The end is near. After many years of working with and against the Sebastopol Charter School on a new facility a final decision from the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors is scheduled for October 25th for a proposed new campus for the school. I have been encouraging the school to
This is a great blog post on how infrastructure decisions are made depending on who is paying for them. If they are publicly funded you get one level of infrastructure. If residents have to pay for their own infrastructure, you get a different level. Why do we continue to subsidize
I am often troubled by the complete disregard many drivers have for pedestrians. A situation I encounter on a regular basis is vehicles parking on the sidewalk. On my route between home and work, I walk by The Grateful Bagle, a bagel shop on Main Street. Given the form of
I went to a conference recently and participated in a tour and session on ‘Missing Middle Housing.’ Missing Middle housing is a term coined by Dan Parolek of Opticos Design, Inc. Missing Middle refers to housing types between a single-family home and multi-family apartments that are compatible in scale to
Traffic congestion is typically the number one complaint about Sebastopol. Being at the crossroads of 2 state highways and given the physical limitations of any expansion to the road network we have to live with what we have. The only way we are going to reduce congestion is to develop
A great post about a wasted opportunity. The street along the Santa Rosa Junior College is a mish-mash of low density, car-oriented sprawl. Given the thousands of people that attend and work at the junior college and the adjacent high school it is appalling how we have developed this stretch
Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns was in Santa Rosa last week. During one of our conversations he told me about this meme and I had to share it. I have been feeling this way for years. One of the biggest complaints about the state of our town is traffic and
This post was originally published as a guest post on the Strong Towns website. Like many other cities in California, Santa Rosa is struggling with high housing costs and deteriorating infrastructure. Rents have risen 40% in the past 4 years. Median sale price has risen about 10% in the past
Here is a great blog post of why modern zoning codes prevent implementation of human-scaled urbanism today. In most places, it is simply not legal to build mixed-use walkable neighborhooods.
I’ve been a member of Strong Towns the past several years and I’ve written about them before on this blog. I’m a little behind schedule on this as they have been having a membership drive this week. (I’m sure no one will mind if you joint next week!). I would
urban design thoughts through the filter of
living in a small town
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