We Have Always Been at War with Pedestria

[akirlu]

Kevin Drum thinks the Woodbridge development in Irvine is about as good as it gets for walkable suburban neighborhoods.

In comments, I disagree:

I used to live in Irvine. Not, I admit, in Woodbridge, but we visited Woodbridge regularly. By car. Based on my time there, I'm afraid I disagree completely that Woodbridge is "about as good as it gets" or even close, when it comes to walkable suburban environments. You've been drinking the Irvine family Cool-Aid too long.

For one thing, one of the things that makes for good walkability is mixed use -- the genuine co-mingling of living spaces and work places and stores, cafes, and markets. Woodbridge isn't mixed use at all. Like the rest of Irvine, it's carefully segregated into zones that don't interpenetrate each other.

One of the things things we used to laugh about was the Irvine Worship Center -- three churches clustered around a parking lot -- because that segregated, car oriented, mini-mall approach to development is a perfect metaphor for how Irvine space usage as a whole is "planned".

Because of that lack of mixed use in Woodbridge, anyone who is walking to public amenities will have to walk the full distance between their house and a mall before they reach any destination of interest. The comfortable radius for people to actually use walkable amenities about .5 miles. So for the majority of Woodbridge residents, the amenities are *not* within their radius of likely walking use, in part because all of the amenities are cordoned off into a separate reserve instead of being interspersed among the residences.

By contrast, I live in a house in a leafy suburban neighborhood. The local historical museum is about a block from my front door. There's a Thai restaurant two blocks away, and in the block beyond that, a dry cleaner and a bodega that sells Mexican pastries, among other things. There's a new Chinese market coming in two blocks from that, and in between, a one-of greasy spoon cafe that makes sublime waffles. In another direction, there's a large municipal park a block and a half from my house. Movie theaters, restaurants, my public library, a particularly fine bakery cafe, my commuter train station, and an outpost of the local community college are all within about a half mile radius of my house. With mixed use, it is easily possible to do a lot better than Woodbridge does. All the vaunted planning does is create large suburban wastelands with nothing of interest to the ambling pedestrian to look at.

For another thing, the only sensible way to *get* to Woodbridge is by car, which means the only people there are people who drove there, and have a car handy anyway. Woodbridge, like any other "neighborhood" in Irvine, is bounded and bisected by huge arterials that would count as freeways in any other city -- the speed limit is often 55 mph, and nothing faces them -- all the houses and businesses crouch behind their beige walls and their over-watered hobbit hills and face inward, toward a parking lot. Nobody enjoys walking those arterials -- they're long, boring, noisy, and scaled for travelers moving at 50+ mph. Meanwhile the transit options in Orange County in general, and Irvine in particular, are genuinely terrible. Buses are infrequent, poorly connected, and bus stops are few, and isolated.

And in addition, because the only workplaces in the area are in the retail strip in the middle, where businesses don't pay well enough to support the Woodbridge lifestyle, virtually nobody who lives in Woodbridge works there, and vice versa. Most of the residents are already acclimated to driving long distances to reach the (again, segregated, parking-lot surrounded) business parks where they haul down the big bucks to be able to afford to live in Irvine in the first place.

So anybody in Woodbridge has already been forced to have a car handy anyway, and to use it regularly. Naturally they're going to be the sort of people who are habitually disposed to pile in the car to get to anything.

Another thing about Woodbridge is that the vast majority of retail businesses you find there are corporate, homogenized, chain operations that you could find in pretty much any other giant parking lot mall in Southern California. Being blandly interchangeable makes the malls themselves rather less interesting as walking destinations in the first place. There is no mystery, there is no adventure, there is no quirky new local artisinal discovery to be made. I think quirkyness is probably outlawed by civic ordinance in Irvine, along with non-beige housepaint and leaving your garage open too long so people might glimpse your crap. If you want quirky, you have to pile in the Lexus and drive down to Laguna.

Woodbridge is splat in the middle of one of the most aggressively car-centric, car dominated suburban messes on the planet. Of course nobody walks there. (A professor of mine at UCI was in fact stopped by the police for walking.) I think the only reason you could think that Woodbridge was an example of a good, walkable suburban space is because you've never actually seen a good, walkable suburban space. You can be forgiven for that. There aren't any in Irvine.

(Edited slightly to amend repetetive adjectives)

Comments

[del-c.livejournal.com]

How's Kevin Drum getting on at Mother Jones, and is there any prospect of them improving their site design so I can stand to look at it?

