Ok, I’m gonna call it: busy is definitely back. I’m teetering right on the edge of exhaling, and it won’t take much to push me into real belief. If I’m dreaming, please don’t wake me, because I like this.

As far as I can figure, the phone started ringing in earnest about sixty days ago. At first, the work was coming in as sort of a steady trickle . . . drip, drip, drip: a combination of both completely new developments and others previously left for dead. The drips have combined and become a relatively steady flow, so much that we’ve been able to bring back some of our people who were temporarily sidelined during the economic maelstrom.

Thankfully, I’m not an analyst or a prognosticator, but if I had to make an assessment of what is motivating new life for so many multifamily and mixed-use projects, I’d say it’s some combination of more money being generally available, and the impetus to get some vertical construction underway while pricing is still at depressed levels. If a meaningful quotient of the projects we’re now looking at—especially the resurrected ones—actually break ground and get rolling, this will put pressure on the pricing, and the window will gradually creak closed. So this current environment is going to work out well for the first teams to make the leap.

Another factor may be the subtle recovery of apartment fundamentals. In what must definitely be a characteristic of “the new normal,” improvement in this case is defined as a leveling off or cessation of the decline in rents and occupancies. This encouragement, however modest, may be enough to ignite a latent intention to build already brought near the flash point by the “available money/construction sale” scenario described above. Whichever it is, I’ll take it.

Finally, it is encouraging to witness the amount of “possibility thinking” I see going on right now. We have re-visited many projects, which have that “designed at the peak of a bubble” flavor—just a little too much with inflated optimism—that are now seeking an obtainable paradigm. Some are attempting to push the constricting envelope of building and fire codes to get just a little more into package that works with a less dense construction type. In other words, I’m seeing a new enthusiasm, albeit need-driven, to imagine a better mousetrap.

What a joy to be in the last half of 2010, a year I’m sure we’ll all be glad to have behind us. Meanwhile, time to pop another Red Bull and get back to the drawing board.

(Daniel Gehman is principal at Thomas Cox Architects. He can be reached at DanielG@tca-arch.com)

Well, to be fair, what I really mean is nobody jaywalks in Los Angeles. Seriously. My conviction surrounding this issue stems from the day my colleague was ticketed to the tune of about a hundred bucks for jaywalking. Mind you, this was not for casually wandering across the street mid-block, this was for walking against the flashing orange hand at an intersection. Not the solid orange hand, the flashing orange hand.

I was in Manhattan about two weeks ago, and it pretty much took a full 24 hours for me to understand I wasn’t in the city of angels anymore. Initially, I waited like a good soldier at each intersection for the light to flash the “all systems go” white walking guy. And the blocks are really small, have I mentioned that?

Pretty soon I began to notice that people were breezing by me as if it were nothing at all to cross the street regardless of what the pedestrian light said. “Wow,” I thought, “these folks are really brazen.” Really, at the end of the day, the stop lights for pedestrians were suggestions, at best.

Fortunately for me, on my first evening in New York, I had dinner with some locals. I explained my dilemma with the cross walks, and, probably without meaning to, they gave me that “Oh, you poor naïf” look. The succinct explanation offered to me: “Daniel, this is New York. Pedestrians rule. You look both ways, and if there are no cars, you cross. No big deal.”

The next day, I watched for a while, and it was absolutely true. Emboldened by this revelation, I pretty soon tried my first crossing against the flashing hand. Wow—on the 30-ft. wide, one-way streets, it was not a big deal at all. In fact, it was kind of exhilarating—I felt freed to pursue my own goals, as long as I wasn’t threatened by a speeding vehicle.

This works, of course, because so many of the streets in Manhattan are really narrow. Seriously, by comparison, even the typical street in downtown LA is like a thruway—the distance to cross is so great, and the cars are moving so fast, do you really want to take your life in your hands? I have been trained, it is clear, that the car is king, and I need to take my rightful place in the divine order of things.

