When exurbs aspire to learn from Old World villages: Esmeralda
When exurbs aspire to learn from Old World villages: Esmeralda
Can a modern development in Sonoma County capture the spirit of Old World village life, or will it fall into the oxymoron trap of creating a "trad," nostalgic technotopia?
How not to sell an exciting to locals is to follow the framing the San Francisco Chronicle picked to report about a newly announced development two hours north of San Francisco: “There’s another plan for a tech utopia in California — this time in Wine Country.” The expression “tech utopia” has lost its allure for a good reason, especially if used to designate gentle urbanism and well-being. Is “traditional technotopia” an oxymoron?
I’ve known Cloverdale, a town in Sonoma County of about 9 thousand people north of Healdsburg and two hours from San Francisco, for almost twenty years. The place is on the other side of 101 from the Russian River, the vineyards of Alexander Valley, and a rail depot restored a few years ago where no train arrives. Though things could change for this “future intermodal station.”
Unpretentious and easygoing, Cloverdale has its charms but is too far to be considered, like the boroughs of Santa Rosa (Sonoma County’s big town, to the south), a part of the outer Bay Area. It’s also a bit too hot, with a temperature pattern more like that of Central Valley than the mild and foggy coastal microclimate revered by Bay Area residents. It could be considered picturesque, though not as artsy or quirky as nearby Hopland, nor desirable by wine enthusiasts and professionals searching for a second home like Healdsburg. In many ways, its mediocrity has saved it from a bigger Bay Area influx. Until now.
Disneyfication of yesteryear’s villages
To put it in regional terms, the closest median airport is 30 miles away in Santa Rosa, from where it’s possible to fly to main destinations on the West Coast and beyond. The closest Trader Joe’s is also in Santa Rosa, 30 minutes away, though some neighbors used to travel twenty miles north to buy at the Ukiah coop store—that is, until Co-op Essentials, which recently opened in town. For middle-aged bulk enthusiasts, both Ukiah and Santa Rosa host Costco stores.
For many years, however, locals would drive to the local Ray’s and call it a day; we’d bike there all the time to get the essentials when staying there. Recently, a Grocery Outlet opened just in front of Ray’s, and many people avoid longer errands as long as they don’t have to, say, go to the doctor, which to Kaiser Permanente patients means, again, driving to Santa Rosa for most things. The town is lively and has become more so over the years; a couple of young entrepreneurs coming from back East reopened the small movie theater years ago, and not much later, neighbors and associations promoted Friday Night Live, a summer event with live music and many attractions that cheered locals and visitors every Friday during summer. Our kids went to the event many times while growing up.
(Besides Kaiser Santa Rosa, Healdsburg has a small hospital, and I have one story regarding the place: about fifteen years ago or so while biking in Cloverdale, I broke my elbow. It was Christmas time, and back then, we lived in Barcelona. I had been working as a journalist and had, on top of the universal healthcare there, private insurance, which ended up saving me: as I walked into the Healdsburg hospital, somebody told me the bad news, and I heard not much later that the surgery would cost me, a foreigner on vacation, over 20,000 dollars. So, I called my insurance, and they told me that they could fly me the day after from San Francisco to Barcelona and do the surgery back home, which I chose as an option rather than navigating any other local “offer”; the surgery went well in Spain, though I missed a few days of vacation).
Transplanting vernaculars
You get the idea about Cloverdale: neighbors have to close their windows when there’s a fire near Clear Lake or further north, and many people are considering heat pumps and filters to plan for such events if I have to trust what I’ve heard. It’s a place far enough to prevent commuting but close enough to make it fairly expensive compared to other areas in the US, though comparatively cheaper than anywhere else with a similar setup closer to San Francisco.
These considerations didn’t prevent Devon Zuegel, a software engineer and graduate of Stanford, where she was editor-in-chief of Stanford Review, from proposing the use of 267 acres southeast of Cloverdale just by the side of the highway and next to the town’s small airport, to build Esmeralda (the Roma girl from Victor Hugo’s—and Disney’s—The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), a new development community very different to the usual car-centric developments in the area. The lot can contain a self-contained village: it’s roughly a half-square mile—the equivalent of 202 football fields.
