Planners walk fine line to perpetuate Ojai's village feel
by Bret Bradigan

Ojai may be a city in name, but in the hearts and minds of its residents, it is first and foremost a village.
Defining what it takes to make a village drives debate in City Council meetings, Planning Commission meetings, ballot measures and coffeehouse chatter. And the effort to make a village has gone well beyond bluster into actual policy.
That village concept - with pedestrian-friendly streets and denser development in the downtown area - was an influential part of Ojai's General Plan.
The strongest evidence of this assertion came during public meetings in 1996 and 1997 leading up to the plan's adoption in 1997, said Dan Singer, now Ojai's city manager and then its director of general services. Village Mixed Use zoning was seen as a way to reduce traffic and expand services in the downtown core.
"The more people you have living close to work, close to services, the more people you have using those alternatives," Singer said, whether it is the Ojai Valley Bike Trail, the Ojai Trolley, or even sidewalks.
Then, as now, consensus on going about this pursuit was not easy to find, Singer said. "Conflicts have, and will, arise. It's an urbanized city model; you're taking the same concept and putting into a rural environment."
Given the way ranch-style subdivisions sprout across Southern California's landscape like mushrooms after a rain, it's clear, city planners agree, that homeowners have a natural propensity for single-family homes on discrete parcels, while commercial developers seek lower-cost, profit-maximizing strategies such as strip malls with chain stores.
So, Singer said, this shift in planning strategy has met with resistance, from both sides of the growth issue.
Recent village mixed use and downtown core developments in Ojai have had a tough time finding acceptance. Offices at the Pew and The Emerald Iguana have stirred up protest from neighbors, while also earning praise from other quarters - Offices at the Pew won the best new building award from the Ojai Valley Chamber of Commerce, for instance. And while Emerald Iguana's change in special use permit from five-night minimum to two-night minimum stays provoked protest, the stylish inn is widely recognized as an improvement over the rundown buildings that preceded it.
"Over time, it will probably work and those conflicts will go away," Singer said.
The Process
By the time the new General Plan map was finished in 1997, Ojai included 60 acres of downtown land under the village mixed use umbrella, representing 360 separate parcels. VMU parcels are zoned for up to eight units per acre.
Bill Prince was Ojai's planning director from 1989 to 2002, and currently occupies the same position for the city of Santa Barbara. He said that despite the inevitable conflicts people found in the several years of meetings and discussion it took to build the general plan, there was remarkable unanimity about what made Ojai special.
"The genesis of that was visionary citizens who wanted Ojai to be more like a village," Prince said. "It's a return to the old days kind of thing."
That unanimity guided the entire process of building the General Plan and its separate elements - land use, circulation, housing, recreation, open space, conservation and noise - but especially the land use and circulation elements.
The planning for the General Plan began in 1995 and it was adopted in 1997. Singer credited councilmembers Suza Francina and Ellen Hall for "a real push making downtown as pedestrian-friendly as possible."
And as a measure of its foresight and the difficulty of the issues it addressed, Ojai's General Plan won the Comprehensive Planning Award in 1998 from the California Chapter of the American Planning Association.
Prince said the past was extensively used to shape Ojai's future. According to the Land Use and Circulation Element, "The strength of Ojai's town core as a memorable place can be attributed to the vision of Edmond Drummond Libbey, whose financial support in the early 1900s resulted in a formalized plan for the town centered on a civic park and small commercial district."
This informed the process to the extent that "it is the community's intent to recognize the significant impact that traditional downtown has had on Ojai's image as a small town by ensuring that new development be compatible with the area's historic and architectural features, as well as the civic and cultural focus the area provides to the community."
By that standard, the new policy concept of village mixed use zoning fit right in. The General Plan seeks to expand "opportunities for home occupations to include such uses as cabinet shops, custom furniture manufacturing, artists galleries, and others ..."
It also seeks, as a deliberate consequence, to exclude strip mall developments and "big box" stores such as Wal-Mart, or large-scale tract home subdivisions. Prince said that was never really an issue as they moved through the process. "Ojai has always done a good job of driving people away, through deft use of creative regulation," he said.
In fact, the number of accepted uses for VMU dwindled from 70 to 90 "down to 25," Prince said, by the time the Land Use and Circulation Element was complete.
Ideally, Singer said, occupants of mixed-use live/work places should reflect the rest of the neighborhood. For instance, in a recent conflict, a bar with late-night live music proved not to be the best neighbor for a yoga studio.
Prince said that many people needed convincing that village mixed use zoning would present challenges and opportunities, and not solely obstacles and diminished profits. "It can be successful," he said. "But developers have to be weaned away from standard formulas."

Owner's viewpoint
One such developer and owner is Scott Loomis, who built the village mixed use property behind the Ojai Playhouse, which now houses Yogaversity.
"It was a lot easier than I expected," he said. "The property (prior to construction) was an eyesore, and (city officials) made it as easy as it could be."
The building, completed in January 2001, was designed by nearby architect Marc Whitman, who is also owner and designer of The Emerald Iguana. Whitman is also the architect for the controversial Los Arboles project on South Montgomery Street, a 23-unit condominium complex which includes both residential and commercial space.
Among the first conditional use permits for a village mixed use property was the Art Workshop on West Ojai Avenue, built in 1998 and owned by Kent and Sharon Butler until last year.
"It worked very well for us. We had no problems with the city," Sharon Butler said. "It's great for us, to live and work in the same place, and have one rent. That's really wonderful."
Besides the obvious advantage of not having to drive to work, the Butlers also found themselves walking more and driving less for basic errands. "Everything was very convenient for us," whether it was Mailboxes, Etc., or Starr Market, she said. "It's nice being close to everything."
The Butlers said that having a live-work space near downtown "does give you more of a feeling of community."
Whitman said that village mixed use properties are more interesting and challenging to build than a typical single-family home or a standard commercial development. "It adds a lot more character and personality," he said.

