ABAG's Got My Back

Petaluma360.com tells how Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) deputy executive director Brad Paul seems to agree with the thesis of my recent letter to the Press-Democrat...and adds some good ideas of his own. Paul says:

“There is so much demand for housing in the Bay Area, yet I’ve heard statistics saying that 40 percent of single family homes are owned by a single occupant. That is usually an elderly person who can’t find a new place that will be equal to the home they own. That dries up the market for younger people wanting to purchase their first home.”... He said local governments should make it easier for owners of single-family homes to subdivide them into apartments and 2nd-unit “inlaw” rentals. He also supported more aggressive “acquisition rehabilitation” programs on the part of local governments, where a city purchases dilapidated housing, repairs the homes and then puts them on the market for rent or sale to low-income families, usually with some financial subsidization by the local government.

See the full article. Rock on, Brad Paul!

Affordable Housing without the Sprawl

Here's a letter I just sent our local daily, the Press Democrat, responding to their article on a new push for residential homebuilding.

It's true that affordable housing is in short supply locally. However, the stock response many are calling for, i.e. to keep building sprawling new subdivisions and condo complexes, will inevitably skew toward the more affluent and continue to erode the County's environmental quality.

Looking around Santa Rosa, I note an abundance of larger homes, built a half-century ago for big families and now housing one or two retirees. The smart solution to affordable housing at this point would be to identify and address all the hurdles that stand in the way of splitting these big suburban houses into two or three units that can be rented or sold separately. It will take a comprehensive re-think of zoning, building codes, bank lending protocols, tax incentives, and more. Daunting, sure, but these are all just policy obstacles, which means all we really have to do is get some key people to change their minds. 

Look at the Victorian-era houses in old neighborhoods, originally single family homes that were split up nearly a century ago into multiple units to accommodate smaller, less affluent households during the Depression. It's time to re-visit that kind of adaptive thinking about truly affordable housing. 

Signs that Lie

Until recently, I was aware of only one of these, and I dismissed it as an unfortunate anomaly. But now I know of at least two little residential areas near my own Santa Rosa neighborhood where the "NO PARK ACCESS" signs on the access roads leading into the developments are not telling the truth. In both cases, I have found these very streets lead to lovely trailheads into Howarth Park. These are clearly legitimate park entrances, given the paved path between two houses in one case and the carefully built and maintained fencing lining the other entrance.

I can understand a desire on the part of both the city and the neighborhoods' denizens to not have the narrow streets of these quiet residential areas become clogged with the cars of hikers, picnickers, and mountain bikers from all over town. At the same time, I perceive what's going on here through my own class warfare lens, as affluent homeowners who can afford to live adjacent to the park wanting to keep privileged access to themselves. Plus there's a typically Santa Rosan car-centricity to this issue. It's only because it's assumed people are going to be driving to these neighborhoods and leaving parked cars in residents' ways that there's a problem. People entering these neighborhoods on foot, as I usually do, to access the trailheads is unlikely to ruffle anyone's feathers.

Whether these are fair perceptions on my part or not, let's not post dishonest signage to achieve our crowd control aims. I think it would be fair, reasonable, and truthful to replace the NO PARK ACCESS signs with PED/BIKE PARK ACCESS ONLY or NO VEHICLE ACCESS TO PARK signs.

Until the city and the residents are ready for that change, here are my secret directions to these trailheads. See you there.

1. Heading east on Montgomery Drive from downtown Santa Rosa, turn right on Jackson Drive and go three blocks uphill, then turn right on Sullivan Way. The trailhead will be on your left, about six houses up along Sullivan. (It's shown on Google Maps.)
2. Again heading east on Montgomery from downtown, turn right on Summerfield Road, then left on Rock Springs Drive.Turn left on Quartz Drive, then left again on Slate Drive. The trailhead is on your left, opposite Quarry Pointe Drive. (How do developers come up with these street names? This trailhead also shows up on Google Maps, as a narrow green strip.)

Culs-de-Sac and Connectivity

Santa Rosa's layout at times reminds me of a giant version of McKinleyville, an unincorporated community in Humboldt County, just to the north of my erstwhile home, Arcata. Like McKinleyville, Santa Rosa appears to have a history of subdivisions planned in isolation from the surrounding community. As a result, entire neighborhoods may have a couple of street connections to a major thoroughfare, but no streets connecting the residents with adjacent neighborhoods. If your kids want to go visit their classmates in the next subdivision on foot or by bike, they have to go out to the busy trunk road to get there. This isn't such a big problem in McKinleyville, a small town where traffic is relatively light. But in Santa Rosa, it can be downright dangerous to get from one neighborhood to the next if you don't subscribe to the local norm of climbing into your SUV to make the trip.

