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Hotel Booking In the shadow of her new high-rise condominium building, Carol Rutkin paused in her morning stroll with her poodle to count her blessings as a Southern Californian without a car.

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Travel Agency "I'm completely independent - I can't think of anything I can't walk to," said Rutkin, a retiree who moved here from Florida a year ago after her husband died. "The bank is right around the corner. There's a grocery store. The library is close. The cleaners is right in my building. The train station is close. Even the cruise ships - last year, I took a cruise, and I walked down to get on the ship."

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Cheap Hotel New residents - senior citizens such as Rutkin, empty nesters from the suburbs, and young professionals - are transforming California's second-largest city. They are part of an ambitious regional effort to rein in sprawl and traffic congestion the old-fashioned way: by luring people to live where they work and play.

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Flight Booking San Diego introduced an ambitious plan last week to increase its downtown population to 89,000 from its current 27,500 in the next 25 years. By comparison, Philadelphia has 83,000 Center City residents - third most in the country, after Manhattan and Chicago.

Travel Agent High-rise condominiums are sprouting here in the subtropical sun like so many steel flowers. There are 16,000 residential units now, and 3,691 more are going up within 26 blocks of the downtown Petco Park baseball stadium, which opened this year. The revitalized Gaslamp Quarter, with restaurants, shops and apartments, has brought nightlife to the once-moribund downtown, and construction cranes dot the sky over the downtown's dilapidated eastern fringe, the next redevelopment frontier.

> San Diego San Diego Hotels Use TravelHERO.com to Find Cheap Hotels in San Diego, California With miles of sunny beaches, challenging golf courses and a thriving art scene, San Diego is a beautiful California city that attracts thousands of visitors every year. Many popular museums, such as the San Diego Museum of Art, are scattered throughout the area, and the city features beautiful historic sites that reveal the strong Spanish influence in the region. The beaches and surfing, in particular, are a large draw for both tourists and natives alike.

Hotel Chicago The San Diego region, like much of America's West and South, is struggling with the consequences of its own popularity. San Diego County is home to three million people, up from 550,000 in 1950 and 2.5 million in 1990. The city's population is 1.2 million, spread over 372 square miles of coasts, canyons, and far-flung housing developments.

Online Booking 'Strong potential'

Travel Health Insurance Commutes on the congested freeways have grown ever longer as residents travel farther to find affordable housing. The median home price in the county is $489,000, up $102,000 in one year. Only 11 percent of local households earn enough to afford the median-priced home, according to the California Association of Realtors.

Hotel Reservation The solution, local planners say, is to shift development to closer-in areas, with denser populations and enough mass transit - such as the growing San Diego Trolley rail system - to give residents a true alternative to driving.

London Hotel Booking "We're seeing early signs that this has a strong potential to work," said Gary L. Gallegos, executive director of San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), the planning combine for the county's 19 local governments. "I would argue we're turning the corner."

Discount Travel "Density has been given a bad name," Gallegos said. "People think 'projects in Brooklyn,' but that's not what we're talking about."

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Booking Agency Much may depend on San Diegans' willingness to pay for new transportation projects. Though the ballots are still being counted, voters this month appear to have approved by the requisite two-thirds majority a local sales tax to provide $14.1 billion over 40 years. The money is to be spent on trains, buses, and new-style highway projects, such as 14-lane-wide freeways with movable barriers to shift with rush-hour traffic and tolls that penalize lone drivers.

International Travel Medical Another force constraining sprawl-as-usual is an environmental-preservation program designed to protect endangered and threatened animals; San Diego County has more animals in those categories than any other county in the nation. About 100,000 acres have been set aside in that Multiple Species Conservation Program. "That creates, more or less, a de facto growth-limit line," said Robert A. Leiter, director of land use and transportation planning for SANDAG. "We're forced to look at in-fill development." In-fill development fills in previously developed areas.

New York Hotel Michael Stepner, a professor of architecture and urban design and a former San Diego city planner, said the region's ability to grow inward would be affected by its pocketbook.

Online Travel Booking "We're a cheap county," said Stepner, a guiding force in the development of San Diego's downtown. "We're about $2 billion short on infrastructure - things like sewers, fire stations, parks and libraries.

Travel Medical Insurance "If we don't solve our infrastructure problems, we're going to have real problems, with more and more people driving more and more places. On the other hand, if we build the transit system and the in-fill system we keep talking about, we'll have very urban and walkable places. And it's beginning to happen."

Miami Hotel San Diego and other Western cities that for 50 years were models of suburban sprawl are now leading the nation in reversing that trend, said John Norquist, the former Milwaukee mayor who is now president of the Congress for New Urbanism. "New urbanists" advocate traditional cities, with emphasis on walkability, street grids, small blocks, and mixed residential and commercial downtowns.

Air Deccan Booking "I think California is ahead of the curve on this stuff," Norquist said. "L.A. is becoming much more like a European city. And San Diego is being used as a model by Southwestern cities like Phoenix, Tucson and Albuquerque."

Las Vegas Nevada Travel Norquist said a certain amount of congestion in a city was unavoidable, even desirable. But it should be concentrated, not sprawling, he said.

Las Vegas Nv Hotel "You can't eliminate congestion unless you have the economy collapse," he said. "Cities are where the money is, and people want to be where the money is."

Hotel Florence Booking Online "I've come to the conclusion that trying to solve congestion is a fool's errand," said Bill Lieberman, a former director of planning and operations for San Diego's transit authority. "It's better to create desirable cities and help devise ways to help people get around. In San Diego, we have finally coupled regional growth and transit plans."

Orlando Travel Lieberman, who came to San Diego two decades ago from Portland, Ore., said San Diego's conversion to "smart growth" had not been as profound as his former city's.

Hilton Hotel "For every acre of smart growth here, you still get six or seven of not-so-smart growth," he said. "In Portland, they have an ethic for the environment that reaches deeper. Here, the ethic is for comfort - sun and fun. Portland always seems to have the larger view. Here, it's been a mixed bag."

Booking Delta Com A centerpiece for the urban revival of San Diego is the 16-block Gaslamp Quarter, the revived historic district that has been transformed from a congeries of flophouses, pawnshops, porn shops and abandoned warehouses into a tree-lined area of street-front restaurants, shops and condos.

Travel Insurance Online As money and development have poured into downtown (more than $4 billion has been pumped into the 2.2-square-mile area since 1975), so have residents. The center-city population has nearly doubled since 1990, from 14,900 to 27,500. And with the boom in condos and apartments, developers hope to accelerate that trend.

London Hotel "It used to be that no decent person went south of Broadway," the northern limit of the Gaslamp district, said Peter Hall, president of the Centre City Development Corp., which oversees the area's development. "San Diego was built on freeways. Life was a ribbon of concrete, and that great sucking sound you heard was life going to the suburbs.

Online Hotel Booking "Now, what we finally have is what great cities have to have, feet on the street, 24 hours a day."

Travel Insurance By Paul Nussbaum
Philadelphia Inquirer - 11/23/2004

Topic: Sprawl

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