Look how we've grown

With magazines and newspapers proclaiming SLO County as the place for sprawl and high tech growth, one thing has become clear: It is not a matter of if we will grow, it is a matter of how.

This week, New Times takes a look at how our communities have changed and grown over the years. Photographer Jeff Greene hunted up old photos of several SLO County communities and recreated modern-day versions of each. The result hits home for many of us who recall a more pristine and less crowded past.

Then reporters Tracy Hamilton and Anne Quinn set out to define some of the buzzwords of the growth-control movement. They found that people, not just government, must have a vested interest and concern for how the world around them is shaped.

From retaining our character and using the tenets of new urbanism to conserving open space around us, our county has many challenges ahead. How we meet those challenges and use the tools available to us will shape the picture of our county for years to come.

While concerned citizens rally to save the last stretches of open land in SLO County, other groups are organizing to preserve their towns’ character.

Cayucos, known as "the Town that Time Forgot," may be the single place on the Central Coast that still looks and feels most like an old California beach town.

That took a lot of hard work. In 1995 a group called Cayucos First organized to make sure that the town maintained its charm. Now, any new structure built between Highway One and Ocean Avenue from 24th to 1st Street had better fit in–literally. New structures must be built in a way that suits the neighborhood, and can’t tower over older homes and rob them of privacy, light, or a view.

"There’s a lot of pressure to develop Cayucos, but because Cayucos First will take on any developer that threatens the scale of our town, we have been successful," said Ruel Czach, a founding member of the group. "We take photos of the area, draw streetscapes, and help build models to assist owners in scaling down their design." Czach is a builder and architect who served on the Cayucos Advisory Council for 10 years.

Thanks to Cayucos First, the town’s planning documents now include an ordinance designed to maintain a small-scale neighborhood design. Community planning regulations also require that new structures be compatible with historical architecture.

"Everyone who comes in wants to build as big as possible," said Czach. "But after they have worked with us, almost all the owners have said, 'This was a much better project than what we started with,'" he said.

One reason Czach offers for Cayucos First's success is that the community as a whole is very civic-minded. "One percent of the adults in the community actually serve on the Cayucos' Community Service District Board," he said.

In Arroyo Grande, civic-mindedness, along with hatred for a new shopping center on the West end of Branch Street, was also the reason Chuck Fellows formed a group called Preserve the Village.

"The west is supposed to be a gateway to the village," said Fellows. "Then they built this huge, massive, stucco-coated project there. It’s too big, too modern–it looks like it belongs in Scottsdale, Ariz., not Arroyo Grande Village. People are upset that when they drive into the village, they no longer see the church," he said.

While acknowledging it can’t do anything to change the new center, the group formed to influence a proposed development at the other end of Branch Street, where developer Richard DeBlauw has purchased the E.C. Loomis & Son Feed Mill, a group of historic buildings central to the town’s agricultural history.

Fellows, a member of the Architecture Review Committee, remembers when the architect for DeBlauw presented plans for the E.C. Loomis and Son building site. "‘He claimed that the buildings ‘had no historical significance and would be torn down.’" Fellows said he started Preserve the Village immediately afterward.

The group, which now has 260 members, continues to do battle with DeBlauw. On March 13, it submitted suggestions for changing the city’s guidelines for historic districts. "Right now they’re toothless," Fellows said.

Preserve the Village hopes to put teeth into Arroyo Grande’s historic district guidelines before the Village is reduced to three blocks of charm sandwiched between modernized stucco and cinderblock.

–ANNE QUINN

When USA Today fingered San Luis Obispo County as the second most sprawling region in the entire United States, planners, local officials, and many residents went apoplectic.

They accused the study's designers of playing fast and loose with density figures and of not taking into account the county's (and the city of San Luis Obispo's) policy of separating urban development areas with rural buffers.

Other people, including at least one state planning expert, said the study wasn't far off the mark. But during much of the discussion, the definition of sprawl was rarely articulated–and the alternatives even less so.

Sprawl is defined most often as automobile-centered, low-density, segregated development. Most of California's development growth in the last half-century has been on by this model, as farmland outside of central cities has turned into suburban neighborhoods and commercial development has become increasingly dependent on, and centered around, the automobile.

But as land has become scarcer and quality-of-life issues continue to clash with automobile-based development, a new movement has evolved over the last decade, "challenging the notions of conventional suburbia," writes William Fulton, one of the leading land use and planning authorities in California.

New Urbanism, as the movement has come to be known, is not anti-growth or even slow-growth. Instead, it challenges the auto-dominated, suburban model of development, focusing on ways to create communities that are human in scale, compact, mixed-use, and pedestrian-friendly–antisprawl, if you will.

In a state that will see its ranks swell by more than 12 million people over the next 20 years, New Urbanists understand that the issue is no longer one of growth or no-growth, but of smart growth. For instance, according to the American Farmland Trust, sprawling development patterns will result in the loss of more than a million acres of fertile farmland by the year 2040. Smart, compact growth could reduce that figure by half.

