It Makes a Village

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STORES, PARKS AND SCHOOLS you can walk to. Grid-pattern streets. Wide, landscaped sidewalks. Sound like a blast from the past? It may seem that way in these days of dead-end cul-de-sacs and suburbs designed for automobiles, not pedestrians.

But you can still find new neighborhoods that hark back to the cozy communities of yesteryear. Across San Diego County, from Chula Vista to San Marcos, housing developments are embracing the village concept, which takes modern ideas and blends them with the most successful features of older neighborhoods.

“It’s really a back-to-the-future concept, based on traditional town centers and downtowns after the turn of the 20th century in the United States,” says Anthony Flint, author of This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America and a researcher at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a Massachusetts think tank.

In Otay Ranch in Chula Vista, slated to become home to 19,000 houses and 50,000 people, the village concept has been in the minds of planners since the early days of development almost 20 years ago.

“One of the basic tenets was a series of pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods that have a sense of place and aren’t a sea of sameness,” says Kim Kilkenny, executive vice president of the Otay Ranch Company. “It really is turning back the clock.”

Developers at Otay Ranch made special efforts to avoid the mistakes of some of their colleagues. “A lot of neighborhoods were built, and they didn’t have schools or parks, and they didn’t have the necessary services in order to make them livable when homes first appeared,” Kilkenny says. “When we acquired Otay Ranch, we saw this as an opportunity to do lots of things differently.”

The result for Otay Ranch: about a dozen villages, approximately a square mile each, surrounding centrally located elementary schools, parks and shops. A giant open-space network. And plenty of transit stops, most within a quarter-mile of each home.

Kilkenny says pathways for people were created by developing 60-foot-wide greenbelts and “pop-through” cul-de-sacs that eliminate dead ends for pedestrians. “It’s easier to walk in Otay Ranch than drive it,” he says. “It’s just the opposite of what you’ve seen in other communities. You don’t have to get into the car to go to the elementary school, the park or stores.”

Indeed, the village concept is largely a reaction to the design of developments over the past few decades, according to Dr. Ethan Berke, a Dartmouth Medical School professor who studies the effects of neighborhood design on exercise. He says, “The concept was a response to far-flung conventional suburban development, which is entirely car-dependent, doesn’t allow for much walking and requires lots of fuel.”

One of the newer villages at Otay Ranch will even have something very rare in modern housing developments—streets in a grid pattern instead of winding roads and cul-de-sacs. That translates into fewer dead ends for pedestrians and makes it less likely anyone could ever say, “You can’t get there from here.”

Researchers have found walkable communities make residents more active, especially when they allow people to walk for more than just recreation. “Grids are good. Long, sprawling, winding suburban streets and cul-de-sacs are less walkable because there are fewer options to navigate through the network of streets,” says Berke. “It takes a longer walk to get to a destination because there are fewer options to get there.”

A walkable community also makes it easy for people to walk to places they go every day, Berke says. “It’s more than just being near a hiking trail or bicycle trail. It’s having an opportunity to walk to places you’d have to go to anyway—a school, bank, post office or restaurant.”

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