The neighborly thing

As the hot summer sun bakes the distinctively colored houses and apartments of the Doe Mill Neighborhood, cars cruise through the comparatively narrow streets. Mercedes SUV and Honda alike, they carry occupants peering curiously through the windows of their air-conditioned vehicles at the southeast Chico development.

They’re different, these smallish, close-together houses where neighbors tend toward evening walks and chat sessions on attractive porches. The “lookie-loos,” as resident Scott Gruendl calls them, stare but rarely get out of their cars. “I usually sit on the porch and yell at people to slow down,” said the ordinarily affable city councilmember.

To see how such a neighborhood became an anomaly, it is necessary to take a look at the history of development in the United States.

From the 1880s to early 1940s, but particularly during the first two decades of the 20th century, neighborhoods were homey and compact, drawing from centuries-old theory on design and European ideas about how shops and businesses close by houses and flats were what made a village. Town planning concepts of the day, deliberately or not, supported a sense of community.

After World War II, American couples were nesting, fleeing the cities for suburbs that sprang up to meet them. The automobile became king, and within a couple of decades the two-car household became the norm. Shopping centers settled in “pods” at the end of town, reachable only by automobile. Downtowns languished. Mass-produced subdivision tracts ruled the landscape.

Then, in the 1980s, the building industry began seeing a backlash to these “blow-and-go” developments. Presented with the choice of smart growth versus sprawl, communities started choosing smart growth and pressing their political leaders to do the same. These resident rebels didn’t want a sea of garage doors and a two-hour commute; they wanted the self-sufficient neighborhoods their grandparents had enjoyed. They wanted what came to be called “new urbanism.”

Fresh out of Harvard and MIT in the early 1980s, Tom DiGiovanni had landed a job working on such Southern California housing developments as Laguna Niguel, an entire new town spanning thousands of acres in Orange County. It was what he had been trained to design—looping arterial roads and dead-end cul-de-sacs—but somehow it just didn’t feel right.

“There I was doing this and playing my small role, and I didn’t want to live there. I wanted to live in an organic, funky place like Laguna Beach,” remembered DiGiovanni, who has called himself a “recovering developer.”

“And it’s not like you’re making a loaf of bread—something that’s going to be consumed. You’re making something that’s going to last 100 years.”

He started studying planning theory again and reading about new urbanism. “It’s both a critique of how we’ve built and a recovery or rediscovery of how we built old places,” DiGiovanni said. “There was a moment of saying, ‘Aha, yes, now I understand why I feel a certain way in a certain space.'”

It’s the same feeling that leads Chicoans to drive out-of-town guests through Bidwell Park and then up The Esplanade, or through the Avenues and along old streets with their tree-lined sidewalks.

DiGiovanni, along with a man who later became his business partner, traditional-neighborhood designer John Anderson, was among a group of architects and planners who in 1993 created the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) and began work on a charter that would guide new urban planning.

New urbanism espoused the virtues of the “neighborhood,” even greater in importance than the houses and other buildings in it—gestalt development, if you will. Exemplifying this new/old philosophy was the “traditional-neighborhood development,” or TND.

Unlike the conventional developments of the 1940s and beyond, where a couple of streets bear a heavy traffic load for a neighborhood (think Chico’s north Esplanade or Marigold off East Avenue), TNDs are connected by a network of streets, and garages are relegated to the backs of the buildings. There is more than one way to get to one’s destination. The suburban “snout houses,” with their dominant garages and nondescript sameness, have no place in TNDs.

Perhaps above all, TNDs cater to pedestrians, to those who want to enjoy a leisurely stroll after dinner or walk a couple of blocks to catch an environmentally friendly bus to work. Designs must pass what the CNU calls the “Popsicle test": A kid should be able to walk to the store and buy a Popsicle without having to dodge fast-moving cars.

