While some folks may not be too fond of Peter Calthorpe in this city because of his connection to the SunCal project, there is no denying that he is a respected leader in the New Urbanist/Smart Growth/InsertCatchPhraseofChoicehere community.
As part of the E2 series, there were podcasts that accompanied each broadcast, Portland’s podcast talks about the subject of Transit Oriented Development, which I’ve read some folks write about as though it is simply a theory in the minds of urban planners, but it is a land use tool that has been embraced by cities like Portland.
Peter Calthorpe on what makes a Transit Oriented Development from the podcast:
“The formula for Transit Oriented Development is very simple. It’s diversity. Diversity in population and in land use so you have a place where you have a range of housing opportunities. You don’t want to ever say, this is a place for one kind of person: lofts for young people or condos for empty nesters or apartment buildings for seniors or anything like that. You want it to be a complete neighborhood. So you get a pretty broad range of household types, and age and incomes.
And then it has to be mixed with local destinations: local stores, cafes, shops, civic places, parks, schools, so diversity of population and of land use. And that ’s not enough, I can show you places in the suburbs that are actually diverse. There’s an office park on one corner, a shopping mall on another, and a condo on the third, and a subdivision on the fourth and there’s no walkability. It’s all divided by these huge, massive arterials with giant pedestrian unfriendly crossings. And we really had to work hard to make a local destination a car trip…
The next fundamental part of a TOD is the idea of a human scale, bringing the pedestrian back into the picture and creating streets that are pedestrian and bike friendly, as well as auto friendly, it’s quite a tricky job…
Walkability and pedestrian human scale plays out on many levels… What do you experience as you walk, is it a series of garage doors or is it a series of front porches? Do you have that old tree canopy overhead? You know there are lots of issues of how you shape the public domain so that it’s really truly pedestrian friendly and so I think those are the two fundamental design criteria of what makes a good TOD.
Density, intensity, these are things that vary place to place. As our population matures and as the economy shifts, I think we’re going to see more and more density. People are going to understand that living in a townhouse that’s truly in a town as opposed to floating off in the middle of nowhere makes a lot of sense for a lot of people. So when you have so little that’s of value in the public domain, no wonder people want large yards to escape in to. But if you no longer have to escape the public world you perhaps don’t need quite as big a private domain.”
This simply goes back to the issue of choice that was raised in the larger E2 broadcast. But I would say that regardless of where we all stand on the issue of a topic like Measure A or even the larger development of Alameda Point in general, the items identified in as components of Transit Oriented Development is something, I hope, that everyone can get behind such as:
- Diversity of population
- Diversity of land use
- Mixed with local destinations
- Scaled for pedestrians
- Walkability
These aren’t radical ideas, but definitely something that we should all have in mind for any development moving forward in Alameda.
As a side note, word has come in that the judge in the Beery case has made a tentative ruling, I’ll talk more about this tomorrow.
With all due respect to your respected leader, just what is it that Alameda has to learn from his leadership?
Calthorpe’s definition of diversity in population and land use pretty much captures the history and present state of this Island. However the increase in density part of his equation is the bug-a-boo that cannot easily be solved because of our limited off/on Island conduits . Get your leader to work on a formula that addresses a REASONABLE solution to this problem and this Island may reassess the density issue.
The solution to this issue appears to be outside the scope of modern CatchPhrase thinkers who can only formulate ouside the Island.
Comment by Jack Richard — July 8, 2009 @ 9:07 am
#1: Bravo!!
Comment by DL Morrison — July 8, 2009 @ 9:35 am
#1, he did offer a solution… PRT.
Oh, you said reasonable. Sorry, never mind.
Comment by Jack B. — July 8, 2009 @ 9:44 am
More and more density is fine in areas well served by many roads such that the “quality” of life for existing users in those areas is not harshly affected by more density. The older I get, the less time I want to waste on “getting there” on clogged tubes.
