Southern California fills in the urban core

In a region where full-scale new urbanist neighborhoods are rare, town center revitalization projects are picking up steam. Southern California is still lacking a good model for large traditional neighborhood development (TND). Playa Vista in Los Angeles is just beginning construction after years of legal wrangling and changes in the development and architectural teams. Liberty, a planned TND on Lake Elsinore southeast of Los Angeles, is in jeopardy after the main investor pulled out suddenly. “Southern California is the capital of fake urbanism,” says City of Azusa City Manager and former Mayor of Pasadena Rick Cole. “Hybrid developments are as far as developers have been willing to go. Had Playa Vista gone ahead 10 years ago we might have seen a very different picture.” But in one section of the Transect — the town center — Southern California is beginning to excel. In San Diego, the completed Uptown District is a successful model for infill that combines residential and retail uses. In Pasadena, a downtown shopping mall is being demolished, and reconnected streets and a mix of retail and apartments will rise out of the rubble. The City of Brea on the northern outskirts of Los Angeles has a new, walkable town center that includes apartments and single-family housing. Similar developments are under way in Cathedral City, Claremont, and Manhattan Beach. “The Los Angeles region has many town cores of deep significance, and because this is such a wonderful place to live, people are finding ways to bring them back,” says architect Stefanos Polyzoides of Moule & Polyzoides. “People’s urge to live in an urban environment is getting stronger, and town centers are able to attract serious investment.” Rick Cole notes that the downtown projects are the result of “pent up energy released by a healthy economy.” He adds that downtown redevelopments in Santa Monica, Pasadena, and Suisun City in Northern California have been strong models. The impetus for these developments typically comes from city governments who wish to pump life into neglected downtowns and seek to take back a share of the retail taxes now generated in suburban malls. “The need for public investment is limited, because you already have infrastructure and some buildings in place,” Polyzoides says. “The issue of shared parking is probably the toughest to get through.” Downtown renovation projects are also attractive because they offer the opportunity to create a unique profile for the city, and because they attract stronger citizen support than residential developments. “Congestion is now so extreme, and the hopes of mitigating it so remote, that people are not as opposed to density,” Polyzoides says. “In Los Angeles County we are building at 20 to 30 to 40 units an acre.” An emphasis on jumpstarting revitalization with cinemas and restaurants as destinations is another common trait in these projects. “The retailers’ key issues are demographics, visibility, and accessibility, and generally downtowns don’t offer that,” says Jonathan Tolkin, whose firm the Tolkin Group is developing Claremont Village, a redevelopment of downtown Claremont, and the Metlox Block, a neighborhood center in Manhattan Beach. “They want to see people on the street, and the catalyst for that has generally been theaters and food.” Urban village replaces mall The town center development with the highest density and intensity in the region is Paseo Colorado in the heart of downtown Pasadena. The project packs 560,000 square feet of retail, 400 live/work lofts and apartments, and office space into the three-city-block site formerly occupied by the Plaza Pasadena shopping mall. Plaza Pasadena had lost market share in recent years, but it was also a blemish on the surrounding Civic Center district which features many important civic buildings from the 1920s. The Civic Auditorium and the Central Library are chief among these, and the mall blocked Garfield Avenue, the axis that previously connected the two buildings. Plans to redevelop Plaza Pasadena began three years ago when a task force of residents and city officials assisted by Moule & Polyzoides explored what it would take to accomplish such a big undertaking. A year later, a committee led by architect and former mayor Katie Nack began work with TrizecHahn, the owner of the mall and the developer of Paseo Colorado, to implement a plan. The final plan, designed by the Los Angeles office of Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn, passed through five separate approval commissions with unanimous votes. Investment from the city has come in the form of a $26 million bond issue to buy out TrizecHahn’s lease on two parking garages next to the mall. The money is intended to jumpstart the $150 million project. Demolition crews started tearing down the mall in May of this year, and the “urban village” is scheduled to open in the fall of 2001. The Macy’s department store has been retained, but it will be remodeled into a three-level facility. Street-front retail will be contained in two-story buildings with roof gardens and interspersed with pedestrian walkways. Four floors of apartments and lofts will be built on top of the retail, creating a compact urban environment around a series of open courtyards. Garfield Avenue will be the only street to cut through the project, although only as a pedestrian promenade. Paseo Colorado will also include a supermarket, a multiplex cinema, and a health club. Post Properties is developing the residential units, designed by the Los Angeles branch of RTKL. Strengthening the core City leaders in Brea have long wanted to give this Los Angeles suburb a distinct center, and to this end the city demolished many poorly designed buildings in the early 1990s. The California recession halted the progress, but in the last three years a new