Imagining Opportunities
Nothing signifies the “paradigm shift” brought on by Chico’s current General Plan like the panicked reaction of Fred Davis. Davis was Chico’s public works director in the 1950s before holding the position of city manager for an entire era of Chico’s history: 1959 until 1992. During this time the central city was redesigned for the automobile and infrastructure was extended for miles to the North, East, and South to facilitate commercial box and strip mall development and low-density housing sprawl.
In a 2010 post on his blog “Debunking the bunk” Fred Davis railed:
Chico always had a reputation as a “wonderful community to live in.” So why does the City Council think it needs to change the development of Chico by adopting a several-hundred-page General Plan that completely changes the direction that Chico will develop?
The new proposed plan attempts to squeeze development, for the next 20 years, in a very restrictive area, with small lots and much new development in high-rise and rental units.
The plan is also developed with the idea that the city’s roadway system is designed to create congestion so that everyone will want to climb into one of those monster buses in order to get to and from their homes or businesses.
But Chico’s City Council, in supporting this “complete change” in Chico’s development, was in accordance with the opinions expressed in dozens of community workshops and surveys, which indicated a clear preference towards walkable communities, biking and transit infrastructure, and against sprawl and automobile dependency.
It should be no surprise that opponents of these plans included our townie developers, who argued that fewer houses with yards will push people to Orland or Oroville; and the Chamber of Commerce, who defended car traffic.
These and other opponents of the 2030 Chico General Plan will be pleased to hear that the principal goals have failed to materialize. The major infrastructure projects on the horizon mostly revolve around cars, like the widening of Bruce Road, the widening of Cohasset Road, and a new freeway interchange at Southgate/Entler Avenue; transit ridership is on the decline, and underlying all this, the city’s flagship policy for transit-oriented mixed-use development has produced next to no results. It’s this last letdown and the hopes we’re left with that we’ll examine this week.
There are a litany of reasons to support building up over building out, or what’s called Smart Growth. Environmentally, we preserve more places for ecological health and diversity, plus agriculture and our enjoyment. Economically, we better utilize the infrastructure we already have and save on the obligations of providing more. We also as families and individuals living here benefit from improved access to services like schools, groceries, and transit. Culturally and democratically, concentrated pockets and strips of value provide conditions for better common spaces that enrich social life.
Chico had policies to promote infill development since 1994, but, as the current Land Use plan states pretty frankly, “these policies have not always yielded desired results.” A big innovation of the 2030 General Plan was to establish Corridor Opportunity Sites (COS’s) where height and density regulations are substantially loosened. Whereas the maximum allowable density in areas like South Campus, the West Aves, or any apartment district in North Chico is 22 units per acre, in a Corridor Opportunity Site or in downtown, people can be housed in up to 60 or even 70 units per acre. Much of these areas are zoned for commercial or office mixed-use.
By lining up housing, work, and services on key arterials a dependable base for public transit lines can develop along with as a tax base to maintain and improve other infrastructure in the city (as alluded above, walkable, mixed-use areas are significantly more financially productive than more sprawled out styles of development).
The Corridor Opportunity Sites concept was ambitious in a sense but it was not very well enabled by real conditions. Since 2011, by my estimation there have been only three major housing projects in downtown or corridor opportunity sites — one, Harvest Park on West East Ave, was a publicly financed development. At 17 units per acre, it’s on the lower range of what would be allowed there even if it wasn’t an Opportunity site. Westside Place on Nord is partially built out by now on a very good design (the streets were laid out by New Urban Builders before the real estate bust). It was approved before the 2030 General Plan. The Post, also on Nord, is the only housing project built to date which leveraged its location within a COS. It was constructed by an out of town developer and, being next to a grocery store and reasonably close to the college, it’s one of the most walkable places a student could live (though it also includes a four-story parking garage). On the down side, the buildings face a private street accessible only through coded gates and it presents an unwelcoming façade to Nord and Columbus Avenues.
With all the public support and economic rationale behind the principles of smart growth, why hasn’t it locally materialized?
