CP&DR

Telecom Hotels--Meance or Enhancement?

Oct 1, 2000

Stephen Svete, Trends, Vol. 15 No. 10 Oct 2000

It seems like a grand time for urbanists. Downtowns across California are dusting off their dancing shoes and, in some locations, absolutely cutting up rugs. This is particularly the case in older downtowns that have enough amenities – the sort that neotraditionalists like to copy — to draw recreational use. In the best cases, the workaday downtowns of yore have evolved into the work/play/live spaces of today. San Francisco, Santa Monica, and San Diego may provide the best examples. In...

Path to Nice Roads Bypasses California

Aug 1, 2000

Stephen Svete, Trends, Vol. 15 No. 06 Jun 2000

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Likewise, you can lead California's road builders to ISTEA/TEA-21Transportation Enhancements, but you apparently can't make them take advantage of the matching funds. That's a shame because this resistance ensures that the state has poorly landscaped roads, fewer bridge and railroad depot renovations, and minimal interpretive centers for historic and scenic area. The Transportation Enhancement (TE) program is a cornerstone o...

Path to Nice Roads Bypasses California

Aug 1, 2000

Stephen Svete, Trends, Vol. 15 No. 08 Aug 2000

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Likewise, you can lead California's road builders to ISTEA/TEA-21Transportation Enhancements, but you apparently can't make them take advantage of the matching funds. That's a shame because this resistance ensures that the state has poorly landscaped roads, fewer bridge and railroad depot renovations, and minimal interpretive centers for historic and scenic area. The Transportation Enhancement (TE) program is a cornerstone o...

Have it YOur Way. Just Get Out of the Car FIrst

Jun 1, 2000

Stephen Svete, Trends, Vol. 15 No. 06 Jun 2000

Odd how the fast food joint has become emblematic of what's wrong with the modern world. The recent bombing of a McDonalds in Brittany was widely interpreted as nothing less than a shot across the bow of cultural globalization. Here on our golden shores, discussions about the merits of quick service restaurants are more measured, but the burger and burrito huts can cause high anxiety. Particularly loathed by many are drive-through facilities. These car-friendly land uses have been scoffed at ...

Conservation Dollars Do Indeed Go South

Apr 1, 2000

Stephen Svete, Trends, Vol. 15 No. 04 Apr 2000

Among the hardest dictums for regulatory planners to swallow is this: possession is 90%. Nonetheless, it's a truism not lost upon a growing number of state conservancies, which have shown that acquisitions are among the best ways to safeguard California's natural resources and open spaces. And even though there has been grumbling about a perceived bias for funding of north state acquisitions over Southern California ones, recent history does not appear to support the complaint. The state's...

Monster Houses Devour Neighborhood Scale

Feb 1, 2000

Stephen Svete, Trends, Vol. 15 No. 02 Feb 2000

In a currently popular coffee-table book titled The Not So Big House, Minneapolis-based architect Sarah Susanka argues for an age-old idea that seems quaint in our hyper economic boom times: quality is better than quantity. When it comes to addressing the current planning dilemma called monster houses ï¿½ the phenomenon of tearing down older houses and rebuilding with Godzilla proportions in Bambi neighborhoods ï¿½ Susanka may be to the 2000s what Andres Duany was to the 1990s: an architect that has desig...

New Wave of Coastal Planning Comes Ashore

Dec 1, 1999

Stephen Svete, Trends, Vol. 14 No. 12 Dec 1999

Like a powerful winter swell, political action related to California's treasured coastline is generating waves in halls of local government, the capitol and even courtrooms these days. Political, environmental, and economic development interests are combining forces to create some of the most intensive changes to coastal planning since the passage of the Coastal Act in 1972. Even cities that are many miles inland could feel the effects of this beach-protection movement. Perhaps t...

A Foreign Concept for Planners to Consider

Oct 1, 1999

Stephen Svete, Trends, Vol. 14 No. 10 Oct 1999

It's no surprise that Ephrain Corona didn't have time to talk when I called. The immigrant owner of a five-store Mexican roasted chicken chain based in Oxnard was too busy growing his business. What Corona undoubtedly realizes is that the time is ripe to cash in on California's fastest growing consumer segment: foreign immigrants. Joining this growing group of entrepreneurs are a few developers and a handful of planning departments – mainly redevelopment agencies – all of whom may have found the...

A Roundabout Way of Solving Congestion

Aug 1, 1999

Stephen Svete, Trends, Vol. 14 No. 08 Aug 1999

It was bound to happen. The neo-traditionalist planning movement is making inroads into the most doctrinaire of planning dynasties – Caltrans. Late last year, in a little-noticed but potentially monumental policy shift, the state road bureaucracy issued Design Information Bulletin Number 80, thereby granting guarded approval of modern roundabouts as part of California's highway design toolbox. Now it's up to local governments to press ahead with a back-to-the-future concept: intersections where...

Getting Beyond a Ctitical Mass

Jun 1, 1999

Stephen Svete, Trends, Vol. 14 No. 06 Jun 1999

They come with Spandex and attitude. And they come with an agenda no less ambitious than to change urban transportation. They are adherents to the merry prankster of grassroots planning movements — Critical Mass. Massers have a simple modus operandi: (1) organize mass bicycle rides once a month, (2) ride through the city, sharing travel lanes with cars, (3) demonstrate that bicyclists have road rights, too. Like other anarchist-oriented movements, Critical Mass boasts no central organizatio...

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