Sacramento Proposal/Approval/Construction Thread - III

[wburg]

"Blueprint? What blueprint?"

*All* single family homes. No retail or mixed-use component. Doesn't sound like it will have much potential for public transit connections. Two roads as the only access points. And they're seriously using buzzwords like "green urban village" and "urban infill"?

It's a gated community. Exactly the same as the cruddy ticky-tacky boxes sprouting along I-5 and the other freeway corridors. Except, oh wait, the parking is in the back, a novel concept in 1995 but not exactly hot news in 2008. It's a cute idea but it doesn't promote walkability if there's nothing to walk to, except for your neighbor's identical house. No retail or mixed-use area means the nearest services (of any sort) are well out of walking distance, so absolutely not "walkable."

Enclosed by a busy freeway on one side and a busy (and noisy!) freight and passenger railroad route on the other, on top of a piece of land with a water table so high that there is still green grass in the middle of it even during a drought year (which means that not only do we lose flood capacity, but it will have water table problems similar to those in Southport where foundations are already cracking because they were poured on top of spongy alluvial soil--perfect for farming but awful for housing) and trying to pitch a generic suburban tract that is attracting little but foreclosure signs and plywood nailed over the windows anywhere in the nation. Oh yeah, and drivers going home to this development from downtown will have to take the 28th Street grade-crossing route, the same ones used by garbage trucks on the way to the old city dump. And speaking of the old city dump, that's the main landscape feature visible across the freeway.

It's almost difficult to imagine a combination more ideally suited for epic levels of failure.