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VAPWA Project of the Year 2005: Van Maren Pump Station Awards are given to projects that demonstrated excellence in management and administration and in the alliance among the managing agency, the consultant/architect/engineer, and the contractor who worked together to complete the public works project. Cynthia Ruth Easton: Who's Who of American Women 25th Silver Anniversary Edition This very special, commemorative edition will spotlight 25 extraordinary women whose unique lives and careers have been chronicled on the pages of Who's Who of American Women since the first edition was published in 1958. Their inspiration and commitment to success have paved the way for women who are making today's most important contributions to society. News: June & Juy 2005 Home-field advantage A city pilot program would make urban infill projects less daunting By Cosmo Garvin If you've got the money, building a new home in the suburbs can be fairly simple. Find the subdivision you want to buy in, pick one of the three or four floor plans available, choose your favorite preapproved shade of tan, and you're in business. Courtesy Of City of Sacramento - www.cityofsacramento.org/dsd Red tape makes it tough to build on blighted lots like this one in North Sacramento. It doesn't work that way in the city. Trying to build a house on an empty lot in neighborhoods like Del Paso Heights, Oak Park or North Sacramento can be beyond the means, and the patience, of many would-be homeowners. First, you've got to come up with the plans. You can draw them yourself on a piece of graph paper, or the back of a bar napkin, and see how they fare down at the city's building department. Chances are the city plan checker won't be overly impressed with your first cut, and you'll need to make several modifications. You could hire an architect, which might set you back as much as $10,000 and six months. Even with professional help, your plans still need to go through the city's design-review department, be approved by a structural engineer as well as somebody called a Title 24 energy consultant, and potentially go through still more bureaucratic hoops. "I've been down to the building department, and I've seen a lot of people who own land but don't know how to navigate the process," said architect Cynthia Easton. Easton is one of two architects chosen by the city to come up with a set of preapproved plans that will help streamline the process for building single-family homes in some of the city's most blighted neighborhoods. The model-house pilot program is one piece of the city's overall infill-development strategy, aimed at diverting at least some of Sacramento's booming population growth away from the suburbs and into existing neighborhoods. The city has some 5,000 vacant lots inside its boundaries, a high number compared with that of cities of similar size around the country. About a third of those vacant lots are concentrated in a handful of distressed neighborhoods like North Sacramento and Oak Park. The lots are an ongoing headache for city officials and for neighbors. The blighted patches bring down property values and become magnets for illegal dumping and other forms of crime. They also present a tremendous opportunity for redeveloping and revitalizing parts of the city that have fallen into disrepair. But infill can be far more complicated than building in new-growth areas. "Some of the biggest obstacles to infill development are time and predictability," explained Lucinda Wilcox, who serves as infill coordinator for the city's Development Services Department. Consider the development process for a planned community in Natomas or Elk Grove. There, the same building plan, the same set of approvals, gets used over and over again for hundreds of houses. To build the same number of units in existing neighborhoods is much more difficult. "We have 1,600 vacant lots in these target areas," Wilcox noted. "Each one of those has to go through a custom design process. We just wouldn't do that in a new area, because it's so inefficient." If implemented later this year, the pilot program would bring some of the economies of scale enjoyed by suburban development to infill projects. The program allows home builders--whether they are developers building a house for sale, or an individual trying to build a home to live in for themselves--to pick from one of four preapproved house plans. Because the plans already would have the blessing of the building, design-review and planning departments, they could dramatically cut the usual red tape facing a builder. The city has set prices for these "off-the-shelf" plans at $1,500, a fraction of what custom plans would cost. And the approval process--which now can take up to two months--would be trimmed down to a single day, Wilcox explained. The streamlined plan process is intended to make urban infill more attractive to developers who want to build and sell homes in the urban core and for the individual builder-owners trying to build themselves a starter home. All four of the plans are for modestly sized homes (from 1,500 to 1,800 square feet) that retain the historic character of the neighborhoods where they would be built. Although small in comparison to most new homes, the infill models all come with at least three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a garage. "We were going for something quaint and attractive that looked like it might have been built in the 1940s but which had all the amenities of a new home," said architect David Piches of his plans--which are called the Bungalow and the Cottage with Porte-Cochere (that's French for carport).   