It fakes a village

Next to the upper-middle-class neighborhood of Curtis Park, a vacant 72-acre lot is springing to life. The property, alongside the Western Pacific Railroad yard near Sacramento City College, has lain dormant, even derelict, for decades. But now, there’s a plan to revitalize this piece of the city with hundreds of new homes and a shopping center. You’d think neighbors in Curtis Park would be excited. But many residents are furious with developer Paul Petrovich, the mind behind the project.

Why? His plan includes a 1,000-vehicle parking lot, a Safeway and one very controversial gas station. Curtis Park resident Kathleen Ave says this new so-called Curtis Park Village is going to look like suburbia “jackhammered into the city.”

Petrovich first introduced his plan in 2004, and ever since, residents, the city and developers have debated how this slice of Sacramento should grow. More than a decade later, some residents still maintain that Petrovich’s project, which could be approved by the Planning and Design Commission this summer, pushes the limits of taste and tact.

It looks like suburbia, they say, and it sterilizes some of the charm and history of existing nearby neighborhoods, like Curtis Park and Land Park. In spite of this spirited opposition, Petrovich has pursued his vision with seemingly little interest in compromising.

This debate between infill developers and residents is a conflict resurrected: After years of recession, urban growth is again occuring within Sacramento’s city limits, rather than on suburban outskirts. The trend is sparking its share of controversy, because residents like Eric Johnson believe the infill could be carried out with more aesthetic grace.

“Petrovich has to have some respect for the existing atmosphere and make sure that the homes that go in have some of the feel of being in a downtown urban space, not the suburbs,” said Johnson, a local going on 18 years and the president of the Sierra Curtis Neighborhood Association. In other words, Johnson and some of his neighbors want the new homes to look more like theirs.

As Sacramento State public-policy professor Robert Wassmer noted, people criticize Curtis Park Village for its focus on automobile culture. But while walkability should be a component of any modern urban development, he says infill projects must respect the fact that we still live in a car’s world.

“People don’t want to give up their cars,” Wassmer said. “We have to have parking lots, garages and gas stations.”

Critics also overlook the fact that infill developments are considered an efficient way to mitigate suburban sprawl, which urban planners everywhere agree must not continue. Sprawl is associated with traffic, air pollution, climate change and other symptoms of a car-bound culture.

Yet some Curtis Park residents still don’t care. They’re more concerned that Petrovich’s plan will defile a historic part of Sacramento.

Ave, who’s also a lead organizer with the group Curtis Park Character Advocates, says Curtis Park Village will generate more than its share of traffic and air pollution, largely thanks to the gas station, and will derail efforts to make the city a cleaner, greener place.

Nearby resident and Sacramento City College professor Bruce Pierini says that the recently finished homes along Crocker Drive lack the material character of adjacent historic buildings—and he and others argue that this wasn’t part of the original deal.

“It feels like Elk Grove. This was not what we had in mind when we first decided to support Curtis Park Village,” Pierini said.

He thinks the development could’ve been so much more. “This was a blank slate, where Mr. Petrovich was building from the ground up, [and] I think this is really a missed opportunity to design something that is beautiful, cutting edge, as far as urban planning, and fits into the central city and could make us all proud.”

Residents are already moving into the new homes of Curtis Park Village and Councilman Jay Schenirer, who represents Curtis Park and also lives in the neighborhood, has been watching construction during morning walks with his dog. He says he's pleased by the progress. “They're very nice homes,” Schenirer says.

But his opinion likely is in the minority. The homes’ architectural style is dull, drab and suburban, others argue, and they bring to a historic part of the city elements of Anywhere, USA.

In spite of these widespread—and loudly vocalized—concerns, Petrovich seems determined to get his way and advance his vision of Curtis Park Village. Several years ago, for instance, the developer reportedly threatened to build an industrial-warehouse landscape if anyone sued him over disagreements about how his project was unfurling.

More recently, Petrovich has been playing hardball like someone who knows he has the upper hand.