History
Village Mixed Use, under other names but with the same basic design, has a long history. And though it is cited as a way out of suburban anonymity and toward a stronger sense of community, it has its origins in war. According to Machiavelli's Arte della Guerra, from 1521, central planning grids with live-work spaces were born of medieval military encampments, where all the streets linked to the center, the better to quickly muster troops to repel invaders.
Instead of the Duke of Parma or Napoleon, the invaders now are strip malls, superstores, and the cash-and-carry convenience that splinters the urban core into shards of suburban isolation.
The grid system, from which village mixed use derives its basic structure, began with Roman engineers and flourished in 19th century America. According to an article in Periferia, an on-line urban design journal, called "Preservation, Mixed Use and Urban Vitality," by Jonathan Cohen, the grid system's "efficiency and ease of surveying made it attractive to speculators and it proved well suited to merchant house builders from Baltimore to San Francisco ... A builder of two or three rowhouses or one of 200 could build in the same tract simultaneously."
It was no one-size fits all solution, however. If the grids were too long or too large, community vitality dwindled.
"Compare Manhattan's Upper West Side with Greenwich Village," Cohen writes. "On the West Side, the long cross-town blocks create traffic problems and tend to channel all pedestrian movement to a few north-south streets. The result is a form of strip commercial development that is neither lively nor varied. Greenwich Village, with its fine grain of streets predating the 1811 grid plan for Manhattan, has a bustling street life and a much greater variety of shops and restaurants."
Jane Jacobs literally wrote the book on East Greenwich Village in her 1961 work, "Death and Life of Great American Cities."
A critic of heavy-handed public developments such as freeways and skyscrapers, Jacobs discovered that those features which contributed to such vibrant street life were largely accidental. The density of construction meant that East Village apartments were too small for much storage, large iceboxes or refrigerators or washers and dryers. The buildings also lacked significant setbacks, with their entrances built right out to the sidewalks. This meant that people had to freely mingle in the neighborhood to do their shopping and washing. They were thus forced out on the street and into "accidental encounters," which spawned informal networks, which, in turn, led to a strong social infrastructure and healthy community.
Ojai residents, who live in a city where running the conversational gauntlet of acquaintances means a simple errand - mailing a package at the post office, for example - can take half a day, can relate to that.
These accidental encounters, however, are no charming inconvenience, according to Jacobs. They give the city its pulse and purpose.

Future
A complex mix of factors are at play with development in and around the Ojai Valley, making it difficult to assess the effects of any one of them independently.
Ventura County Board of Supervisors passed by a 4-1 vote Thursday, with the supervisor representing Ojai, Steve Bennett, casting the sole dissent against, the Ahmanson Ranch development. That makes it increasingly likely a sprawling subdivision with 9,000 people will be built on the county's eastside, and, if the tea leaves can be read from that vote, increasingly unlikely that similar projects will be stopped.
The county's Save Our Agricultural Resources initiative, passed in 1998, does restrict certain types of development in other areas of the county, but would do little to stop strip mall proliferation in Mira Monte or Oak View, areas in which commercial zoning is already on the books.
And then there's the difficulty planners and developers have in finding a market for village mixed use projects. As Prince said, there's seldom much middle ground for artists and artisans; they are either too poor to make a middle-class living at their pursuits, or their success is measured by the acreage of their East End estates.
Whitman said a similar scenario worked against the original designs for Los Arboles, which was planned as live-work spaces for artists.
People's perceptions, shaped by decades of cookie-cutter developments, guide them away from seeking their homes in a bustling downtown. "It's not for everyone; they have to enjoy that hubbub," Whitman said.
Developers also see the litigious spectacle of Los Arboles - with the Citizens to Preserve the Ojai suing the developers for building the project and the City of Ojai for approving it - as a stern warning.
"They're scared to death of getting dragged into court," Whitman said, who has had several clients drop plans to develop mixed-use properties downtown.
It is also tough to find financing, Singer said. "Banks have not been eager to make these type of investments."
Before the developer begins such projects, they face a minefield of reluctant lenders, wary neighbors, litigious local groups, and a small pool of potential buyers or renters.
Despite these obstacles, Singer sees a slow, but inevitable, movement toward these mixed use projects, even if in an unintended way. For instance, many of the recent permits being sought for commercial developments include living space, while residential properties are seeking commercial permits. Ojai Creates! and Ojai House, both within the VMU downtown district, are examples. "We're seeing it from both angles," Singer said.
That's the central paradox of urban planning - the more of it there is, the less likely it is that its stated goal - a vibrant, organic community - will result.
Jacobs, a journalist with no formal training as an urban planner, was met with bitter resistance in the New York City which planner Robert Moses regarded as a canvas for his ambitions. The Canadian magazine McLean's, in a 1997 article about a conference on Jacobs' work in "Death and Life," said, "The lessons from that one book - that cities are ecosystems that can be smothered by rigid, authoritarian planning; that busy, lively sidewalks help cities thrive as safe, healthy places; that good urban design mixes work, housing and recreation - have influenced a generation of planners and architects."
Whitman and Singer both believe, that despite the obstacles, the spirit, if not the exacting zoning standards, of village mixed use will prevail in Ojai's future. "I see it as an old European village, with courtyards and meandering pathways," Whitman said.
Singer said, "I think it will continue, but it will be slow and somewhat fragmented."

© 2002 The Ojai Valley News

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