Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
Agricola's a mixed bag, but its strength is that it has a lot of fine-grained development built up to the street. It's a pretty nice pedestrian environment. I bet you could go pretty far along that street without tearing down any of the old character homes by adding a few midrise buildings and permitting small additions and conversions to commercial use.
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Yeah, the houses and storefronts that have been rehabbed
like these have a very particular charm that I think is intrinsically valuable, from a cultural, destination and business perspective. In any case, the North End is far away reaching the point where it needs more developable land--the area's population could probably double without knocking down a single building (mostly due to the fact that so many houses already were knocked down in years past, mostly for low-density auto-centric uses).
But the overall concept of a transit priority street is great. I'd expect some business owners to kick up a fuss, however. The North End Business Association, despite involving a lot of young and ostensibly progressive people, had a predictable fit over on-street parking a while ago when bike lanes were being discussed. Hopefully they would see, however, that turning the street into more of a commercial destination would be in their best interests.
In fact, I wonder if there's any thing that can be done to encourage further commercialization on the strip--turning those rental houses into storefronts. It's already happening slowly due to market demand, but I wonder if there are any tricks in the city-planners' toolkit that can be deployed to hasten the process.