But this is Chico, too

I have a recurring dream that I’ve gone back to work for the weekly newspaper in suburban Portland, Ore., where I was the editor for three years in the early 1980s.

“Editor� makes the job description sound more important than it was. I was in charge of a staff of two, wrote stories and editoials and did page layout. I was lucky to have a staff. Editors at some weekly newspapers wear all the hats. They take photos, sell ads, deliver newspapers and take out the garbage as well as handle writing and editing. It is exhausting work. I was always frustrated at not being able to keep up with all the news that was happening in North Clackamas County, our circulation area. The publisher, a longtime newsman, demanded comprehensive coverage and professional writing.

In my dream, I’m back in the saddle again, but can’t keep up with the workload. My brain feels like mush. Deadline approaches and I haven’t even assigned the stories, let alone written them, or laid them out on the pages. At any time, the publisher is going to come in and yell at me for not being prepared.

I’ve had this dream for more than 20 years. Last week, it took on a new twist. I had gone back to work at this newspaper as the editor, but it had become a multimedia company. Two reporters I had worked with were still there, but they were producing and starring in videos that they projected on a huge flat-screen TV at the front of the newsroom. I had no idea what was going on. The only part of the dream that made sense was the publisher’s wife telling me she and her husband had just inherited a house, which was why he wasn’t around right now. I breathed a sigh of relief for the reprieve from his wrath. I knew as soon as he returned that he’d get after me for not knowing anything about being a videographer.

The disturbing thing about the dream is that it isn’t a fantasy. In my waking life, I’m no more a videographer than I am an astronomer. The print-oriented medium I’ve become accustomed to over the last 32 years is changing as online editions begin to make use of sound and moving images. The dream was my encounter with “future shock,� the phrase Alvin Toffler introduced 40 years ago in his book of the same title. At my workplace, the future has arrived. I don’t know if I’m ready to step into it.

Posted by at 02:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Starting a blog has begun to remind me of what it must be like to launch a talk show on TV. It’s all about ratings. Will it be a hit, or will it bomb? Blogging is still an experimental enough format that I feel I have time to flounder around and try to hit my stride. I’m not in danger of being “canceled,� but I feel committed to doing a good job of selling myself. At the same time, I don’t want to sell out. I want to succeed as a blogger, but I don’t want to lose touch with who I am as a writer.

As the writer of the column “But this is Chico� in the Enterprise-Record, I’ve always been concerned about my audience. I’ve always craved feedback. I get a few calls and e-mails about my columns every week, and that has always assured me that I have some readers. New people continue to contact me, so I’m gradually developing a sense of the size of my audience.

Blogging leaves you with no illusions about how well you’re doing with online readers. It all boils down to the number of “page views� you get. So far, Dan Nguyen-Tan has scored NorCal Blogs’ only runaway hit with his “Bullfight� blog. Compared to him, the rest of us our struggling to find our niche — some of us more so than others.

As much as I admire “Bullfight� — I liked it before I even knew how popular it was — I’m trying to avoid the “how can I be like Dan Nguyen-Tan?� syndrome. I want to retain my “But this is Chico� voice. But clearly, I need to figure out how the blog version of that should work.

I’ve already started posting more often and making each entry (except this one) shorter. I’m beginning to think I should add photos. My blog is about Chico, so it shouldn’t be hard to come up with photo ideas. On the other hand, where do I find time to even think about this when my job duties already include blogging, writing a column, doing interviews, writing stories, assigning photos to go with the stories and laying out pages? If this were a hobby, I’d be writing and posting blogs at 3 in the morning — and loving it. But sleeping is my favorite nighttime hobby. It’s at the top of my list of fun things to do in the still of the night. It’s the only time I have to dream.

I don’t have trouble being “controversial� — stating an opinion strongly. Columnists are as well known for that as bloggers. But as I’ve said before, when it comes to Chico issues, I’m not an ideological purist. I would probably attract more followers if I were more partisan. But my whole perspective is based on my belief that Chico’s polarized political environment is one of its weaknesses. I think people who wear either a “liberal� or “conservative� label must sooner or later end up supporting untenable positions. And if they ever break away from that label, they leave themselves open to accusations of being inconsistent.

I could write funny blogs, but that’s hard work if you aren’t blessed with a wry sense of humor. I’m more silly than funny. Children find this entertaining. My son thought I was funny until he was about 10. I don’t know if silliness is a bankable form of blog humor. Besides, the columnist in me just seems to gravitate toward serious subjects. Can a popular blog persona be based on that?

