Yuba City Visioning Workshops
When Yuba City , California (pop. 58,000) recently updated their general plan, they held several public workshops to develop a common vision for the city. The consensus vision included some very specific policy guidance:
- They wanted a much more walkable community than they currently had. Connectivity should be required between adjacent developments and new roads should have vertical curbs, detached sidewalks, and planter strips to improve walking conditions.
- New neighborhoods should be compact and built around village cores of neighborhood-serving retail.
- Local job growth should be promoted to make Yuba City more self-contained rather than serving as a bedroom suburb of nearby Sacramento .
- Citizens were willing to allow traffic congestion to worsen on the bridges across the Feather River , which constitutes the town's eastern edge, rather than build an additional bridge that would have taken traffic through existing neighborhoods.
- They were willing to let the city approximately double in size; however, they also wanted an urban growth boundary with a permanent greenbelt on the city's northern, southern, and western sides.
The discussions and outcomes of the workshops surprised some city leaders who had assumed that residents were comfortable with a continuation of the low-density, single-use development that had characterized recent projects. There was an unspoken assumption that the market was providing what people wanted. The visioning workshops thus played a vital role in bringing the public's true desires to the attention of local officials.
Click here to download the new General Plan.