The majority of Alameda is fully built out. Our on/off island conduits are pretty set in stone and guarded by the US Constitution and the Interstate Commerce Clause. The Port of Oakland needs the depth of the turning basin for the container ships which enter, unload, load, turn and leave, to remain uncompromised by bridge or another set of tubes. The Alameda and Posey tubes limit the draw ships can obtain. Not many can cross over them. It becomes fantastically expensive to add egress/ingress to the island. It is not cost effective. There will be limited mass transit increases,unless someone is proposing re-installing the Key System now that GM is in the toilet.
We are an island for goodness sakes. All of our egress/ingress depends on the kindness of strangers. We are more similar in geography to Catalina Island than the other areas to which his generalizations may apply.
Comment by barbara — July 8, 2009 @ 11:23 am
Smart growth often gets described in these very idealized, essentially promotional terms. If it’s recognized as a promotion then it makes sense, but the problem is that it’s often presented as reality. Follow “X-Y-Z” steps and voila, instant perfect place.
I agree that it’s a useful model and preferable to sprawl, but I think the discussion has to get beyond the “either-or” mentality, and I don’t know why that’s so hard. A smart growth development here that’s realistically geared to local conditions and constraints might work well — but what’s currently proposed won’t work, and no amount of rhetoric can make it work.
Anyway, I think smart growth is really the nexus between well-intentioned environmentalists, possible well-meaning lawmakers who want to look good on these issues without offending RE interessts, and developers who want to eliminate any barriers to profitable projects — for the latter group, SG is a dream come true.
The environmentalists want legislative action in whatever form and the lawmakers want the path of least resistance, so they support each other’s agendas, and for them plus developers it’s a win-win-win situation — meanwhile, we’re the losers, the fall guys really. Everyone gets to take a stand on curbing GHG, even the developer(!) — which should tell you something.
Comment by DL Morrison — July 8, 2009 @ 12:07 pm
Does Peter Calthorpe live in a condo in the Berkeley flatlands or in a single family home in the Berkeley Hills?
Comment by AlamedaNayTiff — July 8, 2009 @ 12:38 pm
In a condo at the foot of University, right next to the train tracks, I’m sure … (Not far from where a well-known anti-car activist used to store his pickup truck.)
Comment by DL Morrison — July 8, 2009 @ 12:49 pm
http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/4rpcr
http://www.realtor.com/property-detail/21-Tanglewood-Rd_Berkeley_CA_94705_11a94702
Comment by AlamedaNayTiff — July 8, 2009 @ 12:57 pm
Are you saying that people who live in single family homes with garages on streets laid out for automobiles to travel through their quiet low density neighborhoods don’t have the right to demand tax dollars be spent to make others live in a different way??
Comment by dave — July 8, 2009 @ 1:10 pm
According to public records, Peter Calthorpe lives in the Berkeley Hills in a 3500 square foot home of four bedrooms and three baths on a 17248 square foot lot. And yes, the house has a garage. The home is valued at approximately $2,000,000.
Comment by AlamedaNayTiff — July 8, 2009 @ 1:21 pm
I liked the Peter Calthorpe that was a leader in ’solar villages’. It’s too bad he went ‘in a whole new direction’ to follow tax dollar hand-outs.
Comment by Dave Kirwin — July 8, 2009 @ 1:35 pm
DK: “It’s too bad he went ‘in a whole new direction’ to follow tax dollar hand-outs.” You’re once more ascribing malign motives without evidence. You may not agree with smart growth and prefer the countryside covered in low-density earthships, but understand that others can–and do–disagree with you for reasons other than greed and stupidity. If you want anyone to take you seriously, you need to allow for this possibility.
DJ: I’d argue that developers would prefer to plant fields with cheap tract homes. The reason they’re interested in denser urban housing is that there are too many planning obstacles to doing this. Developers are businesspeople looking to make money. They’re no better or worse than businesspeople in other industries. They risk capital and look for a return. One should be aware of their motives and negitiate well, but also realize that one can get a mutually beneficial outcome from cities working with them: it’s not necessarily a zero-sum game.
