Quote:
Originally Posted by Dmajackson
The construction permit for this project was issued last week and it is for the 7-storey / 60-unit design.
|
It's odd with so many reports, ringing the alarm bells about the housing crisis and spikes in rents, staff doesn't change course from its ideologically driven plan. As hundreds of units are arbitrarily lopped off developments each year, they just don't see the correlation, yet it's clear and apparent it's part of the reason we're in the mess we're in today.
The poor and lower middle class be damned, here's 26 units that families could have been occupied, and for what? To appease some notion that tall buildings are bad while we shoot ourselves in the foot to trying to prove it?
Please, if anyone has access to reports or studies that have quantifiable proof around some of these concepts please share them. I am trying to understand why this keeps happening as there is no viewplanes or legitimate reasons this was shortened. Having studied planning in school, I never got the answer I was looking for about these matters.
I've found it difficult to find data driven facts around FAR efficacy, it just sort of appeared in New York city planning circles after giant blockbuster developments were reshaping the city skyline. I'm starting to feel that it's just a subjective idea of how one group of people think buildings should look like and the scale chosen is decided by staff without much real data to substantiate the decision.
Other concepts like the complete separation from market economics when making master plans and tall buildings being detrimental to a cityscape are also not very studied but the negative effects of previous planning dogma like sprawl is studied over and over coming to the same conclusions. There is studies of what some people think is an ideal height of a building which they felt was around 10 stories but it's not a data driven analysis.
Beyond traffic patterns and some land use, planning is pretty fast and loose with facts and data when developing policy IMO. So much ideology and dogma that bad ideas become so deeply enshrined that change is slow. Many of the successful areas in most cities are the ones planned long ago and now they just try to mimic those success. Disastrous policies like urban renewal and the suburbs, were the new things and look how bad they failed. Why try new when you can just play it safe and copy what others have done. Cafes and urban greenbelts are all the rage today but what happens when they becomes the big box stores and parkways of past planning schemes?
I'm not advocating against greenbelts or cafes but you have to wonder, what mistakes are we making currently that we will have to fix in the future? Thinking big picture, isn't that what urban planning is all about?