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We get pretty excited about our projects- pushing the green features that we can and trying to achieve the best possible designs that normal people can still afford to buy. But I need to come back to each day focusing in on the real goal – creating the best community we can for people.

I just read through a biography of James Rouse who pioneered the development of shopping malls, festival marketplaces, and even a new town called Columbia. We urbanites love to sneer at the shopping mall as a poor substitute for a community center, but I confess growing up in Lodi it was all we had. If we were going somewhere it was usually to the mall. I came to respect James Rouse in that he was attempting to bring community to the suburbs of the 1960’s and 1970’s – quite a challenge! He realized “people seek warm and human places, with diversity and choice, full of festival and delight.” Describing Quincy Market in Boston he says “People don’t come to a festival marketplace for the purpose of shopping or eating… they come for the delight. They come and walk slowly and they smile and they sit and look at other people. There are very few places in a city that people can go with no purpose. They can go not knowing why they are going… this is terribly important to people.”

WOW – how do we make that kind of place? We have ideas. Informal courtyards and tree preserves in our housing projects. A community garden. Definitely coffee shops. The Riverwalk! A park with some water feature to cool off in (Sprayground II). Lively mixed use streetscapes with patio dining.

I bet you have ideas too. I would love to hear other ideas of things we could do to encourage this atmosphere of delight. Is there anywhere you go with no purpose? What gets you out with strangers?

Steve

I’ve been digging through the history of the West Sacramento neighborhood that we are focusing on – and my what a colorful history it is! The Wild West was happening right there in the neighborhood with swindling, shooting, and all kinds of frontier activities. That’s what you get when there are 294 men and 26 women in town!

Special thanks to the West Sacramento Historical Society for posting their detailed history of the city.

It seems there were several owners laying claim to the city at it’s founding. One of the first owners died of unknown causes and according to the records sold a third of his land grant for a dollar on the day he died. Even more suspicious was that he sold additional plots off two days later. Even the one who stuck, Mrs. McDowell, had to sue her second husband to get the half that was all hers before they got married. It’s no wonder we run title reports today. Even though she couldn’t read or write she managed to lay out the street grid that exists to the present day and sold lots along the streets – the first developer of West Sacramento! She was the one who named the town Washington.

The Washington area stayed fairly rural and attracted families that wanted to have large gardens and grow produce for their own use and for sale. Sounds like our vision for a community garden fits right in with the history of the neighborhood. Before Prohibition, hops were a major crop. Washington Microbrew anyone? I met one old timer that said they grew the best asparagus in the world here.

Unprotected by the levees and raised streets that Sacramento invested in, West Sacramento was still a haven for dairy and farms. I just have to share this tidbit that is Mike Bryte’s account of how they dealt with the floods:

In the morning we look out of the second story to see if any of the valley is still in sight. If it is I go downstairs and take soundings on the cooking stove. If it’s full of water I call down the boys and we set to work on the pumps… We keep bailing until the meal is cooked and grub eaten. Then we swim out to the barn and twist a cow’s tail so that she turns over to be milked. When we finish we give a reverse twist and right’er… Next year we hope to teach the cows to swim up to the house to be milked.

Us city slickers can’t relate but almost anyone can grow a tomato here! And the levees have been good for so long that I’m sure all the cows have forgotten how to swim.

There are some great historical structures in the neighborhood that deserve to be preserved – Victorians on 4th Street, for example. As the area develops into an urban center, it will be great to have a neighborhood that is modern-urban where you can walk past Victorians on the way to your community garden plot and the riverfront!

Steve

Being the new guy at LJUrban, I came in with huge expectations of how we will change the world by building a whole new kind of community. It was pretty easy to get those expectations just looking around this website and reading through the mission and values of the group. Having worked here for a several weeks now, I believe we will do it. Everyone’s confidence and willingness to take risks and sacrifice are the key ingredients for getting there.

I also see how the progress towards sustainability will be incremental. Now that I’ve gotten the inside scoop on the status of all our projects, its clear the first steps toward sustainable cities are being taken with the first project—B Street West, with more steps on the next project—Newton Booth, and a continuing escalation as we snowball toward sustainability!

B Street West
B Street West will be the first to be built. If all goes as planned, site work will be starting in the next several months with construction starting in early Summer. Coming from the Tree Foundation, it was so exciting for me to see the oak trees on the corner preserved and given the space to exist for many decades to come. I would sure love to have an oak grove out my front door. Plus Micah has a whole load of other green features we will be adding to B Street West (look for a forthcoming post from him on this sometime this week). We should have more to show about this project, including floorplans and elevations in the very near future.