Do I have what it takes to develop a blog persona? That seems to be one of my main concerns after having spent a few months inside this modern-day Tower of Babel, where millions of voices are clamoring to be heard. I’m almost certain I would be a washout on TV, but I still don’t know enough about what the blogosphere is like to have a sense of whether this medium is for me.

Posted by at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I got together with a friend Friday at the new Has Beans Creekside coffeehouse and bakery on Humboldt Avenue, right across the street from where the Boucher Street bridge crosses Little Chico Creek. This is the business’ second Chico location and the fifth in Northern California. There are Has Beans in Eureka, Mount Shasta and Weed.

It’s in a tiny building with two tables, but there are more places to sit outside, including a patio. We picked a table in front, next to the sidewalk.

Most of the outdoor sections of Chico coffeehouses face either a busy street or a parking lot. A view of cars — moving or stationery — isn’t very appetizing. But this part of Humboldt is relatively quiet and the creek and bridge are a nice backdrop. I like the idea of a coffeehouse in a residential neighborhood.
Has Bean’s opening is a sign that things are continuing to look up for this wedge of vintage Chico, located between the freeway, Eighth Street, Eastwood Park and Little Chico Creek.

On the east edge of the wedge, the Market Café anchors a retail complex that has gradually filled up with tenants. Square Deal Mattress, located on the same edge, is a neighborhood institution. On the west edge, Mim’s Bakery is a stable presence.

Throughout the neighborhood, old houses are being fixed up and a couple of high-density housing developments have gone up on formerly vacant lots. The appeal of the area is reinforced by its great location — proximity to downtown and Bidwell Park — and its tall spreading trees that create an almost continuous shady canopy. The neighborhood even boasts a historically significant landmark — the twice-relocated church on Linden Street between Eighth and Ninth. It dates from 1867
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This is one of Chico’s few semi-affordable areas . It will become even more affordable once the formerly hot real estate market has had a couple of years to cool off.

If the city continues to pursue its policy of buying up property along Little Chico Creek as it becomes available and tearing down the houses on it, Chico will one day have another greenway — a modest version of the one that already exists along Big Chico Creek — spanning the width of the city.
As the city moves away from its former practice of turning its back on this potential gem of an urban pedestrian corridor, I see a day when more places like Has Beans are within walking distance of Little Chico Creek. San Luis Obispo and Ashland are examples of cities that have made good use of having creeks running through them.

Posted by at 02:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My son doesn’t see how anyone in Chico could manage to check out more library books than I do. He can’t believe it’s possible for people to enjoy reading so much — not when there are so many wondrous worlds to explore in cyberspace. That's where my son spends his spare time.

I like to boast that I read about a book a day, but I don’t really know if that’s true. I don’t keep track. I almost always read non-fiction, which is so much easier for me to dive into than novels. I can’t possibly afford to buy 365 books a year, so I have to get most of my reading material from the library.
I’m so grateful for free, public libraries, and I’m especially grateful the city of Chico has seen fit to give money to the Chico branch of the county library system so that it can stay open a decent number of hours a week.

We live in the inner suburbs of Chico, so we’re not within walking distance of a lot of services. But we’re just a few doors down from the library, so it’s no trouble for me to pay it a visit at least once every couple of weeks. I hit the new titles shelf and then head for the non-fiction stacks. It’s so pleasant to browse in libraries. In a world of escalating noise, it’s one of the few places where people are still expected to be quiet.

Harry Ames, a used bookstore owner for almost 40 years — first in Whittier and now in Grass Valley — always liked to say that librarians and teachers are among a community’s most valuable workers. I heartily agree, and I applaud the financial sacrifices they make in deciding to pursue such important careers. Our society doesn’t always reward the people who do us the most good. The claim some people make that teachers are underworked and overpaid is contemptible.

Reading is my default activity. Whenever I’m sitting down, I almost always have a book in my lap. I have to give credit to the libraries in every community I’ve lived in for making it possible for me to satisfy my voracious appetite.

I look forward to a day when reading library books electronically becomes as comfortable as curling up with the printed versions. When that happens, I will have no reason to dispute my son’s belief that cyberspace offers wondrous worlds to explore.

Posted by at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m not going to miss Tower Records when it closes. Ever since I came to Chico, I’ve been hearing about how great Tower is. My first memory of it is of a predatory company. In the early 1970s, it set up shop right next to a locally owned record store in Berkeley, off Telegraph Avenue. It was acting then the way Starbucks does now.