Courtesy\ Of City of Sacramento City officials hope that preapproved house plans, ike this cottage designed by architect Dave Piches, will speed up the process. And each of the plans adheres to "new urbanism" design principles required by the city. Front porches are a prominent part of each plan, and the garages are de-emphasized, placed at the end of long driveways toward the rear of the house. The city's Development Services Department hopes to offer more designs if the pilot program is popular. The pilot program is just one piece of the city's overall infill strategy, which also includes reducing utility-hookup and building fees for infill projects and encouraging more housing in aging commercial corridors like Stockton Boulevard. "I think this is a great statement that this is an area we value and that needs to be developed," Easton said. "We don't want to see the city just keep spreading ever outward and becoming empty on the inside." The Development Services Department will be soliciting input on the four house plans at a series of community meetings over the next month. The Sacramento City Council will consider the plans later this summer.  For more informationvisit www.cityofsacramento.org/dsd. © Copyright 2005 Chico Community Publishing, Inc. Happily Ever After A rocky start doesn't stop this local architect By Jocelyn Isidro March 2007     This story is a fairy tale. It starts with a castle, has a heroine, some ogres and rinces, and finishes with a happy ending. And it’s all true.As a teenager growing up in the ’60s in a small town near Fresno, architect Cynthia Easton went through the normal adolescent identity crisis: What should I do with my life?     Dad was an egg farmer. Mom was a teacher. Dad suggested teaching as a career for his bright daughter.     “I wanted to be something ‘better’ than a teacher,” she says, rolling her eyes a bit at her adolescent crassness. She thought to herself, “Doctor, lawyer or engineer?” The last was her father’s suggestion. Medicine didn’t seem right. She didn’t like to talk a lot, so that nixed law. Math really floated her boat, but engineering wasn’t quite what she wanted.     What to do, what to do?     Then the Easton family took a trip to Hearst Castle, with one of the first groups to ever tour that palatial estate. Architect Julia Morgan was featured front and center. A new possibility suggested itself. Easton was intrigued but kept the idea to herself.     “I didn’t know any architects,” says Easton. “I didn’t want anyone to talk me out of it.”     Here’s where the ogres come in. An inspired Easton signed up for high school drafting classes. She was forbidden to take them. It was the 1960s and the-times-they were-achangin’, but not quickly enough. No girl in her high school had ever taken drafting, and her guidance counselor wasn’t about to blaze trails with Easton.     So after high school, she ended up majoring in math at a social sciences college in Southern California. She also took sociology and anthropology courses that, to her surprise, she enjoyed. Some of her friends decided to transfer to Berkeley and recommended she join them. Berkeley had an environmental design program. Suddenly, Easton was reinvigorated for a career in architecture, now with a more defined goal of creating buildings that impacted people socially.     In the lofty halls of Berkeley, although she wasn’t good at drafting, she felt at home.     In the lofty halls of Berkeley, although she wasn’t good at drafting, she felt at home. “Every class, I learned and felt good about what I was doing,” she says. “It seemed like the right thing for me to do.”     After graduation, she moved to L.A. with a group of women from Berkeley.     Ogres were still lurking in the corners, but Easton was wiser. Soft-spoken and pleasant, she nevertheless has a steel inner core.     “I went into an architects’ office and said I wanted to work there,” Easton recalls. She took a job as a typist working for two male architects. It was a great experience for someone who wanted to be an architect, and she came to a valuable realization. “I just knew that if they could be licensed, I could be too,” she explains. “Every other architect I had met at Berkeley was so grand and great. These two guys were just regular guys doing architecture.”     A prince appeared in her life, in the form of Joe Hafkenschiel. They married, moved to Washington, D.C., where Hafkenschiel had a job, and Easton completed another degree in architecture.     Eventually they felt homesick for California and moved back, settling in Sacramento.     Easton worked for Alan Oshima, a small Sacramento architecture firm, and finally got her license.       One day her husband said to her, “You know, women business enterprises are really the thing.” The federal government was trying to bring women and minority-owned businesses into the arena of funded contracts. He recommended she start her own firm. She liked the idea.     In 1980, Easton opened the doors of Easton Architects on Freeport Boulevard in Land Park. Her former boss referred small projects to her. And then she got lucky: Her firm won a design contract from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.     “We were successful. I think it was because [they were] looking for new, fresh architects doing new things,” she says.     Easton has been in business ever since, handling projects from private homes to public housing to wastewater plants. And she believes in giving back.     She’s been a member of the Soroptimists philanthropic group since 1983, a school volunteer for her two kids and a grader for national architecture exams.     Easton’s also won a long list of national and local awards, including architectural design awards for adaptive reuse at a SMUD substation and an Outstanding Women Leader 2005 award from the National Association of Women Business Owners. She’s just really passionate about the people who are upand-coming.     “She’s well-known, wellrespected,” says architect and American Institute of Architects Central Valley vice president Michael Malinowski. “In particular, she’s known for her mentorship of young architects-to-be. She’s just really passionate about the people who are up-and-coming.”     And the happy ending?     She was recently installed as president of the 600-member American Institute of Architects Central Valley Chapter.     Take that, you dumb guidance counselor. BACK TO TOP

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