Is Aliso Viejo a Design for the Future?
On one gently curving cul-de-sac in Aliso Viejo, some 20 babies have been born in the past three years.
They’ve been nestled into nurseries in shell-pink homes with evenly spaced yards and similar views. The houses, not much older than the newborns, are all within two miles of a mega one-stop shopping and entertainment hub called Town Center.
The infants and toddlers go on regular strolls down Deerwood with their young mothers, women no older than 35 who make their way without pause to a favorite patch of recreational green space.
When they get older, the children will be a bicycle ride away from Aliso Viejo Library, where they can tap into the Internet from a bank of zippy computers and grab a soda at the snack bar. They’ll sit in classrooms at some of the most technologically advanced facilities on the West Coast, where the use of fiber optics, science labs and modular computer stations at the high school and middle school has earned a flurry of awards in recent years.
And later, when the babies have grown into adults and graduated from any number of community colleges or universities within eight miles of their childhood homes, they can choose to stay put, working for corporate big names like Fluor Daniel, Pepsi Cola, Cox Communications and United Parcel Service.
At a time when the wildly popular master-planned communities of the 1970s are all grown up, the next generation has only just arrived, strutting a “newer, better, smarter” philosophy and leaving many urban planners wondering if they’ve finally locked on to suburbia’s “City of the Future.”
“It’s all blissfully tranquil and nice,” Tracy Morales said of Aliso Viejo, where she has lived for seven years. “It’s exactly what people are looking for these days. We have everything we need right here. I don’t know of a more thoughtfully crafted city.”
To be sure, Aliso Viejo is not a city. Not yet. And the idea of universal sameness in a master-planned neighborhood is unsavory to some. But the community’s design and target resident--someone who wants to live near work--are unusual enough in the overall South County landscape that developers have closely watched its evolution.
Aliso Viejo has in many ways become a blueprint for the future. Several South County communities that emerged in its shadow--including Rancho Santa Margarita and Foothill Ranch--have tried to mimic Aliso Viejo’s design but have had varying degrees of success, largely because they are more secluded from freeways and therefore less accessible for businesses, experts said.
The philosophy has caught on in other areas of the country, however, as developers begin to react to the neighborhood sensibilities of the next century. In Washington and San Antonio, Orlando and St. Paul, the second generation of suburbs is taking hold in a fashion that urban planners believe will persevere for decades. The bedroom communities and frustrating commutes of the postwar generation have finally given way to a new template for tomorrow.
So far, Aliso Viejo has distinguished itself by becoming Southern California’s youngest community--35 is the median age of residents--and by keeping new housing costs low enough to make Aliso Viejo the capital for first-time home buyers.
That alone has drawn many second-generation Latino families from Santa Ana to Aliso Viejo, where they’ve settled into new homes and new schools and helped diversify the community’s mostly white complexion. In South County, only century-old San Juan Capistrano has a larger Latino population, according to a progress report by the Center for Demographic Research at Cal State Fullerton.
Business-wise, Aliso Viejo has attracted large, high-growth corporations from around the country. And more than half of the community has been designated green space for a total of 22 parks, a proportion that is more than generous compared to other master-planned neighborhood projects that set aside corner lots and playgrounds and call them parks.
“That alone is what I think sets us apart so drastically from other South County communities,” said Carmen Vali, a board member of the Aliso Viejo Community Assn. “You just don’t see this much open space and parks anymore. It makes a difference in your quality of life.”
The development was planned by the same company and contractors that designed nearby Mission Viejo; developers of Aliso Viejo say they’ve since learned valuable lessons about mapping out a community.
* This time, there will be more industry--the first planned community in the state, in fact, to provide a balance between projected jobs and projected residential work force. By 2000, development in Aliso Viejo is expected to create nearly 25,000 on-site jobs.
* This time, there will be more low- to medium-income housing, so younger families can live, work and play in a neighborhood they love.
* This time, there will be better-equipped schools, more parks and enough shopping and family entertainment to keep neighbors together and, what’s more important, close by.
“It’s all mapped out and worked out, but communities like these are striking just the right balance between work life and home life that people crave now,” said Joel Kotkin, a senior fellow at the Pepperdine Institute for Public Policy. “The idea is catching on because that need isn’t going away. People want more from their communities, and they’re thinking ahead.”
A Centrally Located Commercial Center
It is no fluke, for example, that all of Aliso Viejo’s restaurants, stores and office spaces sit on 300 acres right smack in the middle of the community’s 10 square miles. Surrounding that commercial core, which is cleanly bisected by the San Joaquin Hills Toll Road, are 13,200 homes and apartments. By 2005, when the community is fully developed, officials project about 48,000 residents will be living in 20,000 homes.
The design is in sharp contrast to that of Mission Viejo, which was developed more than 20 years ago when convenience, rather than community spirit, was the rage. City planners believed businesses were supposed to be scattered throughout the town, strung around residential neighborhoods like Christmas lights. As a result, little delineation exists between residential areas and commercial areas in Mission Viejo. There is no nerve center.