In 1988, DiGiovanni was hired to serve as project manager for a development in Nance Canyon, a mixed-use neighborhood that was to perch south of Butte Creek near Highway 99. But by 1990 DiGiovanni had parted ways with the developers, and it was clear the project wasn’t going to go forward. Developers Gerry Blakeley and Don Swartz left town, but DiGiovanni had taken root in Chico, buying a small, 1930s Tudor house in an old Chico neighborhood. He and his wife still live there with their three children.

A few years later, DiGiovanni called Anderson, a leader in the new-urbanism movement who had lectured and written extensively on the topic. DiGiovanni wanted an objective opinion on whether he should buy the old Diamond Match property and build on it. Before the deal could be done, someone else purchased that land, but Anderson was now hooked on Chico as well. The pair joined forces as New Urban Builders, a consulting and building firm. DiGiovanni named his business Heritage Partners and hung a copy of the CNU charter on his office wall for inspiration.

“I felt for a long time that Chico was ready for this,” DiGiovanni said. He bided his time and eventually secured the 48-acre property at the end of East 20th Street that would become the Doe Mill Neighborhood. At total buildout, the land will host 130 to 140 single-family houses, 50 to 60 multi-family units and parkland.

Ten years ago, DiGiovanni and Anderson were considered visionaries in a field where the same crop of names kept popping up. Peter Katz, the organizer and first director of the CNU and the author of The New Urbanism, a groundbreaking 1994 book on the movement, called the pair “pioneers” who truly “get” the concept. “They’re bringing the lost art of town-building to Chico,” he said.

New Urban Builders also offered up expertise when the city considered roundabouts to calm traffic on Manzanita Avenue, and the firm is set to construct single- and multi-family units in west Chico on the site where Texas-based Stirling Housing proposed its ill-fated student apartments.

Heritage Partners’ latest and most public coup, however, was the securing last month of property along Bruce Road formerly owned by Enloe Health System. DiGiovanni teamed up with Bob Kramer and Jeff Fleeman of the Haile Group of Florida for the deal.

DiGiovanni calls Doe Mill the “full-size model” for his next development, but the new project is definitely not going to be Doe Mill times 10. In fact, it will take 10 years to build out the nearly 250 acres. And the project will take place only after “charrettes"—public lectures and meetings—and an open-studio process where citizens can stop in and see engineers and architects at work.

There’s even a chance a high school could fit into the plan, if it’s built in the TND style, compactly in two stories like historic Chico High.

The nabbing of the Enloe property should prove “pretty exciting” for Chico, said Todd Zimmerman, a development market-research consultant and nationally known new-urbanism expert who was on a new-urbanism panel DiGiovanni brought to Chico in 1999. To build a true TND from scratch requires at least 150 acres, so Doe Mill doesn’t show the full possibilities, Zimmerman said in a telephone interview from New Jersey.

He is bugged by the “hey look” attitude some Chicoans have toward Doe Mill. “Fifty years ago Doe Mill would have been just a regular neighborhood,” he said. “To have people driving by like it’s an amusement park is a sad commentary.”

Old Chico was designed during the land speculation days of John Bidwell, when postcards and pamphlets were sent east in hopes of getting settlers to “go west” and stake their claim on land already conveniently set out in 300-foot-square blocks. Look at Chico’s oldest streets and you’ll see a classic Jeffersonian grid. The new, improved version adopted by new urbanists allows for more flexibility and curved streets yet retains the connectivity that doesn’t place the burden of traffic on just one or two thoroughfares.

Kim Seidler, Chico’s planning director, likes what he sees. “It was about five years ago I started taking TND seriously,” he said. “We’re now seeing the engineers coming around.”

The awakening, for Seidler, came as Chico began to reach what is called in the industry a “crisis of growth"—running out of land that can be built upon. “I began to notice the inefficient use of land associated with the way we had been developing, with very wide streets, large lots and strictly segregated uses,” he said. “The fact is that land is not a renewable resource.”

Seidler was one of several city staffers and decision-makers who attended the 1999 conference where leaders of the nationwide movement sought to educate the Chico community on the principles of new urbanism. Prominent new urbanist developer and key speaker Stefano Polyzoides blasted Mangrove Avenue as a nondescript series of strip malls and called subdivisions at the edges of the city “disastrous” and “inexcusable.”

