The legacy of Laguna West

Phil Angelides, chairman of the new Canyon-Johnson Urban Communities Fund, says there has been “very substantial progress in changing the thinking about how you design communities” since 1990, when he started developing Laguna West on the southern edge of Sacramento. The 800-acre development, about 10 miles south of downtown Sacramento, is about 90 percent complete, he says. Over the years, critics have found a variety of flaws, ranging from the inclusion of cul-de-sacs to the presence of houses with garages on their fronts. But Angelides says that in view of how early it was started, “It’s developing into a very livable environment.” The town center contains 50,000 to 60,000 sq. ft. of retail and “is still filling in,” he says. The town center might have developed faster, he observes, if the county hadn’t approved so much conventional retail construction outside of Laguna West’s boundaries. Some of the public spaces have turned out to be too large, in Angelides’s estimation. He says he has learned that although governments often press for large public spaces, these “need to be intimate; they need to be designed to human scale.” “In some ways, we were the Model A of New Urbanism,” Angelides says of the project, planned by Calthorpe Associates. “We were the first attempt to deliver New Urbanism to a mass consumption market.” That distinguishes it from Kentlands in Gaithersburg, Maryland, which Angelides says aimed for a higher-income demographic, and it puts Laguna West in a different category than the resort development of Seaside, Florida, which he has yet to visit. Angelides cites one other measure of what’s been achieved at Laguna West: The subprime mortgage crisis has upset the real estate market in the Sacramento area just as it has affected other communities across the country, but “you can barely find a for-sale sign in Laguna West.”