And as for Calthorpe…he’s successful and has a nice house–so what? Unless we move to a society with an equal distribution of income, the smarter, luckier, greedier, better educated (or whatever you prefer) people will have more money and live in bigger houses. We’re not going to solve that one in Alameda. Judge his ideas on their merits.
Comment by BC — July 8, 2009 @ 2:02 pm
Thank you, BC.
Comment by Linda Hudson — July 8, 2009 @ 2:54 pm
BC:
Are you not aware that the SunCal/Calthorpe plan is dependent on a massie taxpayer subsidy? That isn’t a “malign motive,” it is an unalloyed fact.
And the point on Calthorpe’s own house isn’t class envy, it’s the apparent hypocrisy of preaching that others must live a certain way for the greater good, even while he (and many of his lackeys) doesn’t.
And as far as judging his ideas on their merit, well, he apparently already has — they aren’t good enough for him.
Comment by dave — July 8, 2009 @ 4:17 pm
BC (#12) – well said.
Where Calthorpe lives is mostly irrelevant to the discussion, but clarification on where he lives seems helpful since the discussion has gone there. His neighborhood has many of the attributes he calls for: it’s pedestrian oriented, it’s got good access to transit, it’s mixed use (within a few blocks of two decent shopping areas), and he can probably walk (or bike) to Berkeley where (I beleive) he teaches. Yes, it’s a nice neighborhood, but so what.
The idea of TOD’s isn’t to stamp them out indiscriminately without regard to local circumstances. The point is to tailor them to the location. The whole idea of TOD’s is to go back to planning ideas that were in place, and guided, the building of American cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – exactly the time that much of Alameda was built. That is why much of Alameda looks just like what TOD advocates talk about. To say that TOD ideas don’t work in Alameda is to say that Alameda itself doesn’t work!?! Yes, the ideas need to be tailored to our circumstances, but the ideas do work.
Comment by david burton — July 8, 2009 @ 4:19 pm
14: The important word is “to” in the quotation: “It’s too bad he went ‘in a whole new direction’ to follow tax dollar hand-outs.” That’s imputing a motive, not stating a fact.
Comment by BC — July 8, 2009 @ 4:33 pm
I think it’s a bad strategy to assume the motives of others… at best you are only guessing. Who’s to know if someone is a fool or a tool or both?
Comment by Jack B. — July 8, 2009 @ 5:39 pm
So, it is ok for a corporation to have self-interest and seek profits and it is ok for an urban planner to live on a half-acre estate in Berkeley while espousing high density housing, but when average people try to protect what they most value in their community, they are called, “Nimbies?” And when those Nimbies push back, the alarm sounds that the inmates are about to take over the institution.
Those thick-headed local hillbillies can’t grasp that you are only trying to help them. Perhaps ridiculing and parodying them would get the message across? This isn’t a winning formula for building consensus in the community. It is a winning formula for deep divisions and never ending animosity.
Comment by AlamedaNayTiff — July 8, 2009 @ 5:44 pm
Some of my best friends are hillbillies.
Comment by BC — July 8, 2009 @ 5:55 pm
Maybe Mr. Calthorpe is an arrogant hypocrite. I’m not interested in being the judge of that, but I’m also not going to become an apologist or even worry about making excuses, because I agree with points David Burton made in 15 and will focus there.
I can’t say it is wholly irrelevant where Mr. Calthorpe resides, or that perceptions are not important, or that ANT’s comments 18 are irrelevant. I have deep issues about class and elitism.
But it isn’t all about one group asking another group to live a certain way. It’s about advocating that certain options be made available for others to voluntarily choose to serve their housing needs and help resolve other issues like access to and from jobs. It should not be about people like myself impugning people who don’t want that choice for themselves, but I do take issue with people who because they would not choose something, saying it is bad, stupid, or measuring whether it’s hypocritical to advocate that choice according to people live.
I think most of us might prefer to live in Calthorpe’s house and drive all the time, but it’s not possible. In order to advocate for density and transit corridors do we have to also advocate moving ALL the people out of the houses in the hills and restoring it to parks?
Comment by M.I. — July 8, 2009 @ 6:29 pm
#12: “Developers are businesspeople looking to make money.” Yes, that goes without saying.
