The Hidden Gem in Plain Sight

I’ve lived in California for most of my adult life and feel proud to have traveled widely within its many and varied landscapes. I’ve been to the remote desert Saline Valley to gaze at 10,000-year-old petroglyphs and to Sequoia National Park’s land-that-time-forgot Mineral King to hike into the largest and arguably most ruggedly beautiful roadless area in the US outside of Alaska. I’ve stomped and tasted my way through Los Angeles neighborhoods until I felt familiar enough to write and publish a novel nestled in their hilly breast. I even got married to my wife Annie in the midst of an extremely rare Central Valley riparian forest landscape on the Cosumnes River, the last remaining river entering the Valley from the Sierra Nevada to lack a major dam.

But until last weekend I had never been to Alameda, an island snuggled up next to Oakland on San Francisco Bay and famous for its eclectic mix of late nineteenth and early twentieth century domestic architecture; home as well to the famous St. George Distillery. Two reasons enough to visit, and back in my post-college salad days I had even heard from a friend, back when I had friends in the hipper inner precincts of the Bay Area, that Alameda managed to be both cool and unfussy at the same time. Which made for three reasons to see Alameda, enough for Annie and I to schedule an overnight visit and escape the clinging Sacramento fog (a fourth bonus reason).

I want to share something of what I saw there, so perhaps there is no better place to start than from the windows of the little backyard Airbnb where we stayed:

Here we see evidence of typical dense-packed early West Coast suburbia. In the picture at left notice the two close-layered fences and hedge marking different properties, and on the right note the four rooftops near each other. According to the US Census Bureau, Alameda’s population density in 2020 was just under 7,500 inhabitants per square mile.

Even this density, however, is not enough to accommodate housing demand. I didn’t see much evidence of new construction in Alameda, except around distillery row at the northwest end of the island where Annie and I had dinner at a crowded restaurant in converted warehouse. But Alameda is part of the Bay Area, and the Bay is the absolute worst among West Coast metros when it comes to obnoxious NIMBY values and a general failure to build housing adequate to the region’s unique role as a motor of job and wealth production.

But even as a dedicated YIMBY myself, I’ll say there are significant parts of Alameda you wouldn’t want to see change that much. Other parts feature pretty boring 1970s vintage construction that in my mind could be rebuilt at higher densities without losing much. But the older neighborhoods have qualities that are irreplaceable. In fact, my trip to Alameda made me think hard about the longevity of urban places and lessons to be learned from building neighborhoods that people will truly want to live in 100 or more years from now.

Certainly the attention to architectural detail in truly old homes like the Victorians above make these structures highly desirable today. But fancy old houses like these are not the dominant housing type in Alameda. There are many more modest homes in the older part of town, including a number of tiny residences, such as the cute red cottage in the picture below.

The sheer diversity of housing types is another factor that I think may lead to neighborhood longevity and character. Partly this building form diversity is an artifact of a different economy, when it was profitable for small developers to erect a variety of houses in ones and twos, as in the photograph at left above. Maybe it would be possible to create dense greenfield neighborhoods with manufactured homes in today’s economy in similar ones and twos?

Or I think of a development near my home called McKinley Village, which boasts a whimsical variety of different houses in small pods and doesn’t look like a clone of large national developer neighborhoods in farther flung suburbs. NIMBYs in Sacramento of course hated the idea of McKinley Village. I still remember the ridiculous yellow signs a decade or so ago saying the development would wreck tony East Sacramento. Nothing is wrecked of course, East Sacramento is more desirable and expensive than ever, and my only personal problem with McKinley Village is that there aren’t more apartments and townhouses there.

But turning back to Alameda and the general topic of neighborhood sustainability, one reason I think some old structures are irreplaceable has to do with building materials. Notice the roof to the St. George Distillery in the photograph below, made of old growth redwood.

It’s just not going to be feasible to recreate a structure like the beautiful old airplane hangar where St. George is located, probably ever. The same goes for the old Victorians and Craftsman homes in Alameda, many without doubt also made of old growth redwood and Douglas fir by workers with skills in the trades that, while not literally irreplaceable like the old building materials, are nonetheless increasingly scarce and likely to become even more so with the self-defeating and cruel immigration policies imposed by the Trump Administration.

To close I will say that Alameda is also great for the views one can take in from its edges. I miss living in a big city, and you can kind of see in the photo below why San Francisco Bay, with its calm waters next to a massive river estuary, gorgeous hills, benign climate, and world-class farmland, is one of the most favorable and blessed locations imaginable for a globally significant metropolis. May leaders in California find ways for the Bay to accommodate many, many more people without also destroying the unique qualities on evidence in a place like Alameda.