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A year ago, I was the proud owner of an 89 Camry, fondly known to our family as “Moonbeam”. It was coming to the end of its life-cycle…guppity, guppity, guppity (that’s for you, Robert). There were several known problems that just weren’t going away but they cost too much to fix and we recognized that putting that money into fixing it wasn’t going be a sound use of our resources. So, we waited and saved and waited and saved… and just lived with the problems.

Which is kind of where we are now with our 89 Camry of a Blog the software for which we got open-source and which we chose because it gave us the design control we wanted and a few nifty features (remember when cars first got power windows and locks?) and was fairly easy/fast to set-up. But we’ve had this blog up for almost a year now and know enough now to be keenly aware that its got some problems (..which some of you have ever-so-kindly informed us about…) and that there are a lot more features we should/could be paying attention to.

But we have a plan. It’s the equivalent of the Prius upgrade my family got in January… and its called Wordpress which will be forthcoming sometime in the next couple of months… (amazing how much you have to wade through to make a switch like this). It’ll also coincide with some general re-vamping of our site, which is why the switch is taking longer than we’d ideally like. We’re just having to figure out which priorities come first… and need to focus our time/energy strategically.

In the meantime, bear with a few of the guppity, guppity moments… and do keep commenting.

Jason

As a rule, we try not to talk about ourselves much here on the blog. We just don’t think we are all that interesting and know that there are much better things to talk about.

I am feeling sentimental today, so I am going to break the rules a bit.

I read a book a few years ago about Jet Blue Airlines and how it took them over two years to get the first plane in the air. I remember thinking that was crazy and could not imagine having to be so patient. Yet here we are in our fourth year and just now starting construction on our first home.

LJ Urban’s big audacious goal is to make cities better, but putting a bunch of designs on paper does not a better city make, as you can imagine. We are very excited as our efforts start to come to life over the next six months.

We are getting ready to be unveiling our 1100 square food masterpiece in West Sacramento (March 08′) and starting construction on two other new projects that break the mold of traditional development. We also will get a chance to test out our crazy ideas about how to work with buyers, or as we call them “Urban Optimists”, a term we stole from one of my T-shirts.

Jessie and I have three kids and the two older ones (6 and 3) still do not believe us when we say we build houses. It will be really exciting for us to walk through the first house with them and see the looks on their faces. You really have no idea what a great day that will be!

Its been a long road to where we are today but we are just getting started.

There have been surprises at every turn some have been amazing challenges and others like this blog have brought us to places we never thought we would be. We could not have imagined the value blogging would bring both internally in the area of real time feedback, and as a catalyst in the community for positive change. We always knew there were other eco-urbanists like us out there, but we had no idea that was a whole army of them wanting to make their city a better place to live.

LJ Urban has a dream and as Jason says in the Sit Here Video its bigger than we are because it involves everyone who wants to come along.

It just does not get any better than this! Unless of course you are talking about tomorrow.

Levi

I haven’t been posting too much lately mainly because my writing time has been devoted to web site content.

We’re working on a few ways to present Eco-Urban through the site. We need to have a tie between the car we’re driving around and the site, so people can get a better understanding of Eco-Urban and what we’re doing.

So, we’re taking each scribble on the car and creating an interactive element on the site where people can look a little closer at the car and its scribbles. Each scribble will have a short description “riffing” on the eco-urban correlation as well as what LJUrban is doing that relates to the concept.

Its fun taking other people’s answers to the question “what is eco-urban” and responding to them.

Here’s an example… we’ll see if it sticks… my challenge (as usual) is figuring out how to state things succinctly and sufficiently.

Eco-Urban
How much is your time worth? Ultimately, eco-urban is about quality of life (which starts by sustaining life itself). Suburbia sold millions of people on a false promise of “sanctuary” as typified by a single-family home on a quarter acre. However, this vision failed because the cost of this narrow depiction of “sanctuary” came in the form of increasingly longer commute times now so clearly correlated with sprawl. And as our society struggles to come to terms with the increasingly faster pace of modern living, we’re finally recognizing that sanctuary is a quality of both time and space. The benefits of urban core proximity preserves not only our open spaces, air quality and healthy climate patterns, but also the sense of personal well-being we get from having more time with family and friends.