In a typically Berkeleyish fashion, a line of protesters promptly formed in front of Tower and urged people to boycott it. But the rest of the world is not Berkeley and so Tower prospered. I confess I did not join the boycott. Later, when I lived in Southern California, I loved to visit Tower’s huge store on Sunset Boulevard. I was one of the music lovers who helped make the company successful.

Tower’s rude Berkeley incursion happened more than 30 years ago. A lot of people who go to record stores don’t remember a time before Tower was around. Why should I even bring it up now if I didn’t mind it then? Let me tell you the second part of my story, then you can decide whether I’m making a big deal out of nothing. Earlier this year I went to the Chico store to look for a CD for my wife’s birthday. The store didn’t have it, so I decided to have them order it. My wife’s birthday was about a week away. I was told it wouldn’t be in by then, but I wasn’t worried about that. I had bought her other gifts, so I had the occasion covered.

Two weeks came and went, then four weeks. I called a couple of times to check on my order and was told it hadn’t come in. Finally, after six weeks I gave up. I canceled my order and turned to Amazon.com to get the CD. I couldn’t find it in any store in Chico.

It doesn’t bother me that Tower wasn’t able to get the CD. What bothers me is that the employees I dealt with didn’t care. Nobody I talked to expressed sympathy on my behalf or outrage toward the company about the delay. For all I know the problem was related to Tower’s moribund condition. Somebody could have said “This company is so screwed. We’re so sorry this happened to you,� but the attitude of people at the store was somewhere between “whatever� and “oh, well.�

About a year ago, I ordered a book from Lyon Books that proved hard to track down. Owner Heather Lyon was extremely apologetic about my having waited a couple of weeks. She offered to return my money. But I was impressed by how concerned she was about finding this $10 book for me and told her to press on. It wasn’t long before she found it. Customers never forget a business that goes out of its way to serve them.

I guess my point is that it’s not necessarily the size of the company or its aggressive growth strategies that makes it bad. My final experience with Tower convinced me that its tenure as one of the giants among record stores had made it complacent and uncaring. To me, Tower’s demise means justice has been served.

Posted by at 09:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since the early part of the year, I’ve been writing about attractive and ugly buildings in Chico in my weekly column in the Enterprise-Record, “But this is Chico.� Just when I think I’ve exhausted the topic, something else comes along to catch my attention and get me started writing about it again.

Yesterday I got an anonymous letter in the mail, alerting me to an addition being made to the house at the southeast corner of Filbert and Arbutus avenues. The writer thinks it’s ugly. “You might not agree with me, but if you did, you still wouldn’t write about this one because it is a private home,� the writer asserts.
Just about every building I cited — or that readers mentioned — in my series of column is private. Most of the comments were directed toward businesses, but I have no qualms about criticizing historically or architecturally significant houses that have been badly remodeled or are threatened with ugly alterations or with being torn down. In a sense, buildings — houses or businesses — belong to the community. We have to look at them as we drive or walk through the community. People who tear down beautiful buildings or put up ugly ones have to expect some harsh comments.

My main observation about most Chico houses — and this is true of houses everywhere — is that they are neither attractive nor ugly. They are just there — to keep the weather out and keep all the stuff we collect in. They don’t add to or detract from the landscape. The house I live in is like that.
I drove by the house the letter-writer had singled out and found that I like the addition, which is still under construction. The writer criticized it by saying “You can hardly count the levels of the roofline,� but that’s one of the things I like about it. It helps the addition blend with the existing structure.

This stretch of Filbert seems to have been built mainly in the middle of the 20th century, but it has some new houses. Some of them were built on lots that had remained empty until recently, and I think two or three were put up to replace houses that had burned down. The new houses are larger than the other houses on the street. But the lots on Filbert are roomy enough to accommodate big houses.

I usually don’t respond to anonymous comments, but this one raises both “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder� and density issues. This part of Filbert is one of Chico’s prize suburban streets. I think the house addition will look fine in this neighborhood.

Posted by at 01:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is a companion piece to my most recent “But this is Chico� entry in the Enterprise-Record.
This week’s newspaper column is about the Little Chapman Mansion. Michele Shover and her husband Don Lillibridge, who own the country house surrounded on all sides by one of Chico’s oldest neighborhoods, took my wife and me on a tour of the house and two-acre grounds a little over a week ago.

Shover and Lillibridge have applied high standards in preserving and maintaining their historically and architecturally significant structure. The attention they’ve lavished on it is based, of course, on a sense of caring. People have a way of becoming attached to their houses, especially if they’ve had the pleasure of living in the same place for 20 or 30 years.