DiGiovanni knew that as the first developer to build a TND in Chico, he would have to blaze a new trail when it came to zoning, codes and other city rules.

“So much of [new urbanism’s success] depends on local governments’ ability to accommodate livable communities. I see that as the big stumbling block,” Zimmerman said. “[I blame] lawyers. No one wants the liability.”

In Chico, DiGiovanni battled the city, usually genially, over such issues as height of streetlights, where to orient electrical boxes and how wide to make the streets. Some worried whether fire trucks could get though streets that were about 10 feet narrower than the city standard. In some cases, DiGiovanni said, it seemed as if city staffers were relying on 1950s-era textbook standards over common sense.

“He did run into some real problems,” Seidler acknowledged. “Each issue in relation to Doe Mill had to be dealt with basically from scratch. Ultimately, the right decisions were made, but it took a long time to get there.”

The Cold War spawned an anti-planning mentality, Katz said, with governments providing only the basic infrastructure and leaving the rest to private developers. “Post World War II, we abandoned the building of real towns and embraced the suburban model without ever really testing it to see if it would work.” It didn’t. At 70 percent build-out, Katz said, gridlock chokes the roads.

Seidler saw it come to a head. “There was almost a simultaneous and spontaneous recognition that our cities were not working the way they should. There was a barren sameness that characterized most post-war development,” he said. “The intellectual chicken finally came home to roost. We were building cities that people didn’t want to live in. There was no there there.”

Now, the city hopes to develop a “parallel code” that would guide decisions relating to TNDs. It will likely be done within a year.

The idea, said Seidler, is to “make it as easy to develop TND as it is to develop the standard model.” Officials meant well, but Doe Mill was very out-of-the-box at the time. “Narrow streets were something that were viewed as incompatible with fire protection and vehicle traffic,” he said. “That is changing. We’re viewing streets in a different way. … We’re looking at the past and we’re looking at the future. There is a lot of introspection going on right now.”

Although DiGiovanni is on board, Zimmerman bluntly called parallel codes “a stupid idea.” Cities’ current regulations are so messed up, with patches inserted piecemeal to solve traffic and other problems over the years, that they need an entire overhaul. “Either you do it or you don’t do it,” Zimmerman said, contending that zoning should be less set in stone and more market-driven.

Scott Gruendl, the Chico city councilmember who works for Glenn County as the assistant welfare director, was fifth in line to buy in Doe Mill. He chose the Magnolia model, with its three bedrooms and two and one-half baths. He added on a 535-square-foot carriage house above the garage, an option that started at $43,000, for an income source to help pay his mortgage.

He’d had his eye on the place since he used to walk his dogs along the diversion channel off East 20th Street. “When they first started building I couldn’t figure out what they were building because the houses had two electrical units,” he said. Once the streets were in and he saw the conceptual drawings, “I thought this is exactly what I had been looking for. I had been looking for about two years, and somewhere along the line I decided I wanted a new house, but I became frustrated because every new house was the same.”

Gruendl, a proponent of smart growth, decided to “put my money where my mouth is” and moved into his new home in October 2002.

As the project’s developers had hoped, neighbors hang out on porches and plan block parties, and children from nearby developments come to play soccer on the green field at the core.

“On the weekend, it’s kind of like Disneyland. Everyone’s walking around the neighborhood,” Gruendl said.

He counts among his neighbors teachers, young couples, couples with just one small child, professionals and a handful of empty-nest baby boomers. “I’m the oldest guy on the block,” said Gruendl, 39. Most of his neighbors are in their late 20s or early 30s.

That’s typical of new urbanism, according to studies by Zimmerman and his partner, Laurie Volk, who found that 65 to 75 percent of residents in those developments are younger singles and couples. Another 20 to 30 percent are empty nesters and retirees, while the remainder are larger families. There aren’t many kids living in Doe Mill houses.