I wasn’t looking to dump on anybody — I’m just wondering why state lawmakers put so much focus on high density housing and so little on growth boundaries. Look at the factions involved: environmentalists, developers, local communities, state lawmakers and their constituents — environmentalists might accept a variety of solutions but developers wouldn’t — so the easiest solution is to lean on a few communities to accept high density housing while letting everybody else off the hook.
Developers might prefer to build tract housing, I don’t know, but regardless, they haven’t lost the right to do so.
If you look at this in terms of money and political influence, it all makes sense — and that’s how things work.
I agree 100% w/ ANT — developers pursue their own best interest, state lawmakers pursue theirs as well (as politicians), but those of us living here are constantly being urged to consider the greater good. We have a right to consider our own interests and to push for development that’s “tailored” (agreed) to local conditions.
Comment by dl morrison — July 8, 2009 @ 7:55 pm
Increased traffic in a neighborhood means increased noise pollution, increased air pollution and increased risk of traffic accidents. These conditions both lower the quality of life for residents and lower property values. Why not compensate property owners for their losses? It isn’t only the large corporations that have economic interests; the average guy or gal does as well. How about compensating them with some of those redevelopment dollars to cover their losses? Perhaps $50,000 in tax credits per home? That is both smart and fair growth.
Comment by AlamedaNayTiff — July 8, 2009 @ 8:20 pm
Regarding the previous post #21, “Look at the factions involved: environmentalists, developers, local communities, state lawmakers and their constituents” contains a list players in this debate. As I see it, there is one player that is always conspicuously absent from the roundtable discussion: corporate job creators. One of the biggest reasons that we have a river of cars inching toward the inner Bay Area every workday is because the communities out in the valley and elsewhere never placed any demands on the developers to bring in an employer along with the new residents. Likewise, cities in the inner core have rarely been required to create housing for all of the new employees that will commute to their business.
The new state law establishing disincentives for sprawl is a step in the right direction. But why are the major corporations always absent from the table. Can anyone tell me why a major software firm has to be in Silicon Valley? The “business synergy” concept is bogus if you ask me. Cisco Systems could conduct their business from almost any community in the country that has a small airport within 30 miles. And they would save a lot on salaries in the bargain if they located in outlying areas with cheap housing prices.
I think a better example of a “new urbanist” leader would be the mayor of San Jose, Chuck Reed. He insisted, and had a council majority to support him, that the 25,000-home Coyote Valley project have a system of job triggers. What that meant, and still means in their Coyote Valley Vision, is that x number of homes can be built after y number of jobs are created. And service, retail and government jobs do not count toward the “y” total. Coyote Valley had the same checklist of transit-oriented, walkable features as Peter Calthorpe talks about. The difference between Calthorpe and Reed is that Reed has an actual city to run.
So now after 60 years of anarchic, unbalanced development, the solution centers around individual people adjusting their lifestyles and living in smaller homes and taking transit, if it’s going their way. It’s up to the individual to adjust, but not the corporate group. No demands are placed on them by planners like Peter Calthorpe. They are left to be footloose and fancy free.
Look through the literature on new urbanism. Yes, the neighborhoods that Calthorpe designs are better than what you find in Dublin. He might have a bigger impact if he concentrated on places like Dublin, rather than self-righteously asking us to add ten thousand more residents on a geographical cul de sac at the end of a two-lane road.
Comment by Richard Bangert — July 8, 2009 @ 9:10 pm
Richard B.:
You asked,
One theory of why businesses don’t necessarily want to be in just “any community in the country” is discussed in Richard Florida’s book “Who’s Your City.” Here’s a talk that he gave at Google, which is long, but I suppose shorter than reading the book. I actually found the book entertaining because he likes to pepper his narrative with music references. Although he has this annoying way of trying to truncate “mega-regions” into shortened names like “Char-lanta” for Charlotte through Atlanta. It becomes a bit much after a while.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khQ9BaXZAjM
Also you can see the maps created for his book.
