One of the more startling bits of advice I have heard recently came from a financial planner on television who said: “Don’t marry anyone you wouldn’t want to divorce.”
The advice, of course, is to marry only someone who is rational and has the ability to cut a deal, if and when the time comes to part. In urban planning, this advice could be translated as: “Don’t build anything you do not want to tear down.”
That statement would perhaps shock developers and architects who believe they are building something of permanent value, just as much as the advice on divorce would shock starry-eyed kids in love. Even so, just as many marriages fail to last forever, real estate development is often a temporary condition — especially in the swirling vortex of cultural change and land-use speculation of present-day California cities.
The concept of tearing down buildings has special application to shopping centers, which have the shortest useful life of any type of commercial real estate. Why? To start with, fashions generally change faster than buildings. Supermarkets replace the corner grocer, and the volume discounter replaces supermarkets. In other cases, “anchor” merchants may go out of fashion (remember Montgomery Ward?) and become living fossils long before the lease runs out. And, as in the case of Rancho Cordova, shifting land values can play a role in dooming shopping centers, particularly when the housing market is hot and the value of the underlying land starts to spiral.
Cordova City Center, a residential and office complex in the recently incorporated City of Rancho Cordova in Sacramento County, is an example of a moribund shopping center being replaced by a medium-density apartment complex with 208 units. Built primarily during the 1960s and ’70s near the now-closed Mather Air Force Base and huge Aerojet aerospace complex, Rancho Cordova is an archetypal California suburb, with an underdeveloped urban form made up largely of tract housing and endless, ugly retail strips on major corridors.
The site of the former retail center is an odd shape that does not lend itself easily to housing, at least the kind of row housing and stacked flats planned by the Lily Co., a Sacramento-based, family-owned apartment developer. On the positive side, the developer and the architects at Notestine Mogavero of Sacramento have 10 acres to work with. Even better, the development is located across the street from a Sacramento light rail station. The location triggers the benefits of the city’s transit-oriented development ordinance, including a waiver for about a third of the parking normally required. About 5% to 15% of future residents are expected to commute to work via transit, mostly to downtown Sacramento, the regional job center.
The most refreshing part of the plan for Cordova City Center is the developer’s decision to build a low-rise neighborhood, rather than a monolithic apartment complex. The oddest part of the plan, at least at first glance, are the skewed angles of the individual housing blocks in relation to one other. The buildings look as if they had been laid out originally on a square grid that was subsequently shaken. (I can imagine an architecture student who has been up all night designing an apartment complex, tosses the cardboard model in the back seat and drives hurriedly to school just in time for the design jury, only to realize, when she has arrived, that she forgot to glue the buildings to the board.)
In actuality, the askew arrangement is the resolution of a difficult formal problem, to wit: What is the best way to maximize the number of units on an oddly shaped site, while maintaining the rigid straightness of row housing? In a simple but inspired idea, the architects have made a big plus out of the trapezoidal green spaces between the blocks, which now become socially active little green spaces. In more conventional, less conscientious hands, the green spaces could have become hedges or something else equally idiotic.
Architect David Mogavero says these little green spaces are a kind of homage to Tony Guzzardo, a landscape architect who planned many of the suburban divisions of the 1960s and ’70s in Northern California. Guzzardo made a point of integrating parks directly into neighborhoods, and, where possible, connecting the parks with green strips. It is the connectivity of those green strips that Mogavero seeks to emulate.
In its layout, Cordova City Center reflects the city around it, particularly the heavy traffic on Folsom Boulevard, one of the city’s main commercial streets. The architects locate a commercial building directly on Folsom, which is both contextual and defensive, insofar as the long, horizontal building will screen much of the residential site from the busy arterial street. Apartment buildings lie immediately adjacent, while the streets that border the project area on either side lead to older residential neighborhoods.
The city has yet to approve the project, and designers are still bickering with the fire department over on-site turning radii. But there is reason to believe that, beyond wanting to create some desirable density in suburban Rancho Cordova, city officials view Cordova City Center as the first piece of a future town center.
“We are hoping to establish a precedent for the rest of the district,” said Mogavero. The project represents “the first time anyone is doing a suburban retrofit project in this city,” he added.
For Mogavero, the town center idea offers an interesting artistic challenge of being true to the look of the existing community while introducing some unfamiliar elements. In his formulation, his design represents “three places,” the first being the traditional American street with separated sidewalks, retail on the street and human-scale street lighting. The second is the visual look of the 1970s, which is the “authentic” look for this young city. The third place, Mogavero said, is the future, represented by density, public life and transit.
Unlike retail, housing probably has the longest life of any building type. That is one reason why housing can be considered the template for building cities. I don’t know how long Cordova City Center will last, and I don’t want to see it torn down. When it does eventually go the way of all buildings, however, this project will leave order, not awkwardness, in its wake. In the placelessness of suburbia, city building has started.
