On a recent Saturday morning, Barbara Guise is sitting inside The Health Hut in Brentwood, CA, discussing city planning. The store is neatly stocked with small pill bottles and various tinctures, more pharmacy than Whole Foods, and it seems like an odd location for a primer on zoning and growth. But along with owning The Health Hut for nearly 40 years, Guise has served as a city council member, mayor and vice-mayor during her some 50 years in Brentwood, making her a de facto expert on the development history of this town 55 miles northeast of San Francisco.

"The groundwork was laid very well for planning," she says. But now, "all they want is to build, build, build."

Even as new houses pop up, officials and locals in Brentwood are starting to worry that the town's reliance on wooing commuter homebuyers, without creating new jobs in Brentwood itself, may compromise its future.

After close to 30 years of rapid growth, many in Brentwood are ready to slow down residential development, demonstrating that even miles away from ground-zero of northern California's housing crisis, concerns about unfettered growth run deep.

In the late 1960s, when Guise first came to town, Brentwood was a sleepy agricultural community that had only been incorporated 20 years earlier. Its population hovered around 2,500. Today, that number is quickly approaching 60,000. With its quaint downtown, low crime rate and highly ranked schools, Brentwood has become one of the most desirable commuter towns in Contra Costa County and one of the fastest-growing cities in California.

But while Brentwood's amenities continue to attract homebuyers who are employed outside of the city, locals are concerned with preserving Brentwood's small-town character. Many feel that bringing more jobs within city limits and easing the pace of residential growth will help ensure Brentwood does not become a sterile bedroom community with an economic dependency on developer fees.

If you travel into Brentwood from the west, the town looks like it did a hundred years ago: plowed farmland and orchards lush with gnarled cherry and peach trees cut out of a green landscape. The town of Brentwood was laid out in the 1830s on rich delta soil that was known for its growing potential, and spent a century and a half as a small farming town.

Today, almost no one approaches Brentwood from the west. Instead, commuters returning home from jobs in Livermore, Walnut Creek and San Jose peel off the solid walls of traffic along Route 4 or Vasco Road and weave their way through block after block of outdoor retail and housing developments.

In the 1970s and '80s, the town began to shift away from a farm community and began to build housing developments. Pressure for housing in California was mounting, and land in east Contra Costa County was cheap and abundant, explains Casey McCann, Brentwood's Director of Community Development. Zoning restrictions were minimal, if they existed at all.

In 1990, Brentwood's population had risen to just over 7,500. By 2000, it had grown to 23,000, and that number more than doubled by 2010. Acres of land that once held a hundred peach trees each were razed to make way for housing developments that cram more than 10 houses into single every single one of those acres. McCann estimates that in the early 2000s, the city was processing several thousand permits each year for new single-family homes.

A careful approach to city planning is one of the factors that has made Brentwood such a desirable town for commuters. The city has over 70 parks, and maintaining its core downtown, which boasts boutique shops and an old-fashioned marquis movie theater, is a city priority, McCann says. It stands in sharp contrast to commuter towns like Manteca that have also boomed but have no vibrant town core.

"We're a tight-knit community," says Diane O'Brien, who owns Ribbons and Roses, a florist shop downtown, and who originally moved to Brentwood in 1992. "I think it hugely draws people here."

Brian Sharp of Sharp Realty says he sees people looking for houses in Brentwood for commutes as far away as Silicon Valley. He says for many buyers, commuting is not an ideal solution. "They'd rather buy in San Jose or San Francisco," he says. But with housing prices skyrocketing in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, Brentwood's median home price of over half a million dollars—while higher than many of neighboring towns—is still acceptable.

"They have to come where they can afford. So they buy here," says Sharp. "Affordability is our thing. Affordability and quality of life."

But Brentwood can't continue to grow forever. "A city is finite as far as its boundaries go," says Tim Nielsen, an associate planner for the city. Moreover, planners want more than housing. Already the city has set aside close to 1,000 acres of farmland for agricultural preservation. And, the town's Urban Limit Line, which delineates Brentwood's developable area, has remained unchanged since the 1990s. While the line can theoretically be moved by a vote, Brentwood's voters have twice rejected measures to expand developable land.

Brentwood "resoundingly denied" the most recent attempt, says McCann. "What we heard back from a lot of residents was, 'What do we need more residential for?'"

Brentwood is already almost three-quarters of the way towards reaching its build-out population of 80,000 residents. The General Plan calls for nearly 34,000 jobs within the city to support that population, but progress towards that goal is not commensurate: with about 12,000 local jobs, Brentwood is barely over a third of the way towards that goal.

"The city has a great quality of life," says McCann. But with the commute, "thousands of our residents don't have a great quality of life." Moreover, he explains, residents who commute outside of the city tend to spend their money outside of the city; it's convenient to shop where you work.

The Streets of Brentwood, an upscale outdoor mall that opened in 2008, has helped to bring some of that revenue back to Brentwood, and town events like an annual holiday parade and a fall craft beer festival, along with a Saturday farmers market nine months of the year, regularly connect residents and merchants downtown.

And residential growth has started to slow. While there are currently 13 new housing developments under construction, according to city planning permit documents, which will bring nearly 3,000 new units to the city, many of those projects were approved in the boom years prior to the 2008 recession. McCann estimates that currently, the city processes between 400 and 500 permits for single family homes a year—a trickle compared to the thousands a year earlier in the decade.

McCann explains that Brentwood is currently revamping its Economic Development Strategic Plan in order to focus on industries in which it believes it can compete in the already competitive region. He points to trying to woo agricultural enterprises and boost the area's ag-tourism, increasing visitors to local farms and wineries, and also says that they are looking to attract the healthcare and manufacturing sectors.

"It would be nice to see those come out here—businesses with more than four employees," says O'Brien, the florist. "It would keep people here during the day."

O'Brien says she grateful she's able to live and work in one place, particularly in a town she loves. She and her husband moved from Brentwood to San Ramon for several years while their daughter was in college in San Francisco. But after college, her daughter got married.

Her daughter wanted to buy a house, but not in the Bay Area. So the newlyweds moved back to Brentwood to start their family, and O'Brien and her husband followed. So did O'Brien's parents.

"We have four generations here," says O'Brien. "We're back to smiling at our neighbors."