“Sustainability,” “smart growth” and “transit-oriented development” are the catchwords du jour these days in Honolulu, as we anticipate the $4B+ fixed guideway mass transit project. But from the San Francisco Chronicle comes this “cautionary tale” of a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) transit village gone. . .not quite right:
The basic moves are great: Three and four-story buildings filled with apartments and retail space are on busy El Camino Real instead of somewhere on the region’s outskirts. There’s a BART station next door, and 70 of the 361 apartments are reserved for lower-income residents. There’s even a Trader Joe’s, a grocery chain of cultlike status.
But this showcase of so-called smart growth comes packaged in the most generic structures imaginable, an inept cross between Stanford University and Orange County. The best thing about Solaire is that, with luck, it will be a wake-up call to other cities — reminding them that the quality of what gets built is every bit as important as the planning theories involved.