But their approach to their house also reflects a sensibility that transcends pride of ownership and the sense of cozy domesticity it can bring. It’s based on the idea that in some ways the house belongs to the community. The house is an integral part of the city’s 150-year history. Shover’s interest in preserving the Little Chapman Mansion grew as she accumulated information about its past owners and the imprint each of them made on the house during the time they lived there.

This sensibility is in marked contrast to the one that starts with the statement “I own this property. I can do anything I want with it.� That kind of approach puts the community in an awkward position. We don’t have the financial resources to purchase and maintain every historically and architecturally significant property that owners propose to radically alter or tear down. Preserving Chico’s heritage usually depends on owners who appreciate how much their properties mean to the community.

Ripples of this kind of understanding first appeared in Chico in the 1960s and spread across the placid ocean of indifference. As time has gone by, the ripples have become an undercurrent. People who own historically significant properties are becoming more appreciative of values that extend beyond their own interests.

This is a heartening sign. But I’m not willing to let it go at that. The city needs a historical preservation ordinance. It needs to have something on the books that allows it to cite a building’s historical value as the basis preventing it from being demolished or radically altered. Many other cities have taken this step. Chico needs to follow suit. Physical evidence of its historical heritage is still abundant, but over time it could be lost, building by building.

Posted by at 08:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The decline in Chico’s and the surrounding area’s housing prices is projected be one of the most dramatic in the country, according to a study by Moody’s Economy.com.

By spring 2008, prices in the Chico Metropolitan Statistical Area are expected to have fallen 12.6 percent from their fall 2005 peak, according to the study.

If the figures prove to be accurate, we can’t expect prices to return to any level of sanity, but after years of enduring horrific increases, we’ll be happy for any good news that comes along. If we can have five or six years of flat prices after we reach this trough, that would also improve affordability, given that people’s incomes tend to go up over time. It appears that the bubble — the marked disparity between incomes and housing prices — isn’t going to burst, but it could gradually dissipate.

Rising interest rates will also have a bearing on affordability. They could wipe out the benefit of lower prices in the calculation of monthly mortgage payments.

Only eight other metropolitan areas in the country are expected to have more dramatic drops in prices than Chico. Two of them — Merced and Stockton — are also in the Great Central Valley. Of the 70 metropolitan areas in the country that are expected to show declines, nine are in the Valley. Ten are California coastal communities.

Reno and Las Vegas will be among the biggest housing value losers in the country. Cape Coral, Fla. is expected to be the biggest loser, with an 18.6 percent drop.

The study focuses on metropolitan statistical areas, which in our case means Butte County, so it offers no information about how Chico’s future prices will compare with what may happen in the county as a whole.

Even before housing prices skyrocketed, Chico’s prices were higher than they were in the rest of the county. To this biased viewer, that makes sense because Chico is the most desirable community to live in.
But if demographic projections come to pass, the demand for Chico housing relative to the south county may slacken as Oroville, Biggs and Gridley undergo significant growth spurts. Chico isn’t expected to take part in that high rate of growth in the next 25 years, so maybe the housing price differential will disappear.

The green line has been blamed for Chico housing prices being high, but I’m sure Gridley and Biggs, which are in the middle of prime agricultural lands, will come up with green lines of their own — or maybe the county will. Oroville, which is east of the farming heartland, may have relatively more room to grow.

With so many variables, it’s hard to predict the future of the housing market. I’m surprised Moody’s was bold enough to take a stab at it.

Posted by at 09:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The suburbs aren’t what they used to be. They no longer serve as retreats from urban life. They have become what passes for urban life. They’re not as a dense as our old inner cities, but they no longer look like the spacious places where most baby boomers grew up.

In today’s developments, the houses are so close together that people can’t even pretend they’re living in the country. Nowadays, at least in California, you have to belong to the landed gentry to be able to afford a home in a traditional garden suburb. Garden? What’s that? The typical yard of a 21st century house has a strip of grass and a tree here and there.

If you’d bought your piece of the American dream back in the good old days of the late-20th century, you could still manage a mortgage that covered the price not only of a house but a good-sized lot. People who were able to lay claim to a fine expanse of turf don’t want to be reminded in their own neighborhood of how times have changed. They have become a new kind of NIMBY. They aren’t necessarily opposed to development. They just want it to be a mirror of their own low-density domains.

