New Urbanism Housing Style Filling a Void
Architect Roger Mobley slides his finger across renderings of tree-shaded neighborhoods filled with pocket parks and anchored by a charming downtown. Majestic homes with sweeping, wraparound porches stand alongside humble rentals. Manicured promenades crisscross his maps, linking residential areas to nearby schools, offices, shops and cafes.
The blueprints might seem a good fit for Santa Monica or San Francisco. But for Fullerton, a cradle of Orange County’s suburban tract living?
Construction already has begun.
“The idea was to get back to the historical roots of the community,” said Mobley, whose designs are helping build Amerige Heights, a 1,250-home development on the site of the old Hughes Aircraft complex in Fullerton. There, the typical suburban sea of garage doors hogging the view is eliminated. Cars are parked around back.
“There used to be much more active street scenes,” Mobley said of life before subdivisions took over in the 1950s. “A lot of buyers are looking for a community that re-creates that--a place where people socialize and know their neighbors.”
This vision, incorporated in a design style known as new urbanism, has taken hold in other suburbs across the country, but for years it has been dismissed in Southern California because of a perceived preference for bigger, boxier houses on large lots. A small, wildly popular village in Brea is just about the only example of the style being put to use in the region’s suburbs.
Now, major new-urbanism projects are finally getting underway. In the Inland Empire, Burnett Cos. is planning a community where front porches will dominate the streetscape and a large park will be no more than a 10-minute walk from any of the 1,362 houses. In Corona del Mar in Orange County, a new dense village of bungalows and cottages is emerging that mimics Seaside in Florida--made famous as the set for the film “The Truman Show.”
“People are tired of seeing the same cookie-cutter approach over and over,” said Bill Warkentin, the land planner on the Burnett project. “The notion that there is only a market for one type of housing out here is unmitigated bunk. Our markets are fracturing like everyone else’s.”
In large part, that is because suburbs here, like those nationwide, are no longer filled with families of mom, dad and two kids. They are becoming a small piece of the suburban pie, edged out by a mix of singles, young couples, empty-nesters and others who want to mix a little more urban into their suburban experience.
Add to that the reality that the Los Angeles region is running out of vacant land and that millions of newcomers are expected within the next 20 years. New urbanism espouses more homes on far less land without sacrificing quality of life, and the concept is now getting financial backing from investors.
Outcome Could Spur a Dramatic Shift
At the moment, these projects represent just a fraction of the home building taking place in California and nationwide. And some architects question whether new urbanism is just the same old developments dressed up in a fancier facade. But many experts say the outcome of projects like those in Fullerton and Cathedral City could spur a dramatic shift in the way Southern Californians live in the years to come.
In recent years, Mike and Emily McNichols saw their two daughters move out after graduating from Cal State Fullerton. The couple, in their late 40s, have never known anything but classic suburban living.
Their four-bedroom house sits on a cul-de-sac in Placentia. They can go six months without running into a neighbor. They drive to the strip mall around the corner. Nothing about the center is conducive to walking, Mike McNichols says, and there is nothing about it that makes you want to stay there once you arrive. “It is a giant parking lot with some stores,” he said.
From their backyard, their view over the cinder-block wall is the top of an unattractive trailer the neighbors parked just on the other side, next to their towering jungle gym. “The idea of true privacy in these type of communities is really just an illusion,” said McNichols, a church pastor.
Many empty-nesters like the McNicholses also have become weary of tending to the lawn and garden. They relish their new freedom and don’t want to be anchored to the house. Meanwhile, young professionals living in suburbia are too busy working and traveling.
Some Homeowners Feeling Frustrated
The McNicholses are interested in Fullerton’s Amerige Heights. Despite a general slowdown in the housing market since Sept. 11, the development is moving forward as planned. Houses will become available starting in March--bungalows alongside urban-style lofts, alongside American farmhouse replicas. Prices will start in the mid-$200,000 range and go up to $900,000.
Apart from Amerige Heights, the McNicholses haven’t seen much else they like. Crowded condo living lacks allure. Vintage bungalows cost more than the oversized 1963 home they want to shed. “There just isn’t a lot of choice out there,” Emily McNichols said.
Planners say there are many suburban Southland homeowners feeling just as frustrated. They have lived all their lives without an urban experience, but have gotten tastes of it in their travels and have come to feel that kind of living makes more sense.
“This may seem counterintuitive, but they are not afraid of something different,” said William Fulton, a land use expert and president of Solimar Research Group in Ventura.
