But this is Chico, too

The “reader’s favorite� page in the latest issue of Via, the American Automobile Association’s magazine, has a photo and caption about the Hotel Diamond.

Robby Halford of Salinas, the reader who recommended the hotel, commented: “Ask for the Diamond Suite. It’s decorated with antiques and has an amazing view of the town. Recently reconstructed, the hotel meets the modern needs of today’s travelers with grace and beauty.�

Other “hotels with history� favorites mentioned on that page include Benbow Inn in Garberville, Gold Hill Hotel in Gold Hill, La Playa Hotel in Carmel, Mission Inn in Riverside and Wolf Creek Inn in Wolf Creek, Ore. The Mission Inn is the hotel to beat all hotels. Hotel Diamond is in good company.

As most Chicoans know, Hotel Diamond is the culmination of a major reconstruction project. Owner Wayne Cook has brought it back from the dead. When he bought it, the building was still standing, but that was about it. Its grace, beauty and modernity are all the result his efforts.

In my Enterprise-Record column “But this is Chico,� I’m doing a series based on readers’ comments about buildings. Hotel Diamond is on several people’s favorites lists. The building that had become all but forgotten is rapidly reclaiming its place as a landmark.

I like its upscale quality, but I prefer to use words like elegant, classy — even swank. In this laid-back, tieless and T-shirted city, we need a few places like these. In an era when we have plenty of places to hang and let our hair down, we need venues where we can indulge our urge to get all gussied up and put on the Ritz.

It would be nice to see one or two other hotels of this sort go in downtown. It would give out-of-town visitors more reasons to come here and become acquainted with Chico’s extradordinary downtown. There must be some other nice old buildings that could be converted to this use. A big question is, where would people park. Part of that answer hinges on how soon the new city parking garage can be built.

Posted by at 01:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The blog kingdom was pretty much terra incognita to me until about a month ago when I started “But this is Chico, too� to enlarge on topics I cover in my Enterprise-Record column “But this is Chico.� I’m learning that blogging isn’t the same as writing a column.

Last week, about 20 writers and editors at the newspaper went to a conference to learn about ways to improve our Web site. Most of us are just getting our feet wet. Few of us are adept enough to claim we have developed “Webbed� feet.

MediaNews Group, our parent company, estimates that within 10 years more of our customers will be accessing our newspapers’ Web sites than reading our printed editions. That’s a sea change. It means we have just a little bit of time to test the waters before we take a headlong plunge into the online world.

One of the topics at the conference was blogging. I learned, much to my chagrin, that bloggers can’t make an appearance once a week the way columnists do in newspapers. The blogging community will drop you like so much dead weight if you don’t “update� every day, or every other day at the most.

That sounds like a lot of work. But that’s part of what’s tripping me up. I’m supposed to be having fun doing this. I kinda sorta grasp the concept. (I learned bloggers can be loose with the language and say things like “kinda sorta�) I like to write. I even write when I’m not working, so I guess you could say that writing is also my hobby, but I spend a lot of time fretting over everything that goes on a page Writing is a labor of love, but it’s not a frivolous enough activity for me to think of it as fun. I’ll have to work on that — I mean, I’ll have to play around with that.

The blog experts at the conference urged us to make our entries “short but punchy.� So let me make my point right now so I can wrap this up.

Be patient with me. I won’t be able write every day, even if I learn to think of blogging as more fun than work, but I promise I’ll write more than once a week. If I don’t spend a certain amount of time away from my computer, I will lose the knack of doing other things, such as using my legs and having live conversations. I hope the blogging community is all right with that.

OK, now that I’ve made my point, it’s time to close. This entry is already too long.

Posted by at 04:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When I entered the blogosphere about a month ago, I wrote that I’m not an “idealogue.� What I meant to say is that I’m not an “ideologue.� This wasn’t a clever or — depending on your perspective — lame play on words. I misspelled the word. I have a perfect excuse for my mistake. I offer it as proof that ideology isn’t part of my everyday vocabulary and that my aim is to question the value of “ideologues� — people who adhere to a particular political, intellectual, aesthetic, cultural or sociological party line.

My son Todd doesn’t believe me. He thinks I’m a “pop liberal,� which to him is a type of ideologue. He thinks I react in knee-jerk ways to any number of issues — from illegal immigration, to minority rights, to business practices and economic policies. I admit I have some liberal ideas, but I resist his claim that I can be so easily pigeonholed.