That’s what happened with Tuscan Village, a high-density development proposed for Chico’s northern edge. Residents of the surrounding area, who live in traditional suburbs, rightly pointed out that Tuscan Village wouldn’t fit into the existing scheme of things. Their view triumphed. The Chico City Council supported the neighbors’ wish for less-dense development.

But now that Tuscan Village is to have fewer houses on larger lots, how much will they cost? Is there any doubt they will be offered at a price that only the real estate-rich or the truly rich can afford?

We seem to be looking at a fight that will be waged parcel by parcel. The good news is that once all the infill lots have been filled in, we’ll have only the bigger expanses of rural land — with few neighbors — to deal with. Out in the new developments, residents will all be in the same boat, living in houses on lots that scarcely qualify as suburban-sized.

Posted by at 02:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s fall. The Chico State University students are back, and the roads are being torn up. I guess the crews are taking advantage of the idyllic interval between the summer heat and the rainy season. If you have to work outdoors, this is a good time to do it.

For the same reason, I suppose this is as good a time as any to be stuck in traffic. We can roll down our windows and bask in the toasty air under the azure skies while waiting for the flag man to wave us on. There are limits to my tolerance. When I found out a couple of weeks ago that it would be a 10- to 15-minute wait before I could drive down Vallombrosa Avenue, I decided to turn around and try to find another way home.

Leaving and coming home have been a little tricky in my neighborhood. I’ve felt besieged. First, they repaved East First Avenue, then before it had even been restriped, they started on Vallombrosa. By that time, the Cohasset repaving project had reached Mangrove Avenue. You could get through, but there was the weird sensation of hitting a bump then driving in gravel for several blocks.

The only part of Mangrove that wasn’t torn up was the East First Avenue intersection, which itself had been torn up for several months earlier this year.

Last week, as I headed to the north end of Chico, I thought I’d be well out of the way of the roadwork, but then I turned left on East Lassen Avenue and encountered another “prepare to stop� sign and flag man just two driveways away from where I needed to turn off. But it was a beautiful morning, so I had another chance to bask in the sun’s mellow rays.

With so much roadwork going on at once, it’s hard not to feel how dependent we are on them. I start to contemplate the sobering fact that it would be hard to drive out of Chico in the event of a disaster. All the four-lane roads quickly become two-lane roads. The sprawling city and its capacious thoroughfares become a faint memory as you enter the almost endless realm of country roads that surround Chico. If everybody tried to leave Chico at the same time, we’d be gridlocked solid.

There’s always something going on with the roads outside of town. The bridge-widening project on Highway 99 between Los Molinos and Red Bluff has lasted several seasons. The Highway 149 project south of Chico will be with us for several seasons. I’ve been trying out some creative detours to get to Oroville. But once you’re on a country road, you can never tell what might lurk up ahead. Sometimes lanes are closed because road crews are trimming trees. Sometimes the roads are flooded. Obstructions are everywhere.

It’s good that I like being in Chico and have no ongoing desire to get away. If I couldn’t feel content here, I’m sure the thought of the narrow, always-under-construction roads that surround the city would get to me.

Posted by at 02:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Population projections recently released by the Butte County Association of Governments suggest the south part of the county is headed for a growth boom. Why is that?

The state’s changing ethnic makeup may offer a clue. A large percentage of California’s growth in the last 15 years is the result of increasing numbers Latino and Asian residents. In the state as a whole, Latinos now comprise almost 35 percent of the population while Asians make up 12 percent. About a third of San Francisco’s population is Asian. About half of Los Angeles’ population is Latino.

In Butte County, especially Chico and Paradise, the figures are much different. Latinos are 12 percent and Asians are 4 percent of the county population. Unlike much of the rest of the state, we still have a predominately white population. Blacks make up 2 percent of the population in Chico and Butte County, compared with about 7 percent statewide. Our moderate population growth reflects the fact that the white population in the state is either stable or shrinking.

For some reason, the Sierra foothills and parts of the north state remain white strongholds. It may be related to their enduring rural characteristics. California is the nation’s most ethnically diverse state, but you wouldn’t know it in places like Chico, Redding and Nevada City.

It seems likely that faster population growth in Butte County will correlate with increases in the percentage of the Asian and Latino population.

This trend is evident in nearby counties that are growing fast. Sutter County is 24 percent Latino and 12 percent Asian. Yuba County is 20 percent Latino and 8 percent Asian.

In Southern California, fast-growing San Bernardino and Riverside counties are 40 percent Latino, although Asians make up only 5 percent of their respective population. In Los Angeles County, which is the state’s most populous and numerically fastest-growing county, Latinos make up 46 percent and Asians comprise 13 percent of the population.

