This is a letter I just sent to most of the City Council. I’ll try to link a few things from here, but no extra analysis – I’m really too busy at the office to be spending time on this, even.
Councilmember McCracken and others,
I wanted to register my opposition to the ludicrous and irresponsible plans submitted by these two neighborhood associations in my area to completely opt out of the VMU ordinance on highly questionable grounds (claiming to have already implemented zoning accomplishing some of the same things while rejecting the rest based on parking and other typical excuses). There is no more critical corridor in our city for VMU than this part of Guadalupe.
My family and I walked up to the Triangle for a restaurant opening a week or two ago, and the streetscape along Guadalupe is just awful. This is the kind of thing that Karen McGraw‘s reactionaries are trying to preserve – oil change lots, gas stations, and barely used falling down storefronts which can’t be made economical when they are forced to adhere to suburban parking requirements. (The only healthy business along this strip was Vino Vino, which as you may recall, she tried to force to build a bunch more parking too).
The claim that this represents the will of the neighborhoods is questionable. If you read the backup material, you’ll see the same exact people who spent months and months building the McMansion Ordinance were the ‘voters’ on this plan – this isn’t the kind of issue you’re going to be able to get the rank and file of the neighborhood interested in, as you might have already figured. (But in the case of Vino Vino, you can argue that the true silent majority in Hyde Park made their feelings well known – the population in general is clearly not as reactionary about density as is their leadership).
You already gave these people way too much with McMansion – and the understood quid pro quo was that they’d have to accept additional housing units along transit corridors – and there’s no better transit corridor in central Austin than this one. Parking is thus no excuse. If you don’t force VMU here, you might as well throw in the towel everywhere.
Regards,
Mike Dahmus
Urban Transportation Commission, 2000-2005
