Back at Drawing Boards to Build a Better Yesterday

Coming soon to a suburb or revitalizing urban area near you: more varied styles and sizes of homes, more trails and bike paths, more “pocket parks” and porches. Narrow streets to bring people together--and make outsiders stand out. More neighborhood.

That is the promise, at least, from developers, planners and builders from Ladera Ranch in southeast Orange County to Newhall Ranch in northwest Los Angeles County to Rialto and Loma Linda in the Inland Empire.

Southern California is no bulwark of neotraditionalism, a style more associated with the Southeast, where studiously old-fashioned towns such as Walt Disney Co.’s Celebration have attracted much attention.

But the Southland is no stranger to new attempts at old-style neighborhoods--where parks, schools and stores are within walking distance and you might run into people who are richer, poorer, older or younger than you on the way there.

There are 135 new-home projects being built in North America that are deemed “traditional neighborhood development” by New Urban News, and five of them are being planned or built between San Diego and Malibu.

Best-known is Playa Vista, where the developers’ feuds with DreamWorks studio moguls have overshadowed ambitious plans for an entire new district of Los Angeles. If all goes as planned, Playa Vista will have 13,000 housing units whose occupants will be within walking distance of high-tech jobs and shopping.

A similar project, which proposes more than 1,000 homes next to shops, light industry, offices and public buildings, is planned in Fullerton, where aerospace industry downsizings eliminated 13,000 Hughes Electronics Corp. jobs.

The movement toward old-fashioned neighborhoods keeps bumping up against modern roadblocks: fire officials who complain their trucks can’t operate in narrow, pedestrian-oriented streets, cities that want “gated” communities with walls to cut down on policing costs.

But with “community” being a top feature on buyers’ wish lists, home shoppers can expect to see more porches, alleys and grassy parkways.

Neotraditional fans and skeptics alike warn that many builders are merely dolling up standard, car-dependent suburbs with “applique porches” and other nostalgic appendages.

Irvine Co. Vice Chairman Ray Watson said people may want porches, but they “also can’t live without garage door openers and 85-inch TV sets.” Builders simply cater to all those desires, he said.

“It’s basically a marketing concept” to make people feel they’re in a more neighborly setting, Watson said. “It doesn’t matter if you actually use the porch--it’s a symbol.”

In Woodbridge, the original section of Irvine, planners initially wanted to put in small neighborhood grocery stores.

“But the fact is, the guy goes broke compared with the supermarket two miles down the road,” Watson said.

New Urbanist designer Peter Calthorpe warns of “a dangerous gang of designers that are preaching to homeowners that they can have it both ways”--gated suburbia with a more sociable old-fashioned ambience.

“It doesn’t get to the fundamentals: is it truly a mix of ages and incomes, and is it truly walkable--that is, are there any destinations you can reasonably walk to that are worth getting to?” Calthorpe asked.

“Just putting the porches on and the street trees in is not enough.”

Calthorpe’s own communities have met with mixed success.

One planned more than a decade ago--Laguna West near Sacramento--opened in the middle of a recession and has struggled, finding it especially hard to attract the retailers that were a key part of the plan.

But his work advising Portland, Ore., on how to absorb hundreds of thousands more people without succumbing to suburban sprawl has been widely praised as model urban planning.

Others fond of neotraditional ideas, such as former Pasadena Mayor Rick Cole, take less of a hard line. Cole is a booster of downtown revivals in older cities such as his own.

He said that scores of hybrid communities borrow neotraditional ideas, if not the entire mix of local jobs, shopping, housing and recreation that advocates said is ideal. The enemy is not suburbia per se, said Cole, who also is Southern California director of the state Local Government Commission.

He praises such suburbs as Valencia in northern Los Angeles County, master-planned in the 1960s with pedestrian and bicycle “paseos” linking small neighborhoods to shopping centers, schools and parks.

Valencia, now a section of Santa Clarita, also has shown adaptability, Cole said. He likes its new “Main Street-style” outdoor shopping district--a neotraditional icon--that is being connected to an enclosed mall, the ultimate badge of suburbia.