Zuegel sees the place as a walkable little village on a hill shaped after the aesthetics and livability of Mediterranean (in her parlance, “Italian”) little towns—the very places that became sleepy as generations of countrymen left for the city and, not long ago, for places like California. Interestingly, the whole area around Cloverdale attracted a big Italian-Swiss community, with its epicenter at Asti, a small unincorporated community between Cloverdale, Geyserville, and Healdsburg, and not far from the place chosen to create Esmeralda.
Many years ago, my in-laws bought a house in a Cloverdale retirement community, Del Webb, once they became empty nesters in what is now Silicon Valley. At their house, we met once a very old, healthy, and highly energetic lady, Anne Gillis, who was a part of the historic Italian Swiss community from the area and made hand-made pasta so Kirsten could record it for a video. She explained many anecdotes to Kirsten about life in the area and about the traditions that connected her to the homeland of her ancestors. Esmeralda would have chosen, after all, a location with some potential connections to the world from which it tries, if I understand well, to borrow ideas.
“If you dream of living in a small town while being surrounded by creative, high-agency people, we’re building this for you,” explained Zuegel, adding that it would take shape “on a beautiful piece of land 90 (minutes) north of San Francisco.” Having done the trip myself many times over the years, I’d add that’d be the ideal time, avoiding traffic out of the city and around Santa Rosa, which is something that many people can’t afford to do.
Can you balloon-frame a centuries-old hilltown village?
If Esmeralda were to see the light, perhaps the ever-postponed project of funding the extension of the SMART Train line that connects Santa Rosa to the Larkspur ferry terminal that gets commuters, many of them on their bikes, to the city could someday arrive in Cloverdale.
Devon Zuegel appeals to the popularity of dreamy environments on platforms such as Instagram to explain how Esmeralda would come to reality:
“Two key components will make Esmeralda special: 1. Our 'hardware' – an Italian hill town; 2. Our 'software' – a culture of learning & building.”
I’ve experienced many villages across the world, and I visited the two small villages where my ancestors span from in different parts of Spain growing up; I’ve also lived and/or visited enchanting places across France, Italy, Portugal, Greece, Switzerland, and Northern Africa (including Chefchaouen and the like in and near the Moroccan Atlas).
The organicity of these places has little to do with a framing that comes from computer science. Perhaps Esmeralda should consider the human perspective front and center; otherwise, this Disneyesque project of little Santa Barbara (balloon framing construction disguised as patina-friendly brick-and-mortar constructions) won’t reach the desired outcome. For a bold development to succeed over time, it has to build upon a vernacular that transcends the kitsch elements of social media. Sea Ranch, the coastal community not far from Cloverdale, is an example of success that didn’t copycat what hasn’t existed in North America since its inception as a vibrant culture with many particularities.
Esmeralda is trying to innovate by stating that a European-style little village; not the ones that get built nowadays in Europe, bear with me, but the ones that sparked from a medieval, pre-industrial world. Instead of the rational grid patterns observed in Pompeii, Esmeralda backers seem more interested in the random patterns of vernacular places that grew organically over the years. It can be done, and the weather and landscape in California (including that of Cloverdale, warmer than the Bay Area) aren’t much different from the rolling hills around Tuscany or the Costa Brava (where Esmeralda could learn from Peratallada and its surroundings); I’m not sure it can be done cheaply and in a rush.
On ditching car-centric suburbia west of the Rockies
In form and substance, Zuegel connects to a cohort of software engineers and young professionals who may know little to nothing about Alexander Valley but aren’t afraid to try new things. Given the evolution of suburban America during the last decades, and considering that few people would bet for a development that isn’t car-centric West of the Rockies, the “old idea” of building a walkable and picturesque small village on a hill is bold enough on its own.
We Europeans living in California as adults—partially raised or connected to many of the very villages that a project like Esmeralda would consider small urbanism—also acknowledge that many things may get easily lost in translation. The way vernaculars are built across the Med and other parts of the world has little to do with building standards in California. Yet this reality didn’t prevent Santa Barbara or Santa Fe, New Mexico, from keeping their consistency at a much bigger scale than what Esmeralda is proposing.
However, the project is bound to face many hurdles. Among them, the fact that a big part of the purchased land was contaminated decades ago, and many neighbors think it was never cleaned up. There are many ways to restore previously contaminated land, and hopefully Esmeralda Land Company will consider that in their plans:
“At one point, the property housed a Louisiana-Pacific wood processing mill and, after that facility shut down, required a $24 million cleanup to haul away wood debris and other waste, along with environmental remediation to clean soil and groundwater.”
