Heavens, how did we ever design cities before marketing existed? Sarcasm aside, let us observe that the Main Street movement, despite its harkening of the past, has not necessarily encouraged simplicity. In today's marketing-driven urban-design culture, it does not seem to be enough to bring back housing and commercial uses. We must also bring in giant retail centers and brand-name retailers (usually the same 50 or so names you find in regional malls). Then the city itself must become a "festival." We must decorate the streets with historically false or incongruous street lamps and benches. We must mark important intersections with those strange red bricks that have become so ubiquitous in California that they deserve to be known as redevelopment pavers. We must hang banners that proclaim over and over again: "You're in Sierra Flats, the Stick-To-It-Iveness City!" Some cities do not choose to incorporate these tricks. One such city is Richmond, a working-class community of 70,000 on San Pablo Bay, north of Berkeley. The city has quietly been redeveloping part of its tiny downtown for the past decade. For the most part, this urban-infill project has not made use of the marketing afflatus that now seems part-and-parcel of downtown renaissances. Richmond's downtown intervention is interesting because Richmond is essentially a working-class community with a minimally developed downtown. It is not the classic "Main Street" project anchored by a row of charming historic storefronts. Instead, Richmond is a relic of the industrial era. Like a number of California cities, the city was largely the creation of the World War II-era munitions industry — in this case Kaiser Steel, which created a major shipbuilding plant in the city. Today, Richmond could be described as an old factory town, where frame houses mingle incongruously with warehouses. For much of the post-war period, Richmond has been attempting to shore up a declining industrial base. Accordingly, Richmond City Center has limited goals. It seeks to reintroduce housing, and the stores to support that housing, as well as some open space, into a downtown area that is largely lacking in both multi-family housing and open space (although the city has many parks outside downtown). In other words, Richmond City Center does not seek to reinvent downtown Richmond. Instead, it's an infill project that seeks to create both housing and open space, and perhaps even a sense of "civic focus" in an otherwise regular street grid. In a sense, Richmond City Center had its origins in the city's failure to build a downtown shopping mall two decades ago. The city acquired the site known as the Memorial Park property in the early 1970s, when the city had planned to save downtown with a mall that would either compete with or pre-empt a suburban mall. A suburban mall, however, was built about five miles away from downtown, and continues to thrive, and the city apparently gave up on the idea of developing the site, which lay empty for nearly 30 years. In the early 1990s, however, the city's redevelopment agency put together a dream team of two of the most experienced redevelopment-oriented developers in the Bay Area, BRIDGE Housing Corporation and The Martin Group. In a three-phased plan, BRIDGE converted an old hotel into 72 units of low-income housing, created 64 units of senior housing, and built 34 affordable for-sale townhomes. (The two-bedroom townhomes cost $108,000, compared to the average home price in Richmond of $150,000.) The project features a police substation to make local residents feel confident about security. Martin, a commercial developer, provided a 78,000-square-foot neighborhood shopping center anchored by a FoodCo and a Walgreen's drug store, as well as such prosaic, neighborhood-serving businesses as a dry cleaner, a laundromat, a one-hour photo place, a shoe store, and a beautician. The developer hopes that the 1,200 employees of the Social Security Administration, as well as the employees of the local Kaiser Permanente hospital, will help support the retail center. The greatest strength of the plan is its location in the direct center of downtown, where people are in easy walking distance of both a BART station and a local bus stop. The post office, the local Social Security office, and a hospital are also within walking distance, and they are welcome amenities to a residential project with a high number of older residents. And, of course, the retail is neighborhood-oriented. Another virtue of the plan is that it interrupts the monotony of the street grid with a roundish park, surrounded by a curved street; the townhomes face onto this street. The power of the circle in this plan creates a visual focus in this otherwise uninflected grid. Some purists among the New Urbanists might object to locating the housing slightly out of the way, on a street with a meandering route. But, I think it is a clever way of discouraging non-residential traffic on the street, while optimizing park frontage. I have mixed feelings about the park, however. In general, I dislike parks that are entirely surrounded by streets because they seem less-than-ideally accessible to children. I also think it is unfortunate that the park is a "passive" park, that is, it is more to be seen than to be used (although there is a tiny tot lot to one side). It is good that the city found a way of bringing back the Memorial Park, which is focused on a war memorial; local veterans groups reportedly wanted the park to retain its passive character, presumably to preserve its dignity. I believe that parks near residential areas should be as active as possible. I disagree that active recreational use shows disrespect to war veterans. With or without glitz, Richmond City Center is slowly helping downtown Richmond both look and function better. Last fall, the city gave about $500,000 in loans to local businesses along the west edge of the site, to help pay for façade improvements to commercial buildings. In the future, the city plans further redevelopment on city-owned parcels between Richmond City Center and the BART Station. It was Richmond's blessing in disguise to be stuck with simplicity, and to rebuild its downtown not as a regional mall but as a self-sufficient, urban neighborhood. Maybe if Richmond had more money, it would have made a fancier master plan. But that does not mean it would have necessarily been more successful. I'm just hoping the plan is never quite so successful as to justify the purchase of those red redevelopment pavers. I'll go mad.