In early January, he released a bleak YouTube animation showing two versions of Curtis Park Village. One included renderings of a dodgy discount grocery store, accompanied by seedy businesses with people of questionable character milling about in the parking lot. The other was a very different companion video showing his preferred vision of Curtis Park Village: polished and cheerful, with a Safeway and a gas station and small businesses.

Petrovich’s threat was that the grimmer version would become reality if opponents attempted to derail his plans.

“Petrovich is saying there are basically two options: either a gas station, a Safeway and a happy, shiny development—or no gas station and a collection of fly-by-night businesses populated by shadowy figures,” said Johnson.

His plan for a gas station is the hottest controversy. The proposed “neighborhood fuel center,” as Petrovich has euphemized it, will include 16 pumps. “It’s huge,” said Pierini.

The station falls within the zoning restrictions for the project location, but its inclusion in the current plans has locals feeling tricked.

“We clearly came to an agreement in 2010 with Petrovich to build a traditional neighborhood, with doorsteps facing the sidewalk, sidewalk trees, transit connections nearby and pedestrian paths and bike trails,” said Rosanna Herber, formerly the president of the Sierra Curtis Neighborhood Association. She says locals came to this verbal understanding with Petrovich at a community meeting.

Not until 2014 was there any mention of a gas station, which Herber, a Curtis Park resident for 24 years, calls “mega,” like one of those large gas stations outside a Costco discount store. She says she isn’t outright opposed to all such jumbo-sized gas stations, but she says that it “makes no sense … to put a mega-gas station on a secondary street leading into an urban infill development.”

In fact, Herber says she isn’t even afraid of Petrovich’s threat of bringing in a Grocery Outlet if Safeway and the gas station get pushed off the table. “I’d rather have a Grocery Outlet and no mega-gas station than any other supermarket and a mega-gas station.”

Not everyone agrees. Meg Heede has lived in Curtis Park for 35 years. She is a real estate agent, and she supports and stands by every major component of Petrovich’s vision.

She says the gas station and accompanying Safeway will provide an anchor for a prosperous new business community. “Small businesses need a draw, like a supermarket,” she said. “We don’t want small businesses coming in that will be shuttered up again in a year.”

Even the size of the gas station does not worry Heede. “If it has less pumps [than the proposed 16], that will mean longer lines of cars,” she said.

Those cars will not only be local drivers. Gas station opponents assume that the facility will draw cars from miles away to reap offers of more affordable gas.

Johnson says there is no other “Safeway Rewards” type gas station within seven miles of Curtis Park Village. The presence of the facility in the development may also affect behavior of area residents, who might have walked or cycled somewhere but may instead slip into their vehicles and go for a drive, stopping for gas along the way.

In December, the Curtis Park Character Advocates dispensed questionnaires to 1,800 local homes, surveying residents about Petrovich’s plan. Eighty-two percent of the 201 respondents said they did not want the gas station. A less formal survey of several hundred attendees at a packed meeting hall in mid-January garnered similar results: Nearly everyone present said they wanted the gas station eliminated from the development plan.

If the Planning and Design Commission rejects the “neighborhood fuel center” this summer, the whole plan could crumble. Safeway officials have said they won’t move in without the gas station, since it is something of a partnered operation that will offer Safeway coupon rewards for customers. What’s more, there have been rumors that other prospective businesses won’t move in without the Safeway.

Petrovich, who did not respond to SN&R’s requests to speak for this story, has threatened to make his project even less palatable to opponents if they don’t back off. Can he toe the line and come out a winner?

If it were up to city planners and land-use analysts, Petrovich's vision would be considered worthy. Many say it has the marks of responsible urban infill, where unoccupied real estate within the limits of an urban area is utilized for new development.

Inserting so many homes and retail spaces into a vacant piece of the city means one less development of its kind on the periphery, they point out.