Newton Booth
The next big step we will make is to go from detached houses to attached housing in some of the progress in our gallery). Apart from inherent green features we’ve built into the design itself (such as leaving room for PV panels on the roof and incorporating passive solar design into each unit), we haven’t started the detailed specifications process yet. That will be our next step as we work toward construction drawings. But, we’re all pretty thrilled that we’ll have solar on our second project.

More Projects Forthcoming
In addition to B Street West and Newton Booth, we have four other infill sites, including the Discovery Center—all within a few blocks of each other in the Washington Area—that we’ve begun some preliminary planning on. Jason says we’ll have a map on the website soon so you can see where these newest acquisitions are and we’ll be talking more about them here in the blog.

Steve

Californian’s mythical love affair with the car is so ingrained in our cities that it seems assumed that that is what our economy runs on. Cities chase after auto-malls for sales tax dollars and retail establishments need parking for the weekend before Christmas to feel secure. We have to break out of this – and we sure aren’t the first or only ones to say it. I don’t love my car. It’s useful to get out of town to the mountains or to pick up a sledgehammer at the hardware store. But I’ll give it up if I have a viable option.

We are just starting to envision a new project at 316 G Street in West Sacramento’s Washington neighborhood. The site is a little over half an acre and we would like to build small, economic units there that we hope will add lots of creative people to the neighborhood.

There are a couple London Plane trees that I would like to see saved and turned into greenspace. But how can we fit all the parking on there? If we go by the requirements, we will need almost 40 spaces - goodbye trees, goodbye greenspace, hello parking lot. Another goal is to get people living right on the street, not having the parking there. Even if we tuck the parking under the housing it leaves a big blank space for cars in the middle. I think we are going to have to stack the parking in a garage, reduce the parking with a Carshare or bike parking program, or come up with some new solutions to actually build a urban project with greenspace. It is important enough to have greenspace on the project site that we have to work out the parking issue.

Ultimately, if we continue to follow this line of thought and action, the contribution over time actually becomes a reduction of the car’s stature in our urban environment.

Steve

Steve Schweigerdt comes to us from one of the most eco-urban organizations in Sacramento–The Tree Foundation–where he served as the Nature Project Director. We met him when we were interviewing his family to be featured as one of our Eco-Urban Heroes (more about that to come…) and liked him so much we ended up offering him a job. We think hiring your heroes makes pretty good sense.

You’ve worked here for a week now. How would you describe it? Any memorable moments?
Dynamic is the word I would have to use to describe it. It seems there are so many things in flux and ideas flowing through the place. And now I know who will eat raw oysters or not.

What gets you excited about creating eco-urban community? Why is this personally important to you?
People are so influenced by their surroundings. I feel like our culture has forced so many people into an individualistic, consumer, car dependent lifestyle because it is easy, affordable (in the now), and confused for the American dream. I want to work on a reaction to this that brings people back into community with each other, saves them time and resources, and preserves the open space around our city for recreation, wildlife, and a break from the city. Why shouldn’t this be the best choice for people who want to live in Sacramento?

Anything in your personal life that you are doing (or working on) to try and make the world a better place.
My biggest concern is the poverty overseas, so we sponsor lots of kids with Compassion International so they first survive and then grow into strong leaders for their countries. I’m still hoping to plant lots of trees here with my buddies at the Sacramento Tree Foundation.

None of us do this perfectly. Got any eco-urban confessions?
Are donuts eco-urban or not?

What brought you to Sacramento?
We really like the character of older neighborhoods, the activities of a large city, big trees, California weather (most of the year), biking, a Co-op food store, and big mountains nearby. Where else is there?

Do you have a favorite spot in the urban core?
My bike seat is where I spend the most time. I guess I’m too much of a busy body to hang out anywhere. For a really urban feel I like the north side of the Central Library. For more of a restauranty feel I like Capitol Ave.

You’ve got family. We love families. Tell us about them.
Bronwyn is a curly girl and has most of the personality contained in our match. She loves attention – give her a stage and an audience and there is no one better. Watch out because you’ll be emptying your wallet to sponsor needy kids and becoming a vegan before you leave. She needs a nature fix about every week, so we get out and do some mountain biking, hiking, or kayaking. If you want to get to know her you can buy her book too – The Undiet!

Edie is our precious little girl. She is most interested in red, shoes, and various things that can go in hair. She is an expert sing-a-longer and now has a guitar to accompany. She talks quite a bit for a three year old. And some days she only wants to be called Shelly Ann. She is a quite a trooper and comes along mountain biking on her WeeRide and kayaking down the river.

Which of our core values do you have the strongest connection with. Why?
I’d choose “We are motivated by generosity and the prospect of improving the quality of life.” That’s what I want to do! If buildings can’t improve the quality of life, why do them? – profit isn’t enough motivation for me.

Jason