And so it is. It’s LA; cars rule, peds drool. Will it always be thus? I don’t know. One Thursday a month, in the evening, the emerging gallery district along Spring street comes alive with tens of thousands (I suppose) hipsters out to sample the fare from the food trucks and cruise the galleries. Temporarily the pattern is reversed, and downtown adopts a New York state of mind. It’s a glorious thing.

Maybe as downtown LA continues to emerge, we should have a lot more one-way streets, and generally narrow half of them by making the sidewalks wider and more inviting. In NYC, the heavy traffic is grouped to bigger streets about 10 blocks apart, as far as I can tell. Maybe we need a little more of that.

(Daniel Gehman is principal at Thomas Cox Architects. He can be reached at DanielG@tca-arch.com)

Ok, so I have a new goal. By the time I’m 55, my home will generate enough electricity to not only re-charge my electric vehicle, but also to sell the excess back to my local utility. Please understand that I’m well on my way already—there’s a photovoltaic system on my roof that was designed to provide about 85 percent of my annual demand. Why stop at 85 percent? Well, at the time, the theory went that since any energy generated at my place in excess of what I could use would flow back into the grid—from where my utility company could essentially sell it to my neighbors—there was no financial motive to produce more than I could use.

In the three years my system has been operating, this is pretty much how it has performed. Then an interesting phenomenon occurred. This spring, my wife, who operates a home-based business, was away for several months. In the first 30 days, my energy consumption matched, almost to the kilowatt-hour, the amount produced, resulting in a zero power bill. This happened again in the next month. In the third month, that meter must really have been spinning backwards, because I posted a credit! This became quite a motivator—sport almost—and I tried to double down on my conservation efforts to see how long I could stay in the black.

This week in Los Angeles, the City Council agreed to consider a feed-in tariff program for the Department of Water and Power. If approved, it could foment a large move into “distributed infrastructure,” which is very much a harbinger of the future. Roofs of buildings, large and small, could be retrofitted with solar arrays that generate many more watts than the facilities need, with the overage being sold back to DWP. In the cases of large warehouses with low power demand, this could add a nice little punch to the bottom line. It will help stimulate “green” business and manufacturing, too, and will inevitably push us closer to a massive paradigm shift.\

Expect the utilities to squeal. After all, this will cut into their revenue stream. However, the potential of credit back for the PV systems will make the cost of their installation defensible for many more people, even some single family homeowners.

Like me. If DWP goes for this, our other California energy providers will follow. I have already reduced my electric bill dramatically; I would love to eliminate it completely, and have it instead become a modest revenue stream for me. (It probably won’t hurt re-sale value, either.) There’s 4.5 years left to accomplish this goal. Let’s get cracking!

(Daniel Gehman is principal at Thomas Cox Architects. He can be reached at DanielG@tca-arch.com)

OK, so it’s like we’re all in the locker room, right, and, say, the other team has a lead of at least one, and maybe two touchdowns. We’ve just received some combination of dress down and build up by our fearless leader and mentor/coach, and we’re all chomping to get back on the field to see if we can’t rally to pull this one off.

Our industry is such a mutually dependent thing. Though each of us on a development team may carry the ball for a different stretch of the field, no individual would really have a salient function without the rest of the huddle. So we all keep scratching, digging, looking, waiting, and imagining how great it will be when we get to play again.

This week I heard a bit of news from one of my clients, a large national apartment REIT, that they had recently “green-lighted” a number of projects that had been slumbering. Hooray! (I hope it’s one or two of mine!) Together with a perceivable increase of the number of calls from both new and existing clients about possible deals, it certainly seems like the fog may be starting to lift, one pixel at a time.