Part of the answer we unraveled in the last take, how the housing market is oriented towards the needs of a higher class of consumers and prejudices within the local development industry reinforce the disproportionate focus on them.
But the Corridor Opportunity Site policy has its own problems that made it weak and unlikely to succeed. I’ll break these into three issues.
- Corridor Opportunity Sites are limited to areas of low value and social appeal.
Picture the streetscape in each of the areas selected for ‘corridor opportunities.’ Are they streets you would like to live on? Are they places you would meet a friend to talk or walk your dog?
The practice of confining commercial zones to automobile thoroughfares, responding to but also reinforcing the status quo where the most important customers are those who arrive by car, is problematic. This is the type of vicious cycle we should seek to break, creating more neighborhood commercial centers like Fifth and Ivy, where the streets are more accommodating to people.
But Chico’s corridor strategy has the inestimable benefit of working with the existing layout of the city. We have a mixed-use urban core designed for walking, and central neighborhoods extended out on grids characteristic of early 20th century North American streetcar sprawl, where people walked to and from arterial streets. With a dependable transit system, concentrating commercial along these streetcar arterials allowed convenient access for everyone, and could do so again if there were enough of a market for basic goods and transit within walking distance.
Streetcar arterials were also conveniently adaptable to automobile traffic, and once the streetcar system lost the business of the more affluent sections of the market, headways were cut, and the downfall of the system was swift.
Granting that streetcar arterials are an appropriate place to focus mixed-use and higher density development, it’s worthy of attention where the opportunity corridors are not located. Without question the most pleasant and appreciated streetcar arterial in Chico is the Esplanade, but the opportunity corridor begins at the Lindo Channel, precisely where the ‘good Esplanade’ ends. The benefit in this logic is that if developers did want to redevelop those barren stretches of strip mall they would also pay for some improvements to make it a less of a dangerous and desolate place.
Unfortunately (and at least somewhat consequently) there has been little interest in redevelopment on North Esplanade. Recently, two projects were proposed on vacant parcels on the far northern end. One, approved in spite of the rhetoric in plans and the city code about pedestrian orientation and breaking with auto-dependence, is a gas station across the street from an existing gas station. The other is apartment housing and receives a whopping COS density bonus of ⅓ of a unit.
Like North Esplanade, Mangrove was developed with low-value strip malls before design standards started requiring any tree cover for expanses of pavement. The one area nearer to Bidwell Park and downtown that has received some appreciable public improvements since the middle of the last century is not included in the opportunity corridor.
A similar thing can be said for the Nord corridor. It’s instructive that — the Post notwithstanding — several of the largest housing projects of the last ten years — like Campus Walk apartments and the Urban — are located on the Nord/Walnut corridor but south of the designated COS, nearer to the university and downtown where there are still a number of vacant lots. It’s a further misfortunate of the Nord Opportunity Corridor that all of the parcels on the west side butt up to the railroad, with the only legal crossings about ¾ of a mile apart. Behind one complex a succession of fence repairs testifies to the defiance of some residents to this confinement.
Nord may be a literal state highway but the other Corridor Opportunity Sites are all actually narrower roads with more lanes. In that respect Nord is less hostile to walking.
And this is the common factor that most profoundly degrades the appeal of life on all of our Opportunity Corridors (and to a considerable extent Main Street, Broadway, and 8th and 9th streets in downtown): the foremost purpose of the corridors is to move high volumes of car traffic at fast speeds. Safety or aesthetic appeals are secondary considerations at best.
Whereas a street is meant to be a setting for a complex ecosystem producing community wealth — the kind of setting that makes sense for the heart of a city — and a road is to connect two places together, each one of our opportunity corridors is a stroad, or a mashup of the two, what the organization Strongtowns refers to as “the futon of transportation.”
There isn’t a lot of appeal to living on stroads because they’re dangerous — a vehicle travelling 35 mph is 10x more likely to kill a person upon impact than one travelling 25 mph — they’re noisy, smelly, and feel out of scale to human beings, especially with narrow sidewalks and painted crosswalks few and far between.