LJUrban
By commiting ourselves to only building in the core, we’re giving more people more options to spend their time doing the kinds of activities that feed our souls, whether playing hide and seek with your 2 year old, strolling down to the river, or sharing dessert at the local café with your best friend.

Jason

What Happened to the Car?
The Scribblefest was a month ago and some of you are probably wondering where things stand with the car. Of course, the holidays slowed things down a bit, but the real delays happened the first week of January when the car was broken into: someone apparently really wanted that $50 stereo. And we’ve had a bit of a challenge finding someone who can do the skin since the vehicle doesn’t yet have a template. But, it looks we’re close to resolving these issues (we hope!) and we’re expecting to have the car on the streets sometime the next several weeks. If we can think of some cool and fun way to do an “unveiling”, we’ll let everyone know. Maybe we’ll showcase it at Old Soul at the next Second Saturday…

Project Updates Forthcoming
Thanks to a reminder from Dan, we’re renewing our efforts to post more regularly about the projects. As you can tell, I enjoy the “reflective” big picture stuff, but we know a lot of you are very much into the particulars. Plus, if we’re not doing this, we’re losing an opportunity to get your input on the projects: we really do want to hear people’s questions, concerns, suggestions, impressions, etc. Because of the sheer volume of activity on the projects, it’s been a bit daunting to figure out what to talk about (at least for me). So, I’ve very grateful that Steve, Micah and Vanessa are stepping up to this task. Be looking for regular updates starting… well… yesterday.

Missing a Newsletter?
Many of you have subscribed to our e-newsletter…and haven’t received one yet. No, we haven’t lost your e-mail, the newsletter is another tool under development. We’re shooting to have these going out once a month starting in February. Until then, you can always subscribe to an RSS feed reader or check in here as you have time and inclination.

Blog Spammers
You might have noticed we occasionally have some unwelcome spam comments that show up. I try and delete these as I see them, but can’t always catch them immediately. We’ve debated back and forth about the merits and drawbacks of leaving comments without any kind of “moderation” in place; at present, we still feel the benefits of instantaneous upload outweigh the annoyances of spam; however, we are now going to be “banning” IP addresses that are clearly spamming us. Hopefully, that will help.

Jason

We have a new photo gallery on our blog, just in time to show some of the Newton Booth designs we’re working on.

Questions? Comments? You can post ‘em here or in the gallery.

Blogs are great. You post your thoughts and people respond and then more people respond and a little conversation starts to happen and the community is stronger for it. At least, that’s what we hope.

So, we’re looking for feedback. Always. We can’t get enough of it. Right now there’s a lot of guessing by a lot of people about what will succeed in urban settings and we certainly don’t have all the answers. We figure, the more we can engage dialogue, the more we’ll learn about how to do it right.

Case in Point.
We’re trying to figure out how to accommodate both parking and accessibility and good livable, enduring design. The car won’t go away but we want to mitigate its negative impact on our communities. The garage works for some products and locations (B Street West, for example) but not all. So, we’re exploring the livability of attached houses with a shared underground parking area: everyone would have a space, just not right under or next to their own house (ie. our estimates are that the houses would be approximately 50-150 ft from their designation parking space in a shared garage).

On the Pro Side.
The community gets a more pedestrian-friendly product. Spaces between buildings can be used for landscaping and paths vs. interior streets.

The overall architecture doesn’t suffer from the constraints of garages and accessibility issues. We get to be more creative and weigh in stronger on the relationship of the architecture with the entire area vs. its relationship with the automobile.

Allows higher density bringing more people to the urban core and a smaller eco-footprint.

Floorplans can be more flexible without the attached garage.

Preservation of natural beauty. The specific site we’re looking at has four incredible oak trees in the center that would make for an incredible community open space. While it is possible to use other designs that would still preserve these trees, there are tradeoffs with some of the other variables above.

On the Con Side
Residents would have to walk from the parking spot to their house via a common (landscaped) area.

Obviously, we’re leaning more towards the pro side but we don’t necessarily have the full picture yet.

Any and all comments are welcome.

I was thinking today about our resources and how to use them best. It occurred to me that our greatest resource is YOU. Yeah, you– the person reading our blog, wondering where the heck this company came from and what they are all about.

Then I thought about ways you could be more involved. I had a bunch of ideas–some had potential, others were pretty far out there (ie. starting an eco-urban dance troupe). Here’s one I thought might actually be worth sharing.

