wall (as) the only presentation to the street,” says Glen Matteson, associate city planner. “They have a very different feel from the city’s traditional neighborhoods.”

OK, so a lot has happened between the late 1800s, when much of Old Town was built, and the last decade or so--things like drive-by shootings, air conditioners, television sets and auto exhaust, factors that, when taken together, can make a person go inside on a summer night instead of watching the dusk and chatting with the neighbors. Who are the neighbors, anyway?

But although porches throughout the country have largely shriveled up like unnecessary body parts beset by evolution, they could make a comeback here. A City Council committee has perplexed this Central Coast town by recommending that nearly every new house built in San Luis Obispo have a front porch.

The rationale: “Such design features are effective ways to build neighborhoods and to improve the social ecology of the city,” says the stuffily titled General Plan Land Use Element, Environmental Quality Task Force Draft.

But what is social ecology, and what’s wrong with San Luis Obispo’s?

Richard Schmidt--architect, task force member and porch proponent--rues the day the term was ever committed to print. “I’ve taken so much flak for that,” he said. To some in town, the idea smacks of social engineering, the forcing of utopian views on a small city in a struggling state. But to Schmidt, social ecology is simply “the feeling that it’s not good for a community to wall people off from one another.”

Most residents of this working-class version of Santa Barbara--located about 200 miles, three hours and half a tank of gas from Los Angeles and San Francisco--contend that there’s nothing much wrong with the social ecology as it stands.

People live in this town of about 43,000 largely because they want to, and interact regularly because they can. Families stroll the streets at night, car doors are generally left unlocked, Cal Poly students congregate on steps for a sunset six-pack.

Schmidt and his committee want it to stay that way; porches are their hoped-for guarantee that this slow-growth haven--among the most strident such cities in California--does not go the way of Irvine or Northridge, Las Vegas or Moreno Valley.

“Front porches, entries that are planned to make it easy for people to run into each other, may be clumsy mechanisms,” he says. “We thought they were worthwhile things to try.”

But the very idea of compulsory porches brings sniggers to some City Hall offices and makes home builder Stanley Bell splutter about “radicals” “influencing, no, warping” the planning process. “It’s a zealot’s approach to growth control,” he insists, yet another development hurdle in an already over-regulated city.

Other opponents view the porch proposal--three scant lines in a ponderous 95-page document--as a mere tangent to the important work at hand: figuring out if and how San Luis Obispo will grow. And on top of that, where’s the practicality?

“When . . . you’re dictating homes have front porches that in theory all of us must sit on every evening and chat with each other,” says Charlie Fruit, vice president of Commerce Bank, “you’re starting to manipulate people’s behavior.”

Matteson and Schmidt give the proposal a 50-50 chance, but noted architecture critic Witold Rybczynski, author of an essay on porches titled “As American as Blue Jeans and Sweat Shirts,” doesn’t hold out much hope for the porches of San Luis Obispo.

He does, however, understand what some people pine for since the passing of porch society sometime after World War II: “If you drive around the suburbs, for instance, you’ll see very often people sitting in their garages,” says Rybczynski, a professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s very sad. It shows you they want to sit out and look at the street, but that’s the only place where they can do it.”

Porches are a peculiarly American invention, Rybczynski argues, created to tame the wilderness of a continent-sized frontier, to mediate between peril outside and safety within. The most famous, he says, was George Washington’s, a structure tacked onto Mt. Vernon in 1772.

Some would argue differently: What about the porch where Atticus Finch explained injustice to daughter Scout in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” or the one where Andy Griffith gazed, forever perplexed, at Deputy Barney Fife? What about Tara?

Although there are no official stoop statistics, it is estimated that about half of all homes in San Luis Obispo have some sort of porch, from voluptuous verandas clad in fish-scale shingles to wrought iron afterthoughts barely big enough for a good-night kiss.

There are stately porches lined in flower pots, where the rattan armchairs match and dried-flower wreaths adorn heavy front doors. Their shabby neighbors often sport flaking paint, fleets of Big Wheels and full dinette sets and look out upon pickups parked on the lawn.

At least that’s the scene on Buchon Street--a mile or so strip of the city’s grandest galleries, located near the center of Old Town.

“This is the best porch,” says 19-year-old Donovan, a film student at Cal Poly. “I love my porch. I can kick back and smoke cigarettes out here. You can watch cars and people go by.”

Goateed Donovan, with his hand-rolled smokes and Bad Religion T-shirt, tends to lounge for at least an hour a day on the faded pink easy chairs formerly of his grandmother’s living room. San Luis Obispo’s social ecology does not weigh heavily on his mind: “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this place,” he says. “Try going to Oakland.”

Six blocks south, teacher Marti Warde is a touch more analytical, as she shivers in the evening chill and tends her snapdragons. “My porch was my introduction to the neighbors,” she says. “I enjoy them all. . . . What makes me stay in this neighborhood is the friends I’ve made.” The 600 block of Buchon is so special, she insists, that it has its own social ecology, one “I haven’t seen anywhere else.”

Kristi Logan--owner of the Cossett House, circa 1914--begs to differ. She used to live in the smallest house in the 800 block of Buchon, a tiny white number with slate-blue trim, visible from the Cossett House’s dignified porch with its iron bench and adobe pot of impatiens. Her block is so special that “if we had to move, we wanted to stay here.” And so she did.

Logan and daughter Kylie, 22 months, spend at least half an hour a day on the porch watching passersby and enjoying the fickle Central Coast climate: a little fog, a little wind, a lot of sunshine.

“People are realizing this is a very nice place to raise kids,” she says. “They’ll take a cut in pay in exchange for the lifestyle. There’s not a lot of jobs, there’s not a lot of opportunities for making your millions.”

There are, however, a lot of porches. And there may be many more, once the City Council votes on a new land use element for the general plan. Hearings on the latest recommendations are scheduled to begin Tuesday, complete with porch proposal.

“That is a good idea,” says Steve Parker, 22, as he paints a table in the Buchon Street dusk. On his porch, of course. “I have this idea that houses with porches, they make everyone focus on their neighbors. Here it’s like the old times. Down south, everyone’s in their back yards. . . . They’re scared of everyone else.”