Newhall Land & Farming Co., which built Valencia, is now planning Newhall Ranch, a community of 70,000 residents modeled on pre-World War II towns. Places to eat, shop and play will be located within walking distance of homes and relaxed zoning will allow “granny flat” add-ons for relatives and boarders.

“My favorite is Rancho Santa Margarita” in south Orange County, Cole said. “They’ve got 10,000 housing units, but they also attracted more than 4,000 jobs.”

A prominent advocate of smaller neighborhoods that borrow traditional ideas is Orange County developer Anthony R. Moiso, who led the creation of Rancho Santa Margarita from the O’Neill family ranch holdings.

Woodbridge, the first master-planned “village” on the rival Irvine Ranch, has more than 9,000 homes. Rancho Santa Margarita, promoted as an “urban village,” will wind up with 15,000, Moiso said.

Ladera Ranch, the next O’Neill land project, is planned as five “villages,” each with just 1,000 to 2,000 homes and a recreation or shopping area--factors the planners said will encourage sociability. Builders will put up neighborhoods of about 50 homes--half the usual size of a suburban project--to help avoid monotony.

New Urbanist nods include narrower streets, garages hidden around back, and in each neighborhood a “pocket park”--a feature that reminds Moiso of his West Los Angeles childhood.

“We spent a lot of time in the vacant lot, throwing rocks at each other, playing with matches,” he said. “But more important, there was a place to go that parents didn’t take you in the car.”

Moiso and his financial backers, DMB Associates of Phoenix, want to avoid the sameness of the tile-roofed tracts associated so closely with Orange County. So Ladera will have nine styles, mostly non-Mediterranean, based on late 19th century and early 20th century models appropriate to a ranch setting. The first phase will be Craftsman and cottage style.

Instead of using gates and walls to bar entry, neighborhoods will be small enough, and with narrow enough streets, to give residents a secure feeling and make intruders easily recognized.

However, there will be less emphasis on job creation than in Rancho Santa Margarita, where big weapons contractors closed operations at the business park in the early ‘90s defense cuts and recession.

Moiso figures that most Ladera Ranch dwellers will drive to work at existing job centers such as the Irvine Spectrum--or telecommute using the high-speed computer lines that will be standard issue in the homes.

If that acknowledgment of the region’s car-dependence is not a pure New Urbanist approach, it’s of little concern to Rialto Mayor John Longville, a backer of another neotraditional development planned beside the Lytle Creek wash in his city.

“Right now, Orange County is job rich and housing short,” Longville said. “It would be nice [for Ladera Ranch] to have both elements, but it’s not essential.”

Longville bemoans the heavy restrictions on building appearance and residents’ behavior marking some neotraditional towns, such as Disney’s project near Orlando, Fla., where everything from front-door colors to canoe-storage methods is done by the book.

“Somebody who wants a green house in an area of blue and yellow houses doesn’t bother me,” he said.

Jeff Meyers, an Irvine-based consultant to builders, said pure New Urbanism works only on projects such as Playa Vista, situated on the densely populated Westside of Los Angeles.

“Unless you subsidize retail, it doesn’t work in suburbia. [Calthorpe’s] Laguna West proved that,” Meyers said.

Surveys conducted by Los Angeles-based Kaufman & Broad Home Corp., the West’s No. 1 home builder, show that what buyers really want is more spacious homes and more choice of details such as fireplace styles, said Chairman Bruce Karatz.

Randall Lewis of Lewis Homes in Upland, a giant Southland home builder and a frequent panelist in community-planning discussions, said the issue has become so charged and jargon-ridden that it’s confusing to all involved.

“I couldn’t even tell you what New Urbanism is,” Lewis said.

Yet Karatz and Lewis are hedging their bets. Both are working with Calthorpe on mixed-use projects--Lewis Homes in Loma Linda, Kaufman & Broad in the Northern California community of Brentwood, near Livermore.

“Five years ago, these guys regarded me as a total outsider, a crazed radical,” Calthorpe said.

As more such projects make their way off drawing boards and into American cities and towns, he trusts they will prove profitable to all involved. In the end, that’s the only way to persuade mainstream developers of their worth, Calthorpe said.

“They’ll follow their wallet until they see that it coincides with their hearts--and then they’ll follow both.”