It’s got to be a tough patch for the decision makers. Think of the revenue stream I could generate with a crystal ball at this moment! The conventional wisdom, at least in rental apartment circles, is that nobody wants to wait too long to bring new product to market lest they miss a couple of years of hefty run-ups in rent. Naturally, this sentiment sounds absurd at the moment, but when you consider a typical high-density, podium-style project with around 200 units is going to take conservatively two years to build—even if the permits are in hand—the time frame starts to feel a bit more relevant. So we’re stalled or still moving slightly in reverse at the moment, how long does that really take to turn around?

Everyone knows it’s cheaper at the moment to buy an existing, performing asset than to build new from the ground up. And yet, at best, these established properties changing hand can be fluffed and buffed, which is appropriate for the market, but they are not now, and can never be, the new thing on the block, for which there will always be an interest. What are the right signs that will encourage the decision makers to pull the trigger and start the next new things?

Perhaps rent stabilization would be an element. But what’s the delay, I wonder, between a leveling off of rents and the beginning of a new acceleration cycle? Again, I wish I knew.

What nobody wants in the dreaded ‘double-dip’ recession, where, just as things seem to be moving in the right direction, they stall in mid-air and begin a sloppy second sludge into backward movement. May it never be!

Watch the consumers. My financial advisor told me once that the reason recessions end is because folks grow tired of being super thrifty, and just go out and start spending again. So, basically, the downturns end due to boredom. Would only that were the case we see being played out in front of us.

I don’t know. The Dow’s over 11K today; last month the economy added jobs, oh—and did anybody mention it’s an election year?

Put me in coach, I’m ready to play.

(Daniel Gehman is principal at Thomas Cox Architects. He can be reached at DanielG@tca-arch.com)

Daniel Gehman

Naturally, when I saw an article in my local paper extolling the advent of the first LEED Platinum rated building in Orange County, Calif., I was pretty darn excited. It was a single- family residence, which was a bit unusual, but a notable benchmark nonetheless. There was to be an open house that very afternoon, and, with a bit of time at my disposal, I decided to head on over there.

A steady stream of Priuses, old and new, braked successfully and deposited their optimistic occupants curbside. (I parked mine around the corner.) With a curious but somewhat critical eye, I drifted toward the entry court over the amber waves of native grasses. (This is hyperbole. The landscaping as installed was teeny, tiny shoots of what promised to be well-behaving, low-maintenance lushness later. I just like the way that sounded.)

It was at that moment something I had kind of glossed over in reading the paper’s description of the property leapt up and smacked me in the head like a chunk of Forest Stewardship Council-certified 2 X 4. This place was humongous!

More on that in a minute. First, let me give credit where credit is due. The team who put this palace (oops, I meant place) together stretched the (metaphorical) envelope pretty far, incorporating some resource-sensitive systems such as sinks that capture grey water for flushing of toilets and landscape irrigation use. Also, most of the hard surface on site (for cars and pedestrians) was composed of interlocking pavers, which will also allow rainwater to infiltrate the aquifer, which is a good thing. The landscaping itself was native Californian, so once the plants are established, they should be able to survive without subsequent additional irrigation. Tankless water heaters, which are big energy savers, were thoughtfully integrated, even if it took multiple units to do the job. A bone I had to pick with the paper’s description, which promised “LED lighting throughout,” was that though I looked high and low, there were none to be found–plenty of fluorescent tubes, which is a good thing, but none of the latest technical step forward. The home featured several walls that folded open to allow seamless passage from inside to out, a nice component in this temperate environment—good for climate control and fresh air.

But here’s my beef: weighing in at nearly 6,000 square feet, this domicile was enormous. Seriously. We’re talking six bedrooms, each with its own bath, plus a home office thrown in for good measure. It totally dominated its site, leaving only a little patio area and a large pool and spa outside the boundary of its eaves. Inside the house, the main living spaces were super-sized almost outside of the range of recognizable. It felt more like a semi-public clubhouse than a single-family residence, with enormous high ceilings, cold concrete floors, and very little intimacy outside the bathrooms (All six of them! Perhaps the fact that it was on a golf course led to such unrestrained excess.) Look, even if you paint a Hummer with low-VOC paint, it’s still a big, big ride. Hasn’t this team received the “McMansions are passé memo?)