core has emerged under a master plan by RTKL. “City government has been unusually activist by California standards,” says Nate Cherry of RTKL. “The city put in $50 million in infrastructure and got back $80 million in private investment.” With tax revenues from conventional strip centers and malls, the city created a pool to pay for land purchases, demolition, relocation, and street amenities. All the land in the approximately 25-acre core area is now publicly owned. “When the market was ready, the city pounced on the opportunity and the project has been built remarkably fast,” Cherry says. After two and a half years the development is 75 percent complete. The mixed-use core at the intersection of two busy streets includes a 22-screen multiplex cinema complex in two separate buildings, 225,000 square feet of retail, 20,000 square feet of offices and 100 apartments and live/work units. North of the core sits a cluster development of 100 bungalows with a density of 9-10 units per acre. The overall 60-acre development district also includes a more conventional strip retail center. Recognizing that the primary arterial running through downtown was unsuitable for a main street, RTKL focused pedestrian activity on a smaller secondary street. The City of Brea has incorporated a series of Architectural Control Criteria as part of the codes that guide all development in the new downtown. Cherry says the zoning district sets high standards for quality in the design of civic spaces and commercial signage. “Each building has a separate architect, and that makes the downtown 10 times more interesting than if we had designed everything,” he says. Cathedral City Ten years ago, the core of the desert community Cathedral City near Palm Springs was plagued by a dropping tax base, deteriorating buildings, and a complete absence of interest from developers and investors. Since then, the city has forged a vision of a new downtown and amassed $53 million by, among other things, saving 75 percent of the city’s annual capital improvement funds for the Civic Center instead of spending them on street maintenance. Moreover, the city persuaded local utility companies to pay for new water, sewer, and communications lines in the core. Their investment will be recouped through fees from new customers in the downtown area.The plan by Freedman Tung and Bottomly of San Francisco groups a half dozen new buildings around a town square along East Palm Canyon Drive, the city’s main thoroughfare. A change in state law has allowed this street to be removed from the state highway system and be developed with a more pedestrian-friendly design. A 68,000-square-foot Civic Center has been built on the town square, and an IMAX theater has opened to the west of the square. A multiplex theater fronting the square will break ground later this year, and a retail building will wrap around the southern end of the theater to maintain a lively street facade. “It has taken a lot of resolve and willingness to stick with the vision to get this far,” says Redevelopment Director Susan Moeller. She adds that the completion of the first phase has dispelled the common perception that the city could not pull off a project on this scale. It has, in fact, leveraged plans for residential development adjacent to the town center. A nonprofit group has announced plans to build 240 apartment and live/work units a few blocks east of the town square, and a 300-unit assisted living center and 70,000 square feet of retail are in the works for an area immediately south of the City Center. Two projects developed by the Tolkin Group are still in planning. Claremont Village introduces approximately 160,000 square feet of retail, entertainment, restaurants, office, and live/work loft units into an area adjacent to the city’s existing retail district and a Metrolink train station. The master plan by Peter Tolkin wraps seven one- and two-story buildings around three consecutive blocks. The facades will be modulated to appear like separate buildings that conform to the traditional 50 feet by 150 feet lot size. Streets will be reshaped by bulb outs and new diagonal on-street parking spaces. “Most developers want to vacate streets so they have more land, but we are cutting new streets so we can create more sidewalks,” Jonathan Tolkin says. “We come in to create a district, not a stand-alone project.” The Metlox Block, too, is conceived as a series of street-oriented buildings that extend Manhattan Beach’s downtown and function as a transition between commercial and residential uses. Public spaces include a small town square surrounded by retail and restaurants, courtyards, and a plaza that creates a ceremonial gateway to the city’s civic center. Of the 120,000 square feet of commercial space, 30,000 square feet is taken up by loft-style offices dispersed in several separate buildings. An inn and a public Cultural Arts Facility round out the district, designed by Peter Tolkin and Moule & Polyzoides. In the Golden State’s Central Valley, The Tolkin Group has broken ground on Mainplace Merced, a downtown project anchored by a 13-screen cinema surrounded by 15,000 square feet of restaurants, cafes, and shops on what is currently a large vacant site. The resurgence of historic downtowns in Southern California is happening concurrently with the shopping center industry’s embrace of the outdoor Main Street model as an alternative to the enclosed mall. Such “life style centers” may feature a mix of uses and a pedestrian-oriented environment, but most remain islands in a sea of sprawl. The projects in the city core, on the other hand, give cities the opportunity to reconnect civil institutions and residential neighborhoods with the bustling retail and entertainment trade that has increasingly been relegated to the suburban fringe.
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