Why New Urbanism is Right for Yolo County

There is an interesting if a bit snooty article in the SF Chronicle today on Bay Area suburbs trying to push new urbanist principles as a way to make them more attractive as well as a way to avoid sprawl. This would be an obvious model for downtown Davis, and indeed for all the major cities in Yolo County, as we all try to reconcile a steadily growing population, a desire to refrain from building on the floodplain, a desire to avoid building on some of the most productive farmland in the country, and a housing market so tight and with costs so inflated that a majority of Californians have no shot at ever being able to afford owning a house.

While I am sympathetic to the downtown neighborhoods' concern with development threatening to tear down beautiful historic old one-story houses (especially in the slice of downtown between A and B streets abutting UCD campus), there are a ton of nondescript one story commercial buildings dating to the 60s, 70s and early 80s that could be replaced by multistory buildings with commercial shop space below and housing above without causing too much trouble. Additionally, just building structures where parking lots now sit, and putting the parking spaces underground, would free up space without knocking anything even vaguely historic down (although a town that can try to preserve a dumpy train underpass on historic preservation grounds may very well try to mount a "save our historic parking lots" campaign, since many downtown parking lots date back to the 50s and 60s).

On Woodland's main street and in West Sacramento, there is also room for building up rather than out, without tearing down historic buildings or razing residential neighborhoods. While shifting from low density tract housing and mini-malls to high-density walkable urban downtowns would in fact change the nature of our communities, in the end it ends up being the best use of space, and has the potential to make the downtown areas less sleepy to boot. As an added bonus, since these cities will be living in an era of ever-rising gas prices for the forseeable future, concentrating our future growth within walking or biking distance of public transit options (be it the Amtrak station in Davis, or bus stations elsewhere) and commercial districts selling basic amenities also helps to make our communities more efficient with regards to energy use and traffic congestion. The era of cheap oil is effectively over, and the development pattern that grew out of it will not be sustainable once oil prices start to spike.

The above article's objection to the Disney-like faux historical aesthetics of the Bay Area new urbanist developments is one point where I tend to agree, although I'm even less fond of the more common alternative to the Main Street USA style of building, which is the even lamer "brightly colored angular loft" style that you see in Davis' most recent higher-density commercial buldings like the Lofts, the Natsoulas Gallery, or the Pence Art Gallery. What the neighborhood of Fairhaven in Bellingham, Washington has done, and which I think wouldn't be a bad idea for both Davis and Woodland, is to build future multistory buildings in the style of existing historic buildings (which Woodland has in abundance on Main Street, and Davis much less so, except for the couple near the Train Station). But at any rate, the criticial thing is not the aesthetics so much as the housing and walkable, lively downtowns.

One can either build up, build out, or not build. Each has its own problems, but in the end, I believe that building up is the best of the three, and that not building is the worst, basically just being a way of shunting off housing and transportation problems onto other communities. People who work in town ought to be able to live in town; to accomplish that, we have got to solve both the income and the hoiusing sides of the equation. A living wage, combined with adequate affordable housing close to the location of employment, would make Yolo County cities into far more interesting, sustainable and healthy communities.

---

UPDATE - from the comments, Woodland County Supervisor Matt Rexroad has a response over at his blog, with some interesting Woodland-specific suggestions.