Santa Rosa could use a lot more pedestrian/bike connectors between the ends of culs-de-sac or adjacent residential streets that are not connected for car travel. Our neighborhood has one good example of what I'm talking about, an unassuming gap in a fence that connects Ahl Park Court with the corner of Sandra Way and Lurline Way. This simple portal is designated in purple ink as a "bike path" on the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition's Sonoma County bike map. Scanning the rest of that map, one gets the sense such connectors are a pretty rare feature in this city.

Hopefully future development in Santa Rosa can make such bike/ped connections a required condition of approval. It can be hard to retrofit them into existing developments, but we should look for places this could be done and add them. 

This topic may seem like community planning minutiae. But I believe it's the sum total of little things like this that add up to whether a community really is walkable, or whether it becomes the kind of place where people feel practically compelled to start up their car nearly every time they leave the house. 

Roadside Spray

This time of year, when the grass is green all over, it's easy to notice something I'd overlooked since moving to Sonoma County last summer. The one place the grass isn't green is in a narrow strip a foot or so wide at the very edge of the highway. A telltale sign of recent herbicide application.

Honestly I was a bit shocked the first time I noticed this a couple weeks ago. Long ago I took the practice of roadside spraying in stride, but Humboldt County got wise and banned it many years ago, replacing it with manual vegetation management -- a bit more costly up-front, but with fewer harmful environmental consequences. A little searching online shows me that several other northern California counties have also gotten Cal Trans to drop roadside spraying. Given its environmentally conscious populace, I'm surprised to see Sonoma County is still poisoning its roadside vegetation.

No Ped Crossing

What's up with these things?

I know, the obvious reason for these barricades is to stop pedestrians from crossing where it's unsafe. But why is it unsafe? Seems like a cheap remedy for poor traffic engineering at the expense of walkers. I'd like to see Santa Rosa make it a policy to phase these out everywhere it's feasible to do so, even if it means adding some traffic calming measures like bulbouts (curb extensions) at corners.

There are certain corners where I think the pedestrian barricades make no sense. See for example the west side of the intersection of Steele Lane and County Center Drive. If you're at the bail bond shop on the southwest corner and you want to visit the mini-mart or fast food joint (ah, the cultural richness that is Santa Rosa!) on the northwest corner, you have to cross east, then north, then west, each time waiting for a traffic signal, rather than cross a single street. If the people who design and build these things had to live with the consequences every day, they wouldn't stand it for a minute.

Massive Transit Fail

I've noted how inadequate our local bus service in the Santa Rosa area seems, given how large a community this is. My only metrics for this were the limited hours of service, low frequency of service on each route, and my casual perception of low ridership.

My friend Mike just shared with me an online resource that gives us a quantitative look at just how poorly we fare in urban transit compared with the rest of the country. Check out:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/how-your-citys-public-transit-stacks-up/

This link features a searchable list of 290 of the country's major urban areas. The greater Santa Rosa area, with over 314,000 people, is well above the threshold for inclusion in this list.The table is ranked by how many transit rides per capita took place in each metropolis in 2013. Not surprisingly, New York City comes in first by a mile with 229.8 trips per capita. SF-Oakland is a distant second with 131.5 rides.

Santa Rosa? 125th with just 12.3 rides per person. OK, let's not make a big deal about us being less transit-friendly than the nation's biggest urban areas. Let's make some fairer comparisons. Santa Cruz, half the size of greater Santa Rosa with 169,000 people, nearly triples our per-capita ridership at 33.1. Fresno (670,000), which just about no one in Sonoma County would look to as a greener or more enlightened community, beats us with 17.3 rides. Chico, Santa Barbara, Stockton, Oxnard, and quite a few other California cities larger and smaller than us, also beat our ridership. (OK, some California cities do worse than us, but pretty few.)

So what's going on here? I doubt Santa Rosans are all that ideologically opposed to public transit. Public transit gets its share of lip service, but not many butts on the seats. Maybe it's an affluent enough community that more people have the choice to drive here than in other places. Whatever other factors are at work, I really do think a serious investment in better service -- more frequent trips, more routes, and longer operating hours -- would get results and make us look better in those rankings next time around. It will be interesting to see how County transit's new policy of free service for veterans and college students affects ridership for 2015.