The Bell-Muir quandary

On any given day, West East Avenue is chockablock with cars zipping west toward Highway 32 or east to The Esplanade past office buildings and houses, apartment complexes and supermarkets at a steady 45 mph. But if you turn north on Guynn Avenue for just two blocks to Henshaw Avenue, you leave the city behind and are in what appears to be farm country.

This area, a 400-acre mish-mash of small farming operations, abandoned orchards, ranchettes, mobile homes and stick homes on small lots, is known as Bell-Muir, after Bell Road and Muir Avenue, which border it on the north. It may look like farm country, and it’s outside the Greenline, but it’s zoned for minimum 1-acre lots, and about half the area has been developed.

Only a few acres of tended walnut and almond trees remain—though there are some substantial Hmong truck gardens, and Chico High School’s FFA operates a teaching farm on the north side of Henshaw between Guynn and Alamo. The site originally was intended for an elementary school and park and was purchased on the expectation that Bell-Muir would fill out, drawing more families to the neighborhood. Didn’t happen.

Even the Greenline’s godmother, former county Supervisor Jane Dolan, recognizes that Bell-Muir, despite its rural character, is no longer viable for traditional farming. In fact, when the county Board of Supervisors adopted the Greenline in 1982, this was the one area outside the Greenline that she and her fellow supervisors thought eventually would be brought into the city and developed.

That was 30 years ago. Though the subject of Bell-Muir has come up many times in official discussions, the land is still in the county and the city has no plan for developing it. From all indications, nobody knows where or how to begin doing so.

Part of the problem is that there are an estimated 150 landowners in Bell-Muir, and while owners of the larger parcels want to develop, those living on the small lots prefer to keep the area rural.

And development would be expensive because the area lacks the basic infrastructure—roads, street lights, sewers, storm drainage—that developers, in a partnership with the city, would have to pay for.

Right now, of course, there’s no pressure to develop the area. Because of the recession, nobody’s building anywhere. But that wasn’t the case just a few years ago, when Chico’s booming population had developers warning of a looming housing shortage and decrying the lack of developable land.

As recently as five years ago, at the peak of the housing market, some landowners in the area did express interested in developing, said Brendan Vieg, principal planner with the city of Chico. “But there’s no pressure now,” he noted, and as a result trying to resolve Bell-Muir’s problems has become low priority. There is some concern at the city, Vieg added, that this inattention could exacerbate the area’s historic tendency to build out haphazardly.

Although Bell-Muir is in the county, it’s understood that it will eventually become part of the city and that the city will be the principal planning agency for the area. When that will happen is anyone’s guess.

Under the city’s new general plan, Bell-Muir is one of five “special planning areas” set aside for possible future development. Whatever plan the city develops for the area will have to grow out of what is on the ground now, which means Bell-Muir will most likely end up as a transition zone in which small, low-density subdivisions will be interspersed among community gardens and small-scale farming.

“Integrating sustainable small-scale farming helps build social connections,” the general plan reads, “offers recreation, education, and economic opportunities, and provides open space and a local food source.”

But a plan won’t pay for the roads, sewers and storm drainage the area needs. Historically, city officials have looked beyond Bell-Muir, to the orchard land directly to the north, as a way to leverage improvements in Bell-Muir.

Designated “Study Area 1” by the City Council several years ago, when housing pressures had council members looking for new growth areas, and commonly referred to as the Mud Creek area, this 540-acre section of land is eminently developable, except for one thing: It’s outside the Greenline and still being farmed.

As Vieg put it, Mud Creek “could provide the economic driver for the development of Bell-Muir.” But environmentalists are sure to see it as sprawl that leapfrogs over Bell-Muir and resist any relaxation of the Greenline to enable its development.

The issue is moot, anyway. Nobody’s building. And if the housing market does pick up, the city has plenty of infrastructure-ready land already available. At this rate, Bell-Muir will look much the same 30 years from now as it does today.