The older city was also planned in the early 1960s, when the county’s biggest job core was the Irvine area immediately around John Wayne Airport. As Interstate 5 was extended south to Mission Viejo, developers believed the easy commute to Irvine would attract residents to South County’s first real master-planned community, said Kevin Canning, a project manager with Culbertson, Adams and Associates, which helped the Mission Viejo Co. design both communities.
“It was a bedroom community, pure and simple,” Canning said of Mission Viejo. “The idea back then was that people would live there and commute to work. People don’t want to do that anymore. And they don’t have to.”
People still want convenience, of course. They still like new houses and new schools. But lately, planning experts have found that residents are expressing the cyclical need to live in a community that has more of a soul, a spirit. A bigger heart.
Look no further than Aliso Viejo, they say, to experience the newest, hottest style in suburban design, one they suspect will clearly define the emerging cities of the new millennium. Buzzwords affiliated with early master-planned communities, such as “homeowner associations,” “gated communities” and “CC&R;’s,” are being supplanted by a more intriguing, all-encompassing idea for suburban satisfaction: self-contained, easy living.
Ten years ago, county planners were already calling Aliso Viejo a “more enlightened” approach to development. Rather than build strictly bedroom communities, developers began to realize the importance of putting employment centers nearby to reduce pollution and traffic on freeways.
Residents today want more than ever to live and work in one community, where they can make it home for lunch or catch the latter half of their child’s soccer game and still return to the office in the afternoon. They long for easy commutes and a more satisfying balance between job and family.
An Office Campus Offering It All
Those were the signals Russ Parker of Parker Properties kept in mind when he and his father, John B. Parker, began planning the Summit in Aliso Viejo.
The suburban office campus will eventually comprise 1.7 million square feet of office space in 14 buildings, including a health center, a day-care facility and restaurants. The campus concept took shape after the Parkers surveyed hundreds of potential office tenants to determine what work-force amenities they would want or need in the future.
“What we found was people wanting to be closer to home, which would give them more flexibility in their work schedules,” Russ Parker said. “It isn’t like the ‘80s anymore, when we had this prestige factor that made employees want to work in fancy, high-rise buildings clustered all together in upscale areas. Now they want a sense of place and a community. And they’ll pay more for it.”
The Summit project--which has already lured several high-growth companies like Remedy Temp, a temporary-services agency now based in San Juan Capistrano, and Safeguard Health Plans, a managed-care company in Anaheim--capitalizes on its suburban setting with low-rise buildings and outdoor courtyards and park areas.
Responding to the surveys that showed tenants would gladly trade a glossy corporate setting for one that improved the overall quality of their work and family lives, the Summit boasts a business community that allows tenants to “Live, Work, Play” in Aliso Viejo.
“Your entire work force can be five minutes away from the office, from top executives to the new hire fresh out of college,” said Todd L. Burnight, a Parker Properties official. “It’s the balance people are looking for these days. You have to listen to what they want, because what they want is more out of life. It’s a priority that isn’t going away.”
The business area also enjoys precious visibility from the toll road, a factor that did not go unnoticed by Fluor Corp. executives who decided to relocate their 2,000 workers from Irvine to new headquarters in Aliso Viejo.
“The toll road was definitely a large, influential factor in our decision to choose the Aliso Viejo site,” said company spokeswoman Lisa Boyette. More than half of the company’s work force lives in South County.
Besides proximity to jobs, residents crave the freshness of newer communities with good schools, clean roads and reasonably priced single-family homes, a trend that is mirrored throughout the country as developers tap in to new urbanization fervor, urban planners said. Even more appealing to residents is the ability to have a hand in shaping the identity of that community themselves, and turn it into the neighborhood they want it to be.
“Urban designers everywhere have completely underestimated how strong this desire really is, this urge and need that people have to create their very own sense of place,” said Joel Garreau, author of “Edge City: Life on the New Frontier,” which explores the sterility of suburban communities in America.
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Doing so gives them ownership of it, a connection that tends to keep people from moving out of a community within the usual three to five years, Garreau said. The average length of uninterrupted occupancy for 25- to 35-year-old Americans has grown to seven years.
“What we’re seeing is loyalty to a community that works well,” Garreau said. “If it’s new enough, the residents can get things added or changed and mold it into their own perfection. Then, as their needs change, they’ll just massage it until it responds again.”
The phenomenon is sometimes referred to as CPR--community progression resuscitation--and residents in Aliso Viejo have used it to set up walking groups, reading groups, community groups, mothers-strolling-their-babies groups and dads-coaching-their-kids groups. There are Christmas decorating contests and concerts in the park, carnivals for every holiday, and food drives. Committees have been formed to establish a community center, fight the El Toro airport proposal, improve landscaping and protect residents from crime.
It is plain, old-fashioned community involvement in a community without a mayor or a city hall, a police chief or its own fire department.
Tom Marshall, co-chairman of one of the largest committees, Cityhood 2000, said the interest residents have shown in creating such clubs and movements is indicative of how they have embraced Aliso Viejo as their “for-good” home.
