I See by the Papers...

If a time machine is ever invented, lord help Santa Rosa's 1960s decision-makers; there will be mobs of howling Facebookers chasing them through the streets for what they did to this town.

Those who hang out in local history and nostalgia social media often write about downtown Santa Rosa in that era as if it were a crime scene; a vintage photo of a picturesque building now demolished, a scene of streets crowded with shoppers will draw tearful emojis and bitter comments. How did all this come to disappear? We know the answer: It was the outcome of the town's gung-ho embrace of urban renewal schemes, which are the subject of this series, "Yesterday is Just Around the Corner.”

(This article covers only "Phase I" of Santa Rosa's redevelopment in the 1960s, when the urban renewal area was limited to the 40 acres between Sonoma ave. and Third street, and from Santa Rosa/Mendocino avenues and E street. Events leading to construction of the Santa Rosa Mall were Phase II and III during the 1970s and will be covered later.)

Other cities and towns climbed aboard the redevelopment gravy train - it was free federal money after all, and the government wasn't too picky about how it was spent. But few communities were willing to go as far as Santa Rosa and gut most of their downtown core.

One reason this is so crazy-making for us today is because there was no compelling reason to declare most of the downtown "blighted," which was their excuse for wiping out entire blocks and more than a hundred historic buildings. The movers 'n' shakers of Santa Rosa saw the opposite - downtown was economically blighted because their projections estimated the taxable value of the area after redevelopment would be at least three times greater.^*

They were also true believers that anything new was better than old. In a 1961 editorial the Press Democrat dismissed all the old buildings as "substandard" and said tearing them down would "...serve the Santa Rosa of today and the future instead of continuing to be a deteriorating hodge-podge that 'just growed' over the past 75 years or so."

Steering the redevelopment ship was the five-member Urban Renewal Agency (URA), which was created by the City Council in 1958. Its executive director and the appointed members wielded enormous power (including the ability to condemn land using eminent domain without a public hearing) yet faced little criticism except from one persistent fellow named Hugh Codding - more about him in a minute. What the public heard instead was enthusiastic approval from the Council and city staff and particularly the PD, which was the URA's most ardent cheerleader. The paper leaned hard on the notion that the blighted area really was studded with eyesores, and good riddance; there was a photo they liked to use showing a ramshackle house badly in disrepair with a sagging porch - while neglecting to mention one of the first places to be demolished would be Luther Burbank's house.

Redevelopment programs became infamous for graft and corruption but I don't find a whiff of that happening here. While the URA was biased toward particular developers and clearly treated Codding unfairly, I fully believe everyone's motives were well-intentioned - that they expected the result of their labors would truly create a city beautiful. Of course,  very little worked out as well as they expected and they ended up creating a city regrettable. To paraphrase the great disclaimer at the start of the movie, Fargo:

This is a true story. The events described here took place in Santa Rosa, California. Out of respect for the survivors of those times and their families, keep in mind the decision-makers back then were not fools, dunderheads or venal crooks, though some of their choices seem glaringly stupid today. But hey, it was the 1960s, when everybody was a little nuts.



The rest of this article can be read at the SantaRosaHistory.com website. Because of recurring problems with the Blogger platform, I am no longer wasting my time formatting and posting complete articles here. I will continue to create stubs for the sake of continuity, but will be publishing full articles only at SantaRosaHistory.com.

- Jeff Elliott