For example, I don’t think I was a liberal parent. When Todd was a child, I washed out his mouth with soap whenever he uttered foul cusswords, and I didn’t hesitate to spank him whenever I felt he had seriously misbehaved. Just a couple of weeks ago I told him no card-carrying liberal would ever admit to having done that. Todd, who is now 20, said pop liberals would have been OK with corporal punishment back in the 1980s, but they wouldn’t be now.

But what about corporal punishment for criminals? I told him I support the death penalty. He said nowadays pop liberals are trying to convince people they aren’t soft on crime. I brought up a couple of other issues that I thought would prove to him that I’m not a hardcore liberal, but he was unmoved by my arguments.

Why does Todd insist on believing I’m incapable of thinking outside the party line? In many ways, he’s a liberal, but he shrinks from applying that word to himself. He’s no more comfortable with a label than I am. How did these labels become so much a part of our everyday conversation.?

Nowadays, everyone uses “liberal� and “conservative� a lot more frequently — and a lot more pejoratively — than they did when I was a kid. Ideological warfare has reached a level of viciousness that was unimaginable in the past — even during the tempestuous Sixties. For some reason, it has become far more necessary than it once was to adopt and assign these labels. The tendency has spread everywhere, including supposedly nonpartisan city council races.

Yes, it does take four votes to make things happen on the Chico City Council, but why have we become convinced that electing a bloc of similar-thinking people is the best way to get there? I’m not criticizing conservatives for running as a slate this time around. They are just acknowledging the dynamic that underlies these elections. It’s part of what everybody knows. It’s always clear who belongs to which camp. In every election there are always too many candidates who align themselves with one camp or the other.

In the last election, I made a point of voting for candidates whose views were as different from each other as possible. That’s my idea of a good slate. I’m looking for candidates who resist the conventional wisdom that they must be prepared to sing party line anthems in perfect four-part harmony. I want the four or more council members who determine the city’s fate to have their own voices. I want them to to be self-assured enough to sing solos. I don’t want to be able predict how they’ll vote on key issues months before they weigh in on them. I want us to elect people to the council who have the courage to step out of their own and everyone else’s ideological comfort zone.

Posted by at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

My favorite way to enter Chico is from the west, either along Chico River Road or Dayton Road. I like how the orchards suddenly give way to the historical heart of the city without the usual preamble of suburbs.

On my way home last night, I was reminded of how dark these country roads are. I had to put my high beams on, which attracted swarms of bugs. At times, so many of them crashed into my windshield that it sounded like rain. While having this elemental experience, I found it hard to believe that within a few minutes I would be entering a city of 100,000.

A few blocks after Chico River Road turned into Fifth Street I came upon Chico’s Great White Way. The new street lights stretching from east of Walnut to Chestnut street were dazzlingly bright. I hadn’t been out this way at night in a while, so I had never seen them on. By day, I had admired their vintage look. They fit in well with the old neighborhood. But I was glad to find out there was more about them for me to like.

They were like a beacon, welcoming a weary traveler home. As I continued heading down Fifth, I took comfort in passing landmarks that have become familiar to me in the eight years since I moved here — the Stansbury House, the Post office, Senator Theatre, the old City Hall. From downtown I drove through a quiet old neighborhood, where some of the houses were bathed in the soft glow of porchlights, then crossed Big Chico Creek and turned right on Vallombrosa Avenue to pass by the ghostly outlines of Bidwell Park’s sycamores and oaks before reaching the street that leads to my house.

It was one of those Chico moments, a time to remind myself how much pleasure my adopted hometown gives me.

Posted by at 05:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cities started out as pinpoints on a map. As they grew, they became dots, then spots. But as they increased in circumference, they lost their compact, concentric shape. They became ungainly, more like Rorschach blots — a crazy quilt of developed and open land.

By the early 21st century some cities, such as Chico, were trying to weave that rough patchwork into a seamless whole, filling in the blank spots. The idea sounds fine, or at least harmless. Why not have a city with clearly defined boundaries? Why keep leapfrogging out into the countryside when so much land is available closer to the center?

But rising land costs and new planning strategies are playing havoc with a prevailing expectation that is so strong it is seen almost as an entitlement. It goes like this: I live in a suburb. Don’t mess with it. Don’t build tall houses that are practically touching each other, don’t build apartments, don’t build stores, don’t build anything next to my short house on a large lot except another short house on a large lot.
This is strident stuff, but who can blame these suburbanites. They’ve worked hard to get where they are. They don’t want to wake up one morning, look over their fence and discover their cherished long-view landscape is gone.