The most frequent criticism DiGiovanni hears about Doe Mill is about the size of the lots: The back yards are small—32-by-36 feet for the smallest model in the initial phase—compared to those of houses built a few decades ago, but he contends they are almost on par with other newly built conventional houses in the same price range.

Gruendl, who is glad to forgo mowing grass for tinkering with his patio and vegetable garden, concurs: “The most common thing the people say is the houses are too close together,” he said. “Show me a new house in Chico where the houses are not close together that is not $400,000.”

Somewhere along the line, new urbanists got together and decided “compact” would be better to say than the “D” word that so stresses residents and city officials.

“Density became a dirty word when the way we built density got dumbed down over the last 30 to 40 years,” DiGiovanni said. People see a 200- to 300-unit apartment complex and think that’s what dense development means. The trick is, when new-urbanist principles are applied, neighborhoods aren’t supposed to feel that dense.

Even as the city’s General Plan hopes for seven units an acre, conventional developers are content to build at three and one-half to five units per acre. Doe Mill averages seven to eight units per acre. The development’s bungalow courts were conceived as 16 units per acre.

When people tell DiGiovanni Doe Mill is too dense, he finds the view ironic. One of his favorite streets in Chico is The Esplanade, which was profiled in The Boulevards Book by Allan B. Jacobs. The blocks nearest the downtown contain offices, small apartment buildings, small homes, large homes and a bed and breakfast inn. Parking is in the rear. The density, averaged out, is 15 units an acre.

“We’re trying to build places that resemble the best parts of Chico—the places people love,” he said.

“On a personal level, I’m very attracted to TNDs,” said Seidler, the planning director whose family lives in an old Chico neighborhood flanked by student rentals. “I like the relationship of the buildings to the street. It frames the street and makes me feel like I’m in a place. I like mixed densities and mixed uses. I like the concept of placing living space closer to destinations,” he said. “I like being able to walk and have things to look at. When I see subdivision walls, I feel very isolated as a pedestrian, and it’s boring, to boot.”

If there’s one big criticism of traditional-neighborhood developments, it’s a lack of affordable housing contained within.

“I’m probably more concerned about that aspect of TND than anything else,” Seidler said. “I see no reason why affordability cannot be built into a TND development. As far as I’m concerned, Doe Mill is not an affordable development. But it’s certainly no less affordable than most developments that are being built.”

Doe Mill houses start at $197,500; the one- and two-bedroom houses in the new bungalow courts range from 850 to 1,350 feet and are at least $30,000 less. That’s well below the median home price in Chico but still well out of reach for lower-income residents. The four-plex apartments have been bought by investors who are renting each unit for at least $925 for a two-bedroom.

It’s a conundrum. New urbanists already feel altruistic in that their developments reduce urban sprawl, conserve resources and promote walking and neighborly behavior. Should they be expected to fill the affordability gap, too?

“Why would you lay that on the new-urban developers if you’re not laying it on anyone else?” asked Zimmerman. It costs more to build houses these days because of factors ranging from land prices to rising workers’ compensation insurance costs. At the same time, most developers are still turning a healthy profit.

DiGiovanni hopes part of the community-wide goal can be achieved in new-urbanist neighborhoods through economy of scale—integrating smaller, cheaper houses into the already mixed-used neighborhoods. “We are continuing to look for ways to look for houses that are smaller and cuter and more affordable.”

Noted new urbanists Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk support the idea of integrating affordable housing at a 1-to-10 ratio among market-rate homes that look similar from the outside.

In revising the Housing Element of its General Plan, the city is considering requiring developers to include a certain percentage of affordable homes in each project.

In planning circles, new urbanism is old news. Architects and planners were first on board, with policymakers following behind and conventional developers keeping an eye on the trend from the sidelines.

Recently, the conservative Builder Magazine tabbed new urbanism as the No. l development trend during the past 25 years. New-urbanism experts who could scarcely scare up an audience at conventions seven or eight years ago are packing the house. Investors, too, are starting to see sprawl as a poor bet and turning toward TNDs.