Peter Detwiler, who teaches a course on public land use policy at Sacramento State, says suburban sprawl is a trend that must be stemmed. “Public policy makers know [suburban sprawl’s] inefficiencies from a natural-resources point of view, from an energy point of view, from a finance point of view,” he said. “We can’t keep doing it.” Infill is a ready alternative, he says.

The societal benefits of infill are well understood, yet public outcry often erupts when these projects are proposed. People, Detwiler observes, tend to be leery of change—especially when it unfurls in their backyards.

This peculiar phenomenon is the source of many a clever acronym, like NIMBY, for “not in my backyard”; BANANA, for “build absolutely nothing, anywhere, never again”; NOPE, for “not on planet Earth”; and CAVE People, for “citizens against virtually everything.”

“Infill is much harder than greenfield development, where you build out onto farmland,” Detwiler said, “because cows don’t vote, and sugar beets don’t come and protest, but when you propose a project near an affluent, politically connected neighborhood like Curtis Park, people pay attention.”

Though objections against Curtis Park Village have been vehement at the community level, fellow Sac State professor Wassmer feels the layout and location of Curtis Park Village achieves the two main goals of infill: it offsets outward suburban sprawl while bringing people into relevant proximity of a public-transit line.

He points out that the plan also brings a grocery store—whether it will be a Safeway or a Grocery Outlet—within reach of Oak Park, long cited by social activists as an urban food desert.

The design looks transit-friendly, too. Gordon Garry, research director with the Sacramento Area Coalition of Governments, says the gas station “is definitely a land use that isn’t supporting the transit investment our city has made.” But Curtis Park Village on a whole is supporting that investment, he argues.

The community is just across the Western Pacific tracks from the light-rail line, and Petrovich is building a pedestrian bridge that will connect his new neighborhood to a light-rail station. These train stations and rail lines, unlike bus routes, are expensive to install.

Garry says Sacramentans who live within a quarter-mile of a light-rail station use the associated rail line about seven times more frequently than the average Sacramento resident. In Curtis Park Village, more than a thousand people will be living just several minutes by foot from two light-rail stops.

Even if most of those people drive to work or to the central city for dinner—and most probably will—the location of those people near the center of the city is going to have a net benefit on the environment, according to Schenirer. He says each home being built in Curtis Park Village could mean one less home in a suburban neighborhood 10 or 15 miles from downtown. This means Petrovich is reducing Sacramento’s total “vehicle miles traveled”—an important metric for planners.

Still, Garry wants to see urban infill push society toward a less automobile-oriented future.

“We want developments to encourage walking, biking and transit,” he said. “We want developments to encourage people to live their lives without cars.”

Joe Devlin, another Curtis Park resident and Schenirer’s chief of staff, says neighbors can’t expect the new development to slip seamlessly into the adjacent neighborhoods. But he says the Village will be a major upgrade.

“My hope is that [Curtis Park Village] will be complementary to Curtis Park,” Devlin said. “Will it look exactly like Curtis Park? No. But it’s a lot better than having a toxic rail yard.”

The Petrovich-vs.-residents drama showcases how a well-to-do, educated community can be uneasy about the arrival of newcomers even though they support urban infill projects. Many Curtis Park residents say they oppose suburban sprawl and support fighting climate change. But the catch is that infill has to be done right.

“We need infill. We can’t just build outward,” resident Ave said, “but the format he’s proposed was bad enough when it was a strip mall—and then he throws in a gas station.”

Councilman Schenirer does not think his neighbors’ expectations that Curtis Park Village’s homes should look and feel like the homes in adjacent neighborhoods built a century ago is very reasonable.

He says he was recently walking his dog past the new brownstones being built at the south edge of Curtis Park Village when he saw another local standing by, watching construction work underway and shaking his head. Schenirer asked what was troubling the man.

“’These aren’t brownstones like we had when I was growing up in New York,’” he told Schenirer, who says he had nothing encouraging to tell the man.

“I mean, what do you do with that [sort of statement]?” Schenirer said.

In other words, so what if things today are different than yesterday? Things change, Schenirer says.

“That’s the nature of life, isn’t it?”