We can’t expect a substantial number of people to live on these corridors, much less anyone investing in building up on them, without a reliable promise that the character of the space is going to improve.
2. Corridor Opportunity Sites are limited to a single thoroughfare.
When Chico’s streetcar neighborhoods were originally laid out, houses were built out from the streetcar arterial at a distance of around four blocks. That was considered a distance people could comfortably walk to take transit to their ultimate destination.
In today’s plan only the single strip of commercial arterial is granted permission to build up. The areas surrounding them are almost entirely reserved for low-density housing, meaning they’ll hardly develop at all, and in any case have low contributions to the market potential of the immediate area, in spite of their residents will benefit from growth on the neighboring corridors.
Growth should be permitted in the blocks with convenient access to the Opportunity Corridors, albeit at a more modest scale than the corridors themselves. This will contribute to the success of the businesses and transit that will be shared by everybody. Expecting a sea-change to occur on one thoroughfare while the surrounding neighborhood is preserved like it a historic artifact is stifling, unrealistic, and counterproductive.
If our goal is to develop a sustainable city, we have to confront the interests in preserving property values at the expense of new investments in housing and infrastructure. If we’re serious about granting opportunities on corridors, we need to allow the surrounding streets to progress to the next level of urban character too.
3. Corridor Opportunity Sites have unnecessarily high barriers to entry.
It only matters that the Builder’s Association and the Chamber of Commerce don’t like multifamily or transit-oriented projects because Chico doesn’t have much of an alternative to turn to. COS land is very scarce, and land prices are very high, so contemplating any corridor project is necessarily a multi-million dollar venture, far beyond the means of almost all Chicoans. Meanwhile, the public sector is confined to financing privately owned developments and is barred by custom and handicapped by law from pursuing equity or economies of scale. Out-of-town developers are the most likely instigators of high-density corridor projects and this isn’t a very favorable situation for Chico to be in. If we were to have success in attracting outside capital, it’s liable to come in a form like the Post, gated with little or no benefit to the surrounding community and streetscape.
The economic agents we ought to be empowering through our public policies are community members outside the development industry. On one hand, substantial development of transit corridors should occur through community supported non-profits like CHAT, CHIP, and the North Valley Housing Trust; but we should also furnish the setting for the people living along the corridors to leverage their modest financial resources and become developers in thousands of little projects, building up and splitting their homes into multiple units or erecting new smaller scale structures. Chico has significantly more wealth in the form of capable independent contractors than large firms willing to take on high-intensity construction projects. Our development strategy should reflect this.
In 1992, the same year Fred Davis departed as city manager, the task force developing the General Plan which preceded our current one came out with a “Community Character Study” which contrasted the early grids with development in the Davis Era.
The plan of the Avenues illustrates the continuity and accessibility of the residential grid pattern… the Parkview area, built in the 1960’s, is marked by discontinuous and fragmented streets and tenuous connections between neighborhoods.
Such is the case with the streets along North Esplanade, Nord, and West East Avenue. We may be inclined to say we should pursue a heap of state or federal grant dollars (if we weren’t spending them all on widening roads at the end of town) to redesign these roads and their adjacent streets to be more people-friendly and spur redevelopment that way.
I think this would be a mistake.
It isn’t that these areas are unworthy of grand opportunities, but they aren’t the most productive places to focus activity. If we consider what areas people currently appreciate, there’s much to be improved, and we should be nourishing those places and giving them all the space they need to grow to be even better.
Many barriers remain to sustainable development everywhere — like exclusionary zoning, mandatory parking, stroad engineering, the hostility of neighbors, and the absolute unreliability of local public transit — without even touching upon issues of ownership of land and capital. The governor just signed a few bills which will help widen the net of opportunity, but not by more than a little bit.
Chico will need to tackle those barriers all at once with more force and determination if we’re to reverse course towards a more sustainable city.
