Little Boxes Made Of Ticky-Tack
By Mitch Berg
A friend of the blog emails:
I don’t know how I feel about this one.
On one hand, I don’t think that what the developer wants to do is a bad design. I’m sick of the developers squeezing in tiny 800 square feet apartments everywhere and charging high rents and making places artificially trendy.
Also, I love that CM Noecker reminds everyone that the specific zoning for the area was asked for by the neighbors and that should mean something-
“It’s this recent community process that says this should not be RM2, it should be RM1,” Noecker said. “There is a value and a status in plans that are community-created and then adopted by this body. … The community has said we specifically don’t want this parcel to be RM2.”
The community process was a backlash against CM Jalali’s election to the council because those neighbors knew that Jalali has never met a developer that she doesn’t like on Marshall Avenue.
But, those Merriam Park Marshall Avenue neighbors are the same neighbors who constantly think that they run the entire city and they think that gives them the right to tell other neighborhoods what they need and don’t need. They meddle so much, that I think they kind of get what they deserve in their own neighborhood, too. If I were like them, I’d organize a loud group of people to shout at the council that Marshall Avenue needs this space to be 7 Townhomes with greater floor area ratio and if they don’t support it, they’re just racist.
I’m not them, so I won’t. But, the other reason that I don’t really know how I feel about this vote is that I don’t know if I want too much precedent set in the “community process” in this town. After all, those same Merriam Park Marshall Avenue residents who are the activists that are trying to remove I94 through “community process.”
*Sigh* We just someday need better choices on the ballot- voting ought to be the community process.
These apartments are pretty clearly built on the cheap by developers with an “in” with the city council. In 50 years they will be slums.
And the people voting for our oh-so-special city council, and/or their descendants, will be turning Woodbury and Inver Grove Heights into blighted cesspools.