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

No idea. This is the first time I've read him at the Mother Jones site, having been sent a link.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

A couple drives into Irvine, with map in hand, left me wondering "so where is it?" That is to say, there didn't seem to be anything there except endless landscaped boulevards. I think I eventually found a Denny's. (I was looking for a simple restaurant prior to heading to the airport.) If there were any either shopping districts or residential areas, I couldn't find either of them.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

As I say, everything faces inward, away from those big boulevards. I can't remember how long it was -- years, I think -- that I was living in or near Irvine before I finally figured out where the 7-11 was. There's no sign that faces the street -- you have to be in the parking lot already in order to find it. In general, Irvine has no center at all, and everything is tucked away in unlikely places. It took years of chasing down personal recommendations and a lot of leveraging of reviews in the local free papers before we were finally be able to build a repertoire of Irvine-area restaurants that were simultaneously (a)good (b) inexpensive and (c)not a chain, so I do feel your pain. Two of our favorites were Lima City, a Peruvian place in a food court inside a strip mall and Jamilla Garden, a Hallal Chinese restaurant in an obscure corner of an industrial park, next to a manicurist. Ordinarily we would never have gone hunting for good restaurants in these places.

The best thing to do in Irvine is have a seasoned native guide.

[urlgirl.livejournal.com]

My mother is an architect of several projects in and around Irvine, this one included. It should be said she disagrees with the philosophy of "walkable neighborhood" that the developers espouse, but she's one of those people who believes in "better something than nothing." Nevertheless, having grown up in Europe, and living on Brand Blvd. in Glendale, as she does, she also bemoans the disappearance of *actual* walkable neighborhoods.

We need to bring all these people back from suburbia, seriously. It's not necessary to live in (essentially) tract housing just to be in a place with lower population density. As your town shows, you can have low density AND community, without all this master planning.

I'm feeling an anti-developer rant though, so I'll stop there :-)

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I'm happy to chime in on the choruses if you want to do that anti-developer rant. Although, funnily enough, part of what makes Kent attractive is the development of Kent Station into a shopping district rather than just a train station. In particular, it was developed into a shopping district that interacts fairly well with its surrounding neighborhood. It's a bit of a cross between a standard mall and regular city streets, and so there's natural flow between it and the library and the farmer's market and, to a lesser extent, the old business district over on Meeker, a block farther over. What the area really wants is a draw in the intervening block to increase the foot traffic in the area.

Anyway, in defense of Woodbridge, it *is* better than nothing, and the Woodbridge Shopping Center tended to be full of families on weekend evenings, because the mall worked fairly well as a Third Place, with areas for kids to play, and restaurants with outdoor seating. But most of those families did not get there by walking.

[auntysocial.livejournal.com]

What does she think of the walkability of Brand Blvd. in Glendale? I have used it as a dog walking locale for years. It even has benches you can sit on if you get tired!

[urlgirl.livejournal.com]

She loves it, she and my father are out there almost every night, taking strolls and so on, especially closer to the north end (the introduction of the In-n-Out burgers by the Borders seems to have introduced some chaos in the streets they're not too fond of, and I can't say I blame them).

Whenever I go visit, I just cross my fingers that all the old booksellers are still there. I think they've been closing :(

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

The addition of an In-N-Out seems unfortunate. I like their burgers okay, but they're both incredibly car-oriented, and incredibly popular, so they'll turn any street they're on into a congested mess, full of idling cars, unless they're built into one of the big Power Center-type strip malls, so the drive thru lane can be incorporated into the parking lot planning.

We used to like to stroll around on Brand, back in years of yore.

[urlgirl.livejournal.com]

The In-n-Out on Brand is one of the few I've seen that doesn't actually have a drive-thru. It's in the ground floor of a large building, it's a huge space with lots of seating, and seems to cater very well to the after-movies teenage crowd coming from the Mann and the Exchange theaters across the street. The problem as I see it is that these folks end up milling around quite a bit, on the sidewalks and in the intersection. So, late on a Saturday night, it's been my impression that walking in that corridor is a little dicey. Lots of teenage hormones and bravado being tossed around.

... not to show my old-lady colors, here, but I do prefer a more peaceful stroll than that. During daylight and early evening hours, the place still works great for me, though :-)

[maryread.livejournal.com]

I forget that people need to have all this explained. Maybe even most people in the country. Thank you for doing it.

I've been spending my time out having a walk. Even here in eminently walkable town, I feel a missionary zeal to demonstrate how it is done.

