The online Comment window has expired

Agenda Item

9. Dry Creek Estates Subdivision (P20-040) [Noticed 04/28/2023; Passed for Publication 05/02/2023; Published 05/03/2023] File ID: 2022-02004

  • Default_avatar
    Matthew Kessing over 1 year ago

    In section Goal UL 1.1 Growth and Change, Policy 1.1.5 Infill Development, the report states that conversion of agricultural land on the outskirts of our City to meet this goal. The policy is obviously aimed at densifying existing neighborhoods and says so in plain language. To use this as a justification for single-family zoned sprawl is unconscionable. The argument that sprawl helps to connect rural communities to the city is just bologna and isn't what "Infill Development" means. All this proposal does is add one more car-dependent, exclusively single family suburb to the outskirts of our city that will continue to make it more difficult to achieve our climate goals in the future.

    Agenda item 2 on today's meeting is about studying 15-minute neighborhoods, and taken together with this one is a great illustration of "missing the point." The important aspect of a 15-minute neighborhood that is completely missed by Staff is having amenities and destinations intermixed with residential plots; places where people can get to easily to meet their needs; think Taylor's Market in Land Park or Curtis Park Market. Small corner stores and grocery stores intermixed into the neighborhood fabric. Every suburb we continue to plan like Dry Creek Estates is one more missed opportunity because it is zoned exclusively as low-density residential on the outskirts, dropped into a car-dependent framework. It doesn't work because the amenities are spaced out with the assumption of car-dependency.

    As the colloquialism goes: continuing to do the same thing while expecting different results is the definition of insanity. Well, here we are.