Comment by Lauren Do — July 9, 2009 @ 7:04 am
Sili Valley has the people. Job-hopping is accepted, even encouraged in the tech biz, so even if the location is pricey, employers stay in SV to stay near their talent pool.
Comment by dave — July 9, 2009 @ 7:17 am
While the idea of locating employers near housing makes a lot of sense, the reality is that in this specialized world it’s harder to make that model work. People don’t usually move their homes to be close to their jobs anymore (now that people change jobs so frequently it’s just not practical), and people don’t usually find jobs that match their background and experience that are close to their homes.
Comment by Jill — July 9, 2009 @ 7:51 am
OK, I’ll accept the explanations given by #s 24, 25 and 26. Maybe it is an idealistic notion that we can create a balanced marriage of jobs and housing. We can’t legislate where businesses go.
We can, however, legislate how our public monies are spent. And I do believe there is something way out of balance when Caltrans spends an astronomical sum of money to reconfigure the 24/680 interchange in Walnut Creek and then a few years later embarks on another engineering marathon at the 580/680 interchange. Yet we can’t get a visit by a state senator to help focus attention on West End connections to the mainland. They want us to curb sprawl and add more housing but they won’t meet us halfway with some money to ease any hardships this might create. Instead, they make it convenient to drive to another time zone to sleep.
AC Transit has not made any written commitment to fund Bus Rapid Transit through the Tube, and Oakland has not made any commitment to accommodate such a system.
If we as a state are going to make it easy for people to choose sprawling suburbs, we should at least make it as easy to choose to live in the inner Bay Area. Transit agencies face cutbacks, yet disagreements over the design of the Bay Bridge triggers 10s of millions of dollars in added construction costs for a roadway. The cost overrun for the Bay Bridge alone could have built another tunnel or drawbridge on the West End.
By the way, take a look at the original base reuse map with the notation suggesting a new tunnel or bridge would be built to help make the vision a reality. Common sense told them they were never going to get the necessary transit ridership to prevent a bottleneck at the Tube.
After looking at that map, look at one of Peter Calthorpe’s maps from one of the first community meetings. The arrows on the map called “Alignments” correspond to Fruitvale, Webster and a yet-to-be-constructed crossing to Oakland from the mixed-use redevelopment area. The arrows pointed to the nearby Bart stations. They weren’t there to show wind patterns. Someone apparently suggested that he forget common sense and go with a management system called TDM rather than an infrastructure system called concrete and steel. That “Alignment” map doesn’t reappear in later workshops.
Comment by Richard Bangert — July 9, 2009 @ 1:48 pm
I don’t think that this an official AC Transit public relations piece — though it is catchy.
Comment by AlamedaNayTiff — July 13, 2009 @ 5:50 pm
One time on the 51 somebody popped a bubblegum real loud and everybody ducked under the seats. I didn’t duck because I was new here and didn’t know what to do but the funniest thing was people just sat up afterwards and nobody said a word about it, they just went about staring out the window. That’s true. If I knew how to rap, I’d write some lyrics about it.
Comment by AD — July 13, 2009 @ 6:13 pm
Daly purchases home in Fairfield
“District 6 Supervisor Chris Daly, who has often mocked his critics who do not live in San Francisco, announced today that he and his wife have purchased a house in Fairfield and that she and their two children moved there a month ago. Public records show that Daly and his wife, Sarah Low, purchased the home on a suburban cul de sac in Fairfield in April.”
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/cityinsider/detail?entry_id=44103
Comment by AlamedaNayTiff — July 23, 2009 @ 7:50 pm
That explains everyhing. He lives on a 1/2 acre in Berkeley. Surely he knows that volleyball in windtunnels is not copasthetic. Oh? He doens’t actually play volleyball? Just reads about people playing it? Great. Another don’t do as I do (sit at home and watch the sunset) do as I say – try to play any class volleyball or tennis or other wind sensitive sport in the estuary wind tunnel. But build the houses in the way for the developer to maximize his profit.
Comment by barbara — October 1, 2009 @ 10:11 pm