The transition to higher densities would have been less traumatic if the spots on the map had simply become larger, spreading out in an ever-expanding circles. The mid-20th century low-density suburban ring would now be surrounded by an early 21st century higher-density “new urban� ring. Only the people at the edge of the lower-density belt would be discomfited. But because every neighborhood is laced with patches of open land, far more people face the prospect of living next to developments that look like fortresses.

The Sorrento project on East First Avenue is Chico’s most notorious example of a jarring juxtaposition of land uses. A small orchard that co-existed for decades with a subdivision of one-story, custom-built, ranch-style houses on large lots became a dense cluster of two-story Mediterranean-style houses with almost no yards. It brought big changes to the old neighborhood.

A couple of weeks ago, I received package of materials from Chris Persson about a proposed development called Tuscan Village in her north Chico neighborhood. She wrote that some of the neighbors have nicknamed it “Sorrento North.� The proposal calls for about 200 dwelling units — single-family with second dwelling units, townhouses and multifamily residential — on about 18 acres on the south side of Eaton Road between Morseman and Burnap avenues. A 1.5 acre lot at the southwest corner of Eaton and Burnap Avenue is proposed for commercial development at a future date.
Her neighborhood has single-family, single-story residences on large lots as well as large duplex lots. It has no commercial developments.

She said despite the large amount of information she sent me she wasn’t writing with an agenda specific to her neighborhood. She said the Tuscan Village proposal is an example of what’s happening all over Chico. “First there is a rezone (to high density, usually with commercial added, as required by the general plan), then developments go in matching or surpassing that higher density rezone and then, if neighbors are lucky, infrastructure improvements eventually happen (roads, etc.).�

I don’t dispute Persson’s motives for contacting me. Many Chicoans have or will experience her plight. The process she describes is pretty much a recital of how infill works. She said she feels there is little that “ordinary citizens can do to be a part of a larger vision.� I can sympathize with her. Because infill by definition is a fragmented process, it’s difficult to even conceive of it as part of a larger vision. If there is a vision, it’s to discard the idea that new projects should blend in with the existing neighborhood. It seems that in Chico, infill has automatically come to mean higher-density, mixed-use development.

It’s a sure-fire strategy for alienating and infuriating residents of established neighborhoods.

Posted by at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Are Chico houses overvalued? Absolutely. Will they ever be priced just right? The wishful thinker in me says “Absolutely.� The realist has a more tentative answer: “Perhaps eventually.�

A lot can change in a few years. An analysis released in June by National City Corp. and Global Insight found that as recently as 2002 Chico metropolitan area housing prices were slightly undervalued. But four years later, they had become 60 percent overvalued.

The report took housing prices, interest rates, household incomes and density into consideration. Even in 2006, Chico metropolitan area housing prices remain low compared to many areas in the state. In fact, our housing prices — $270,000 — were less than half of what they were in the Santa Barbara and Salinas metropolitan areas, where the average house costs more than $600,00O.

Our houses are overvalued mainly because average incomes are low here compared to larger metropolitan areas. I’m sure that’s why the analysis placed so many Central Valley metropolitan areas in the overvalued category. The Merced, Stockton, Madera, Modesto, Redding, Fresno, Yuba City Bakersfield and Sacramento metropolitan areas all had high rankings. Except for Sacramento none of these places has a dazzling job market. A clear pattern is emerging. The big discrepancy between incomes and housing costs places all of these areas at risk for a significant fall in prices.

Or is that just the wishful thinker in me, wanting to believe that I may one day be able to become a homeowner? I figure I need prices to fall about 30 percent — to about $180,000 — to be able to comfortably afford a house. Am I asking too much?

National City Corp. and Global Insight’s analysis says, yes, I may be asking too much. The report tracks price “corrections� 66 metropolitan areas experienced between 1985 and 1999. The typical drop in value was 17 percent. Only five metropolitan areas experienced a drop of more than 30 percent.

But the good news — for house-hungry people like me, at least — is that the average degree of overvaluation before a correction in those years was about 34 percent. By mid-2006, the situation had become more alarming. The housing markets in about 50 metropolitan areas in the country were overvalued by more than 50 percent. I’m thinking that “the higher the overvaluation, the harder they fall� theory may prove to be valid in the next couple of years.

There’s no question that we are heading into a period of price stability — or price stagnation as would-be sellers might call it. If prices stay flat and incomes rise, affordability will gradually improve. For most of the 1990s, Chico’s housing prices stayed about the same. Let’s hope the pattern repeats itself over the next 10 years. It would be a great boon to potential homebuyers.