-a devout pedestrian

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, your town is a very special one, imho. If it weren't for the weather, I would consider living there myself.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

Didn't we used to have places called "neighborhoods" in "cities" for stuff like that?
I'm two blocks from two different train lines, and within a mile's walk of both the local major supermarket chains (and two Whole Foods), and dozens of restaurants. The office supply store is two miles (next to another big supermarket), etc. . . .
It's a good three miles to the big Indo-Pak neighborhood with myriad groceries, restaurants, jewelers, and appliance stores; but "Chinatown North" which is now mostly Vietnamese is at one of the stops of one of those trains.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Lots of places that grew naturally still do have neighborhoods with lots of walkable amenities. Irvine was virtually all bean fields 30-35 years ago, and was developed by a single agency with a master plan, rather than grown out of the needs of the people who live there, and so there are not these "neighborhoods" of which you speak.

[auntysocial.livejournal.com]

yes, places that grow naturally can be a lot more walkable than planned "communities."

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

I think quirkyness is probably outlawed by civic ordinance in Irvine, along with non-beige housepaint and leaving your garage open too long so people might glimpse your crap.

You've just aptly summed up what I find unbearable about CA suburbs. One of the things I enjoy most about Seattle is that we live a neighborhood where we can walk to things. And nobody cares how long our garbage cans sit outside. (We used to get regular letters from the Homeowners' Association about out sins in leaving the garbage cans at the curb too long.) I love living in an urban neighborhood.

MKK

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

It's hard to imagine a place more draconian than Irvine (though I know they're not the only "developed community" with ridiculous regulations on resident aesthetics). As far as I could tell, absolutely NO personal items were allowed to be visible on the outside of rental apartments or condos, not even personal itmes like healthy potted plants or well-maintained patio sets. Every single unit looks exactly like its neighbor in the larger complexes. That's down right creepy. It's one thing to want a well-maintained neighborhood, but quite another to impose totalitarian blandness and uniformity down to the smallest detail.

Funnily enough, I don't think of your neighborhood as genuinely urban -- the density isn't all that high, it's mostly single family homes -- but in fact as an example of the way low-density neighborhoods can be walkable in a way that Kevin Drum's piece implicitly assumes that they can't.

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

Well, it is pretty low density when compared to someplace like Manhattan or Chicago, but probably most of Seattle is. We do have small apartment buildings interspersed throughout the single family homes. There's a small one just up the street and a larger one in the next block north. And lots of them as you go towards Broadway.

MKK

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

There are higher density neighborhoods in Capitol Hill than yours, sure, but for genuinely urban, check Belltown.

[auntysocial.livejournal.com]

The most walkable places in southern California are the ones where poor people live and middle-class people are afraid to go. Lots of randomness and color.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I dunno. As a rule of thumb this will have exceptions, anyway. I lived for a few blighted months in Pacoima. Definitely poor, definitely one of the places middle-class people are afraid to go. Not very walkable, in my experience. While the neighborhood I lived in in Pasadena -- just near the intersection of Lake and Colorado -- was pleasantly walkable to all sorts of amenities, and definitely not a poor neighborhood.

[auntysocial.livejournal.com]

It was a rather reckless statement. I'd rather take a walk in Pasadena than Pacoima most of the time. Pasadena is quite urban, and getting more so all the time. I had an uncle who lived in Pacoima in the fifties and sixties. It always felt like it was out in the country, and it still has a little of that quality.

I do find the "frightening" neighborhoods more visually interesting than many of the richer ones, and people in them walk more by necessity. I would probably not be so bold if I didn't travel with a large dog.

[auntysocial.livejournal.com]

I found Lakewood to be a very walkable suburb. It was planned in the early fifties when most women did not have jobs or cars. There was supposed to be a market within 1/2 mile of every house, a much more reasonable distance than 1 1/2 miles. While the architecture is dull, the trees are beautiful. It's on a grid so you don't have to walk longer than you have to to get any place, and you don't get lost.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I don't have a good sense of where Long Beach leaves off and Lakewood begins, so I can't claim much familiarity with Lakewood, but certainly Long Beach has some older sections that seem very walkable.

[auntysocial.livejournal.com]

My grandmother lived in Long Beach in the 1950's. Even though it has changed a lot since then, it is still a nice place to walk. Long Beach is a city that grew up spontaneously, starting back the 1880's, while most of Lakewood was built on farm land in the 1950's. The style of development in Lakewood was characteristic of it's era, but on a larger scale.

This subject is close to my heart, and I'm thinking of going out to Irvine for a little stroll, myself.