Contra Costa looks to NU for a vision

Fregonese Calthorpe Associates is hired to draw a regional plan for a California county where job and population growth is outpacing the supply of housing. Contra Costa County is feeling the pressure. The latest census revealed that the San Francisco Bay Area county had grown 18 percent in the last decade, and over the next 20 years, the current population of 950,000 is expected to be joined by another 225,000 people. To deal with the issues and impacts from such an influx, the Contra Costa Mayors Conference, representing the 19 cities and the county, hired new urbanists to begin work on a regional plan this summer. The impetus for a regional plan came from a small group of city officials who realized the need for a fresh look at growth, according to Don Blubaugh, City Manager of Walnut Creek. Cities were making development decisions in isolation, and the county needed someone “to help us chart a course for the future: How fast do we want to grow, where do we want to grow, what do we want to be?” Blubaugh says. “And to do that in a way where land use, transportation, air quality, poor schools, and reuse of land were all put together and looked at as a whole.” Among the handful of firms that responded to a request for qualifications, the Mayors Conference picked Fregonese Calthorpe based on the firm’s previous and ongoing regional planning work in Salt Lake City, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Portland (Oregon), and other metropolitan areas. “The Bay Area at large is producing more jobs than housing,” says principal Peter Calthorpe, “so the real challenge is how to find more appropriate housing sites at appropriate prices, as well as provide more alternatives to the automobile. The good news for Contra Costa is that it is fairly transit rich already.” The county is on the expanding Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) network and is also served by a Caltrain commuter rail line. Calthorpe adds that with its mixture of poor and rich cities, the county is “microcosm of the whole region. Part of the exercise is, I believe, that if we can solve the problem in Contra Costa, we can solve it at a regional scale.” The county already has some “greenlines,” or urban growth boundaries, that have come about on an ad hoc basis through ballot initiatives. The regional plan will add polices on infill development and redevelopment to these boundaries, Calthorpe says. Fregonese Calthorpe’s work will begin with analyses of the county’s transportation, housing, and economic conditions. The firm’s collaborators include Strategic Economics, an economic consultant firm, and traffic planners Fehr and Peers. In addition, public workshops will get the planning effort started. “We will do hands-on mapping exercises with stakeholders to give them a choice about where development should happen and what type it should be. From that we will build a series of alternative scenarios and analyze those,” Calthorpe says. In this process, participants are given chips that represent the amount of projected development and are asked to place them on the map of the county. The result is that only by stacking the chips — i.e., using already developed land and building at higher densities — can participants preserve open space on the map. For Calthorpe, such public workshops are essential to the success of the regional plan. “In order to bring about change, you’ve got to affect the way people at the grassroots envision the growth of their cities and regions,” he says. Blubaugh has already tested the mapping exercise on small groups and is convinced that the general public is ready to move on to New Urbanism. “Once people begin to understand that they need to figure out where we are going to put the growing population, they invariably make the right choice. They try to preserve the land outside the urban growth boundaries, but they are then willing to look at reinvestment in old downtowns, housing over retail, and transportation nodes.”