Developer Learns How Costly It Can Be to Build a Better Suburb

SACRAMENTO —  Can a veteran developer of standard suburban tract housing succeed by re-creating the small-town feeling that communities had in his youth?

Or will a sluggish real estate market dash our hero’s hopes of doing well by doing good?

Stay tuned. This particular soap opera is being played out 11 miles south of our leafy old capital, whose charm and cheapness have made it a magnet for refugees from pricier venues throughout California. If our hero succeeds, you can look for versions of this story on empty land near you.

Let’s open with a series of establishing shots. First, the city: tree-lined streets, stores within walking distance, great old homes, charming cottages, apartments. Kids jump rope on the sidewalk. Neighbors wave hello.

Cut to the burgeoning suburbs: row upon row of look-alike homes marching along streets that meander aimlessly. And nobody in sight. The audience is puzzled; maybe this is science fiction, about some future after the neutron bomb.

As the region’s most prolific home builders, Phil Angelides and his partners have played a major role in all this. They had just completed a hot-selling 6,500-unit project in the Laguna Creek area, and Angelides was about to commit yet another soulless new cul-de-sac haven next door when, in 1989, he had a kind of awakening.

A slender man of oceanic energy and undying idealism, he acted on this epiphany, jeopardizing certain profit in order to build a better community.

“I began to compare the older neighborhoods to the newer neighborhoods,” he says. In the new suburbs he saw “patterns of development that were dysfunctional.”

Angelides decided to tear up the plans and start over again. He hired San Francisco architect Peter Calthorpe to build a small town, complete with town hall, village green and main street.

The narrow roads are purposely clogged with tree planters, and the two-headed light stanchions ape antiques. Built closer to the street, many houses will have porches in front and garages in back. More than 15,000 trees will grow into a canopy over the streets.

The town center was made denser. Apartments were added, and for a few thousand dollars, home buyers can have a “granny flat” over the garage. Locally, everything’s a short walk. Express buses for downtown Sacramento will leave from the town center. Light rail is coming.

It’s a big risk, and so far Angelides has succeeded mainly in proving the old adage that no good deed goes unpunished.

He had already won approval for the $500-million, 1,045-acre development, to be known as Laguna West. And he knew the tried and true would sell.

Redesigned, the project had to get approval all over again, costing more than $4 million in interest alone. Worse, the delay pushed Laguna West out of a strong housing market and into today’s doldrums.

Angelides’ story reminds us that people don’t only act out of profit, even in business. And it underscores a subtle change in thinking about the way new homes--whole new places, really--are built. There is growing recognition in California that we build houses but not communities and that the resulting anonymous sprawl is bad.

Calthorpe may be the state’s leading exponent of these ideas, and his thinking is having an effect. Sacramento County has already embraced many of his planning notions. Calthorpe has also been hired by San Diego County to help it figure out a better way to grow.

Nor is Angelides the only developer to adopt these ideas. Kaufman and Broad Home Corp., California’s largest home builder, is working on several “planned communities.” In Brentwood, about 25 miles from Oakland, the company plans a new neighborhood of perhaps 500 homes, with stores and day-care or other facilities within walking distance.

Angelides and his Laguna West project illustrate the new approach, as well as its many pitfalls.

A Sacramento native, Angelides held state housing posts under former Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. In 1984, he got into housing development, eventually forming his own company, River West Developments.

A Democrat and a big fund-raiser for Michael Dukakis’ presidential bid, Angelides found no public role for himself in this Republican era. He decided instead that he could effect change in the private sector. Ironically, he discovered that government land-use and zoning laws make it tough to build anything but sprawling suburbs. Many communities require huge roads, acres of parking and strict segregation of living and commerce.

The village green and town hall, for instance, are being built “almost in spite of the public agencies,” Angelides says.

It took 11 months to get Laguna West re-approved, even though Sacramento County planners are already applying the very ideas Angelides is acting on. It didn’t hurt that the county is controlled by Democrats; Angelides is the state party chairman.

Laguna West has already had a break: Apple Computer is bringing in a $20-million distribution facility, so some residents will be able to walk to work.

The question now is whether a community can be willed into being. People love their cars, and not all porches are created equal. A vaguely Spanish model home at Laguna West looks as if it’s rejecting a porch that’s been grafted on.

Still, Angelides gets an E for effort. Given that he and his partners have spent $40 million on the site and borrowed $70 million more, no one can say they haven’t put their money where their mouths are.