COLUMN ONE : Putting a Human Face on Suburbia : The New Urbanists are rebelling against sterile subdivisions by planning more neighborly neighborhoods. Skeptics say it’s a futile exercise in nostalgia.

Rialto Mayor John Longville knows what he doesn’t want built on the biggest piece of undeveloped land in his Inland Empire city. He does not want those 3,600 acres of scrubland and gravel quarries to become another anonymous suburb where garage doors dominate the landscape and residents must drive miles for a quart of milk.

Instead, the city and Lytle Creek Land and Resources Inc. are planning three villages that are supposed to resemble, in spirit if not style, small towns that thrived before mega-malls and walled subdivisions conquered much of America. Even with a projected 7,954 housing units, the development is envisioned as a place where youngsters can walk to the store, front porches encourage neighborliness and streets are designed with at least as much care as his-and-her bathrooms.

That project and many others throughout California and the nation reflect the widening influence of the neo-traditional movement or, as adherents prefer to call it, the New Urbanism.

This rebellion in planning and architecture seeks to overthrow the automobile’s high-octane dominion over American life since the 1950s and to restore a human quality to suburbs and cities. New Urbanists contend that most recent construction denies the basic hunger for community and creates an alienation that no amount of pastel paints and red-tile roofs can ease.

“If you do something for decades, everybody thinks that’s the way it has to be done. But that’s not true,” said Longville, pausing on a rocky path at the Lytle Creek property, nestled against the San Bernardino Mountains near Interstate 15 and Glen Helen Regional Park.

“We have been in an aberration with the type of planning that was done in the United States post-World War II. And, hopefully, we are trying to swing back from an extreme position that was unnecessary, undesirable and destroyed our communities.”

Interest in the New Urbanism represents the biggest shift in planning and development in at least a generation, said Reba Wright-Quastler, president of the American Planning Assn.’s California chapter. Even though the movement has inspired new towns such as Seaside, Fla., and Laguna West, near Sacramento, she said its true test will come if the recession-battered construction industry recovers to build the New Urbanism projects on the drawing boards, such as Playa Vista in Los Angeles.

“I think there are elements of it that will sell themselves and others that will need a real sales job. Contractors like to do the tried-and-true formula and I don’t blame them. It’s their money on the line,” said Wright-Quastler, who also is planning director in Poway in San Diego County.

The tried-and-true is legion throughout Southern California. Carved into hillsides or plopped onto former asparagus fields, unrelenting rows of nearly identical stucco houses present large garages as their face to the street and save their best features for the back yard. Square footage counts more than neighborliness and the only gathering spots are the regional malls.

New Urbanism’s battle cry is contained in the Ahwahnee Principles, drafted at a seminal 1991 conference at Yosemite’s Ahwahnee hotel. They urge that communities be designed with housing, jobs and daily shopping and recreation venues within easy walking distance; housing for different income and age groups; a central plaza for commercial, civic and cultural uses, and as many mass transit connections as possible.

Although New Urbanists insist that their principles accommodate all architectural styles, many celebrated projects echo the past. Seaside, a 300-home resort on Florida’s Panhandle coast, looks like a 1990s interpretation of an 1890s beach town. Kentlands, a Washington, D.C., suburb, and Harbortown, near Memphis, Tenn., have a colonial flavor.

Laguna West, a 1,045-acre project 12 miles south of Sacramento, mixes styles. Its many front porches, unobtrusive garages, tree-lined streets and Victorian-style street lights may remind some of sets for an Andy Hardy movie.

Of an envisioned 3,370 units, 350 houses have been built since the 1991 opening--most selling for $110,000 to $300,000. That sluggish record has caused deep financial problems for the developers and sparked debate about consumer demand for New Urbanism.

Phil Angelides, one of Laguna West’s developers, contends that the economy, not the design, slowed construction, and that 400 units will be added this year. During a recent interview, he sat on a bench near the community center building. Across the way, roofers were finishing a child-care center. But muddy fields remain where retail shops were supposed to be.

“A lot of people ask, ‘Gee, does neo-traditional work? A lot of these projects have had a tough time.’ But all of America has had a tough time from 1990 to ‘94,” said Angelides, an unsuccessful candidate for state treasurer last year.

Skeptics claim that neo-traditionalism is an exercise in nostalgia, an attempt to re-create an illusory past like Disneyland’s Main Street. Moreover, they say the extra public amenities hike house prices and attract few consumers in an era when people are retreating to gated communities. Only earthquakes, they stress, will tear down the malls that have emptied many real Main Streets.

“The social claims of neo-traditional planning are absurd,” said Margaret Crawford, chairwoman of the architectural history program at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. New Urbanism has some good designs and ideals, but it is fixated on an outmoded way of life, she said: “We may feel sad about its passing, but at the same time it has passed.”

New Urbanists insist that they are more concerned about fixing the present than copying the past. The fractured American family, they say, needs the sense of belonging that tight-knit clans once provided. The best crime-stoppers are active streets filled with law-abiding citizens. And for people weary of long drives, telecommuting makes neighborhoods more important than ever.

“This is not a ‘back to the future’ strategy, not turning to the way things were,” said Peter Calthorpe, a New Urbanist guru who designed Laguna West. “The reality of our lives today is too complex. What we are trying to do is offer people more choices, not taking away anything.”

