When it opened in 2010, Walnut Creek Apartments provided 422 apartment units and 35,000 square feet of street-facing retail immediately adjacent to the Pleasant Hill/Contra Costa Centre Station of the BART system, located in Walnut Creek, California, in the bay area east of San Francisco. What isn’t immediately evident when visiting this attractive transit-oriented development is that it is the culmination of a decade of planning that followed several proposed projects that were rejected by the public prior to that. The key to achieving this successful transit-oriented development (TOD) was the facilitation of an intensive charrette process, followed by the…

There certainly has been a lot in the media lately about demand for urban living. Everywhere you look there is a study indicating cities are in demand and suburbs are on the outs. It may already be happening – according to the Brookings Institution, cities are “thriving” and suburbs are “sputtering.”. Long range demographic analysis shows that demand increasing. So if the long range forecasts are true and the American Community Survey (ACS) results are more than just a blip, then urbanists like you and I should be giddy. So why am I so gloomy? Articles in the Minneapolis Star…