Attending a Local Meeting

Last night I attended my first ever public planning meeting, this was for Rochester ZAP changes for the southeast quadrant, which I've covered extensively in my previous post. I already had a pretty good idea about the material that was being presented, but it was also neat to hear from other people in the community.

So this is a pro-city blog. I like cities, and I think it was a mistake for Americans to turn away from cities in the 20th century. And of course not everyone agrees with me on that. The start of the presentation felt like a reassurance that "no, we're not getting rid of your single family zoning".

There was one older lady who talked about how she fought really hard to keep a strip of street zoned residential a few decades ago, and if it was rezoned now she threatened to move out of the city.

Another lady was complaining about the planned project at the former Colgate campus, which is a pretty cool site and project, and I'll make sure to make a future blog post about it. But she was saying she would prefer condos to apartments, because we need to have more people own the place they live.

There were also some people there who shared my perspective. They were happy to have more upzoning, and we had a nice discussion about how nice the new bike lanes were, and that I wished more of this quadrant was rezoned from low density to medium density.

All in all, it was nice to talk to some of the planners working for the city to remake the plan. It seems like they have a tough job balancing the priorities of the citizens with what they think would be healthiest for the city.

Is the community input process actually valuable? There's plenty of people with the opinion that it's at best worthless, and at worst counter-productive. I get the motivation, planners want to be democratic, they don't want to repeat excesses of the mid-century. But, the people who show up are either weirdos like me who are "fans" of cities, or people who want to keep their neighborhood zoned restrictively. Neither of us are really representative of what people in the community want. It also comes down to what is proper. Why should a neighbor have a veto power over an aesthetic decision or in a matter they aren't an expert in?

I don't really know the solution. I like the idea of drawing up multiple different plans and asking people what they like about different options. I like surveys, since they tend to be more representative. I like the idea of having a city architect, or possibly ward/neighborhood architects who have a vision of what a place should look like, and having this person be receptive to the community, possibly elected, possibly subject to recall, but still an expert in their field. Above all, smaller changes should be easier push through than big ones. The way input is collected now with commenting periods and community input it's likely that you might get equal resistance to a small or big project. This tends to push development toward bigger projects which replicates again the problem of large developers making local residents upset.