Bright, shiny dreams: New towns pop up in the valley

Do towns started from scratch live up to promises?

By GARTH STAPLEY
gstapley@modbee.com

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Your dream house is new, and so is everything else.

Perfectly ordered streets for miles around are newly paved and no cracks scar sidewalks or the nearby plaza. A park across the road is green and neatly trimmed, and your children attend a sparkling new school just around the corner.

You can walk to a grocery store, post office and library -- all new, of course. Your spouse might bicycle to an office job.

Everyone you meet lives in a new home, and you share a common identity because you are all pioneers, willing members of a real-life utopian experiment, residents of a new town.

"It's hugely exciting," said Susan Dell'Osso, contemplating the new town her company is on the brink of creating near Lathrop, after nearly two decades of planning.

It's also hugely difficult, incredibly expensive and often subject to militant opposition from very angry people.

New towns -- at once invigorating and fraught with financial peril -- increasingly spark conversation among planners trying to visualize California grappling with an expected growth boom.

Some say new towns could play an important, innovative role in accommodating millions of additional residents. They say planners can do a better job creating efficient, attractive communities when they start with a blank slate, as opposed to sewing on new borders at a city's fringe when it decides to grow.

If all of California's current new-town proposals play out, they would add the equivalent of another Stanislaus County in terms of population.

Others contend that new towns represent little more than sprawl in disguise, eating farmland and creating more traffic because promised jobs rarely materialize.

"If you plop X number of units on ag land away from town, is that functionally different from sprawl at the edge?" asked Thomas Jacobson, a planning professor at Sonoma State University. "Now you have to commute from out there to wherever the jobs are. What have you gained?"

Another growth form is infill, or developing vacant parcels within a city. This is commonly preferred by smart-growth proponents because jobs, streets, water and sewer lines, and many other urban amenities are close.

There is little argument that new towns, however bold or ill-conceived, are fun to concoct but extremely hard to create. Sev- eral land-use experts are skeptical that active new-town proposals, many of them clustered in Central California, will rise from the dust.

"You've got to have a whole lot of (guts), a whole lot of patience and a whole lot of capital," said Paul Shigley, editor of California Planning & Development Report.

The allure

A widely accepted definition of a new town doesn't appear to exist, although most analysts agree on similar components: a stand-alone, self-sustaining community developed according to a master plan.

"How many chances do you get to build a new community and be in on the ground floor?" asked Diane Dzurochak, marketing director for Shea Homes, a major builder in San Joaquin County's four-year-old Mountain House.

"What's nice is, everything is planned properly," said Dell'Osso, project director for the future River Islands in south San Joaquin County. "And not just the layout, but the schedule -- when parks need to go in, when roads need to go in, when schools need to be built. So you're never behind the eight ball in terms of services you need to provide."

Many new-town backers have promised to set aside large swaths of land in permanently protected open space.

And some new-town residents say they have few regrets, other than a lack of shopping and restaurants.