Integration with All-American Cloverdale or gated community?
That said, the new project won’t need to undergo an environmental review since the previously approved project has already undergone one. As of now, the new entity is still communicating its intentions to the local community, having hosted a couple of events in nearby Healdsburg over the last months. According to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, the local paper of choice in the area (my in-laws get it, as do many neighbors), they will need five to eight months to draw up final plans, which will then be scrutinized by the residents of Cloverdale.
So far, the vision seems to appeal to the area’s representatives, who have been trying to allure visitors to the area’s potential for recreation and laid-back environment despite its proximity to the city. According to Melanie Bagby, a member of Cloverdale’s City Council:
“This project, at its core, has an ethos that will fit right in with Cloverdale’s vision for a sustainable community. Unlike previous developers, Esmeralda Land Company celebrates its location near SMART, the Great Redwood Trail, Cloverdale Airport, and the River Park. They will be an important partner in completing future phases of these projects.”
The chosen site, located at Asti Road, and hence in the middle of a land settled by Swiss Italians, is right below the airport, just south of Santana Drive, cut from Cloverdale by the road but with access to river and valley views. From 2008 to 2015, the current owners tried to encourage the development of a resort willing to attract weekenders from the Bay Area, winning city approval a little after. It proposed a 150-room hotel, 40 standalone bungalows, a spa and restaurant, 130 homes, an equestrian center, and a commercial area. In 2017, however, the project fell through.
The way the US West came to be
I’ve noticed a pattern over the years regarding how California is perceived among enthusiasts of alternative living of different strains, from self-builders to people trying to buy their first dwelling (even if it’s an unconventional one) to people trying to create intentional communities of different sorts.
Overall, early comments around stories (of any kind, always created from Kirsten’s positive, constructive view) produced in big coastal cities such as New York City, the Bay Area overall, or Los Angeles, are loaded with many talking points regarding why those places are more insecure (they are not), are infested by an epidemic of homelessness and mental illness (this is partly true, though the phenomenon is not exclusive to the state and many people experiencing such issues come from other places), or way too expensive (they are), or lack any quality of living (simply not true).
In reality, the fortunate ones able to buy or rent a place in such areas may have access to the best combination of job opportunities, culture, food, entertainment, and cosmopolitanism in North America. It doesn’t matter, however: mentioning places like San Francisco or Los Angeles is enough for people to express the negative side of how things are doing in the most dynamic parts of California, often with knowledge but often showing little to no consideration for facts.
Among the most mentioned problems, housing costs and the homeless epidemic are among the most mentioned by those willing to speed the bashing. Regarding New York City, commenters lately focus on the wave of immigrants coming to the city as they entered the US in border states and were encouraged to go to New York (instructions given, tickets paid).
Many issues requiring coordination and a will to be solved realistically are used like electoral bait instead. Just like the artificially induced cognitive dissonance around guns (why analyze causes and effects if you can always use the problem to your electoral advantage?), hyper-polarization is a very American tragedy. Until it’s not, once entire consecutive cohorts decide enough is enough.
Immediate perception vs. reality over the years
Consider Los Angeles, the strange, disconnected city that nonetheless irradiates some unique, appealing traits like a combination of weather, pleasant alleyways, laid-back elegance, access to the best produce and food around, and overall quality of life. Many of its issues aren’t new, either: Joan Didion already talks about the city’s clogged arteries and the public backlash when Caltrans experimented with high occupancy lanes for the first time on the Santa Monica Highway. The outrage around the idea of HOV lanes was real.
“All ‘The Diamond Lane’ theoretically involved was reserving the fast inside lanes on the Santa Monica for vehicles carrying three or more people, but in practice this meant that 25 per cent of the freeway was reserved for 3 per cent of the cars, and there were other odd wrinkles here and there suggesting that Caltrans had dedicated itself to making all movement around Los Angeles as arduous as possible.”
“Bureaucrats,” The White Album, Joan Didion, 1976, p. 81
As for homelessness and “scary transient people,” well, Los Angeles is the place where Didion reported about the excesses and exuberance of cults of all sorts that led to the Manson killings and how that event felt like the closing chapter of the sixties.
“On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive. The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”
(…)
“Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”
The White Album, Joan Didion, 1968-1978, pp. 42-47
The times they are a-changin’
Places historically deemed conflictive and beyond repair, like Downtown Los Angeles, had experienced a certain revival and improvement in the years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it hasn’t fully recovered since. Endemically problematic areas such as Skid Row continue to puzzle any distracted visitor.
