California, Why Are You Like This

California undeniably beautiful and undeniably maddening at the same time sometimes it feels like everyone wants to live here but nobody can afford to So today we're doing a case study on a city that exemplifies all of it a microcosm of how Progressive ideals run up against nimi policies a love affair with signs that have lots of words on them and most importantly why I can't pronounce the name of this city correctly it's all coming up next this is City nerd weekly content on cities and transportation viewer suggested topics always welcome and this wasn't really anyone's idea except I got invited out to speak at a student conference at calp which I'll touch on briefly later and I'm just going to address this right up front the way locals pronounce the name of this city is San Louis abiso which as an outsider seems strange but what I quickly realized is that the quote unquote correct way to pronounce basically any name of Spanish language origin in these parts is simply to pronounce it as if if you had no idea the Spanish language existed at all I'll actually come back to this but for the most part I'm going to refer to this city the way I heard it most often which is slow it's California so there's a lot of stuff you can and should ridicule they can handle it but let's just State for the record that this is an absolutely gorgeous part of our country slow is surrounded by these Hills or moros that come right up on the city and are sort of everpresent in the background as you go about your business and just to orient you to the location since it isn't a city with the very highest name recognition it's in the central coast region of California roughly halfway between the Bay Area and greater La population around 50,000 and I'd say it has a downtown that punches way above its weight for a city of 50k Charming walkable streets with unbroken pedestrian oriented building Frontage the vehicle traffic is reasonably well behaved and on Thursday nights they shut down traffic altogether for a Street Market it's good vibes several restaurants along the main drag advertise Creekside dining and yes there is a creek that runs right through downtown on the inside of some of the busiest blocks with its own walking path not super active at the beginning of February but I can use my imagination slow is pretty good for biking there's protected bike infrastructure downtown and lots of low traffic streets that work pretty well for shared use it's not uncommon for cities to put sherrow on streets like this well slow uses the largest shos known to mankind Transit it's a good system for a city of 50k remember this is a college town decent frequencies and I did Rite it which I'll come back to later but I just want to point out that this is literally slow Transit and you better believe the agency knows that their tagline is being read phonetically remember this city is geographically equidistant from SoCal in the Bay Area and having a slow pace is apparently considered a feature not a bug oh and this is the slow train station I don't really have anything to say about it I just know that if I don't include it in the video there's a certain type of person who watches my channel who will get extremely distraught and we just can't have that here's what I want to talk about though this is a city that's fairly Infamous for the number of reasonably normal human behaviors that are restricted or just outright banned like I know this isn't literally the most restrictive place you can possibly live in the US set it's got to be like 99.9th percentile and there's a reason why the city is sometimes dubbed ban Lewis abiso for example this is somewhat famously the first city in the US to ban fast food drive-through restaurants which I have talked about in a couple other videos that's really just the beginning though you want to put balloons or floppy wavy guys outside your business do it in another city skateboarding downtown will get you a ticket interested in having a pet rabbit just keep it moving down the road it's not happening here you can't feed ducks no gas powerered leaf blowers on Sundays which is still honestly six fewer days a week then they should actually be outlawed but really one of my favorites is municipal code 12.32 one10 on naming streets which states that all street names should be pleasant sounding and easy to read spell and pronounce which is funny because this is literally a place where the city's own citizens can't even pronounce the name of their City correctly the Main Street that runs right through downtown the locals pronounce it huera I'm not even kidding and I'm sort of being harsh I realize we all call Los Angeles Los Angeles but the ordinance is funny I think ostensibly it's to make it easier for small children or whatever to communicate location in case of emergency but then instead of doing the street signs in an ultra readable street sign font like Clear View they're done up like Medieval theme park wayfinding I just I don't know like they managed to use extremely standard readable font on pretty much every other sign it's just the font is often very small because they really like to put a lot of words on signs usually multiple signs extremely detailed parking restrictions as if