We are always looking for urban land deals in the Midtown, Central City, Downtown and downtown West Sac. There’s no way we can scout it all out ourselves (the “acquisitions department” is one person: me). So, if you know of any land that might be available, tell us about it. We have certain established ideas about what it takes to make a great community so we don’t bite at everything that comes our way. But, if you look at the projects we’re working on now, you’ll see we’re not necessarily daunted by obvious challenges, and you should see what Vanessa can do with a piece of dirt.

So, its just a thought. If you know of anything you think we should take a look at, my number is 930-9400, ext. 11. Give me a call any time. Or if you just want to chat about LJ Urban and what this strange company has in mind for the urban core, drop me a line any time. Really. Any time.

Levi
P.S. Likewise, if you have other thoughts about getting more involved, I’d love to hear them.

Today marks the first week we’ve had our site up. It’s still in a somewhat Beta version, although the perfectionist in me cringes to say that. But overall, I’m glad that we don’t have any “under construction” pages with cheesy tractors or cranes or teaser “coming soon” features. Personally, I don’t like websites with dead-ends. But there is still a lot of work to do, including some finer proof-reading and some revision of our home page. We’re shooting for a more finished and completed site on October 31st.

Then again, a website like ours will always be a work in progress. We’ve got a lot of creative ideas that we’re itching to act on. In some ways, we feel like kids in a toy shop. Which one do we play with first?

Actually, the blogosphere was the first toy we picked and we’re still figuring out how to play with it. We tend to jump into things and figure it out as we go. This blog is no exception. We still have a lot of questions and issues to work out, but its great to have a vehicle to share our journey as we go.

Even getting this far has been Herculean, mainly because we needed to really get a clear focus on what our website would accomplish. We looked at a lot of websites, mostly ones outside of the real estate industry. And we read a lot of Seth Godin’s writing. His ideas resonated with our thoughts on marketing and have helped crystallize our thinking.

I can’t sing the praises of our design group, EMRL, enough. Not only for their intuitive design instincts but also for their patience and persistence and collaborative ethos. We’re a challenging client because we tend to be far more involved in the process and details than most. There’s a reason my bio heading says, “he’s a bulldog about getting things right.” This probably slows us down but it also means that we end up with a truer and better (we hope) end result.

Part of me wishes we’d waited to launch until after the 31st but another part of me thinks its good to have a working draft that we can test and see what does and doesn’t work. Sometimes working on a site when its not live keeps you from seeing some of the most glaring problems. The pressure of public access keeps you sharp.

That said, if you notice glitches, errors or anything that would make the site more functional, let us know. You can comment below or email me.

Jason

Welcome!
We’re excited about launching this blog in conjunction with our website. Many of the ideas introduced on the site will have extensive riffs here on the blog. If we’re doing this right, we should be posting at least once every working day on average.

What We Blog About.
1. The Core Concepts: Urban-ness. Eco-ness. Community. Sacramento’s urban core.

2. Our Journey: We’ll unravel our insights, half-formed notions, questions, frustrations, perspectives, as well as some of the “daily life” stuff that happens around us.

3. The Projects: A blog format works perfectly with project development. Anyone in the blogosphere can participate in our unfolding process of creating eco-urban communities. We’ll post ideas, new developments, upcoming challenges, working drawings and plans, etc. with the hopes that you’ll share your insights, suggestions, questions, and critiques with us.

Why a Blog?
Simple. Real community requires authenticity and interaction. Blogging gives us an ongoing vehicle to be transparent about the how, why and what we’re trying to accomplish. It also enables others to join in the dialogue. We don’t work in a vacuum; we need input and discussion if we’re going to do this right.

How Comments are Handled.
Comments get posted right away. However, we will delete posts that are inappropriate or disrespectful of readers. So, spamming, obnoxious, offensive, or irrelevant posts will be axed quickly. We ask posters to keep comments “family and office friendly.” Constructive criticism is always welcome and won’t be deleted unless its simply name-calling.

So, Who’s the Actual Blogger?
Almost everyone in LJUrban. Although some tend to be more prolific than others. We haven’t yet convinced Mary to enter the fray yet, but we love her anyways. We’ll all sign our own posts, so you don’t have to guess the identity of the post you’re reading.

Stay tuned! It’s about to get really interesting…

Jason