But seeing only homelessness and disarray in Los Angeles—which exploded again during the pandemic, although it had epidemic levels beforehand—is reductionistic at best. Perhaps it’s unwise to talk about such matters one month away from a Presidential election, though bear with me: we live in times where there’s always something politically or geopolitically important close by, so this time may be as good as any other to share my insider-outsider observations, as I live in California and interact with Californians every day.
When posting, say, videos about legal secondary dwellings that can go up in people’s backyards as “accessory dwelling units” (ADUs) in single-family use zoning environments, which represent the suburban majority in places like California, the first commenters (sometimes, early watchers, like early adopters of anything, know one thing or two about trolling) can sometimes be harsh beyond rationality or good faith, highlighting how expensive everything is and how sclerotic things are. “But the video we just posted is about a legislation change that overrides local zoning and allows people to increase density in neighborhoods that otherwise would remain the same for generations,” you may tell them.
To them ADUs, as well as the rest of aggressive, comprehensive state legislation to speed multi-story buildings near public transit stations and the development of infill properties stuck in zoning limbo until now, are mere “details” not worth mentioning since they want to say something like:
“I think it’s important to include in [the] discussion the policies and politics that have led to unaffordable housing and degradation of law in California.”
Big statements about particular examples of how any suburban home in California can now virtually legally build a second dwelling that the owners can use to host relatives or rent to people with issues with local rents or house prices. Any response to that comment is deemed to build upon a fundamental disagreement: when somebody has decided that things are going “in the wrong direction,” there aren’t enough examples to reframe the conversation into a more constructive level: showing, for instance, examples in practice of policy reforms intending to tackle housing issues, like ADUs going up, infill lots being quickly built despite local skepticism or outright opposition, or taller buildings popping up near public transit stations.
The challenge of highlighting examples of a more humane urbanism
Being particular examples, some of these stories will always include something worth criticizing to miss the point: because it’s California, because the house’s owners building the ADU are “wealthy” (e.g., have money to own a house and finance the ADU), or because the co-living experiment being showcased that particular week isn’t conventional (and, to some, anything unconventional is “a cult”).
That said, most comments are as constructive and in good faith as Kirsten’s videos themselves; like the videos, they can be more or less engaging depending on the week, but they always seem to be legitimate and thoughtful enough.
As a part of this community, helping with its production and coordination, I can’t help but admire more and more the people from yesteryear who stood their ground when if most made sense; like the movie 12 Angry Men shows, sometimes things look one way but require thorough analysis, and in the end, things are much more nuanced. When Émile Zola wrote the article J’Accuse in the newspaper L’Aurore, he wasn’t sure it was a good idea for him to do so, but it was certainly a just position, for he denounced an outright injustice. To him, it would have been easier to see where the wind was blowing and accommodate his opinion after the fact.
When talking about housing and urbanism reform, there are also unsung heroes in history, many of them unknown, who defended positions that yielded benefits decades and even generations after, despite their early unpopularity. Looking in retrospect with the benefit of history, we consider it a no-brainer to see the Haussmann transformation of Paris in the late 19th century as a pivotal change for the city, which created the consistent style and city grid that Parisians and people all over the world praise today. It’s less known, however, that a majority of Parisians disliked (hated is probably a better word to describe it) the plans so much that they rioted against them.
Conversely, another praised urban transformation for its comprehensive consistency and historical yields, the rational expansion of Barcelona beyond its walled limits during the late 19th century, the Pla Cerdà (named after its promoter, urbanist Ildefons Cerdà), displeased Barcelonians so much that protests and press attacks risked to derail the project before it got the chance it deserved.
Had Haussmann and Cerdà accommodated what was popular among citizens and powerful people in their time and place, Paris and Barcelona would be very different places now. Some housing issues—like the impact of inflation, higher interest rates, and a lack of inventory due to a pervasive building slowdown after the subprime crisis—affect many places in the world, and there’s no quick fix for it.
Macro changes never trickle down as fast as required
Say, interest rate cuts and a bigger inventory can yield some marginal changes over the years, although not to the extent that people being priced out would need. California would be the fifth world’s economy if it were an independent country. Yet, with a population of almost 40 million people, only 112,000 homes went up in the state in 2023, or about one-third of the state’s annual goal.
