Note: This is an edited version of a post first appearing on Adrian Covert's blog
Santa Rosa is the Bay Area’s 5th largest city, the seat of Sonoma County, and an internationally recognized Mecca for wine and craft beer. Yet from a land use perspective, downtown Santa Rosa is mostly a place to transport and store cars. Nearly half (47%) of downtown Santa Rosa’s total surface area is just car infrastructure, counted as highways, streets, and parking. Santa Rosa’s existing car infrastructure came at the expense of about a third of its pre-car-era downtown and left behind a much less vibrant and sustainable city as a result. As the city works to update its general plan, it has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a better future—by looking to its past.
Like most towns in California, Santa Rosa was established in the late 19th century prior to widespread car ownership. A modern-day time traveler to historic downtown Santa Rosa would notice wider sidewalks, narrower streets, many more storefronts, and likely more people despite an overall much smaller population. By the 1940s, increased car ownership allowed more people to live in larger homes farther from jobs and markets while also making them dependent on cars for nearly all activities. Cars require a lot of space, not just to drive around but also to park while we shop, and most pre-car-era downtowns had very little space for parking. As a result, farms and ranches on what was then the edge of town were developed into new residential and commercial spaces—suburbs, motels, fast food, strip malls, and big box retail—with sprawling parking lots to accommodate car-dependent consumers. Downtowns across the U.S. fell into disrepair and sought to compete by expanding the space available for cars. Sidewalks were narrowed to make room for on-street parking and homes and businesses were demolished to make space for parking lots. By destroying homes, cities were also eliminating the local customer and employee base, which made downtowns even more dependent on car-dependent workers and shoppers, which led to even more demolitions and more car infrastructure. The destruction within cities like Boston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati to make room for car infrastructure was comparable to that in some European cities during the second World War.
Santa Rosa was similarly transformed. Commerce shifted away from downtown into car centric developments like Montgomery Village (1950), Coddingtown Mall (1962), and Stony Point Plaza (1980). Even when commerce did expand downtown, as it did with the opening of Santa Rosa Plaza (1983), not enough people lived downtown to support it so parking infrastructure had to be built to accommodate shoppers and workers living far away. Fifty-one housing units, a pool hall, and a hotel were demolished to build highway 101 through downtown; eighteen storefronts were demolished to make room for the parking lot at 5th and B Street; the parking lot at 6th and B Street demolished four homes and a church; the parking lot at 3rd and E Street was once two storefronts and 16 homes; a small Chinatown was demolished to build a parking garage on D Street. The Santa Rosa Plaza parking garage occupies the space of nine football fields and is almost certainly the largest building in Sonoma County, even larger than the mall itself. Where it stands was once home to 71 homes and 23 storefronts.
Today, 47 percent of all land in Railroad Square and Courthouse Square, the center of Santa Rosa’s Downtown Planning Area, is just car infrastructure. That’s more than all businesses, sidewalks, public squares, parks, housing, and rail combined. Parking consumes 25 percent of the surface area of downtown, more than all housing and pedestrian space combined and up from basically zero in 1900. Highway 101—although perhaps the single most obvious piece of car infrastructure downtown—takes up about five percent. Streets take up about 17 percent and are entirely devoted to cars on account of the complete absence of dedicated transit lanes or class IV protected bike lanes.
Virtually all of the land currently used for parking downtown required the demolition of a previous building—almost none was developed on open space. Using fire insurance maps from 1900 and 1950, we can see with extraordinary detail what Santa Rosa sacrificed to accommodate cars. In total, Santa Rosa’s parking lots and garages were once home to 73 commercial storefronts, including furniture shops, printers, banks, offices, and another hotel; nine restaurants, a theatre, and a bowling alley; six churches, and the aforementioned Chinatown. Perhaps most of all, parking cost Santa Rosa homes. Sixty-three percent of the land currently used to park cars in downtown lots and garages was once housing—249 units in all.
Replacing downtown homes and businesses with parking, combined with the online revolution in retail behavior, has lead to a breathtaking surplus of parking in downtown Santa Rosa that undermines the city's vibe and kneecaps its ability to compete for talent and tourism. A 2022 study commissioned by the City of Santa Rosa estimates 74 percent of all parking spots in downtown go unused on a typical busy day, up from from 42 percent in 2019. The study paints a picture of an underutilized downtown overburdened with ugly blocks of empty concrete and asphalt.
Here are several ways Santa Rosa can begin to undo the damage and optimize downtown for affordability, vibrancy, and climate goals:
- Replace the dilapidated and underutilized city-owned Parking Garage 5 (on 3rd Street) with housing. Furthermore, don't saddle the future housing with the enormous cost of replacing the existing (underutilized) Garage 5 parking capacity on a 1:1 basis. Sign this petition in support.
- Pedestrianize 4th street downtown. Removing and replacing traffic lanes and parking with pedestrian-only zones has been a huge success for small businesses and the public in cities like Grass Valley, Santa Monica, and others. Downtown Santa Rosa needs this transformation to compete with regional rivals like Napa and Healdsburg. Sign this petition in support.
- Preserve the pedestrian space we already have. The first rule of holes is that when you're in one, stop digging. The city should prevent converting any existing pedestrian space to additional car space, like Santa Rosa Plaza is attempting to do at the current location of the Agraria hand sculpture. Read more >>>
- Eliminate development impact fees: One of the many ways in which cities across California make housing more expensive is by charging new housing construction with excessive fees which can add tens of thousands of dollars per door to the cost of construction. The City Council should eliminate development impact fees on all new deed restricted housing units affordable to households earning up to 120% of area median income.
- Restore sidewalks and extend network of Class IV Protected bike lanes. Twenty-six percent of all trips in Sonoma County (44 percent of which are entirely within Santa Rosa) are less than two miles long, yet 98% of these trips are taken by car. That kind of dominance by any mode of transit reveals not individual choice but infrastructure choice. Everyone drives because that's what we've optimized for without creating a safe and competitive alternative (cars have killed 25 pedestrians and 2 cyclists since 2012). Restoring downtown sidewalks to their pre-car widths and installing protected bike lanes are relatively low cost ways to provide safe and competitive options to move around downtown for people who don't want to drive (and free up space for those who do).