Quote:
Originally Posted by mja
She isn't opposing development, or arguing that the city should. She's opining that the city should leverage the needed zoning changes to demand a better design.
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While I agree with her suggestion that a tall slender tower would be better, she is being too simplistic about an assumed City power to do anything about it.
Everyone is held hostage to a political/legal process that gives too much power to community groups to stall development.
Inga is pretending that City bodies can enforce a better design that will almost certainly be opposed by neighborhood groups who have a knee-jerk fear of tall buildings, regardless of slenderness. This places the developer in an impossible situation:
- either create a responsible design to win city approval but then be stalled interminably by community legal challenges, or
- create a bland squat design that will assuage neighborhood groups' imaginary fears of Manhattanization, blocked view corridors, and shadows, but will get shot down by City agencies.
The developer then has no options except maybe to build a 3-story tickytacky townhouse development, which is unfeasible on many levels in a site like this.
The problem isn't the developer. The problem is that City agencies, like Inga, talk out of both sides of their mouths. They advocate for responsible design but are not willing to challenge or limit the power of neighborhood groups to impose their irrational fears on development that severely hamstring responsible design.
The fact that there is even a debate about this design is ridiculous. The developer's options should have been made perfectly clear long ago. The City has had 100 years to come up with a clear, viable, responsible comprehensive planning strategy for the Parkway and has failed to do so, essentially deliberately, because in politics clarity is the enemy. It removes the necessity for backroom dealing and the give-and-take horse-trading that give politicians their raison d'etre.
So Inga is deliberately missing the forest for the trees here, and what she is suggesting simply can't work. She's saying the City must force the developer to go back to the drawing board to come up with a design that will surely be shot down by the neighborhoods. Ridiculous. Ensures no development will take place.
No, the City must impose some limits on neighborhood group power to inform development. No way the City will do that.
So we are stuck two choices:
1) Inga's approach, which will result in no development (or a shitty minimal mctownhouse complex), or
2) The current approach, which results in squat mid-rises with huge footprints that are palatable enough to neighborhood groups in exchange for a few goodies of one type or another.
Much as it would be nice if the City laid down the law to the neighborhood groups, I know it will never happen. So I prefer option two to option one.
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