It seems to me that along with accepting the general ideas that come with designing sustainably—pursuing “building high performance and resource sensitivity”—at some level there is a theme of generally stretching resources further, and, frankly, doing more with less. Whatever happened to Sarah Susanka’s “Not So Big House?” The conditioned area in this behemoth could accommodate an entire order of Carmelite nuns. Have I mentioned the six bedrooms?

What a disappointment that the first LEED Platinum project in the OC gets so many of the little details right, but completely misses the big picture. The developer has vowed to take on another project after this one that follows the same path. Please: keep all the cool widgets, but show us what you can do with some creative design of modest spaces, so the soul of the thing might match its makeup.

(Daniel Gehman is principal at Thomas Cox Architects. He can be reached at DanielG@tca-arch.com)

Ah, if only. People around here are fond of saying “God stopped making land a long time ago.” If not precisely scientifically correct, at least those words capture the emotional tone of the current predicament—we’re running out of dirt.

Allow me to qualify. It’s not so much that there isn’t bare land available anywhere, but powerful forces have conspired to make a great deal of it simply in the wrong place, even if for the right reasons. Of course, I’m talking about real estate suitable for the development of new multifamily communities. With the tiniest glimmers of light beginning to penetrate the dense fog of the “great recession,” it is time for new projects to enter the entitlement pipeline in order to properly anticipate the arrival of a better market, one in which the latent demand for dwellings will once again surface as people “un-couple” from the hybrid households that formed during our recent painful contraction. (Phew!)

So give us dirt! I have many colleagues in the development industry who are now on the prowl for a few acres of blank slate on which to sculpt their next multi-family masterpiece. Naturally, I want to assist the search in any way possible because I need work as well. So, partly at their bidding, but largely prompted by my own survival instinct, I’m keeping my eyes open, my ears to the tracks, (place your favorite cliché here) to pay attention for purchase and development opportunities.

Our industry, at least in California, is evolving. The give-back in rents of the last few years has had the effect of rendering nearly any project with structured parking essentially impossible to pencil. Back in the day, when rents were increasing, these dense infill projects could work. Construction costs have backed off considerably, but not enough to balance out the overall picture. And here’s the rub: to quote a friend frustrated by a fruitless search, “The sellers still think it’s 2006.”

Back in 2005, apartment REITS were consistently bid out of the competition for infill sites because for-sale developers could always offer more money for the land. Then by early 2007, with the declining market, many of these properties changed hands, with the for-sale teams bailing out through sales to for-rent developers.

Today feels eerily similar, but the problem doesn’t seem so much that the land is being bid up by for-sale guys; rather, the sellers all remember those days, and still expect inflated prices. To qualify yet another aspect of this, bear in mind that cultural pressures have gelled that make the wildly ex-urban properties (think 90-minute commute stuff) unpopular due to their “unsustainable” nature. All signs point to the logic of denser communities being built near and around transit, which has recently been resuscitated due both to public will and the infusion of recovery money. This means, of course, that all the land held in these zones is offered only at premium prices! Argh!

So what does it all mean? My buddies, the acquisition folks, are working harder and being more creative than I’ve ever seen. All my in-house colleagues are all trying to pay attention to the land market, though it is far outside our typical comfort range to do so, watching for leads. Everybody wants deals to be made so we can step up our work efforts.

All this effort is going to lead to “break-away” ideas—really new and unique propositions for properties that seemed unlikely in the past (see my post “Car-ied Away, from September 10th.) The municipalities may need to help, too, by offering incentives such as zoning overlays or parking relief.

Everything in me has that feeling that somebody, somewhere, is going to break through soon.

Bring it on!

