With construction under way, Dublin planning 12,000 units

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Jul 11, 2004 | by Alan Zibel, BUSINESS WRITER

DUBLIN T HERE WASN'T much of note in Dublin 20 or 30 years ago, save for a few gas stations, fast-food joints and muffler shops.

"We used to be a town where you came and got your muffler fixed" and not much else, said Tony Oravetz, a member of the Dublin City Council.

Dublin had a real history as the intersection of two stage coach routes, but it didn't have a real downtown. There was plenty of suburban housing, but little else to speak of besides some shops and fast-food joints.

But these days, Dublin is a fast-growing city of

38,330, with a 21-screen movie theater, a BART station, the shimmering headquarters of software company Sybase Inc., a new golf course, million-dollar homes and hundreds of condominiums under construction.

"Now, no one kicks sand in our face anymore," said Oravetz, a Dublin resident since 1970.

Dublin's aggressive approach toward residential growth -- particularly in the building of apartments, condominiums and townhouses -- is winning plaudits from Bay Area housing experts and even some environmentalists. Housing experts have long bemoaned that the Bay Area is producing far too few homes. As a result, home prices have soared, making the region less and less affordable.

In Dublin, more than 11,800 housing units are either under construction or in various stages of the planning process. Those units include a variety of housing types -- from million-dollar homes in the hills next to the new golf course to apartment buildings and condominiums.

"A lot's happened in a few years and if you come out here and haven't been following what's been going on in Dublin, everyone's astonished," said Eddie Peabody, the city's community development director.

Dublin, which incorporated in 1982, is regarded as one of the local leaders in promoting what is often called "smart growth" -- dense urban-style developments often clustered around retail centers or BART stations that are friendly to pedestrians and reduce dependence on the automobile.

"That's the kind of thing that's going to reduce the sprawl that's really hurting our environment," said David Reid, the East Bay field representative with the Greenbelt Alliance, which advocates open space preservation. However, Reid criticized Dublin for approving a giant new auto- dependent IKEA home furnishings store near the Dublin- Pleasanton BART station, a project that has spawned opposition among local residents who say it will jam up freeways and city streets with traffic.

Ira Leitner, a five-year Dublin resident who opposes the IKEA project, said the scale of proposed residential construction hasn't yet caused any significant opposition in Dublin.

"If they take all those little

sections of green grass and put homes on willy-nilly, that's going to change the character of this town," Leitner said. "Dublin is growing too fast. It has growing pains."

To help deal with the inevitable traffic problems, transportation officials are studying adding two lanes to each side of Interstate 580 -- a carpool or toll lane and an express lane for buses.

Dublin Mayor Janet Lockhart believes that residential development in her city could bring people back to the Tri-Valley from such places as Tracy and Stockton, especially if they spend large parts of their day commuting on the jam-packed Altamont Pass.

"The whole concept is to offer people an opportunity, a chance to live and work in the same community -- to take them off the freeway," she said.

Alex Amoroso, principal planner at the Association of Bay Area Governments, said that there is always fear in suburban cities that "the integrity of communities is going to be ripped apart by changes in density."

But as the amount of developable land shrinks, more and more Bay Area suburban cities are exploring this kind of development. For example, Pleasanton is looking at creating high-density housing in the Hacienda Business Park near the BART station.

While there still are a large percentage of people who want to achieve the American Dream of owning a single-family, detached house, population changes may favor a more dense variety of housing, Amoroso said.

Aging baby boomers, young couples and single-person households are all considered part of the target market for dense housing projects. Such developments are attractive to people looking to have shorter commutes and live closer to restaurants and shopping.

Unlike many suburban cities, Dublin hasn't had much community opposition to its growth plans, because the city's growth is largely taking place on formerly vacant parts of eastern Dublin. Alameda County has been gradually selling off parts of the 1,000 acres of land it acquired in the 1960s. That land was part of the property annexed by Dublin in 1994.

Dublin did go through growth-related battles with Pleasanton and Livermore, where residents were concerned about increased traffic. But those battles have died down. In 2002, Dublin appeased Livermore by agreeing not to develop a 2,700-acre piece of land known as Doolan Canyon.

During the dot-com boom, high tech companies including Cisco Systems and Sun Microsystems were slated to develop office complexes in Dublin, and the city was given the nickname "Digital Dublin." But all of those companies - except for Sybase - dropped their plans after the technology bubble burst.