As prices stabilize or move slightly downward, it will expose the fallacy of the belief that so-called slow-growth policies have been responsible for the runup in local housing costs.

In the first place, the Chico City Council — regardless of whether its majority has been liberal or conservative — doesn't shy away from approving housing developments. This is pretty much a pro-growth city. I know, I know. What about the green line and the hillsides? The time may come when they will restrain growth, but so far they haven’t.

In the second place, Chico’s prices haven’t gone up any faster than they have in places that take a willy-nilly approach to growth. San Bernardino and Riverside counties’ price increases mirror those of the Chico metropolitan area. But the Inland Empire is becoming a land where farming is a quaint relic of the past. All of the flat land is being paved over.

We in the north state don't want to imitate our neighbors to the south. If anything, we need to become more cautious and comprehensive in our approach to protecting farmland and other open space. We don’t want to become another California-style sprawl region. Now that housing prices are stabilizing, I hope we can enter a period when the idea of responsible growth planning won’t be muddled by the red-herring argument that we must build lots of houses in order to keep the prices down.

Posted by at 02:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I’m not a Wal-Mart hater. When I lived in Lompoc on the Central Coast, I shopped there just about every week. When Wal-Mart opened in Lompoc 10 years ago, it became the biggest store in the city of 35,000 people. Even then, the company had already developed a reputation for decimating small cities’ central business districts, but Lompoc’s downtown had shriveled up long ago, so Wal-Mart took nothing away. In fact, it gave us fewer reasons to have to drive 25 miles to Santa Maria to do some of our shopping.

For different reasons, Chico is like Lompoc. It has little to fear from Wal-Mart. Chico has a strong downtown that has withstood 15 years of big box store invasions as well as the coming of two shopping malls about 20 and 40 years ago. At this point, I doubt if any competition, even from the biggest retailer in the world, could do much damage to it. Just as the coming of Wal-Mart didn’t hurt Lompoc, I don’t think the morphing of the one regular-sized Wal-Mart into two supercenters would hurt Chico.

Those aren’t the problems I have with Wal-Mart. My objections are philosophical. I believe in the free-enterprise system, but that doesn’t mean I think every enterprise should have free rein to do whatever it wants. Our approach to how businesses operate shouldn’t be values-free. Note that I’m using the word “values,� not “value.� Wal-Mart prides itself on giving shoppers great value, but when it comes to ethical standards, it seems to be giving itself a black eye.

I’m reading a book called “The Flat Earth,� by New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman. He discusses 10 trends that are accelerating the creation of a worldwide capitalistic economy. One of the trends is what he calls “supply chaining.� He singles out Wal-Mart as an outstanding example of a company that can quickly and efficiently move products from all over the world into its more than 4,000 stores.

“As consumers, we love supply chains, because they deliver us all sorts of goods — from tennis shoes to laptop computers — at lower and lower prices,� Friedman writes. “That is how Wal-Mart became the world’s biggest retailer.�

But Friedman says earning this distinction fostered the growth of a darker side. “Sam Walton bred not only a kind of ruthless quest for efficiency in improving Wal-Mart’s supply chain but also a degree of ruthlessness period. I am talking about everything from Wal-Mart’s recently exposed practice of locking overnight workers into its stores, to its allowing Wal-Mart’s maintenance contractors to use illegal immigrants as janitors, to its role as a defendant in the largest civil-right class-action lawsuit in history ... This is all aside from the fact that some of Wal-Mart’s biggest competitors complain that they have had to cut health-care benefits and create a lower wage tier to compete with Wal-Mart, which pays less and covers less than most big companies.

“One can only hope that all the bad publicity Wal-Mart has received in the last few years will force it to understand that there is a fine line between a hyperefficient global supply chain that is helping people save money and improve their lives and one that has pursued cost cutting and profit margins to such a degree that whatever social benefits it is offering with one hand, it is taking away with the other.�

I think Friedman’s comments are fair. He’s not part of the anti-Wal-Mart rant league. I feel the same way about Wal-Mart. The company needs to face up to the criticisms, take stock and change. I hesitate to even brand Wal-Mart as “the bad guy� of the corporate world. The company may simply be acting like the little guy it once was when it blazed its way through the extremely competitive retail sector. But now that it’s the big guy, it needs to act differently. The biggest retailer in the world needs to champion values as well as value.

Posted by at 02:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)