“When the new urbanism first came on the scene it was viewed by a lot of those in the business scene as a niche market,” said Katz, who has himself become a developer. “Change is coming not from the producers but from the consumers. … More and more it is the preferred model.”

“In Chico,” observed Zimmerman, “most of the developers are builder-developers, which is a very high-risk, low-margin business.” Builders either focus on residential or commercial development; few do both. That might change as the industry continues to look inward.

“For the past 20 years builders have been focused on one very large demographic, which is the full-nest household,” Zimmerman said. But baby boomers are downsizing as their nests empty, and younger generations are subscribing to less-is-more ideals such as those promoted in Sarah Susanka’s best-selling Not-So-Big House series. “Progressive builders around the country are beginning to see that. The conventional wisdom is no longer wise.”

Gruendl believes Chico is many years from a full-scale attitude shift by builders. “They’re used to doing what they do, and what they do makes money, so why do anything different?” he said. “There’s no market reason for any of them to do anything different. They all have waiting lists.”

But when these “production builders” do get on board nationwide, Katz and DiGiovanni predict, new urbanism will have truly gone mainstream.

“Beneath their skin, they’re still production houses,” Katz said. Builders are learning that with what’s known as mass customization they can still “make it feel more individual while still retaining a lot of the economy of scale,” he said.

Will the movement be watered down if developers shift to new urbanism not because they buy into the philosophy, but because it sells? “At the end of the day it shouldn’t matter,” DiGiovanni said. “These wonderful old neighborhoods, whether they’re in Chico or Westwood or Los Angeles or in old Orange or Anaheim or Pasadena, these places were also built by profit-minded individuals.”

“Every developer is doing it for profit,” Katz agreed. “It’s not a question of being an enlightened developer. It’s knowing what the market wants.”

DiGiovanni believes the last holdouts will be converted in 10 or 20 years as they see the trees along the Doe Mill streets grown up, creating an Oleander Avenue-like canopy. “The houses will recede in importance. Architecture really is secondary to urban design,” he said. “Buildings are forming a space that can be felt.” In other words, it’s all about the neighborhood.

Seidler doesn’t like the term “smart growth.” “It implies that everything else is stupid, and maybe it’s only stupid to perpetuate it to the exclusion of everything else,” he said. “I don’t want to suggest that there’s no longer a market for the standard suburban model. This is an issue of choice.”

A plan for the old Diamond Match property surfaced last week, and while it was not touted as new urbanism, conceptual drawings did show mixed uses.

Developers who used to look at DiGiovanni strangely are sitting up and taking notice. “I don’t think they thought I’m crazy as they thought I was two years ago,” he said.

Georgie Bellin, a Chico real-estate agent and former mayor who also develops property, was converted after she took a nationwide tour of new urbanist developments.

“I was just sold on it—the charm of it,” said Bellin, who spent 30 years selling conventional subdivisions. “The standard was that people wanted the cul-del-sacs with big back yards and two- and three-car garages,” she said. “But I’ve always had a long list of clients who want me to call them when something comes up in the avenues—the cute, little bungalows.”

Now, she lives in Doe Mill, where she and her neighbors have a standing date Sunday evenings to barbecue in their back alleys as children ride bicycles nearby and young couples show off their new babies. “I’ve never seen that in all my years in Chico living on different streets,” she said. “There’s different times in your life where different things fit you. For a lot of people, it doesn’t feel right. But for a lot of people it does. I’m truly living in Doe Mill for the experience of Doe Mill.”

Those who admire Doe Mill from afar, especially the Eastwood model with its sloping, cat-slide roof, often come up with the word “cute” in describing the neighborhood.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” DiGiovanni said. “We try not to make it precious. This is for real people living real life.”

Many believe that, intrinsically, it means a lot more to create a neighborhood than to build a house. "The real genius of new urbanism is in understanding that what was wrong was not what was in the house but what was around the house," Katz said. "Until recently, we didn’t understand what it was about certain neighborhoods that made us feel good. We thought it was just because they were old."