(Daniel Gehman is principal at Thomas Cox Architects. He can be reached at DanielG@tca-arch.com)

How many times in the past year have I found myself saying, “You know, when the next recession comes along, doggone it, I’m going to have a hundred grand laying around so I can take advantage of these dang fire sales that are constantly tempting me.” Wishful thinking only? Well, perhaps, but let me explain the latest observation to spark this ambition.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a couple of occasions to enrich my in-depth appreciation of the City of Angels. First was a downtown walking tour, sponsored by the LA Conservancy, of the locations that were central to the summer indie film “500 Days of Summer.” This romp was a great deal of fun, despite it being the hottest day of the year. Of course, there were the typical trompe l’oeil effects of making one place seem like another—Old Bank DVD standing in for a record store, and another building on South Spring Street faking it as Tom’s apartment. At least the treasured Bradbury Building (site of Harrison Ford’s apartment in Blade Runner, only much prettier in real life) was played close to the real thing as an important meeting takes place there between the architect protagonist and a prospective client. (Could this be a thinly veiled reference to the developer who is actually headquartered in this Victorian confection?)

The city itself, however, played itself, rather than imitating New York, Philadelphia, or any number of loony third world outposts. It might be noted that often when LA plays itself in a movie, it ends up being destroyed—Terminator 2 and Independence Day spring to mind. So, in this quirky little study, not only does downtown play itself, but it survives, and even thrives.

Our tour guide pointed out that the producers of the movie deliberately edited out of strategic camera shots iconic LA structures that would have plainly painted it as a modern town: the Walt Disney Concert Hall; the Library Tower. Instead they focused on what they termed “pre-World War Two” architecture. At the end of the day, this gives the film a bit of a “timeless” quality, or at the very least, a romantic patina. LA has, by the way, the largest concentration of historic early 19th century buildings in the entire country.

But on to my sales pitch. This past weekend I went on a Downtown Housing Tour, which is sponsored by the Downtown Center Business Improvement District as a means to promote dwelling opportunities in the core of the burb. I have done this before, but there was a spate of new stuff I really wanted to see, including several historic buildings that have been adaptively re-used as apartments or condominiums (and for actual people, not for actors in a movie!) A couple really got my attention. The Rowan building, on Spring Street (the emerging artsy district) is extremely classy, with the signature feature of unimaginably large windows. Seriously, these monsters must be nine feet wide by six feet tall—and the open, too! It’s almost a wall of glass, except for the existing beefy structural columns that separate the openings. Awesome. Oh, and there are special transparent guard rails added to keep your French bulldog from plummeting over the sill.

If slick, modern, chic, amenity-rich living is more your style, Evo in the south park area offers it in spades. This brand new high rise in one of downtown’s other emerging hot spots has walls of glass, too, but of the modern variety, not to mention outstanding finishes and top shelf appliances. Without resorting to hyperbole, it is really quite jaw-dropping, especially on the upper floors, when the building breaks out above it’s tall neighbors.

Now, if you’ve got a bit of bank, you can snag a fine pied a terre in one of these buildings for a total song. I’m not exaggerating. The entry-level pricing at Evo is around $350/square foot; that’s probably $100/foot less than it cost the developer to construct this gem! The Rowan was one of the first downtown properties to offer a release of units at auction, which was a tremendous success for buyers, even if the seller lost money on every transaction.

I must say that if I were serious about moving downtown and could pull it off, I would probably have a very difficult time deciding between Evo and The Rowan. Too bad I won’t have to agonize about it now.

Somebody call me again in about eight years.

(Daniel Gehman is principal at Thomas Cox Architects. He can be reached at DanielG@tca-arch.com)

So I was sitting in a ULI professional conference on “Developing Green” several months ago and made a small note to myself. “What a good idea it might be to consider the adaptive re-use of shuttered automobile dealerships.” Well, imagine my ironic delight as I read in Globe St. this morning about a new arm of a well-known brokerage firm that had been set up to deal in “work-outs” for closing car lots. Hmmm. Should have registered my idea somewhere, I guess.