Issues are exacerbated in areas where the economy outperformed, attracting high-income individuals and families yet failing to offer housing for all income levels, not only for those capable of paying price increases and willing to do so (in the case of the Bay Area, newcomers working in the tech industry) but also for locals who have to navigate higher prices across the board. Again, this phenomenon isn’t exclusive to California, as families being priced out in expensive metro areas from California or Northeastern US decide to relocate to the Sun Belt or the outdoorsy middle cities of the Great Basin and the Rockies.
Rate cuts to favor more advantageous loans, and a lengthy reform to ease zoning and building restrictions (as Bryan Caplan puts it, “planning less” as the best viable plan), are welcomed changes by people and political constituents of any sign, almost anywhere, particularly in California, formerly the land of NYMBYism. Yet comprehensive changes in monetary policy or zoning will hardly shake things up the way some places would need to allow people in need to rent or buy their first place at prices they can afford.
Places become sclerotic when entrenched interests—for example, people who bought their house many years ago or did so at historic lows for interest rates—are incentivized to artificially increment their property values by failing to move from big houses into ones better suited after they become empty nesters, or by blocking new housing inventory so the market constraints further increase property values, making houses for rent or sale even more expensive. It’s a vicious circle that individuals, in their legitimate pursuit of maximizing equity, won’t break willingly.
Housing vs. tech innovation
With the help of the military early on, California’s thriving innovation culture, blending University and public research with private investment to build the most successful companies in the world today, contrasts with its sclerotic performance when it comes to solving more mundane issues like building enough inventory for all demographics, at a price that people could afford if only creatively (say, with loans and by mobilizing family equity).
Housing differs greatly from tech innovation, yet acknowledging the obvious divergence doesn’t imply that housing couldn’t benefit from innovative workarounds and bold experimentation. To any visitor knowing little about the Bay Area and the Southern California suburban megalopolis, the first thing that comes to mind is how on earth some of the wealthiest spots in the world can afford to maintain single-family housing legislation, which benefits only a few at the expense of the rest.
A case in point of the double morality that nurtures this obvious cognitive dissonance is the double morality of tech personalities such as Marc Andreessen: on one side, the VC executive is an enthusiast of tech acceleration, even if it breaks many things on the path to technotopia; on the other hand, Andreessen and his wife, daughter of local real estate mogul and Stanford donor John Arrillaga, lobbied to prevent the construction of entry-level housing near their mansion in Atherton. Many people believe in building more, even favoring denser, mixed-use streets like those found in New York or Europe. Just not where they live.
Only in California? With promoters of innovation and prosperity like these, it isn’t surprising that many Bay Area residents are wary of any housing promotion at a big scale promoted by Silicon Valley investors, as the cooldown of the plans to build a city in Solano County just outside the Bay Area are put on hold, once potential investors realize that they may not have the neighbors’ approval as of now. California Forever isn’t just for now, it appears, accused of both being too bold (planning for a walkable community of 400,000 in a rural area) and not bold enough at once, as the proposed designs seemed to have been developed to avoid refusal. What is it?
The place where experiments ought to work
To many Bay Area residents, a medium-density, walkable, bikeable metropolis capable of learning from mid-sized European cities or even central Portland (or the bike-friendly nearby college town of Davies, an oasis of trees and gentle bike paths in Central Valley) would be good news. Neighbors from neighboring Solano County shouldn’t be too glad to prevent such an opportunity from happening as long as they can actively participate in its shaping and benefit from it, along with nearby newcomers.
As we’ve observed over the years while interviewing people across California, younger people still favor the city or medium-density environments close enough to urban cores. As long as they can afford it, that is.
The California Forever project or smaller experiments, such as the little Italian-style village-on-a-hill, as envisioned by the people behind Esmeralda, are a small part of what’s happening in California as the state tries to make up for lost ground, but every structural transformation needs an ongoing dynamic public conversation, as well as ideas and projects that make them think in a future that isn’t predetermined, no matter the entrenched interests.
There are many ways California can increase its housing stock, but many people want to go beyond the goal of mere “inventory increase” thanks to ADU, increased infill developments, and bold pilot projects like Esmeralda.
In the end, like Joan Didion wrote in 1965,
“California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”
“Notes from a Native Daughter,” originally appeared in 1965 in Holiday, also a part of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion (1968)