DIRECTORY:

Community Participation

Background

Guidelines and Analysis

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January 29, 2000 Old East Neighborhood Workshop

On January 29, 2000 over 20 people participated in a design guidelines workshop for the Old East Neighborhood at the Food CO-OP. The workshop objectives included:

  • Define Character Areas
  • Identify neighborhood design features the community values
  • Establish a preliminary set of design principles

Workshop Summary

Character Mapping: Old East has mixed lot size and income traditions at a "farm house spacing"

The workshop participants prepared maps that illustrated the various areas of the Old East with distinctive character. The maps reflected two general observations. First, Old East has traditionally possessed a mix of lot sizes. This includes large traditional homes, bungalows, bungalow courts, and commercial. Secondly, post war apartment development has been an intrusion into the neighborhood.

 

Question #1: What are the three most important streetscape features that should be conserved in your neighborhood?

Street trees, planting strips and wide streets were identified as the predominant streetscape features in Old East.

Question #2: What are the predominate lot and site patterns in your neighborhood that should be conserved?

Workshop participants identified the mix of lot sizes, farmhouse spacing, and open feeling of the neighborhood as the key ingredients in the neighborhood's "fabric". Most importantly, houses in Old East Davis have been developed in proportion with their lot size.

Question #3: What are the desirable architectural design features in the neighborhood that should be conserved?

In terms of architectural features, participants said Old East Davis houses featured sloped gable roofs, sitting porches, a central mass broken by horizontal and vertical architectural elements, and low-scale front yard fences.

Question #4: What types of changes or threats do you see to desirable design features in your neighborhood?

The participants identified a variety of conservation issues facing Old East Davis. These include the increasing amount of traffic, parking impacts from under-parked student rental property (with too many bedrooms relative to parking provided), and most importantly, poorly planned and design speculative multi-family housing.

The workshop participants felt existing zoning for the neighborhood has produced rental housing that does not respect the "historic fabric" in Old East Davis. The lot coverage is too great, the scale of development is incompatible, and there is an imbalance of rental verse owner-occupied housing being developed. The participants wanted to explore a combination of incentives and disincentives to encourage compatible development and restoration of historic homes.

Planning Team Summaries

The workshop participants worked as members of four planning teams. Individual team summaries follow:

Team 1

Question #1: Streetscape

  • Raised foundations vs slab-on-grade
  • Front doors face the street/garage should not
  • Absence of commercial signage
  • Pre-WWI California farmhouse vernacular

Question #2: Patterns

  • Need to measure and identify setbacks and massing typical of farmhouse spacing
  • Mixed sizes
  • Openness, not all fenced

Question #3: Architecture

  • Mass is broken by horizontal or vertical elements
  • Landscape at RR corridor as exists
  • Gable facing street, second story dormitory, sloping porch roofs, columned porches, picket fences and porch rails

Question #4: Conservation Issues

  • Traditional houses being converted to commercial use (commercial infill)
  • Parking/traffic pressures from downtown (we should be included in the delta's in downtown)
  • Group housing (pseudo-flat dorms) due to the inventive use of the term "duplex"
  • Lack of owner occupied single family homes

Team 2

Question #1: Streetscape

  • Keep pedestrian outlook
  • Bungalow/cottage feel
  • Preserve present size diversity and historic feel
  • Preserve ecological space/resource (trees in strips)

Question #2: Patterns

  • Preserve diversity of size (do not divide large lots)
  • Keep setbacks
  • Open space on lot
  • With buildings to be replaced-use same scale, preserve old style with remodels

Question #3: Architecture

  • Bungalow/cottages
  • Period architecture
  • "Family" style-lower occupancy
  • Maintain backyard sizes

Question #4: Conservation Issues

  • Replacement of single family homes
  • Construction for dense occupation
  • Don't replace old WPA-style sidewalks with modern walks (widen green strips/reduce street where feasible)
  • Cutting up large lots

Team 3

Question #1: Streetscape

  • Planting strip
  • Wide streets and grid
  • House prominent-garage secondary

Question #2: Patterns

  • House proportional to lot size
  • Variety of lot sizes
  • Gardening room

Question #3: Architecture

  • Fences-low scale of natural materials
  • Front and side gables
  • Porches

Question #4: Conservation Issues