One of the most innovative and respected proponents of New Urbanism is Peter Calthorpe, principal in Calthorpe Associates, a Berkeley-based land use and planning firm that has helped dozens of cities envision and create compact development project

"Visioning" is an integral part of the process, said Matt Taecker, another principal at Calthorpe Associates, since typically each of the stakeholders in any particular development–developers, planners, city councils, traffic engineers, utilities and parks departments, for example–focuses on their own small slice of the entire pie. These players become de facto city-builders, but rarely take a holistic approach to the entire development or plan. New Urbanism asks a community’s stakeholders to get involved with the larger process, "visioning" a town’s future growth rather than just allowing that growth to happen.

John Mandeville, San Luis Obispo's new community development director, formerly the city's long-range planning division manager, said city residents did participate in a visioning process as the latest General Plan was being developed–a process that took almost five years, he said, and entailed literally hundreds of hours of community input.

Far from being the sprawling megalopolis described in USA Today, Mandeville says SLO Town, at least, is far ahead of the curve when it comes to smart growth. "We were one of the first cities in the state to define its urban growth boundary," he said. The importance of boundary definition one of the central tenets of smart-growth New Urbanism.

That tradition will continue, he said, with the development of the last two major parcels of land within the city zoned for residential use, the Margarita and Orcutt areas. Combined, they will add approximately 2,000 homes to the city. Both are considered infill, Mandeville said; both lie within city limits, and both are at least partially surrounded by other development. Both developments will be linked closely to employment areas and services, so that miles of new roads will not be necessary to make the developments successful.

On the large land-use map that dominates Mandeville's office, however, are blocks of white, representing potential rural residential development in the county just outside the city. That land is zoned rural residential–think ranchettes on half-acre parcels far away from retail or city services, practically the definition of sprawl. "The county has a few parcels of low-density residential development," said Mandeville, "and the city is concerned about these."

The city has also had to contend with would-be commercial developers of tracts abutting the city–the Dalidio property and Froom Ranch, to be precise–who have threatened to build even if the city does not annex the land and allow the development. (They’d build under county auspices.) Such ultimatums put the city in a tenuous position. By annexing the land into the city, it at least gains control over design and land use, not to mention garnering the sales tax income that’s become crucial to cities since Proposition 13 slashed income-generating property taxes.

While the Dalidio development may not technically be sprawl, with its mixed-use plans for retail, some housing, and open space infilling a tract of farmland that’s already partially surrounded by development, opponents still decry the project's massive scope and dependence on the automobile, not to mention the loss of prime and scenic ag lands that grace the southern entrance to the city.

No matter the fate of that or any particular development, writes Fulton, "The issue of sprawl vs. compact development has taken center stage in many planning debates over the past few years, and will likely continue to be at the forefront of planning discussion for the foreseeable future."

–TRACY IDELL HAMILTON

Even Atascadero, a town not known for protecting its open space, has joined the trend.

While committees redesign and try to preserve the center of town, the Atascadero Land Preservation Society is rallying to save some of the surrounding wild hills.

A major effort is underway to save 770 acres of oak woodlands, waterfalls, and steep slopes crowned with views of Morro Rock. What might otherwise become an upscale, exclusive neighborhood, would instead be turned into a community park. In two weeks, a pledge drive to raise funds to buy the 770 acres, initiated after property owner Frank Atkinson expressed an interest in preserving his land by selling it to ALPS, raised $104,000.

Despite his interest in preserving the land, Atkinson is a pragmatist who is well aware of the land’s value, estimated at $3 million. If trying to buy the land for that price sounds like a gamble, it won’t be the first for the town, which was founded as a colony by E.G. Lewis, a man some call a visionary, some call a crook.

Atascadero seemed like paradise to Lewis, who bought it for a shoestring and then set up a printing facility and published tracts inviting "colonists" from the Midwest to send him advance payments and help him finance its development. He laid out the town, complete with roads, a water system, and orchards.

Atkinson’s land appears on Lewis’ original maps. It was intended to be subdivided from the very beginning.

But Lewis, who began his development in the spring of 1913, wasn’t aware of the effects of erosion, the impact of torrential winter rains on steep and occasionally unstable slopes. A Midwesterner himself, he was unfamiliar with the fact that in Central California it doesn’t rain for six months of the year. He had envisioned a town of several thousand, not 23,000, the population today.

Val Houdyshell, who heads up the attempt to buy the Atkinson property, said that the group’s hope of preservation has been enhanced by an offer from a large national land trust. (While negotiations are taking place, she declines to name it.) She can hardly contain her excitement over ALPS’ success to date. "We are absolutely delighted the community has stepped forward. Atascadero has not only been generous with their financial support, but they have spoken out decisively in favor of protecting this land from development," she said.

The group plans its first fund-raiser Thursday, March 22, at the Atascadero Lake Pavilion. From that vantage point, Atascadero neighborhoods, nestled against the sheltering hills, look something like a Currier and Ives painting–one that can't be duplicated.

–Anne Quinn