Close to Home: Privacy or connection? Cities need to choose

Late in my mother’s life, I would visit her in Los Gatos. One day she was sad. She had lived in her home for over 60 years and at 90 years of age, she did not know any of her neighbors. No neighbor would stop by with some cookies or to keep her company. She wondered despondently why she did not know her neighbors.

It was not appropriate for me to tell her at that point in her life, but as an urban designer I knew the answer. When you design a neighborhood or town you have two options. One is to make privacy the goal. The other is to make sociability the goal.

In my mom’s neighborhood the goal was privacy and exclusivity. The lots were large, so to begin with there were not many neighbors. Low density is a result of this type of development. Properties were fenced, walled and gated. No sidewalks were installed. To live there you had to have a car. You only saw your neighbors at the mailboxes, and most of the time you were in your car when you got your mail. There was little opportunity for chance meetings. The result was solitude, seclusion or loneliness depending on your point of view.

The other type of town planning has sociability as its goal. Healdsburg uses this model in its downtown planning. Walkability is a priority in this type of design. Roads and sidewalks connect outlying residents to services and life; services such as grocery stores, cafés, parks, etc.

Garages are minimized or placed off alleys. This way, large porches that prioritize human activity face the street. Neighbors get to know each other informally as they walk their dogs or relax on their porch. These places encourage social interaction and safety as the people on or behind the porch provide eyes on the street. Windsor has been designing new buildings with “sociability” and “eyes on the street” as a priority for about 30 years.

Santa Rosa continues to go down the privacy route. In a historic neighborhood in the Railroad Square area, a new apartment complex was recently completed on Wilson Street. Across the street is a corner store (the Ninth Street Deli) and cute houses with porches designed using the sociability model. The three stories of apartments place their collective back to the street. There are no street-friendly front door entries or their associated stoops or patios. Just a back patio — a 4-foot-wide patch of concrete that is close to the sidewalk but fenced off from it. I have never seen anyone using these patios.

Santa Rosa is preparing to set the framework for the sociability model in its general plan. In the meantime, the city’s all-important zoning code continues to allow lifeless “back-on” units even in historic neighborhoods but especially behind the east side of south Santa Rosa Avenue.

There have been concerns in The Press Democrat about Santa Rosa adding new housing units without the city becoming more exciting as a place to live. The privacy model being used blockades new higher-density residents from the street. Santa Rosa will continue to have boring streets that are painful to walk along if it continues to prioritize privacy over sociability in its zoning requirements.

There are real world consequences to this approach. Most of the time seniors like my mom need to move from car-required suburbia to a retirement community when they stop driving. We were able to keep her at home due to paid help. The neighborliness that she longed for never materialized.

Lois Fisher is an urban designer with Fisher Town Design. She lives in Windsor.

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