Anyway, I still find the notion quite compelling. Naturally, there are as many variants in the location of car dealers as there are option packages, but some of these sites might really work if re-purposed. The ones that spring to mind are those located right on the fringe of residential neighborhoods. Now, I’m aware that today is not the most propitious moment in history to be considering the development of new ground-up housing, but every now and then something comes along that’s just too good to pass up, at least as far as land values are concerned. So a dealership that has been family-run for three generations in the same spot—what’s the land value there? Wouldn’t re-zoning for multifamily or mixed-use development on some of these properties make sense?

On the other hand, what if some portion of the vertical improvements (especially some of those bombastic, palatial homages to the muscle cars and mini-vans of yore with the soaring volumes and granite floors) could be saved and given new life with some minor tweaking? Adaptive re-use is such a wonderful exercise in resource sensitivity; it just requires the proper brilliant design team and a fearless developer. But what uses might work?

I’m thinking a school might be a good fit (at least for a dealership close to residential areas—for those located under freeway off-ramps, maybe not so much). There’s one major assembly area, then lots of support spaces around it to be used for classrooms. Actually, when I hear myself describe it that way, it sounds like a church might also be a good use, especially with all that convenient surface parking scattered around. (The really frustrating thing about a church, of course, is how much surface parking is really required. Talk about designing for the Easter crowd.)

But perhaps there’s a creative hybrid (note the subtle car reference) to be generated with one of these properties, in a mixed-use vein. I could see an enhanced neighborhood center/transit hub where the local (alternate fuel) shuttle stops to pick up people bound for the train station or other public transportation. It could be a small school, library and recreation facility with a tiny amount of retail and maybe a handful of executive suites. Then, build as much multifamily housing around this highly recognizable central element as could possibly fit, generating lots of residents to interact with this new multi-use facility.

The shuttle-to-transit provision could possibly help reduce the amount of parking required for the new residential units, as well as bring interest and activity to the re-purposed dealership building, not to mention reduce overall vehicle trips and greenhouse gas emissions. One might anticipate some municipalities shrieking at the specter of having a huge tax-generating facility re-purposed as something that makes a more modest contribution, but this is a case where the greater good—say the holistic health of the community—needs to be considered over the mere means of income.

Besides, as everyone already knows, this is not your father’s Oldsmobile.

(Daniel Gehman is principal at Thomas Cox Architects. He can be reached at DanielG@tca-arch.com)

Wonderful change is afoot in one of LA’s most notorious neighborhoods. Jordan Downs, located in the heart of the community of Watts, in South Los Angeles, is targeted for redevelopment. The design team, led by the capable staff at the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA) is in the midst of the community outreach for the project. Jordan Downs may be noted as one of the last public housing projects to be developed in the city of the angels back in the 1950s. Regrettably, it is probably better known for being in the middle of the neighborhood that gave birth to LA gangs knows as the “Bloods” and the “Crips.”

Last Saturday I attended the fourth stakeholder outreach meeting, my second in the series, which was held, as always, in the community center located at Grape Street and Century Avenue. At the former meeting, there was a modest security presence, with uniformed officers generally keeping watch over folks arriving on Grape Street by car. This time, however, the detail was beefed up a bit, complete with orange traffic cones demarcating a drop off zone by the front door. I had heard there would be “special guests,” so I supposed this was for them.

As it turned out, the dignitaries on had for this event were Antonia Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los Angeles, and Maxine Waters, the congresswoman for the district in which the community is located. For having such star power on hand, I expected a massive turn-out, with standing room only for us “observer” types. But this was not the case. Attendance was marked (as the LA Times pointed out) by a handful of residents, and a bevy of consultants, handlers, and onlookers.