Yet Jeff Meyers, an Irvine-based real estate analyst, wonders whether New Urbanism can ever succeed in isolated suburban settings such as Laguna West, particularly because the Sacramento trolley line has not reached there. “To try it out in suburbia is really difficult,” he said. More promising, he added, is the urban setting of Playa Vista.

Developers won city approval last year for the first phase of that $7-billion, 1,087-acre project on the former Hughes airfield south of Marina del Rey. Over the next decade or so, they hope to build 13,000 dwelling units, large offices, shops and a hotel. The dense mixture is more reminiscent of San Francisco than Southern California. The project must clear several other regulatory hurdles because it includes sensitive wetlands.

Other developers have adopted aspects of New Urbanism.

A pedestrian-oriented main street and public square are under construction at Rancho Santa Margarita, with expectations that the population of 22,500 will nearly double in the southern Orange County community. Similar ideas are proposed for Santa Clarita Valley and San Diego County projects.

Zoning and building codes throughout California have been altered to encourage denser development around transit stations and to push garages to the rear and sides of houses. The rejuvenation of Pasadena’s Old Town--with its lively mix of stores, funky cafes, cinemas and apartments--is considered a triumph of New Urbanism. More success is expected after the Blue Line train is extended to the once-dilapidated district.

About a third of future development in California will adopt some form of neo-traditional planning to ease traffic and air pollution, predicted John Schleimer, head of Market Perspectives, a real estate research firm.

Certainly, New Urbanism won’t fail for a lack of passionate preachers. They include planners and architects Calthorpe and Daniel Solomon of San Francisco, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zybeck of Miami, and Stefanos Polyzoides and Elizabeth Moule of Los Angeles.

“I focus on the kids,” Calthorpe said. “What the modern suburb does to kids is isolate them in front of TV sets. They have no way to go anywhere on their own. And that is a real profound tragedy, at least in my mind. At Laguna West, a kid can say, ‘I can get to the lake, get to the playground on my own.’ That’s the scale of things there, and it’s still a pretty big world for somebody between 5 and 12.”

The Sacramento-based Local Government Commission holds seminars to advocate New Urbanism to builders and municipal leaders. Rialto planners and developers attended such meetings and Mayor Longville is now a commission member.

Polyzoides, one of Playa Vista’s planners, complained that some builders distort New Urbanism into porches tacked onto tract houses, when in fact it involves community, ecology and transportation, not recycled architecture.

“They put up a couple of Victorian clocks or a town square or a nice lake and then rape the landscape around it by sprawling all around it,” he said.

New Urbanism’s biggest hurdle is attracting stores, according to Lloyd Bookout, an official at the Urban Land Institute, a real estate think tank in Washington. “People tend to shop differently than a hundred years ago. The discount stores, the big boxes, are popular now and those are very hard to accommodate within the neo-traditional town setting,” he said.

Even though Apple Computer has opened a 1,200-employee factory at Laguna West’s northern edge, the absence of stores has contributed to a sense of isolation among some residents. Nonetheless, some say it remains a better place to live than surrounding tracts.

Arts administrator Amy Kaplan and her husband, Richard Holden, a state government employee, bought their four-bedroom house, with a Craftsman-style porch and two side garages, 2 1/2 years ago for $225,000.

“We didn’t want to live in a typical suburban subdivision,” she said. They have made friends with neighbors and their two young sons play with other children on leafy Lombardy Way. Yet, she concedes, community life is more akin to other anonymous California suburbs than a country village.

“I feel like it’s more comfortable here and it’s definitely more attractive, but I’m not sure we can go back to that imagined time that we are never sure even existed, especially in California,” Kaplan said. “I think people who move here, they are who they are. The physical environment doesn’t change them.”

Less ambivalent was Jesus Rubio, a junior high teacher who lives across the street with his wife and three children in a four-bedroom house that cost $240,000 two years ago. The ample porch and deep driveway were initial attractions. “At all the other places, all the houses looked the same. The first thing you saw was a garage,” he said.

The Laguna West streetscape, he added, “enables you or forces you to communicate with your neighbors. It’s so nice outside that you want to be outside.”

Rancho Santa Margarita in Orange County has popular and well-designed public spaces: a lakeside promenade, a plaza with restaurants and a fountain, and miles of shaded walkways. Yet its planners maintain that it is unrealistic to go full-tilt “neo-trad.” The new main street will try to re-create the Spanish colonial flavor of Santa Barbara, but will connect two shopping centers fronted by enormous parking lots.

New Urbanist purists sneer at those compromises, saying that the pedestrian-friendly streets are reduced to marketing tools. And real urbanites may feel claustrophobic with Rancho Santa Margarita’s ubiquitous tiled roofs and bell towers. Nonetheless, its success has spawned imitation.

The Rialto project, about to undergo city review and then years of construction, will have more pedestrian-oriented streets than Rancho Santa Margarita but fewer than Laguna West, said Ray Becker, project manager for the Lytle Creek firm.

“We are trying to push people into doing what they really want to do in their hearts,” he said, “but not try to get them to do what they will flat-out refuse to do.”

Rialto’s population doubled to about 80,000 during the Inland Empire boom of the 1980s. The Lytle Creek project will be controversial as it gobbles up open space close to the San Bernardino National Forest. Backers hope that the New Urbanist elements will be seen as an improvement over the walled subdivisions in other neighborhoods.

“We want more of the kind of design you see when you watch ‘Leave It to Beaver’ and see him walking down the street,” Longville said. “You can actually see people in the yards rather than just a bunch of cars parked and the feeling that nobody’s there except behind locked doors.”