The Newest Hip Suburb: Downtown

Forget suburbia. The city is coming back.

Planners, developers, city officials and even transportation authorities say that maturing baby boomers and young people are migrating to downtown neighborhoods, where -- according to UC Irvine professor Marlon Boarnet -- “townies” find a more energetic street scene and better access to transportation, jobs and social outlets.

And with last week’s groundbreaking for a transit-oriented community in Santa Ana, Orange County has jumped on the train.

The newly cleared lot next to the Santa Ana train station is the county’s first transportation-oriented development, 108 lofts designed to double as homes and businesses and strategically situated next to the train depot.

David DiRienzo, president of Urban West Strategies, which is overseeing development of the lofts in conjunction with Lennar Corp., said transit-oriented communities represent a way of sustaining urban neighborhoods.

“It’s going back and working with land in a change of use rather than continuing to march outward,” DiRienzo said. “We are going back into the cities and reusing the land.”

Bringing people back to the urban core is a logical choice because there is little open land remaining in Orange County and a pressing need for housing.

Recycling urban land, DiRienzo said, only makes sense; building near mass transit gives residents the chance to travel out of their communities.

The idea is not new, DiRienzo said. Rather, it is a return to a time when tailors and grocers lived above their shops and people walked or rode the streetcars in their neighborhoods.

But transit-oriented developments are not everyone’s ideal, said Boarnet, who chairs UCI’s department of planning, policy and design.

Those who oppose additional rail lines or who want to see more freeway construction, he said, are going to “get their spines up” over transit villages.

But Orange County Transportation Authority spokesman Ted Nguyen said the county was ripe for transit communities.

Transit communities have already sprung up in urban settings in San Diego, Los Angeles and Pasadena.

Carlsbad resident Anne Vu has ditched her car.

“I haven’t had to drive in a long time,” said Vu, who moved into a transit-oriented community in Carlsbad seven months ago. The business analyst says she commutes by train to her job in San Diego, and she and her husband walk almost everywhere -- whether to the store for groceries or to the beach.

“We don’t have to get in a car anymore,” Vu said.