The mayor, dressed down in jeans to look approachable (as he himself quipped) offered a mellow, uplifting encouragement, along with a pledge of the City’s devotion to the project. Ms. Waters, who, admirably, was recognized by a handful of residents as well as most of the JD Advisory Committee and vice-versa, was a bit more animated. She made a very interesting point: without weighing in on what direction the re- development should take, she emphasized that the burden on the designers and HACLA was to engage the community in every step of the process, “from planning to picking paint palettes.”

This noble commitment is riddled with challenge. There are many, many layers to the “community” of Jordan Downs. As mentioned above, there were only a handful of residents present. (The community consists of 700 apartments, suggesting a total population of at least 1500 persons; there were perhaps 40 at the peak of the activities.) It was mentioned that some residents don’t attend out of fear of retribution. From whom wasn’t quite clear. What was clear was the wild proliferation of half-truth, rumor, innuendo and ignorance. It was disheartening, but comprehensible.

What this milieu set up was a context in which the design team, which included Dan Solomon and John Kaliski, spent the majority of their presentation time de-bunking bad information that had to be cleared up before anything resembling a design discussion could occur. Then, in what was an eye-opening experience for me, it became necessary to always search for the “question behind the question,” to have a decent shot at answering what was being asked, because it was extraordinarily easy for misunderstandings to occur due to the lack of even a basic design vocabulary. Dan and John, to their credit, avoided pontificating in “architect-ese”, which would have been especially dreadful in this instance, where two groups of people where already reaching WAY beyond their comfort zones to communicate with the other parties.

In brief, the proposed project envisioned a “Hope VI” type of arrangement, that would replace the 700 public housing units on a one-to-one basis, then add 700 units of “work-force” housing, plus 700 units of market rate housing. This 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 approach has been very successful in other parts of the country. Good thing HACLA was able to purchase an adjacent 21-acre parcel, which would enable them to start a first phase with enough replacement units to allow a “rolling” redevelopment of the site without any residents actually needing to leave the community. Even with that land included, the average density of the new neighborhood would more than double that of what it is today. This, naturally, was of grave concern, for a collection of reasons, to almost all residents who spoke,.

This project, as they say in developer lingo, “has a lot of hair on it.” Props to HACLA and the development team for diving into it, believing in the vision, and having the love and patience to continue to work with the community to seek out not just consensus, but even a common language basis from which to begin a dialogue! This is where design really hits the streets.

The spokesperson from my break-out table, who presented to the overall assembly the ideas developed there, spoke with passion of how the residents’ hopes had been raised before, only to be dashed when re-development plans were scrapped. Some were dumped, incidentally, due to overwhelming negative feedback from residents that created insurmountable political hurdles. Let’s believe (stronger than hoping) that this time the process will be successful, that the proper leaders will emerge to shepherd a dramatic transformation of a “project”, and by extension, it’s neighborhood and community.

(Daniel Gehman is principal at Thomas Cox Architects. He can be reached at DanielG@tca-arch.com)

Some time ago I wrote about a new senior housing community that was being proposed in my neighborhood. Since this is a product type that my company also designs, I was quite interested in who was proposing just what, so I followed the process. I can’t recall exactly how it happened, but I ended up on the mailing list of the association that represents my neighborhood, and is called upon to review proposed projects for design consistency.

(As a curious aside, when I first moved here about fifteen years ago, I attended a couple of meetings in an attempt to gain familiarity and perhaps even make some connections. At that time the majority of projects being reviewed were cell phone tower installations, and this committee was tough, tough, tough! I believe it was partly due to the great hurdles they put in front of the companies proposing these installations that the coverage at my house is abominable. Seriously, there’s one place I can stand in my driveway to take calls on my work phone. But I digress.)

It quickly became clear to me that the association was, shall we say, vehemently opposed to the project. I took the bait and looked up the drawings myself, and, frankly, saw what I believed to be a sensitively designed community that proposed a modest 150-some units on just over seven acres, which is quite a bit less dense even than the three-story walk-up communities we’ve been doing forever—around 20 DU/AC. I wondered how they made it pencil at such a low number then learned the land had been donated to a religious organization so they could develop retirement homes for their maturing clergy, which I thought was a marvelous gesture.