you were in Manhattan signs telling you where you can and can't go signs to let you know you're being watched signs reminding you that you can't smoke which I kind of agree with a lot of this stuff but it's just a lot especially when there's so many objectionable things they haven't banned like convenience stores right on the main drag through the center of town not banned high-end Scandinavian car dealerships also right on the main drag skateboard shops are apparently totally legal even though skateboarding itself isn't this business totally cool and legal more things that are deemed completely acceptable quote unquote bike routes that don't have any identifiable infrastructure or even markings of any kind green painted buffered bike lanes that are right in the door Zone this style of bike rack which unaccountably seems to be really popular here paving materials that get extremely slippery in the rain and it did absolutely poor when I was here these things still totally legal and awesome I mean this city has a lot of things that I would personally Outlaw if I had absolute power any of these kinds of places this chain fast fashion any place that sells a Leisure or having literal lifestyle centers that take up multiple blocks of your downtown now that is absolutely permissible honestly you could argue that this is better than having them on the outskirts of downtown except now you need Downtown parking structures just to reiterate having a rabbit as a pet is an affront to civilized society but devoting chunks of prime downtown real estate to cheap vehicle storage totally awesome okay I'm being grouchy slow is really nice and pleasant and a lot of what I've shown you is done better here than it is in the vast majority of cities this size in our country but in a minute I'm going to get into a couple city ordinances that are actually just a little more disturbing but first brief reminder to click on all the things the Bell is especially useful if you want to be notified of like breaking news or emergency live streams whatever connect on all these usual websites if you want to see more pictures of my cats and patreon is super important when it comes to giving this channel anything that resembles Financial stability by the way this was another speaking engagement this time for the student Leadership Summit of The Institute of Transportation Engineers Western District very cool to meet with the youngs who are really going to be the next generation of people who are planning and designing our City's transportation systems and it turns out an absolutely shocking number of them watch this Channel and I don't quite know how to feel about that okay so it got exhausting trying to find ways to be annoyed by slow which by any any measure is a beautiful walkable livable small US city so I hopped Route 12 which runs once an hour and gets you to Moro Bay right on the Pacific in like 26 minutes it's shocking that it takes so little time because you feel like you're departing from a mountain town and then less than half an hour later you're standing at the edge of the Pacific Ocean I don't know how much there really is to say it's a pleasant Seaside town a lot like the places I used to go on the Oregon coast to get away for a weekend except warmer suppose all the usual trappings saltwater taffy gift shops that sell knick-knacks for married people who hate each other overpriced Seaside restaurants these tacos were actually amazing though there really is something about gazing out onto the Pacific that speaks to me but it's probably a me thing Moro Bay does have its own idiosyncratic rules though not being able to steal plants that's like borderline fascism back to slow I think someone in a recent live live stream suggested that when I do a city visit I should go back and look at the different metrics I use when I'm analyzing cities so if you care Citywide Walkin bike scores of 56 and 69 respectively although if I drop a pin on igera sorry huera and choro downtown it's 99 and 91 eh I covered a lot of this in my college towns video median rent over $2,500 what are you going to do it's California people want to live here another comment I got a lot on my last live stream was that I should do a video on California forever which if you don't know what it is it's this idea of building a whole new city in Solano County outside the Bay Area from Whole cloth as a way of relieving some of the state's housing crunch it's backed by a bunch of tech billionaires and when you read about it you keep having to remind yourself that you aren't reading about one of those misguided utopian high-tech cities they're always proposing on the Arabian penins Pula I don't know if I'll do a video about it but the ging thing is California has literally hundreds of cities that already have the infrastructure to support thousands of additional housing units it's just apparently too politically difficult to do things that should be much more technically straightforward like one thing you might have noticed in all the images of slow that I've shown you so far there aren't any cranes in the air if you squint you can see a bit of multifam but median rent over $2,500 there's tons of demand to live here I can't imagine construction doesn't pencil out well let's