Fulton said people are fed up with the “hassle factor” of trying to live a suburban lifestyle that has become overrun with congestion. “People now want to avoid getting in their cars whenever they can,” he said.
In the Southland, their options are limited to small in-fill developments here and there, such as the Pasadena Civic Center redevelopment and the “transit villages” that are mixing eclectic residential architecture with shops and cafes around train stations. Orange County is in the process of rezoning about 1,000 acres of blighted property to develop more such projects.
In Corona del Mar, home-seekers are willing to pay big money to enjoy a new urbanist experience. Sales already are brisk at Sailhouse, which opened earlier this month. It offers bungalows and carriage homes with large front porches, squeezed close together along wood boardwalks with gazebos and fountains. Prices for a 1,700-square-foot home start at about $600,000.
Yet large-scale developments that succeed in creating an entire new-urbanist community so far have been nonexistent. New urbanists were hopeful about plans to do that in Lake Elsinore in Riverside County, but investors pulled the plug on that project two years ago. A mixed-use Playa Vista development plan in Los Angeles has been mired by controversy over environmental concerns.
But planners argue that demand for new urbanism is soaring, although consumer surveys have found mixed views.
The movement’s marketing guru, New Jersey-based consultant Todd Zimmerman, said that should be no surprise.
People hear terms like “high-density” and “mixed commercial and residential use,” he said, “and the image that comes to mind is an apartment building with a 7-Eleven and gang members drinking Slurpees in front.”
“But take Americans and drop them into one of these neighborhoods, and they vote with their wallets,” he said.
Brea Neighborhood a Source of Pride
That’s what happened in Brea.
Along Ash Street, there are cottages with gingerbread-laced front porches, landscaped back alleys and canopied walkways to a downtown shopping plaza. Most of the 88 homes went for $190,000 when they hit the market four years ago. Now they can sell for more than $300,000, a striking increase even by Orange County’s housing standards.
Nobody anticipated such enthusiasm in Brea, where many gawkers now stroll through on weekends and residents gush about their community.
“This is the perfect neighborhood,” said Paul Cain, 42, a warehouse supervisor who bought when the development opened. “We can stay here the whole weekend without taking our car out. There are like 12 restaurants in walking distance.”
His only complaint: a shortage of children in the neighborhood for his 12-year-old son to hang out with. The homes are about 1,600 square feet, making them tight for families with children.
Cain lives in a neighborhood with a mix of residents from the emerging demographic groups that experts say are searching for an alternative to the standard suburban model.
Kip Christianson, 50 and semiretired, spends every evening sitting on a wicker chair on his tiled front porch, listening to the soothing trickle of his rock fountain, smoking cigarettes and striking up conversations with passersby.
A few houses down is Linda Sherrill, a 53-year-old school administrator who moved to the neighborhood after her divorce. “I wanted a house, but I didn’t want to take care of a yard,” she said. “And I love being able to walk around at night.”
Analysts say it was Brea’s success that sparked interest from developers and financiers.
“Investors are accustomed to investing only in certain kinds of projects and a certain kind of use,” Fulton said. “They are lemmings. They follow what they think works. It’s been a big hurdle to get them past this. . . . The market was there. Now the money is there.”
Bill Warkentin is betting that the same will happen in his Inland Empire development known as Rio Vista Village, which was modeled on new-urbanist communities such as Walt Disney’s Celebration Village in Orlando, Fla. Construction is expected to begin soon.
Warkentin, the land planner on the project, can talk for hours about the beauty of a properly executed back alley, one of the defining elements of new urbanism.
“These are well-lighted, usable spaces,” he said. They’re places to keep cars, trash facilities and storage--all out of sight to clear up the front of the home for leisure space. “These are not crime-ridden, trashed city alleys.”
Rio Vista’s plans call for a school, a church and a community center within walking distance of the homes, though there will not be stores. The residential streets will be narrow and won’t be filled with curb-cuts and driveways that might make walking and playing on them a hazard. And, as with the Fullerton project, the most expensive homes will not be segregated from the most affordable ones.
“You are buying into diversity here,” said Larry Lazar, a vice president with SunCal Cos., developer of the Fullerton project. “Lots of people talk about the way Fullerton used to be in the past, where there was lots of diversity and interesting neighborhoods. Then developers got into the practice of building subdivisions. . . . We’re going back to building communities.”
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Times staff writer Daryl Strickland contributed to this report.