Among Butte County cities, Biggs, Gridley and Oroville are projected to growth the fastest, more than doubling their populations by 2030. At the time of the 2000 Census, Oroville’s ethnic mix reflected that of the county as a whole. It was 8.3 percent Latino, 6.3 percent Asian, 3.9 black and 3.5 American Indian. Both Biggs and Gridley already have Latino populations that are more in keeping with statewide totals — 27.6 in Biggs and 38.6 in Gridley, but both communities still have small Asian populations.

Paradise, which is expected to see only a 27 percent population increase by 2030, was 91 percent white at the time of the 2000 Census. It was 4.3 percent Latino, 1.3 percent Asian and less than 1 percent black.

Posted by at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One of my pet peeves is that people think Chico is growing faster than it is.

The urban area, which has about 102,000 people, is growing by about 1 percent a year. Chico itself, which has about 80,000 people, is growing by about the same amount, but the rate is consistently reported as about 2 percent. That’s because half of the increase is the result of annexation of urbanized areas. That’s not growth. That’s just a different way of counting people who are already here.

There’s also a perceptual problem. People think Chico is growing faster than it ever has. In fact, Chico’s and Butte County’s boom days were the 1970s and 1980s. Growth has slowed in the last 15 years.
We have a tendency to compare Chico’s experience with that of California as a whole. Yes, the state is growing fast, adding as many as 500,000 people every year. But neither Chico nor Butte County are taking part in that population boom right now. The county is growing by a modest 2,000 to 2,500 people a year.

A population projection released by the Butte County Association of Governments shows that Chico will continue to grow at its same moderate rate for the next 24 years. By 2030, its population is expected to be 127,212, or about 25,000 more than it is now. That means it will continue to add about 1,000 people a year. If current trends continue, I expect that by 2030 all of the urban area will have been annexed to the city, finally ending the confusion about which areas are part of Chico and which aren’t.

BCAG’s projections for the south county tell a much different story. Biggs, Oroville and Gridley are expected to more than double their respective populations by 2030, when the county’s total population will reach 321,000 — a 50 percent increase from what it is now. Chico will lose its dominance. Right now half of the people in Butte County live in Chico. By 2030, only 40 percent of the county’s population will be based in Chico.

We keep hearing that growth is coming, but will it ever reach Chico?

Posted by at 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don’t leave Chico very often. I’m content to spend most of my days here. Sometimes, when I do leave, I have my regrets.

My wife and I took a trip to Ashland last week. We had a great time, but it meant I had to miss out on meeting Witold Rybczynski, who visited Chico State University as a presidential scholar. Rybczynski is an architect and the author of the books “City Life� and “The Most Beautiful House in the World.� They are a cherished part of the “urban studies� shelf of my home library. Rybczynski, along with the late Jane Jacobs, is one of the best-known critics of American cities and urban renewal projects. I quoted some of his comments about architecture at the start of the series about good and bad buildings that ran in “But this is Chico,� my weekly column in the Enterprise-Record.

Rybczynski visited Chico at the invitation of Chico State’s Humanities Center, which is sponsoring a year-long series on “The Built Environment.�

This sort of program is right up my alley — or lacking an alley, it is right up my cul-de-sac. I was thrilled to hear the Humanities Center is going to spend an entire academic year discussing this topic and that it brought Rybczynski to Chico. The program is funded by a grant from Tom DiGiovanni of New Urban Builders. DiGiovanni and his business partner John Anderson built the Doe Mill Neighborhood. They plan to build a much larger project, called Merriam Park. They are proponents of the “new urbanism� movement. While Rybczynski was here, DiGiovanni and Anderson took him on a walking tour of The Esplanade. I wish Jane Jacobs could have come out to Chico. She kept writing until the end of her life. She died in April, at the age of 89.

I may have missed Rybczynski’s visit, but I hope to be here to catch a lecture by Mike Madison, one of the speakers featured in Chico State’s “On the Creek� series. He’s the author of “Walking the Flatlands,� a book about the Sacramento Valley’s landscape. The book is a valued part of the “California� shelf of my home library.

Madison will be speaking at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 16 in the Rowland-Taylor Recital Hall on campus. It’s a free Chico Performances event. His lecture will focus on the human landscapes of the Valley. This is a variation on the theme of the built environment. Farming has completely altered the natural landscape of this region.

Posted by at 04:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)