Because of my inclusion on the mailing list, I got to witness the battle over the proposal, which, due mostly I think to its proposed zone change, engendered so much ire you would have thought it was the President’s new health care proposal. This to me would all have been fine and well, except when the discussion started to distort the facts. The project was called “extremely dense”, “commercial”, “enormous”, and worse. I didn’t think it was any of those things, so, because the connections were provided to me, I contacted the county planner, and even my county Supervisor (who had already been drawn into the fray) to express my support for the project and go on record as such. Finally, I contacted the developer to deliver the same message.

I heard nothing for several months, then received a Notice of Preparation for the required Environmental Impact Report. This involves a public meeting (not a hearing—it is just intended to collect resident concerns about what should be included in the study.) I figured that to be consistent to my position I should show up and see what might unfold.

Well, the meeting was last Tuesday. I got tied up in a client meeting and arrived 45 minutes late, so I missed the presentation by the developer. The room was filled to literally overflowing, with a few brave souls standing outside with their heads stuck through the door, hoping to catch the gist of things. A speaker, who I learned to be an attorney, was pontificating against the development. “Hmmm,” I thought, “I guess I better follow through fully and register to speak.” When I handed in my speaker card, there was a pile nearly an inch thick. How merciful that each speaker was limited to three minutes.

OK, before I get to the punch line here, I must say that in fairness, I heard several issues that evening that had not occurred to me, which I believed were reasonable, and which should be considered in the EIR. This is the essence of a scoping meeting—to uncover the salient issues for analysis, and I look forward to seeing what answers are conveyed in the draft.

I’m not sure how many of the other 150 plus citizens understood that process. Speaker after speaker railed against the project, some reasonably, and some more viscerally. Often the remarks were prefaced with “I’ve lived in this neighborhood for 40 years,” or something along that line. I felt inferior for only having resided here for fourteen. I believe I listened to 20 or more residents before my turn came.

Now, I speak in public all the time, so I’m a pretty good manager of my own nerves. However, I’m usually speaking in the role of the developer’s consultant, and I precede the outpouring of public opinion. I took a breath, and attempted to present my thoughts, about design, precedent and process. I congratulated my neighbors for their willingness to engage in public discourse, observing that the NOP process was precisely for that purpose. I opined that this single zone change would not necessarily topple the first domino in an unstoppable juggernaut, and that this process was accomplishing exactly what it was supposed to do. Perhaps if had more sense, I would not have added that I believe it is important to separate the dry, rational facts of the case from the loaded, visceral reactions.

I concluded in just under the allotted three minutes. A millisecond after uttering my “thank you,” and somewhat to my surprise, the crowd erupted in booing. Seriously. One attendee even shouted out, “How much are they paying you?” I returned to my seat (on the floor) a little shaken, but incredibly energized. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” I thought. Though I was briefly tempted to leave, I realized I had to stay till the end to see what else might happen.

As I was leaving, I did receive one greeting from another (against) speaker, an attorney. He warmly smiled and shook my hand and thanked me for participating in the process. That was good to hear. What a great place we inhabit. What a fascinating experience for me to be on the other side of the podium for a change. How proud I am of my neighbors, even if I don’t agree with them, for taking their time to come out and exercise their rights. How fortunate I am I wasn’t beaten to a pulp in the parking lot by a gang of restive septuagenarians!

As John Mellencamp might say, “Ain’t that America? Home of the Free. Little pink houses for you and me.” Just no “monstrosities” (another speaker’s term) for our aging parents, and yours, too.

I’ll keep you posted.

(Daniel Gehman is principal at Thomas Cox Architects. He can be reached at DanielG@tca-arch.com)