“When you drive around here, you can’t help but feel the neighborhood spirit because it’s everywhere,” said Marshall, a leading proponent of the incorporation of Aliso Viejo.
“There’s community announcements posted all around town and flags waving and families walking. You always hear people saying how nice it is to have everything right here. They don’t want to leave and they don’t have to.”
A Certain Artificiality, a Lack of Identity
Critics, of course, remain skeptical of master-planned neighborhoods overall and say Aliso Viejo is no exception.
This is a community, they quickly point out, that lacked identity for years and relied on the construction of a $5-million library to be a beacon for growth. It is where clusters of neighborhoods are categorized by random subjects: In one development called Applause, streets are named Overture, Bravo and Front Row Lane; Picasso and Matisse can be found in the California Renaissance neighborhood; and in both phases of Laguna Audubon, streets are named after an assortment of native birds.
Colorful flags adorn rows of street lights up and down Aliso Viejo’s main thoroughfares, flags that trumpet the community’s offerings: “Top state schools.” “Brand new library.” “3,400 acres open space.” And, for those who aren’t sure, “Closer to the ocean.”
“It’s marketing gone mad,” said Elisabeth Brown, an activist with the environmental group Laguna Greenbelt. “They’ve tried to create a sense of place, but it’s actually seamless, one thing running right into another. And everything’s pink. Pink or peach, and you can see every single roof because there are no trees.”
While urban planners note such criticism, they suspect Aliso Viejo has tapped in to the future--and suburban superiority--just the same. Even those who have long resisted the idea of master-planned communities will likely find themselves succumbing to the second generation, neighborhoods that will have prepared for an unprecedented shift in the desires and “nesting instincts” of its residents, said Ron Baers, an urban designer and UC Irvine professor.
“No one chooses to live an hour and a half away from their jobs,” he said. “It’s just a market force. But if you want it to change and you wait long enough, it will correct itself. It’s a natural equilibrium that adjusts itself so people will improve their life situations.”
In the meantime, people will continue to tailor their communities into “Cities of the Future” one day at a time, accommodating residents’ needs as their neighborhoods mature and diversify, Baers said. They may soon be asking for the construction of pagodas or temples. They may need gang-prevention programs or want multicultural marketplaces.
“Until these master-planned cities mature, you don’t really have a sense of what their soul and character is all about,” he said. “But it sure is an exciting process to watch.”
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Aliso Viejo Numbers
Aliso Viejo, with a median age of 35 is one of the state’s youngest communities, and it may become the next generation of master-planned communities with a “newer, better, smarter” philosophy and by keeping housing costs low.
Population Characteristics
1991: 7,612
1997: 20,622
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1990 Racial and Ethnic Estimates
White: 77.8%
Hispanic: 12.3%
Asian & Pacific Islander: 7.8%
Black: 1.5%
All other races: 0.5%
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1990 Age by Gender (bar chart)
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Housing and Household Characteristics
1997: 9,987
1990 Housing Units by Type
Single Attached: 44.6%
Single Detached: 15.5%
Other: 1.5%
Mobile Homes: 0.1%
5 units and above: 32.2%
2 to 4 units: 6.1%
Median Home Value: $192,700
Median Rent: $900
1990 Households
Owner-occupied: 2,159
Renter-occupied: 1,169
Total occupied: 3,328
Source: County of Orange
About the Series
Beyond 2000 is a series of articles that explore how our lives will change in the next millennium. The series will continue every Monday as The Times Orange County examines what’s in store for the county in such areas as transportation, education, growth and technology.
LAUNCH POINT 2000
More information on today’s topic can be found on several Web sites:
History of Cities and City Planning: The first cities developed roughly 10,000 years ago when people learned how to farm and domesticate animals. Read an interesting account of how cities have functioned and learn about modern urban planning, including how plans for ideal cities have changed over the years.
https://catalog.com/hopkins/simcity/manual/history.html
America’s Most Enlightened Towns: What makes a city a good place to live? Read about 10 towns that combine good urban design, local culture and civic involvement to create lively communities.
https://www.utne.com/towns/index.html
12 Gates to the City: A Dozen Ways to Build Strong, Livable and Sustainable Urban Areas: How can cities be planned to promote quality of life rather than simply optimize traffic flow? This article by Francesca Lyman discusses the state of today’s urban planning and how communities have enhanced their living environments.
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/199705/gates.html
Urban Planning 2010: This article discusses how urban planning will change in the coming decade as well as raises important questions.
https://cad9.cadlab.umanitoba.ca/jill/up2010.html
Los Angeles: Past, Present and Future: Uncover L.A.’s rich history and culture through the comprehensive resources on this site.
https://www.usc.edu/isd/archives/la/
Irvine: A History of Innovation and Growth: Read about Irvine’s beginnings from Mexican land grant to model-planned community in this online book with nearly 200 photographs.
https://www.irvine.awardgroup.com/contents2.asp