look at a couple more city ordinances that may or may not be related no overnight camping in vehicles no smelling bad if you want to use a public library and no sitting in one place for more than an hour a cynical person might say these things as well as the design of the benches are simply intended to annoy the unhoused into moving to another city that has less picity laws again it's a very nice City and slow is literal it's a city where having a slow pace of life is not only considered a virtue but a selling point that differentiates the city and this is a great tension in urban planning part of the reason why so many people want to live in a city like this and why prices are so high is because they very intentionally made it a place where people want to live there's a tension between being free to do whatever you want which is kind of a Houston approach and on the other hand making things sufficiently restrictive so that you curate the type of urban environment you want it's funny conservatives or Libertarians will tell you that they hate this kind of government overreach or whatever and will go on and on about the nanny state but then they'll literally choose to live in some Suburban subdivision with crazy restrictive HOAs and Covenants look I'm all about people having choices when it comes to living in a variety of urban or Suburban environments really as I've been visiting so many many cities in the last year the idea I've really latched on to is that having that diversity of urban contexts across a variety of geographies should in theory allow for the most possible self- selection and self- sorting and what I always come back to is the places that are the most walkable and bikable that give you the greatest opportunity to avoid car dependency are almost always the places with the highest demand and are the most expensive and as I travel and try to grasp what's going on in all these different cities the staggeringly obvious thing I keep thinking is we need to build more of the type of places that have the highest demand and probably not as Green Field development but let me think about it some more being able to travel more is something I've really enjoyed about the evolution of my channel but it does make it a little more challenging for me to do my actual job which is making videos for you all when I'm traveling I'm working and hooking up to Wi-Fi and coffee shops hotels airports and that's where today's sponsor nordvpn comes in a lot of what I do is just writing and editing that I don't need an internet connection for but I do spend a lot of time in my Google account including YouTube studio and I don't want to have to worry about what kind of information I'm putting out on the local wifi this is all stuff I'd prefer not to worry about but the reality is there are any number of things that bad intention people can do if they get a hold of your IP address like they can do a distributed denial of service or DDOS attack which is not fun and is sometimes part of like a ransom scheme or some other nefarious plot but if you're logged into nordvpn which is just one click that person isn't going to get your actual IP address you're going to be anonymous this is really just one piece of what makes nordvpn indispensable for me it also has nextg encryption it blocks malware and trackers it gives me peace of mind when I'm traveling and also when I'm back home working remotely at coffee shops and other beverage establishments which is a thing I do pretty often and this is why I recommend nordvpn so strongly I like to work from anywhere and not have to worry about it what can I say I'm an urbanist I love a good third place anyway if you sign up for any of nordvpn's 2-year plans during the current promotional period you're going to get four bonus months on top if you use my code and your nordvpn subscription comes with access to their proxy browser extension which is a more lightweight flexible option for getting the benefits of a VPN like if you're borrowing someone's computer you can log in and add the extension or if you have apps that you want to keep using your actual IP while your browser stays Anonymous it can come in handy but I just keep nordvpn logged on wherever I go because it works for everything I do again make sure you use the code down the description it's going to get you four months for free and it's going to help support this channel too and thanks again and that's all I've got thanks for joining and thanks as always to the patrons whose direct support really gives me the freedom to Branch out and do these events where I can connect with the people who are going to be influencing our build environment for years to come keep the great topic suggestions coming I'll be back with a new episode next week and I'll see you then

Channel: CityNerd

Views: 185,393

Keywords: urbanism, urbanist, urban, urban talk, urbanism sociology, urban exploration, urbanism as a way of life, urbanism architecture, urbanist exploring cities, urbanist session, urban planning problems, urban planning, city planning, urban design, cities, cities skylines, urban planning career, urban planning degree, urban planning 101

Id: OvvUSc_7Z6w

Length: 15min 42sec (942 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2024