Chattanooga Times Free Press reports that Chattanooga lands VW plant. It’ll be at Enterprise South which is about a mile from my parents’ house. This is a very good thing and also a very odd thing. It’ll mean that area is going to see a lot of commercial development so we might actually have good restaurants close by. On the other hand, Chattanooga’s zoning regulations have been, shall we say, spotty in the past. They are doing great things downtown, but I worry that the road to my parents’ house will become stripmall central.
BUT since my mom works with Allied Arts, the local arts council, this is fantastic for the arts. It’s also great for jobs. It changes everything. My mom was so excited she called to tell me about it. Everything will be different from here on out.
Heck, maybe they’ll finally build that high speed rail between Atlanta and Chattanooga they’ve been talking about forever.
Mm, developers. Give them an inch and they will take a mile. I was at a county site plan review meeting last week, where a certain engineering firm and development company were actually trying to push through 16,000sq.ft. of retail, two big box stores on the rural southside of the county, and wanting to *put in a really big septic tank*. And they expected this would *fly* with the county planners. Of course, the board sent them packing and told them basically “Redo everything, you losers” but the point is, if developers CAN turn your parents’ road into stripmall central, they will. And they will use all the loopholes in the zoning code to justify this.
But smart growth is always good. Let us hope the VW plant sparks smart growth and yes, mass transit such as the high speed rail. It’s probably pie in the sky, but I’ll remain optimistic.
(My day job is pursuing my masters’ in urban and regional planning, fyi.)
Portland supposedly has a great reputation for land use planning, transportation, and ecologically sensitive development. It sure looks a lot different here on the ground, though. My wife and I have been to several design “charrettes” (architects and planners love that word) where tons of public input was taken . . . and thereafter we saw either nothing or a project that reflected NONE of the input we saw and heard taken from the public.
The downtown north-south high-speed light rail, whose construction displaced the wonderful Tri-Met bus mall the past two years, is almost finished, and we predict it will take less than a week or two for one auto mishap (on a pair of two-lane city streets dedicated to light rail, buses, AND cars) to gum up traffic in the entire downtown.
Charrettes get a lot done in very little time. That’s why we like them. If you had any idea of what we have to go through to get things to where you, the public, can SEE them…
Do you happen to know a fellow named Peter O’Toole?
I share David’s concerns above. The old bus mall was simple pleasant, and totally functional. I suspect that the ridiculously complex scheme replacing it, ill concieved from the start, will have everyone muttering “what were they thinking?”. I have spoken to several bus drivers who plan to retire early rather than navigate it.
Wow. I can’t wait to come back and see this.